The Outpost Undiscovered by Tourists by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, January 1982) is a Three Wise Men update that begins with one of them, Melichor, getting out of a Rolls Royce and inflating an air mattress. There then follows a certain amount of kvetching among the three (Melichor peppers his speech with Yiddish words, and the other two are later described as “Nubian” and “Oriental”). Then they eat, and later go to sleep.
They are woken the next day by the stench caused by the creatures of the underworld, which have reached their location and are overtaking them. So they gather their belongings and get back in the car.
They later turn back the Forces of Chaos and overcome other minor difficulties before arriving at a Hyatt hotel, where the Saviour is with his parents in a “moderately priced room”. There, they argue over what his name should be.
A weakly humorous non-story.
* (Mediocre). 1,450 words.
The Christmas Present by Gordon R. Dickson
The Christmas Present by Gordon R. Dickson (F&SF, January 1958) opens with a young boy called Allan talking to an alien called Harvey about how his mother is decorating a thorn tree for the family’s first Xmas on the planet:
There was beauty on Cidor, but it was a different beauty. It was a black-and-silver world where the thorn trees stood up like fine ink sketches against the cloud-torn sky; and this was beautiful. The great and solemn fishes that moved about the uncharted pathways of its seas were beautiful with the beauty of large, far-traveled ships. And even Harvey, though he did not know it himself, was most beautiful of all with his swelling iridescent jellyfish body and the yard-long mantle of silver filaments spreading out through it and down through the water. Only his voice was croaky and unbeautiful, for a constricted air-sac is not built for the manufacture of human word. pp. 34-35
Allan adds that the decorations will make the tree beautiful, and that Harvey will understand what “beautiful” means when he sees the finished product. However, when Allan goes back to the house on his own, what he sees upsets him, as the tree isn’t the same as the one on the ship out. After his mother consoles him Allan goes out and briefly brings Harvey in to see the tree before taking him back to the water.
Allan and his mother wrap their presents later that evening, and he tells her that he wants to give Harvey one of his figurines, a painted clay astrogator, as a Christmas present. His mother tells him it is too late to go out again, so she goes to give the gift to Harvey instead, and also explains to the alien the concept of exchanging presents at Christmas time. Then she asks Harvey about water-bulls—dangerous sea creatures known to attack boats—as her husband will be coming back by river the next day. Harvey tells her their behaviour isn’t consistent (“One will. One will not”), before adding that his species is “electric”, so the water-bulls don’t bother them.
After Allan’s mother leaves (spoiler), Harvey swims out of the outlet and swims to a place between two islands where he finds a water-bull; he tells it he has come to make it into a present.
The story closes with Allan’s father returning home the next day by boat. En route he and the other settlers find a dead water-bull floating on the surface and, on closer examination, they find the crushed body of a Cidorian nearby. Allan’s father realises that the dead Cidorian is Harvey, his son’s friend, and asks the other settlers not to tell him about what they have seen. After they leave, there is an elegiac closing passage:
Behind them, the water-bull carcass, disturbed, slid free of the waterlogged tree and began to drift downriver. The current swung it and rolled, slowly, over and over until the crushed central body of the dead Cidorian rose into the clean air. And the yellow rays of the clear sunlight gleamed from the glazed pottery countenance of a small toy astrogator, all wrapped about with silver threads, and gilded it. p. 42
I didn’t really buy the ending of this one, which seems to involve an overly disproportionate act in return for a simple gift. But I liked the alien setting, Harvey, and the last passage was still rattling around inside my head days later.
*** (Good). 3,300 words. Story link.
The New Father Christmas by Brian W. Aldiss
The New Father Christmas by Brian W. Aldiss (F&SF, January 1958) concerns Roberta and Robin, an old couple who live in an automated factory in the year 2388 (Roberta is forgetful, and Robin is the mostly bed-ridden caretaker). When Roberta realises it is Xmas day she goes downstairs to invite three tramps up to the flat (the tramps have an illegal home on the factory floor, but have to block the door every day to avoid being evicted by the “Terrible Sweeper”).
When the four of them arrive back to the flat, Robin is up and about—and not at all happy to find that Roberta has invited the tramps to spend the day with them. Then a Xmas card arrives for Robin but addressed to “Factory X10”. This causes Robin to become quite agitated because he is the caretaker of SC541, so he orders his wife and the three tramps to go and check the factory’s name on the output gate. On the way there, and back, the four of them discuss the factory’s change of output from television sets to strange metal eggs.
The group eventually return and confirm to Robin that the factory is now called X10. Jerry also reveals that he has bought one of the eggs back with him:
“I brought it because I thought the factory ought to give us a Christmas present,” Jerry told them dreamily, squatting down to look at the egg. “You see, a long time ago, before the machines declared all writers like me redundant, I met an old robot writer. And this old robot writer had been put out to scrap, but he told me a thing or two. And he told me that as machines took over man’s duties, so they took over his myths too. Of course, they adapt the myths to their own beliefs, but I think they’d like the idea of handing out Christmas presents.” p. 73
Jerry’s thoughts are met with further belligerence from Robin, and Jerry responds by saying that New Father Christmas will come for him (New Father Christmas apparently takes old people and machines away).
When the egg later hatches Roberta becomes alarmed, as it looks as if the egg is going to build another factory in the flat—so she stamps on it. Then the group realise that the egg is wirelessing for help, so they flee, only to be caught on the stairs by . . . .
This is a little on the slight side, but the robot factory setting (with its interstitial humans, and the new myths that have arisen) is captivatingly and amusingly done.
*** (Good). 2,100 words. Story link.
Icicle Music by Michael Bishop
Icicle Music by Michael Bishop (F&SF, November 1989) starts with a twelve-year-old called Danny getting up early on the Xmas morning of 1957. When he goes downstairs he finds that his (single) mother has scrimped and saved to find the money to buy him a shotgun. As he loads the gun and plays with it, Danny hears what he thinks may be a burglar coming down the chimney; eventually, a grungy looking man in a heavy red coat and khaki trousers appears.
Danny challenges the intruder and, after ducking an ornament thrown at him, shoots. His mother hears the altercation and comes downstairs, taking the shotgun from Danny and reloading. But by the time she is ready to shoot, the man is almost at the top of the chimney—so she goes outside to get a clear shot:
Unless [Danny] was imagining things, there was a deer on their roof, a buck with twelve to fifteen points. The guy who’d tried to steal their Christmas was mounting the jumpy creature. He encouraged it—“Up, Blitzen, up!”—to fly him to safety over both the riverside dump and the rooftops of their sleeping town.
“Stop!” Mom shouted. “Stop or I’ll shoot!” She sounded just like a sheriff on a TV cowboy show.
“No, Milly!” the man on the roof pleaded. “Don’t!”
“Clifton?” Mom murmured. Then, louder: “Clifton?”
The compact little buck (a courser, Danny thought, like in “The Night Before Christmas,” which Mrs. French had read them on the day before their holidays) soared up from the house. It lifted like a dream creature, pawing the night air and defining both itself and its desperate, neck-clutching rider against a blowing purple scrim of stars. All Danny could do was marvel. There should have been seven other reindeer (if the words of that silly poem counted for anything), but one was about all Danny could handle.
The deer—the courser—drew an invisible circle over their backyard. Mom and he looked up to see its glinting hooves and white belly. Then the thief sprawled across the deer took a shiny ball from the pocket of his coat and nearly unseated himself sidearming it with all his wounded strength at Mom and him.
“Here’s something for you, Milly!” And the stolen ornament—a second one, Danny realized—shattered on Mom’s forehead.
“Ouch!”
“Merry Christmas to both you and the brat, bitch! And to all a good ni—”
Danny’s mother shoots, and (spoiler) the man falls off. The reindeer then crash-lands into a barbed wire fence. Both die. The mother subsequently takes her ex-husband’s body to the dump and burns it, while Danny butchers the reindeer for meat.
After this captivatingly bizarre start the story leaps forward thirty years, and we find Daniel in hospital. He has just finished telling a man called Philip about the incident, and goes on to tell him about what happened on the tenth anniversary of the altercation in 1967, when he was camping alone in the wilds: Danny was visited by the ghost of his father, and his sleeping bag and tent disappeared (presumably his father’s doing) while he was following the apparition. He almost died from exposure.
Danny then recounts what happened on the twentieth anniversary in 1977, when his father’s ghost came and took the soul of his terminally ill mother.
After listening to all this, Philip gets up to leave. He kisses Danny on the forehead, and notes that it is the thirtieth anniversary that day. Daniel then asks Philip to get Gary to visit him, but Philip has to remind Danny that Gary is “gone” (there are hints in the latter section that Danny is gay, and presumably in hospital with AIDS). Philip leaves.
The story ends with this:
Outside Daniel’s window, faint icicle music. The glassblower’s panpipe hanging from the cornice had begun to melt, releasing long-pent melodies.
“Come on,” Daniel murmured. “Come on.”
He couldn’t wait. He wanted his father’s bitter ghost to get a move on. If it materialized in the room and stole his soul, that would be a welcome violation: a theft and a benediction, the first Christmas present his daddy had given him in over thirty years.
Come quickly, Father. Come.
This is an odd and very dark Xmas story but it works, and I suspect it’ll stay in reader’s heads for some time.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4,400 words.
At Darlington’s by Richard Bowes
At Darlington’s by Richard Bowes (F&SF, October-November 1995)1 is the seventh published story in the “Kevin Grierson” series, and begins with his “Shadow”, a doppelgänger, or perhaps more accurately a secret double who normally exists inside Kevin, getting dressed and going to work instead of him. Most of the rest of the story involves the scrapes and encounters that the drug-using Shadow has with the other people at his place of employment (his boss warns the Shadow not to come in late again; he goes to an outdoor fashion shoot with Les; he meets a woman called Sarah who has a boozer/druggie husband, etc.)
Dropped into all of this mostly scene setting description and verbal back and forth, is a short flashback scene where we see Kevin working as a male prostitute (I think) and waking up to find his drill sergeant client is dead.
At the end of the story the Shadow returns from a drug deal to find Kevin has been drafted.
It was hard to keep track of what was going on in this slice-of-life, and I have little memory of what I did read. I’ve no idea what the editor saw in this (at best) borderline fantasy story, and wonder if it got taken on the strength of its prequels.
– (Awful). 6,750 words.
1. The ISFDB page for the Richard Bowes’ “Kevin Grierson” series.
Nackles by Donald E. Westlake
Nackles by Donald E. Westlake (F&SF, January 1964) begins with the narrator discussing the characteristics of gods, and whether Santa Claus is one, before he goes on to talk about his sister and brother-in-law. We learn that the latter assaulted his wife on one occasion, but was convinced by the narrator (with the help of a baseball bat) not to treat her like that again. Later on, however, the brother-in-law reverts to verbally and emotionally mistreating his wife and kids, eventually inventing the idea of a satanic anti-Santa, Nackles, to keep his three children out of sight and earshot—he tells the kids that Nackles doesn’t leave presents, but comes up from his underground tunnels to capture and eat children who have been bad. Frank also tells other fathers about his invention, so the idea spreads and belief in Nackles increases.
In the final section (spoiler) Frank’s behaviour becomes worse than usual one Christmas Eve—with the expected results for someone who behaves like a spoiled child.
There isn’t much of a story here, but it is a neat, well-developed idea, with a good last line from a well-known Xmas Song (“You’d better watch out”).1
*** (Good). 3,050 words. Internet Archive.
1. Santa Claus is Coming to Town (not the original, but a version I like) at 00:49.
Stranger Station by Damon Knight
Stranger Station by Damon Knight (F&SF, December 1956) opens with Paul Wesson arriving at a space station built far from Earth for the purpose of interacting with visiting members of an alien species whose proximity causes humans mental distress.
For the first month of Wesson’s six month stay he is alone, apart from an AI/computer network he calls “Aunt Jane”, who he quizzes about various matters while he waits for the alien to arrive—What do the aliens look like? Can he see a picture of them? How did the previous incumbents of the station cope with their tour of duty, etc.? But Aunt Jane won’t answer most of his questions, saying that it isn’t permitted. The computer does, however, read to him an account of the first contact with the aliens on Titan:
We gained access to the alien construction by way of a large, irregular opening . . . The internal temperature was minus seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit; the atmosphere appeared to consist of methane and ammonia . . . Inside the second chamber, an alien creature was waiting for us. We felt the distress which I have tried to describe, to a much greater degree than before, and also the sense of summoning or pleading . . . We observed that the creature was exuding a thick yellowish fluid from certain joints or pores in its surface. Though disgusted, I managed to collect a sample of this exudate, and it this was later forwarded for analysis . . . p. 6
The rest of the month sees Wesson become slightly stir-crazy but then, one day when he is on a spacewalk to the much larger sector two of the station (built to house the alien), he starts to feel fearful, and then there is a booming sound—the alien visitor has arrived. Wesson now feels the same distress as the original contact team:
It was the scent of danger, hanging unseen up there in the dark, waiting, cold and heavy. It was the recurrent nightmare of Wesson’s childhood—the bloated unreal shape, no-color, no-size, that kept on hideously falling toward his face. . . . It was the dead puppy he had pulled out of the creek, that summer in Dakota . . . wet fur, limp head, cold, cold, cold. . . .
With an effort, Wesson rolled over on the couch and lifted himself to one elbow. The pressure was an insistent chill weight on his skull; the room seemed to dip and swing around in slow circles. p. 11
During this part of the story we also learn that the alien’s golden fluid provides humans with increased longevity, and that Wesson’s bosses want him to ask the aliens if they intend continuing their twenty year visits. Then Wesson realises he can sense the position of the alien, and realises that it may be suffering too. Eventually he pressures Aunt Jane into showing him a video image of the alien, which precipitates a realisation (“When two alien cultures meet, the stronger must transform the weaker with love or hate.”). Wesson concludes (spoiler) that, while he and the alien are in close proximity, his mind is being changed so that he (and others like him) will be able to peacefully co-exist with them. When he explains all this to Aunt Jane however, he discovers that he can no longer understand her or speak, read or write English.
The last section sees Wesson decide to resist the emanations coming from the alien, which then causes it such pain that it breaches its sector and wrecks the station. There is a long description of the death throes and, before Wesson dies, his final realisation is that his actions will cause humanity to come into conflict with the aliens.
If the plot of this story sounds like it doesn’t makes much sense, that is because it doesn’t: I think Knight was writing a brooding psychological horror here, and hadn’t really thought through the internal logic. Now, if readers are happy to just immerse themselves in the descriptive writing and atmospherics, they will probably enjoy it—if you have an analytical mind, however, you will be distracted by many questions (Why does Masson have to be unconscious when he arrives at the station? Why does he spend a month there on his own before the alien arrives? How does humanity manage to get enough immortality fluid for everyone if the aliens only visit every twenty years? How did they discover that the fluid could be used for this purpose in the first place? Why do the aliens think they can affect humanity as a whole if they only “convert” one station keeper every twenty years? Why must the two races have a love/hate relationship, can’t they peacefully co-exist or ignore each other? Why does the last sentence have Aunt Jane sounding as if it loves Wesson?) Also on the debit side of the story is the fact that a lot of the writing is long-winded description (whereas the conversation Wesson has with his boss about a possible fluid shortage—and why he doesn’t have a cat on board with him—isn’t even that, it’s just padding). The final nail in the coffin is that a couple of major plot developments come from Wesson having realisations or intuitions about things, always a weak way of advancing a story.
Not one for the left-brained (analytical/methodical).
** (Average). 9,400 words.
The Piper by Karen Joy Fowler
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.
The Sword Swallower by Ron Goulart
The Sword Swallower by Ron Goulart (F&SF, November 1967) is one of his ‘Ben Jolsen/Chameleon Corps’ stories, and opens with Jolsen being briefed about the disappearance of senior military men from the Barnum War Cabinet. Jolsen’s boss Mickens suspects the persons responsible are pacifists objecting to the colonization of the Terran planets by Barnum, and he sends Jolsen to Esperanza (a cemetery planet) in the guise of an elderly technocrat called Leonard Gabney. When Jolsen arrives there, his task is to slip a truth drug to an Ambassador Kinbrough and find out where the missing men are.
The rest of the story follows his various adventures on the planet, which include meeting a female agent, getting shaken down when he arrives at a health spa, meeting the Ambassador and drugging him, an attempt on his life by the health spa attendant who extorted him, tracking down the Ambassador’s contact (Son Brewster Jr., a not very good protest singer), and so on (this takes you about two thirds of the way through the story).
To be honest the plot is irrelevant, as it’s just a framework for Goulart’s telegraphic and occasionally semi-amusing prose, such as when he steps out of the air taxi on arrival at the health spa:
Jolson stepped out of the cruiser and into a pool of hot mud. He sank down to chin level, rose up and noticed a square-faced blond man squatting and smiling on the pool’s edge.
The man extended a hand. “We start things right off at Nepenthe. Shake. That mud immersion has taken weeks of aging off you already, Mr. Gabney. I’m Franklin T. Tripp, Coordinator and Partial Founder.”
Jolson gave Tripp a muddy right hand. His cruiser pilot had undressed him first, so he’d been expecting something.
“I admire your efficiency, sir.”
“You know, Mr. Gabney,” Tripp confided in a mint-scented voice, “I’m nearly sixty myself. Do I look it?”
“Forty at best.”
“Every chance I get I come out here and wallow.” p. 213 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)
This is pleasant enough magazine filler but I’ve no idea what it is doing in a ‘Best of the Year’ annual, and I doubt anyone will remember much about the story a couple of hours after they have read it. I also thought, for a piece of semi-satirical fluff (the peaceniks, the incomprehensible slang used in the club, the protest songs, etc.) it’s longer than it needs to be.
** (Average). 9,800 words.
Lifeboat on a Burning Sea by Bruce Holland Rogers
Lifeboat on a Burning Sea by Bruce Holland Rogers (F&SF, October-November 1995) begins with the narrator/scientist, Elliot Maas, and his two business partners (Bierley, the PR man, and Richardson, the other scientist) at a press conference. They tell the press that have created a “multi-cameral multi-phasic analog information processor”, or what they prefer to call a TOS (“The Other Side”), a device which can store a machine consciousness and which they hope will eventually enable humans to cheat death.
Shortly after this, Bierley dies, and their funding vanishes, so Maas and Richardson use the TOS to build a copy of him:
“Bierley, regrettably, is dead,” said Bierley’s image. He was responding to the first question after his prepared statement. “There’s no bringing him back, and I regret that.” Warm smile.
The press corps laughed uncertainly.
“But you’re his memories?” asked a reporter.
“Not in the sense that you mean it,” Bierley said. “Nobody dumped Bierley’s mind into a machine. We can’t do that.” Dramatic pause. “Yet.”
Smile. “What I am is a personality construct of other people’s memories. Over one hundred of Bierley’s closest associates were interviewed by TOS. Their impressions of Bierley, specific examples of things he had said and done, along with digital recordings of the man in action, were processed to create me. I may not be Jackson Bierley as he saw himself, but I’m Jackson Bierley as he was seen by others. p. 23-24
After the press conference there is a long conversation between Maas and Richardson, where they discuss possible uses of constructs like Bierley (bringing back dead actors and singers, etc.) before the conversation touches on other (and odder) matters: Richardson starts talking about Shiva and reincarnation, and suggests building a simulacrum of Maas to help work on the project.
Shortly after this Richardson is apparently killed in a terrorist attack on the underground (the story is set in a world where there are constant terrorist bombings1) so, of course, a Richardson construct is created with the help of the Bierley one.
After this the story becomes ever more existential: the Richardson construct talks to Maas (whose obsession with cheating his own death is a thread that runs through the story):
Irritatingly, TOS started to suffer again from hurricanes. Those chaos storms in the information flow started to shut down the Richardson construct around one in the morning, regularly.
“It’s like you’re too much contradiction for TOS to handle,” [Maas] told the construct late one night. “A scientist and a mystic.”
“No mystic,” Richardson said. “I’m more scientist than you are, Maas. You’re in a contest with the universe. You want to beat it. If someone gave you the fountain of youth, guaranteed to keep you alive forever with the proviso that you’d never understand how it worked, you’d jump at the chance. Science is a means to you. You want results. You’re a mere technologist.”
“I have a focus. You could never keep yourself on track.”
“You have an obsession,” the construct countered. “You’re right that I can never resist the temptation of the more interesting questions. But that’s what matters to me. What does all of this—” He swept his hand wide to encompass the universe with his gesture, and his hand came to rest on his own chest. “What does it all mean? That’s my question, Maas. I never stop asking it.”
“You sound like him. Sometimes I forget what you are.” p. 34
Maas then starts to have suspicions about what is causing the information storms, and tricks the machine to make it think he has left the building. He hides beside the Richardson TOS, and then later that night (spoiler) the real Richardson (who has faked his own death—even to the point his wife is fooled) visits his own construct. When Maas challenges Richardson, it sounds as if he has had some sort of breakdown, and keeps saying he is dead and is going to start another life. This baffling exchange pretty much ends the story, and is followed by a repeat of the opening image, a dream Maas has of a man in a lifeboat watching a ship on fire with trapped sailors (him surviving death while the rest of humanity doesn’t, I suppose).
For the first half or so the story is reasonably interesting, but towards the end it takes a deep dive into its own navel. I have no idea what point the story is trying to make and am baffled as to how it won a Nebula award.
** (Average). 10,100 words.
1. The Oklahoma bombing that is described took place in April 1995; there is a Wikipedia page about the event.