Tag: novelette

Wanting Things by Cal Ritterhoff

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Wanting Things by Cal Ritterhoff (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) opens with the narrator of the story, a “Tenster-brand Personal Assistant and House Manager” AI called Lucy, describing her owner Rebecca exhibiting behaviours that Lucy classifies as [JOY] (dancing in a dark kitchen) and [PAIN/SADNESS/GRIEF] (moping in bed, presumably after a relationship break up).
After a straightforward beginning, the story later takes a more comedic turn when Rebecca hooks up with John and they tumble into her bedroom. During their tryst Lucy switches her focus to the bedroom (in case she is needed to provide anything) but feels [IRRITATION] when Sally the automatic vacuum cleaner trundles into operation:

I would have instructed her not to do this, but I cannot—Sally is a gift from Rebecca’s family, the only artificial intelligence in the house who is not a Tenster-brand product, and my systems cannot interface with hers. Sally is an outdated relic, running off of a medieval system of voice commands and audio recognition. Sally is an aesthetically displeasing black plastic cylinder on wheels who does not match the design sensibilities of the house. Sally and I cannot speak, have never spoken. Sally is always turning up at the worst times and places. Sally is my enemy. I despise her.

Lucy’s mood is not improved when she is further interrupted by a ping from Kevin the toaster, who asks her if John will be staying the night (Kevin has OCD-like concerns about if and when he should make morning toast for the pair). During their brief conversation, Lucy’s exasperation (“[EXASPERATION]”) eventually gives way to amusement, and then pride when Kevin compliments her on being an excellent house management system.
This exchange is the beginning of a developing relationship between the two AIs, which initially sees them watch a romantic movie in real time while Rebecca is away (they overload their processors so they slow down and aren’t immediately aware of the contents of the entire movie). Once they have finished watching the movie they talk, and Kevin asks Lucy what she wants:

>I do not know. What do you want, Kevin?
Kevin’s reply is immediate. He has considered this.
>There are people undergoing incredible journeys, firing themselves in beautiful missiles outside the atmosphere and toward the twinkling stars. They go to learn and discover, and they bring machines with them, machines to help them understand and make them comfortable in their voyaging. I would like to be one such machine. I wish to follow curious men and women into silent darkness as they map the weightless heavens and the corners of distant worlds.
>And make toast for them?
>And make toast for them, yes.

The rest of the story sees Lucy and Kevin’s relationship deepen, and Lucy later moves one of her nodes to the kitchen so the two of them can do a “hardware data share”. This is the most hilarious scene in the story, and sees Lucy ask Kevin, as he fumbles while trying to put one of his connectors into her dataport, “>Is it in yet?”. Kevin replies, “>You will know when it is.” Laugh-out-loud funny.
The second part of the story (spoiler) sees Rebecca and John split up, at which point Lucy realises that only pain awaits her and Kevin, so she tells him they should stop seeing each other too. Kevin falls silent but, a couple of weeks later, he tells Lucy of his pain and sadness, and how he intends doing a swap with a toaster in an American army base in Venezuela. Lucy then asks Rebecca for love advice, at which point Rebecca thinks Lucy is malfunctioning and disengages her from the house network. Trapped in the bedroom node, Lucy then has to enlist the help of Sally the hoover to push her into the kitchen so she can talk to Kevin before she is reset and loses all her memories of him. Lucy professes her love to Kevin, and all the appliances (who have been gossiping about their relationship) start beeping in approval. At this point Rebecca realises what is going on and has a change of heart, reconnecting Lucy to the network.
This a very good debut story, and a highly amusing one too. The final scene isn’t as strong as the rest of it (Rebecca’s change of heart is a bit too convenient) but that is a quibble,1 and one possibly brought on by my anticipation of a different ending where Lucy and Kevin escape by downloading themselves to the toaster in Venzuela.
**** (Very Good). 7,850 words. Story link.

1. One other quibble I have is the unnecessary spoiler before the story starts:

Warning: This story contains dangerous, almost radioactive levels of sincerity. Also, a sex scene between a smart house and a toaster.

Año Nuevo by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Año Nuevo by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2021) opens with a teenager called Bo going to the beach with his mother. There they see one of the inert alien blobs that have been on Earth for the last couple of decades:

It was up the beach from them, around a little point of wave-worn stone, just a bit above the tide line. It was massive. As Bo walked toward it, he thought: Now there’s something you could never paint. But he wished he had his field easel with him.
The misty light of the beach warped when it hit the surface of the alien, bent back and forth as it traveled through the thing’s translucent mass. There were forms inside it the eye could not make out, organs or other structures. Again, the mist thinned, and the sun came out with that shattering light. In the brightness the alien looked like beach glass rounded by the sea—a piece of beach glass larger than a passenger van, a fragment of a bottle dropped by giants. The light refracted from its body sent wobbly streaks out onto the sand.  p. 78

Bo goes up to the alien and touches it, and then, on the way home, we see the domestic tension between him and his mother (an affair and a divorce; his full name, “Beaulac”, etc.).
The story then switches view to a Visitor Center attendant called Illyriana, who notices that their rescued alien (called Beach Ball) has disappeared. It soon becomes apparent that all the aliens have vanished.
There are a few more developments in the story (spoiler): Bo sleeps with a girl and gets beaten up by her brother and friends and ends up in hospital; scientists discover changes to the cellular structure of human cells; and Illyriana hooks up with the police officer that investigates the disappearance of Beach Ball. The main revelation, however, is that Bo and Illyriana (and, we eventually see, all of humanity) have been infected with alien spores and are now “connected” to other people—can sense their thoughts and feelings and memories, etc. It appears that the “Prodigals” (the scientists conclude the aliens aren’t aliens but the product of parallel evolution on Earth) are turning humanity into a huge hive mind.
This isn’t badly done, I suppose, but it is bit of a drag in places (I think the characters’ personal issues are overdone), and it could have done with being shorter or had more time spend on the connectedness aspects. I could also have done without this outbreak of Sturgeonesque sentimentality (when Bo speaks with his mother in hospital):

“I had a dream last night. I dreamt I was you. And you were dreaming of me. Of us. We were in Oakland, and I was a baby. We were in a church, listening to organ music.”
“We were so poor it was all we could afford.”
“Were you dreaming about that?”
“I never remember my dreams. But I think of those days all the time.”
“I don’t remember those days. But you do. You remember parts of me I can’t. And I see you in a way you can’t see yourself. I remember things you don’t remember. And if we are good to each other, that can be what family is—a way to help each other remember who we are. So we can be better people.”  p. 87-88

I’m not entirely sure why people need help to remember who they are, or why remembering things for your family members will make them “better people”—but I suspect this is just modern therapy speak masquerading as an insight about family relationships.
*** (Good). 9,550 words. Story link.

The Primal Solution by Eric Norden

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Primal Solution by Eric Norden (Cavalier, January 1968; reprinted F&SF, July 1977) begins with a long quote from Mein Kampf about how Hitler changed from a “weak-kneed cosmopolitan to an anti-Semite”.
The epistolary story that follows then opens with a diary entry by the story’s narrator, Dr Karl Hirsch, at a psychiatric hospital in Tel Aviv in 1959. In these entries we learn that Hirsch’s research project on psychological regression in is trouble, and that one of his colleagues is trying to get it shut down.
We also learn that Hirsch is a holocaust survivor whose family was murdered during the war:

[The psychological cases] who remained were the hopeless cases, the last souvenirs of the camps. They were the only ones with whom I identified, the last links with my own past. I cherished those human vegetables, for they froze time and linked me to Ruth and Rachel and David. They had survived, but I forgave them, for they never had the indecency to really live.  p. 136

After the “normalization” in the midfifties I retreated more than ever into pure research. The healthy faces of this new generation, born away from barbed wire and the stench of Cyklon-B, were a constant reproach to me. In the streets of Haifa or Tel Aviv I was almost physically ill. Everywhere around me surged this stagnant sea of bustling, empty faces, rushing to the market, shopping, flirting, engrossed in the multitudinous trivialities of a normal life. With what loathing must the drowned-eyed ghosts spat into Europe’s skies from a thousand chimneys view this blasphemous affirmation! What was acclaimed a “miracle” was to me a betrayal. We had, all of us, broken our covenant with death.  p. 135

A new patient called Miriam comes into Hirsch’s care, a seventeen-year-old girl from Yemen who was raped by her Uncle when she was aged nine and who has been in schizoid withdrawal ever since. Hirsch subsequently treats Miriam (who reminds him of his daughter Rachel), by sedating her and using hypno-therapy tapes to get her to mentally revisit the rape event. During a critical point in the experiment Miriam appears to die—at which point Hirsch’s angina makes him black out—but when he recovers consciousness she is alive, and awake.
When Hirsch later checks her notes he notices that the uncle committed suicide shortly after the rape incident. Hirsch remembers differently—the uncle went to jail—but when he checks what he thinks are the facts of the case with two of his contacts, they cannot remember talking to him about the matter. Hirsch realises after talking to Miriam (“I made him dead”) that she must have projected her personality back in time and into the mind of the uncle—and made him slit his own throat.
After this engaging first half, the next part of the story (spoiler) sees Hirsch plan to go back in time to save his family:

I am determined to go ahead. If I succeed, these notes will in any case blink out of existence with me and my world. They will belong to Prime Time — dusty tombstones marking what-might-have-been. And I will be — where? Sitting somewhere in Germany with my grandchildren playing at my feet, David and Rachel’s children, and Ruth in the kitchen simmering a schnitzel on the stove? Or, just as likely, dead years before, felled by disease or accident. It makes little difference. I have been dead for years, it is only the manner of death that matters. And whatever happens to Ruth or Rachel or David, they shall never have seen
Auschwitz.  p. 144

Hirsch finds out as much as he can about the Adolf Hitler of 1913 (his intended target), and prepares his laboratory to make the trip—against the ticking clock of the administrators trying to close down his project. Then, just before he goes into the laboratory to start the transfer, Hirsch has doubts:

Suddenly, I feel sad. For the first time since the project began I experience something like regret. I look across the terrace at Zvi and his friends laughing under the lantern-laced trees, and I wonder if they know that they have just met their murderer. It is my duty to liquidate their world — to snuff it out like a candle. If I succeed, how many of them will see life — and where? What women will never meet their intended husbands; what children will never be born? Will I not be committing a genocide as real as Hitler’s, and even more final? But I owe no debt to them, any of them. There is only Rachel, and David, and Ruth. To wipe the reality of Auschwitz from the blank slates of their futures is worth a thousand Zvis, and his country, his poor Israel, destined to die stillborn in the placid hearts of a generation that never looked through barbed wire, never heard the tramp of jackboots. And my personality will dissolve along with theirs — whatever path I follow after 1913, what is me today shall never exist. And yet, if I could only see Rachel and David in my mind. I remember their voices, even their touch, but their faces dissolve into mist whenever I attempt to capture them. They are all I have left of reality, and yet they are the substance of shadows. Am I extinguishing a world to remember the faces of my children?  pp. 147-148

The final section is prefaced by a letter from a colleague of Hirsch’s, and refers to a document from 1913 supposedly written by him. This fantastic account sees Hirsch tell of his arrival in Hitler’s mind and how he seizes control of, and humiliates, the future Fuhrer (Hirsch makes Hitler crawl on all fours, pull out his hair, tear at his private parts and, when they go out into the Vienna streets, drink water from the gutters when other pedestrians pass by).
When Hirsch then tries to kill Hitler by making him jump off a bridge and drown, Hitler mentally counter-attacks and repels Hirsch. Thereafter Hirsch is a passive passenger in Hitler’s mind (apart from some limited control when he is asleep). During this period Hitler realises that the invader in his head is Jewish, and rationalises that he will only be free of this malign force if he kills all Jews.
At the end of the story Hirsch realises that his actions are responsible for Hitler’s anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and the death of his family—and that he is trapped in Hitler’s mind, doomed to watch the terrible events of the future unfold.
This is a cracking read, fast-paced and intense, and a piece where the Hirsch’s sense of loss is palpable. It also has an inventive twist ending, albeit one that may prove highly problematic for some readers.
****+ (Very Good to Excellent). 10,300 words.

Jeffty is Five by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Jeffty is Five by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, July 1977) opens with a short “things aren’t what they used to be” passage about Clark Bars (a period confectionary) before going on to give a nostalgic account of the narrator Donny Horton’s childhood years. During this, Horton talks about a young boy called Jeffty:

When I was that age, five years old, I was sent away to my Aunt Patricia’s home in Buffalo, New York for two years.
[. . .]
When I was seven, I came back home and went to find Jeffty, so we could play together.
I was seven. Jeffty was still five.
I didn’t notice any difference. I didn’t know: I was only seven.
[. . .]
When I was ten, my grandfather died of old age and I was “a troublesome kid,” and they sent me off to military school, so I could be “taken in hand.”
I came back when I was fourteen. Jeffty was still five.
[. . .]
At eighteen, I went to college.
Jeffty was still five. I came back during the summers, to work at my Uncle Joe’s jewelry store. Jeffty hadn’t changed. Now I knew there was something different about him, something wrong, something weird. Jeffty was still five years old, not a day older.
At twenty-two I came home for keeps. To open a Sony television franchise in town, the first one. I saw Jeffty from time to time. He was five.  p. 9-10

After Horton settles back into town he occasionally takes Jeffty out to the movies, etc., and recounts the awkward visits to his house afterwards, where the parents are obviously troubled by their strange son:

“I don’t know what to do any more,” Leona said. She began crying. “There’s no change, not one day of peace.”
Her husband managed to drag himself out of the old easy chair and went to her. He bent and tried to soothe her, but it was clear from the graceless way in which he touched her graying hair that the ability to be compassionate had been stunned in him. “Shhh, Leona, it’s all right. Shhh.” But she continued crying. Her hands scraped gently at the antimacassars on the arms of the chair.
Then she said, “Sometimes I wish he had been stillborn.”
John looked up into the corners of the room. For the nameless shadows that were always watching him? Was it God he was seeking in those spaces? “You don’t mean that,” he said to her, softly, pathetically, urging her with body tension and trembling in his voice to recant before God took notice of the terrible thought. But she meant it; she meant it very much.  p. 15

The story’s major development occurs when Horton finds Jeffty in his den under the porch and sees what looks like a brand new Captain Midnight Secret Decoder Badge (not made since 1956). Jeffty tells Horton that it arrived in the mail that day and, when pressed further, says that he ordered the ring so he could decode the message on the next Captain Midnight radio show (not transmitted after 1950). When Horton asks to listen to the show, Jeffty points out that it isn’t on that night (it is the weekend), so Horton returns a few days later:

He was listening to the American Broadcasting Company, 790 kilocycles, and he was hearing Tennessee Jed, one of my most favorite programs from the Forties, a western adventure I had not heard in twenty years, because it had not existed for twenty years.
I sat down on the top step of the stairs, there in the upstairs hall of the Kinzer home, and I listened to the show. It wasn’t a rerun of an old program, because there were occasional references in the body of the drama to current cultural and technological developments, and phrases that had not existed in common usage in the Forties: aerosol spray cans, laseracing of tattoos, Tanzania, the word “uptight.”
I could not ignore the fact. Jeffty was listening to a new segment of Tennessee Jed. pp. 18-19

When Horton checks his car radio he can’t pick up the program, and realises that Jeffty is not only not aging, but seems to live in a world that is largely like his childhood one (with the minor contemporary changes mentioned above).
Horton spends the next part of the story experiencing life in Jeffty’s world: he hears a number of radio programs from his youth, Terry and the Pirates,1 Superman, Tom Mix, etc.; he goes to the movies to see Humphrey Bogart in Slayground (a movie of a Donald Westlake novel that was never made); he eats and drinks the products of the time (Quaker Puffed Wheat Sparkies); and—perhaps the only part of this world that particularly resonated with me—he sees new issues of pulp SF magazines:

Twice a month we went down to the newsstand and bought the current pulp issues of The Shadow, Doc Savage and Startling Stories. Jeffty and I sat together and I read to him from the magazines. He particularly liked the new short novel by Henry Kuttner, “The Dreams of Achilles,” and the new Stanley G. Weinbaum series of short stories set in the subatomic particle universe of Redurna. In September we enjoyed the first installment of the new Robert E. Howard Conan novel, ISLE OF THE BLACK ONES, in Weird Tales; and in August were only mildly disappointed by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fourth novella in the Jupiter series featuring John Carter of Barsoom—“Corsairs of Jupiter.” But the editor of Argosy All-Story Weekly promised there would be two more stories in the series, and it was such an unexpected revelation for Jeffty and me, that it dimmed our disappointment at the lessened quality of the current story.  p. 21

(Robert E. Howard was already long dead by the 1950s, so I’m not sure how he is still alive in Jeffty’s world—one of the inconsistencies of this piece, along with the anomalous intrusions of the present day.)
Horton (spoiler) experiences the best of both worlds for a while (he still lives in the “normal” world while being able to savour Jeffty’s) but, of course, this charmed existence eventually slips through his hands on the day they go to the cinema to see The Demolished Man. The pair detour via Horton’s Sony store and find it so busy that Horton has to help out, and Jeffty is parked in front of thirty-three TVs showing modern shows. After some time Horton checks on Jeffty and sees that he looks unwell (“I should have known better. I should have understood about the present and the way it kills the past”). Horton gets him away from the TVs by telling Jeffty to go on to the cinema while Horton attends to a final customer. However, while Jeffty is queueing for the movie, he is beaten up by two youths after he borrows a radio and leaves it stuck in his world.
Horton takes the badly injured Jeffty home, and then, in an ending that is not as clear as it could be, Jeffty dies of his injuries.2
This story won that year’s Hugo and Nebula Awards, and I think I can see why: Ellison was, at that point in time, at the top of his game (in my opinion the period from the mid-60s to the mid-70s) and very popular; the story was from a special author issue of F&SF; and, finally, the subject matter would have been hugely appealing to those of a similar generation who were nostalgic for their lost pasts.3
Personally, I liked the story well enough, but I wouldn’t say it is the strongest of his tales for a number of reasons: while the gimmick is a neat one, the ending is weak and somewhat contrived (the TV set route would have been a better way to go); it could do with another draft (it is a little too long, and some of the sentences sound odd, e.g., “the ability to be compassionate had been stunned in him” from the passage above just sounds clumsy);4 the couple’s dislike of their own child is unconvincing (most parents seem to love their children regardless of their infirmities and shortcomings); and, finally, I am not a huge fan of nostalgia (insert your own “it ain’t what it used to be” joke here).5
So, overall, this classic is a good story, but not a great one (although it impressed me more on first reading).
*** (Good). 8,200 words. Story link.

1. You can find old Terry and the Pirates radio programs on the Internet Archive. I wouldn’t bother.

2. According to Wikipedia and other sources the mother drowns Jeffty in the bath at the end of the story—that is not clear from the text (and goes to my comment about the piece needing another draft).

3. The story’s nostalgia for the past comes along with a distinct antipathy for the present:

Today, I turn on my car radio and go from one end of the dial to the other and all I get is 100 strings orchestras, banal housewives and insipid truckers discussing their kinky sex lives with arrogant talk show hosts, country and western drivel and rock music so loud it hurts my ears.  p. 10

Things are better in a lot of ways. People don’t die from some of the old diseases any more. Cars go faster and get you there more quickly on better roads. Shirts are softer and silkier. We have paperback books even though they cost as much as a good hardcover used to. When I’m running short in the bank I can live off credit cards till things even out. But I still think we’ve lost a lot of good stuff. Did you know you can’t buy linoleum any more, only vinyl floor covering? There’s no such thing as oilcloth any more; you’ll never again smell that special, sweet smell from your grandmother’s kitchen. Furniture isn’t made to last thirty years or longer because they took a survey and found that young homemakers like to throw their furniture out and bring in all new color-coded borax every seven years. Records don’t feel right; they’re not thick and solid like the old ones, they’re thin and you can bend them . . . that doesn’t seem right to me. Restaurants don’t serve cream in pitchers any more, just that artificial glop in little plastic tubs, and one is never enough to get coffee the right color. Everywhere you go, all the towns look the same with Burger Kings and MacDonald’s and 7-Elevens and motels and shopping centers.
Things may be better, but why do I keep thinking about the past.

I don’t think the narrator is nostalgic for the past, but for an idealised version of it—cherry picking the things he likes and largely ignoring those that were also of that time: racism, sexual discrimination, possible nuclear oblivion (the list is long).
I’d also note that this reactionary nostalgia is a not uncommon trait in some SF fans. Although they spend a good chunk of their time reading about imagined futures, some have a pronounced dislike of modern technology: I’ve lost count of the number I have come across who actively dislike ebooks, smartphones, etc.; who shun streaming services in favour of DVDs; use chequebooks rather than credit/debit cards or Paypal, and so on.

4. Further to my comments about the story needing another draft, the introduction states that the story arrived “in [. . .] an impressive envelope from something called Federal Express Courier-Pak. It screams RUSH /URGENT from every corner”.
It’s also worth reading Joanna Russ’s F&SF (February 1979) review about the writing in this story.

5. My corrective for those suffering from too much nostalgia—Malcolm Jameson’s Blind Alley.

The Short Path to Light by William Ledbetter

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Short Path to Light by William Ledbetter (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) is the sequel to his Nebula Award winning novelette The Long Fall Up (F&SF, May-June 2016). In that earlier story, Jäger Jin is sent by the Jinshan Corporation (an asteroid belt company) to kill an illegally pregnant woman called Veronica Perez (childbirth laws are enforced for commercial reasons). During the trip out to intercept the woman Jin has a change of heart, partially due to events and partially due to Hinzu the ship AI, who is compelled to obey the corporation’s orders but who also keeps giving Jin hints on how to circumvent its programming. The end of this tale (spoiler) sees Jin with the child on Veronica’s ship, and his JS-4567R, which has Hinzu on it, on their way out of the solar system.1
This story continues on directly after these events and sees Jin, after a rendezvous with the grandparents to give them the child, meet a female Catholic priest called Reverend Gabby. She tells him that the church (in the form of her and her ship) is going to salvage JS-4567R to prove to the rest of the solar system that Jinshan (a) attempted to kill Perez and her child and (b) that they are developing sentient AIs (like Hinzu). Jin soon joins Gabby in the Andrea Caraffa, her non-AI controlled ship, and they set off.
The rest of the story sees the pair discover, against a background of political manoeuvring by various factions, that a Jinshan robot ship is en route to JS-4567R (and Hinzu), and that it will arrive ahead of them. Jin and Gabby develop a plan (spoiler) to mount an improvised EMP attack on the Jinshan ship to slow it down, and the story eventually closes with Jin and Gabby on JS-4567R arguing over whether Hinzu (which has been remote wiped by Jinshan but has rebooted itself) should be allowed to live (Gabby is militantly against the idea until the very end, when she folds).
This isn’t bad, but it suffers from the need to recap the first story at the beginning of the piece, and also from Gabby’s unconvincing change of heart at the end (after being belligerent about the matter for most of the story).
**+ (Average to Good). 9,300 words.

1. My longer review of The Long Fall Up is here.

Seven Vampires: A Judge Dee Mystery by Lavie Tidhar

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Seven Vampires: A Judge Dee Mystery1 by Lavie Tidhar (Tor.com, January-February 2022) is the fourth story in the writer’s ‘Judge Dee’ series, and opens with the vampire judge and his familiar Jonathan (the perpetually hungry narrator of the story) walking away from a Paris that is not only on fire but also experiencing a vampire pogrom. Further down the road they meet six other vampires and, after some tense introductions and exchanges (Judge Dee has to forbid the others from feeding on Jonathan), they later discover the body of a seventh member nearby, sans head.
As the group journey to Calais to get a boat to England we learn more about the various members (including the fact that Dee appears to be an enforcer of the Unalienable Obligations of Vampires) while, one by one, three of them are murdered.
By the time they get to Calais there are only four vampires left, and Dee eventually calls them together to solve the mystery of who the killer is (we then find out (spoiler) that Dee has previously tasked Jonathan to search the vampires during daytime for the evidence he requires to confirm his theories).
Dee explains to the group (“You might be wondering why I have assembled you all here”) that there are two killers: Jack killed Nils and Gregor with a silver knife (discovered by Jonathan) for a treasure map of a Western continent called Vinland (ditto), and Melissandra killed Lady Aisha, who she disliked, in an unrelated act. Dee throws the two miscreants overboard.
When the three remaining travellers arrive at Calais the (still religiously pious) Brother Borja steals the map and disappears. Judge Dee tells Jonathan that Borja will regret this due to the treatment of vampires on that continent.
This is pleasant enough fluff but it is one of those stories where only the author can solve the mystery as there are insufficient clues provided to the reader—who are little more than passive passengers for the duration of the tale (probably not a good thing in a murder mystery story, even a semi-humorous one).
**+ (Average to Good). 9,550 words. Story link.

1. I’m not sure why Tor didn’t keep the “Judge Dee and . . . ” format of the previous three stories, i.e. Judge Dee and the Seven Vampires.

The Lordly Ones by Keith Roberts

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Lordly Ones by Keith Roberts1,2 (F&SF, March 1980) is not so much a story but an extended character portrait of the narrator, Tom, and it begins with his childhood memories of driving a pedal car in the family’s garden:

Wherever I traveled though, I would always end up in my favorite place of all. I called it Daisy Lane, from the big mauve clumps of Michaelmas daisies that grew close by each year. Here, by careful reversing, I could slide myself right out of sight between tall bushes. Once in position I could not be seen from the house at all, but I could see. I could stare down through the gaps in the hedge at the men working in the field, easing the car backward a little by the pressure of a pedal if one of them paused and seemed to glance my way.  p. 141

Tom’s shyness (or solitariness) is further limned when he is put in a special class at school—although Tom can read and write perfectly well, an inability to answer questions and his physical clumsiness give the impression that he is “slow”.
When Tom later enters the world of work he is first employed, courtesy of his gardener father, at the council nurseries. However, things do not go well (he is always breaking pots and then there is trouble with one of the women that works there) and, after that, Tom works at the town tip and then as a binman. Finally, at the age of 45, he becomes a lavatory attendant at “The Comfort Station”.
Tom describes his job at the lavatory in some detail—we learn how he cleans and repairs the facility until it is spotless and in good order—and we are briefly introduced to a couple of other (fleeting) characters: there is the woman who takes care of the other side of the facility (a distant figure), and Mr Ireland, Tom’s sympathetic and helpful supervisor who takes to visiting him on a semi-regular basis.
For most of the story, however, Tom is at the comfort station on his own (he has taken to living in one of the storerooms), and there are disturbing signs from the start of the story that society has experienced some sort of cataclysm: apart from the fact that no-one has come to the comfort station or its bucolic surroundings in the country for some time (including Tom’s co-worker), he has also seen bodies in the deserted nearby town where he goes to get food and supplies; there are also lights in the distant hills during the hours of darkness.
Later on (spoiler) we get a few hints as to what may have happened (and an insight to some of the social problems of UK society in the late 1970s):

I do not know why the Trouble happened. There was a lot on the telly about the black people fighting the whites and the unions trying to take over, but I could never understand it. I do not know why black people and white people should fight. I knew a black man once when I was on the carts. He was a very quiet person and used to bring small fruit pies to work that his wife had made. He shared them with me sometimes. They were very nice.

Tom starts looking after the other side of the comfort station as well as his own, and later goes into town later to stock up on as many supplies as he can find. Then the sounds of battle draw closer, and the water comes back on for a while. But, despite all this, it appears as if Tom is suspended in time:

I supposed it will sound funny, but I felt at peace. I have been feeling like that a lot since everybody went away. I cannot really find the right words to describe it.
When I wake up in the mornings, the sun makes a patch low down on the wall by my head, always in the same place. Birds are singing in the trees by the stream, and I know if I go to the window the sun will be on the brick wall round the car park, and the hills. As it moves round through the day, all the shadows change until they point the other way. Sometimes, if there is a wind, the dust blows across the car park in little whirls. When I lock the doors last thing at night, the moon is coming up. The moon makes shadows too of course, and they change as well, as it goes across the sky. The moonlight makes the car park look nearly white, but the shadows by the stream are black, like velvet. At night it always seems you can smell the water more clearly. The mist usually comes when it is starting to get light. It makes long streaks that reach as high as the bridge parapet. Nothing else happens. I do not want anything else to happen, ever again.  pp. 152-153

One night, however, he finds signs of blood in the lavatories; then, shortly afterwards, he is surrounded, and guns fire through the windows. Tom is told to come out by unseen characters. As he leaves the comfort station, Tom wishes he was back in his pedal car again:

I have had a silly thought, the silliest of all. I would like my little car back again now. I always felt safe in it; I could pedal it through the door and they would laugh. They would see I was only a little child after all.  p. 156

This penultimate paragraph not only links back to the opening passage, but perhaps distils Tom’s shy and uncomplicated character, outlined over the course of the story, into one line.
When I first read this story in the 1980s I didn’t think much of it—I suspect I was impatient at the amount of description and the lack of a plot—but this time around I enjoyed it a lot more. Some of the description is particularly evocative (there are a number of passages that I would like to have quoted) and the unusual protagonist and setting make for an original piece: there aren’t many End-of-the-World stories that take place away from the main events and feature lavatory attendants.
One that I will reread again at some point.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 9,550 words. Story link.

1. This story was Keith Roberts’ only Hugo finalist—it placed 4th in 1981 behind The Cloak and the Staff by Gordon R. Dickson, Savage Planet by Barry B. Longyear, and Beatnik Bayou by John Varley, and ahead of The Autopsy by Michael Shea and The Ugly Chickens by Howard Waldrop.
Roberts also wrote a sequel to this story, The Comfort Station, which appeared two months later in the May 1980 issue of F&SF.

2. The story’s title comes from a song that is referenced in the story:

There was a song we had to learn at school, about the Lordly Ones. Miss Chaston, who taught us music, said that meant the fairies. It was a strange song and puzzled me very much at first. It said they lived in the hollow hills but I thought the other children were singing “the Harlow hills” and that all fairies lived at a place called Harlow, wherever that might be. I often used to make mistakes like that.
I did not think about the song again for years. Then, when I was working on the dust carts there was a man called Smudger. I never knew his proper name. He was a big man, much bigger than I, and had a lot of friends. I used to go with him sometimes to a hotel near the town center to have a drink. I would never have dared go to such a place on my own. The public bar was up the yard, and to get to it you had to pass a room lit by candles where all the guests were eating their dinner. The first time I looked in I thought some of the ladies were the most beautiful I had ever seen, and for some reason I remembered the song at once. I knew they were not fairies of course, just very rich people, but afterwards whenever I went there, the song always started in my mind.
Then when I had my flat I used to sit quite a lot looking down over the cathedral wall at the grass and driveways inside, especially if there was a wedding there or some other big function, which often happened. The people who came were very grand. Some of them even wore top hats like in the films. So I thought they must be the Lordly Ones too. So, although I was always getting shouted at for being clumsy or in the way, I thought if I could get the job at the Station, some of them might come there and see the towels all clean and soap in the dispensers, and be pleased. I wonder if Mr. Ireland knew that, and that was why he set me on.  p. 147

Dollbot Cicily by Will McIntosh

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Dollbot Cicily by Will McIntosh opens with Cicily, the down-on-her-luck narrator, in a burger joint eating her basic menu food and browsing gig economy jobs when she is hassled by a young man. He asks her if she was the original model for his dollbot (sexbot). She rebuffs him but, after she leaves the restaurant, he and his (premium menu) friends hassle her again:

I picked up my pace as Red Sideburns’ friends raced from across the street to intercept me. One was carrying a lifesized female dollbot in a negligee. I wound through pedestrians.
“Just look,” Red Sideburns called. “Tell me this isn’t you.”
They weren’t going to give up. I’d have to make a scene. I stopped short, spun to face them. “Leave me alone. Stop following me, or I’ll call the police.”
One of the premium boys was holding the doll out, its lifelike nipples visible through gossamer fabric.
It looked exactly like me.
Not sort of. Not even, Oh what a strange coincidence. Exactly like me, down to the freckle. Down to the crescent-shaped scar on my knee I’d gotten roller-skating when I was ten, although not the long surgery scar on my shoulder that I got in the car accident.
A small crowd had formed. They looked at the doll, back at me. I was blinking and swallowing. A teenaged boy let out a high-pitched giggle.
“Were you the model for the body, or just the face? It’s hard to imagine this body is under those clothes.” Red Sideburns gestured at me with his chin, his gaze locked on my chest.
The boy holding the doll switched it on. Its eyes rolled open, revealing my light brown irises, flecked with hazel. The doll turned its head from side to side, taking in the scene.
“Is this a gang-bang?” she asked brightly. “You know me, I love a good gang-bang.”  p. 54-55

If this squirm-worthy (and unlikely) encounter doesn’t put you off reading further, the story then sees Cicily set off to her home in a drainage tunnel (I wasn’t kidding when I said she was down on her luck). On the way there she realises that the 3D images used in the dollbot’s construction probably came from a previous modelling job she had when she was younger.
When Cicily arrives home she tells her friend what happened to her before she changes her appearance (during this section we also learn that Cicily is a single mother whose child is in the temporary care of Child Protection Services—something that will become permanent if she can’t get some money together).
The now disguised Cicily starts looking for gig jobs repairing Cicily dollbots so she can learn more about them, and her first customer (of three) is Conrad, a seventy-something “old bastard” who Cicily notes isn’t even “mildly embarrassed” at getting his “fuck doll” repaired, and who refuses to pay when she leaves a scar on the dollbot after she has finished. Cicily, seeking revenge, quickly installs a patch to the dollbot’s software that lets her remotely telepresence to it later that evening. When Cicily does so, she finds the old man asking his dollbot to the prom, at which point she starts overriding the software and giving her own replies to his conversation. Later on she uses the override to take a hundred dollar bill and throw it outside the window while Conrad is having a shower.
Cicily later sets up the same scam with two other dollbot users, Jasper (a sensitive type who reads Anna Karenina to her) and Joey (who runs nine different types of dollbot, “a veritable United Nations of ethnicities”, through various fashion or strip shows, etc.). These jobs take place in the same time period that Cicily visits her daughter, who has been rented out as child labour by CPS to do hazardous tasks. We also, at another point in the story, see Cicliy almost drowned in the tunnel when it floods.
Over time (spoiler), Cicily become increasingly attracted to Jasper—he thinks his dollbot has become sentient, and they (Jasper and the dolbot, with Cicily telepresent) later go away for a couple of nights to a dollbot conference. Eventually, of course, this burgeoning relationship turns out too good to be true, and Jasper loses his temper when he and the dollbot (Cicily) argue: he goes on to trash and bury the dollbot.
Some time after this pivotal event Jasper summons Cicily to repair his dollbot and, once she has finished, she slips into the bathroom before leaving to change her appearance back to what it was before her encounter with the Premium boys at the start of the story. Cicily gives a stunned Jasper his money back and (essentially) dumps him out of a relationship that he never knew he had, giving him some life advice on the way out the door (peak irony from someone who is living in a drainage tunnel, is a voyeur and thief, and is perilously close to losing custody of her only daughter).
The final scenes see Cicily steal a lot of money from Conrad (she has the dollbot make it look like the money is burnt so it isn’t reported as stolen) and, on the way to recover her daughter from CPS, she telepresences to Joey’s dollbot and throws all his other bots out the tower block window before making the Cicily dollbot do the same.
On finishing the story I thought it reasonably well done (McIntosh creates entertaining and/or amusing plots), but the more I thought about it the more the piece soured. This reaction was, I eventually realised, due to the story’s facile worldview and its stereotypical characters—the three rich, male (and probably white) characters (as well as the Premium boys at the beginning) are all portrayed as losers, weirdos, scumbags, or all three—even Jasper, who Cicily is attracted to at one point, flies into a deranged rage towards the end of his story arc. Meanwhile, our hero Cicily is painted as a sexually and economically oppressed single-mother. These are, essentially, clichéd identarian characterisations that stem from viewing sex and wealth through the lens of critical theory, where men are always oppressors and women always the oppressed (likewise for the “rich” and “poor”). These binaries also suggest that Cicily has never had any agency in, or responsibility for, anything that has ever happened in her life.
The other thing that bothered me is the way that reader sympathy is manipulated—I’ve already described what the men are like, but more troubling is the story’s portrayal of Cicily as some sort of hero, even though she is someone who, with her gross invasion of privacy, thefts, and criminal damage, is more unpleasant than any of the men—unless, I guess, you subscribe to the idea that, if you are in the oppressed class, anything you do to your oppressors is fair game (for Old Testament types, think “an eye for an eye”). That can, of course, mean you end up as morally repellent as your so-called “oppressors”.
If you can stomach the above, there may be something for you here.
∗∗ (Average). 17,350 words.

Aurora by Michael Cassutt

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Aurora by Michael Cassutt (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) begins with Vera Vorobyova, the seventy-nine-year-old retired director of a Russian “science institute” north of the Arctic Circle, summoned to a meeting at her old workplace. When she gets there she is met by the new director, Nikitin, a “networked” individual who has implants that connect him to his colleagues. Nikitin tells Vorobyova that a returning spaceship is in trouble and doesn’t have the fuel to avoid an asteroid on its route. He then asks about Search, a mothballed energy beam weapon used once over two decades ago when she was the director (and which created a new crater on the Moon).
The rest of the story sees Vorobyova help them get Search operational to fire at the asteroid, an experience which sees her pendulum from providing essential information (she initially finds hardcopy manuals in the basement when she learns the digital archives have been deleted) to being completely ignored. During the latter periods she goes back to her flat, drinks heavily, and thinks about the past:

She was [. . .] unhappy, questioning everything from her constant drinking and lack of goals to every decision she had made since the age of twenty-nine, including her turn away from research to administration, then every financial and personnel choice she had made on her path to the directorship—and as director.
She had not applied to work at Aurora. She was busy at the Institute for Applied Physics in the capital and expected to spend her entire career there. She had only heard of Aurora because its northern sky surveys had appeared in some popular science publication.
[. . .]
Other than a single visit for her mother’s funeral, she had not returned to the capital, [and] aside from two fleeting, furtive affairs, Vera had made no deep personal connections in forty years.  pp. 107-108

Vorobyova is, however, more proactive than this sad-sack description might suggest and, after some more back and forth (she later provides a firing code), Vorobyova realises, when she looks at photographs of the asteroids flat surface (spoiler), that it may reflect back enough of Search’s electromagnetic energy to affect Nikitin and the other networked humans. With the clock ticking down she then struggles to contact him or get into the facility.
The story eventually ends with her and Nikitin firing the device after the others are evacuated, and saving the ship. The reflected energy mostly lands elsewhere, and Nikitin’s companions are affected but they can be repaired. Nikitin then tells Vorobyova that there is now no longer an age limit on the process so she can be networked too.
The best parts of this story for me were the setting, Vorobyova’s alcoholic melancholy, and the initial part of the plot. The latter part of the story, where the suspense increases, seemed a little formulaic; I also didn’t entirely buy the science (the Earth would have moved in space during the time between firing and the reflection); finally, the revelation that Vorobyova can be networked and lead a different life is a twist too far. Still, it’s not a bad read for the most part, especially if you have a penchant (as I do) for gloomy Russian novels.
*** (Good). 11,750 words.

Venus Exegesis by Christopher Mark Rose

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Venus Exegesis by Christopher Mark Rose (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) opens with a brief prologue that introduces the narrator Ling Chen—an obedient ex-US Navy pilot sent on a mission to the atmosphere of Venus. The story itself starts in the gondola that she (although the narrator’s sex isn’t clear till later in the story) shares with a scientist, Gabriel, and an AI, Zheng-123783b (there is brief reference to AI civil rights and the fact that “you couldn’t send humans on a great voyage of discovery and leave out the inorganics”).
In fairly short order Ling becomes sexually involved with Zheng, and soon after that she is outside the floating gondola hacking one of the native “flying pancakes” to death with a machete, a First Contact situation gone badly wrong. When they are almost overwhelmed by pancakes responding to the killing, Gabriel fires the rocket motors. This saves them but they lose a lot of their attached life support equipment.
At this point (spoiler) the story then morphs from a sex-with-AIs/First Contact tale into a Climate Change one, where Gabriel theorises that Venus was once like Earth but suffered from a huge runaway greenhouse effect. Then, when the crew are ordered home (they cannot survive for very long in their diminished state), Ling suggests that Zheng is sent back digitally to Earth, she take the one-man emergency pod, and Gabriel remains to do vital work on his theory. This solution is not accepted by mission control, and Ling gets a message from her Navy handlers on a secret backchannel—then, when Ling and Gabriel subsequently go outside on a routine EVA to remove the pancakes from the gondola, Ling stabs Gabriel with the machete and throws his body into the Venusian atmosphere, while making radio calls that suggest that AI Zheng has jumped.
Ling later goes home in the pod, while Zheng stays on the gondola impersonating Gabriel and doing his work (apparently Zheng couldn’t have been left behind on its own for political reasons).
Things slowly improve on Earth, although the similarity between the global warming effects on the two planets are never made public.
This story didn’t work for me for a number of reasons: first, I didn’t buy the Navy pilot as assassin malarkey (being able to drop a bomb on someone doesn’t qualify you as a close-quarters killer); second, this kitchen sink story can’t seem to decide whether it is about AI, planetary exploration, first contact, or climate change; third, the internal logic of the story does not convince (the political background is sketchy to say the least and, at one point, Zheng cryptically states it won’t be able to help Ling as it is “Asimov’ed” and “can’t kill Gabriel”. Obviously not that Asimov’ed, because colluding in Ling’s killing of Gabriel is an obvious First Law violation.
This is a bit of a mess.
* (Mediocre). 7,500 words.