Tag: 2*

Long-Term Emergencies by Tom Purdom

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Long-Term Emergencies by Tom Purdom (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) is set in the Asteroid Belt and has as its protagonist a woman called Muskeree. She is the long-lived Director of Community Relations of a data storage company called the Institute, and the story opens with her trying to contain a dispute between three individuals which is affecting the Institute’s ability to get new contracts—something that may affect its long-term existence:

[Sandora] vented her outrage over the community network. Kellerson tried to dismiss the whole matter. Others joined in.
One of the others was the stepson of one of the more established elders on the asteroid.
Ramis Valden was only twenty-six, but he had acquired a well-developed talent for turning interpersonal squabbles into conflicts over fundamental principles. He had gone after Kellerson as if he was assaulting a major threat to interplanetary civilization.
[. . .]
The flare-up had evoked queries from three of the Institute’s clients. Right now the situation was still tolerable. But the trend was moving in the wrong direction.  p. 140

Most of the rest of the story revolves around Muskeree’s attempts to defuse the situation by either dealing with the three characters directly, or indirectly through their family and friends.
The Foundation-like social mathematics vibe at the end is reasonably intriguing, but most of the rest of it (an HR person endlessly talking to people about other people) is about as interesting as you would expect—especially when you don’t do the blindingly obvious thing and sack Ramis, or threaten to sack him, for being a troublemaker.
** (Average). 7,050 words.

Sparklybits by Nick Wolven

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Sparklybits by Nick Wolven (Entanglements, 2020) gets off to a bloated and rambling start with four mothers, who are group-parenting a child called Charlie, meeting to discuss his lack of progress. During their long conversation, lights and icons flash across the walls—this is attributed to “Sparklybits”, but there is no immediate explanation as to what is going on. The author manages, however, to squeeze this in on the first page, well before the light show:1

Jo checked what was left of the brunch. No pastries, no cinnamon buns, no chocolate in sight. Just a few shreds of glutinous bagel and a quivering heap of eggs. They usually did these meetings at Reggio’s, and Reggio’s, say what you will about the coffee, was a full-auto brunch spot with drone table service and on-demand ordering and seat-by-seat checkout. Which was all but vital when the moms got together, when the last thing you wanted to worry about was who got the muffin and who bought organic and who couldn’t eat additives or sugar or meat. Whereas when they did these things at the house, the meal always became a test of Jo’s home-programming skills. Likewise the coffee prep, likewise the seating, likewise every other thing.
All she needed, Jo thought, was one tiny bite of cinnamon bun to help her through. But a rind of hard bagel would have to do.

The mother-stereotypes (“Aya can be a big mamabear about nutrition. Teri’s a hardass when it comes to finances. Sun Min’s got a lock on the educational stuff”) chatter about Charlie’s “problems” for another few pages before Jo, the live-in mother, and Teri go to speak to Charlie. We then see Charlie communicating to the flashing lights—now described as a virus—in his room, using a non-verbal/sign language.
The story finally perks up (and starts making some sense) when Evan, the AI virus exterminator (and mansplainer) turns up to deal with the problem. After some talk about the virus/ghost, the semaphore/lights language, the internet of things, etc. Evan manages to capture Sparklybits when it turns up to see what is happening. Charlie loses his temper.
The final part of the story (spoiler) takes place after the three non-resident mothers depart, and Jo takes Charlie to Evan’s workshop. There, the two of them see other AIs that Evan has captured and given a home. At the end of their visit Charlie gets to take Sparklybits back home, but with strict instructions to keep him contained in the device that Evan has provided. However, the final page sees Charlie show Jo something that he and Sparklybits are building, although I’m not entirely sure what the point of this is (the picture he shows Jo has two tiny figures stand on the lawn in front of the house holding hands; Charlie wears a conspiratorial grin while he does this).
This story has a bloated and inchoate start (you can’t help but think that Robert Sheckley’s first line for the same story would have been, “There was a ghost in the house”); a decent middle; and a weak ending (and a twist I possibly missed because, again, too many words).2 Overall it is an okay satire about modern parenting I guess but, having reread the above, I suspect I’m being over-generous.
** (Average). 8,750 words.

1. What is it about Asimov’s SF (and adjacent anthology) stories that they have this constant description of food and people eating?

2. I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that Wolven is just not my cup of tea (and if he was coffee, he would be a cup that is mostly full of froth and not liquid). Of the stories by this writer that I’ve read so far, there is only one that I liked, Confessions of a Con Girl (Asimov’s SF, November-December 2017). As for the others, I thought Caspar D. Luckinbill, What Are You Going to Do? (F&SF, January-February 2016), Passion Summer (Asimov’s SF, February 2016), and No Stone Unturned (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2021) were mediocre; and Galatea in Utopia (F&SF, January-February 2018) and Carbo (F&SF, November-December 2017) were awful.

Your Boyfriend Experience by James Patrick Kelly

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Your Boyfriend Experience by James Patrick Kelly (Entanglements, 2020) opens with the narrator Daktari playing a “therapy adventure” with his partner Jin. As they play, Jin asks Dak to go on a simulated date with a new generation “playbot” called Tate which Jin has developed for the company he works for. Dak is not particularly happy with this suggestion:

Why was I so upset? Because I couldn’t remember the last time Jin and I had been on a date. How was I supposed to get through to this screen-blind wally who had the charisma of a potato and the imagination of a hammer, and who hadn’t said word one about the Shanghai soup dumplings with a tabiche pepper infusion that I’d spent the afternoon making?
“Just because we call them partners doesn’t mean you have sex with them,” he said, missing the point. “If you don’t want to have sex with Tate, it will never come up. He doesn’t care.”
I wanted to knock the popcorn out of his hand. Instead I said, “Okay.” I flicked the game back on. “Fine.” I huddled on the far side of the couch. “You win.”

This passage illustrates two of the things I didn’t much like about this piece: Dak’s continual grievances about his relationship (later on he replies to a heartfelt marriage proposal with a grudging and conditional acceptance), and the endless mentions of food (Dak is a chef at his own “forum”, so we have mini-recipes pervading the story).
Eventually, about half a dozen pages in—after a scene where he meets the boss of Jin’s company, and sits with lawyers to sign legal papers (riveting stuff)—Dak finally meets the very lifelike Tate, and is surprised to find that the playbot looks like him.
After this encounter Dak and Jin go to dinner, where Jin reveals the huge bonus he has received for finishing his project before proposing to Dak (see above).
The story kicks up a gear when Dak finally goes out on his date with Tate. The pair go to a very exclusive restaurant and matters proceed smoothly—Dak likes Tate because, obviously, the playbot is programmed to adapt himself to his human user—but Tate eventually causes a scene when his simulated intoxication causes him to loudly blurt out his love for Jin. After that the restaurant staff want both of them to leave, but the newly arrived owner smooths matters over.
Dak and Tate decide to leave anyway, and Tate suggests they go to a bowling alley he went to with Jin on a previous simulated date. There they eat (there is paragraph long review of the skinnyburger, “dried”, the tofu, “soggy”, and the firedog, “nice umani finish”, “heat was more at the piripiri level than cayenne”, etc. ) before later meeting Jin’s mother who, as Tate knows from his previous visit, goes bowling there regularly. Dak subsequently learns that she doesn’t appear to know he is living with her son (more grievance).
The final reveal (spoiler) occurs on the way home: Tate reveals he is imprinted on Jin and is now imprinted on Dak, and that he has been designed for couples so they can “fill any holes in the relationship.” Dak then realises that, if he rejects Tate, the persona the playbot has developed so far will be wiped—so he invites it inside when they arrive at the flat.
This story has some interesting and lively parts (mostly when Tate is onstage) but it is essentially a flabby relationship story with a premise that is not convincing (the idea that most couples would invite a robotic third party into their relationship isn’t convincing, and the more you think about this the more ridiculous it seems). It’s also hard to like a story whose narrator is endlessly moaning about his relationship and other First World problems.
** (Average). 11,500 words.

When God Sits in Your Lap by Ian Tregillis

Posted on by Paul Fraser

When God Sits in Your Lap by Ian Tregillis (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2020) starts off in what I assume is hard-boiled/noir detective style:

I was jammed to the gills in the City of Angels the night some dumb onion started a war in heaven. And I was still piffled, a few hours later, when it ended.
I’d been weighing down a stool in my favorite gin mill, chewing face with a bottle and trying not to leave a puddle. A geriatric air chiller slowly lost its fight against entropy while the happy lady fumbling with her client in the corner gave us all a case of the hot pants, so the tapster barked at them to scram. They did, but not before pausing in the open doorway to let a devil wind rifle our pockets for loose change. (It got no business from me. You’d keep your cabbage in a shoe, too, if you’d ever lost a sawbuck to a Cherub’s grift.)

It keeps this up for a handful of pages until it moderates into a more normal style (although one still peppered with the likes of the above), during which we learn (a) that the “war in heaven” is an anti-satellite shooting war and (b) see the narrator, Philo Vance, approached by a man who wants him to check on his very rich mother (who seems to have cut him off after marrying a gold-digger).
The rest of the story mostly takes place at the woman’s mansion. Philo visits, sees a crashed car, and eventually manages to talk to someone at the house who has blood on his cuffs. Simultaneous with these events, Philo sees messages in his cigarette smoke and in water vapour—someone or something is trying to contact him.
The rest of the story is quite strange and, at one point, involves Philo departing our plane of existence to talk to something called the “Power”, which is concerned about something called METATRON running amok. This latter section, and previous hints, seem to suggest that Philo is an angel, although not from the sort of Heaven that we normally think of, and that the Power and METATRON are divine forces (possibly God and the Devil?).
Eventually (spoiler), and after various adventures at the bar and the mansion, we find that the mother’s disappearance and the behaviour of METATRON are connected, and matters resolve in the mother’s underground bunker—for both Heaven and Earth.
I’m not I entirely understood what was going on here, but those readers who have read Tregillis’s novel Something More Than Night (described as “Angel Noir” in the Asimov’s introduction) may fare better. As for the rest of us, there is probably enough sense here for it to be rated as okay. It’s more style than substance though, and it becomes a bit wearying.
** (Average). 8,200 words.

We Have Forever by Redfern Jon Barrett

Posted on by Paul Fraser

We Have Forever by Redfern Jon Barrett (ParSec #1, Autumn 2021) opens with one of the two narrators, Petra (her husband Felix is the other), meeting a man called Lorenzo at a party with what she thinks is his young mistress. When she objects (Petra knows Lorenzo’s wife) it materialises that the younger woman is his wife—she has had rejuvenation treatment.
The rest of the story alternates between Petra agonising about having the treatment herself (Felix is keen) and backstory about how the two came to meet before the fall of the Wall in East Germany (and eventually have kids). After an amount of this (spoiler), Petra and Felix have the treatment but she leaves him and ends up living with their son. The last line is:

I have a thousand lives ahead, and no more time to waste.  p. 45

Is suspect that the rejuvenation treatment is probably a metaphor for later-life couples growing apart and separating, but I was not convinced at all the hand-wringing that Petra does about whether or not to proceed (wait till you are in your sixties and you will see what I mean). Also, the arc of the story is quite slight.
This isn’t bad, but it’s essentially a mainstream story in drag.
** (Average). 3,350 words.

Fasterpiece by Ian Creasey

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Fasterpiece by Ian Creasey (Asimov’s Science Fiction, January-February 2022) opens with the wife of an artist watching him at work:

As Elaine harvested plums, carrying them from the garden to the kitchen, she glanced through the large windows of Barnaby’s studio. She could barely see her husband: only a blur as he moved with superhuman rapidity, augmented by the Alipes system. He flitted between three separate canvases, executing portraits simultaneously in watercolors, oils, and pastels. Today’s client sat at the far end of the studio, her stillness emphasized by the contrast with Barnaby’s whirlwind. Elaine disliked these Alipes-assisted commissions, but many customers appreciated the shorter modeling time.  p. 124

It turns out that the husband, Barnaby, has some sort of time-acceleration device fitted (similar in effect, I guess, to Gully Foyle’s commando wiring in The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester).
His wife is not happy, however, for two reasons, (a) he isn’t using the time saved to spend more time with her and (b) she fears that, with so many using the Alipes system, the market will be saturated with artwork. After discussing the latter problem with Barnaby (she is his agent), he decides to head off to the Birmingham Wipe (the site of a nanotech accident that has turned a large swathe of terrain into glass) to see if an artists’ collective he knows of can produce something special—and saleable—before the art bubble bursts. After he leaves Elaine goes to see her sister, who is living as a refugee in a half-drowned London.
So far, so good: there is a novel SF gimmick, interesting characters, and an intriguing background. Unfortunately, however, the rest of the story sees Elaine head up to Birmingham to find her husband (Barnaby is spending too much subjective time away from her), at which point (spoiler) all the Alipes time-acceleration stuff is jettisoned and the story devolves into a bland fantasy adventure in a virtual reality populated with charismatic queens, dragons, etc. (and this latter part is not much improved by worthy discussions about art or mentions of Picasso’s Guernica). Very much a game of two halves.
** (Average). 9,100 words. Asimov’s SF store.

Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus by Frederik Pohl

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus by Frederik Pohl (Alternating Currents, 1956) is, partially, an “if this goes one” satire about the commercialisation of Christmas, and begins with the story’s narrator, Mr Martin, recruiting a young woman called Lilymary Hargreave for his department at Heinemann’s store. Her job is to gift-wrap and label shoppers’ Christmas purchases, and it’s here where we get the first dose of satire (apart an earlier mention that this Christmas rush is happening in early September):

[Lilymary] called me over near closing time. She looked distressed and with some reason. There was a dolly filled with gift-wrapped packages, and a man from Shipping looking annoyed. She said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Martin, but I seem to have done something wrong.”
The Shipping man snorted. “Look for yourself, Mr. Martin,” he said, handing me one of the packages.
I looked. It was wrong, all right. Heinemann’s new wrinkle that year was a special attached gift card—a simple Yule scene and the printed message:

The very Merriest of Season’s Greetings
From …………………………………
To ……………………………………
$8.50

The price varied with the item, of course. Heinemann’s idea was for the customer to fill it out and mail it, ahead of time, to the person it was intended for. That way, the person who got it would know just about how much he ought to spend on a present for the first person. It was smart, I admit, and maybe the smartest thing about it was rounding the price off to the nearest fifty cents instead of giving it exactly. Heinemann said it was bad-mannered to be too precise—and the way the customers were going for the idea, it had to be right.

When Lilymary says she can’t complete the job as she needs to go home to her father, Martin does it himself. Then, when she doesn’t come in the day after, Martin goes to her house. There he finds that the father, Lilymary, and the other three daughters are Sabbath observant.
The rest of the story sees Martin romantically pursue Lilymary, which provides a clash-of-cultures situation between him and the family, who have just returned to the United States after a long time in Borneo as religious missionaries. Consequently, they don’t have a TV or dishwasher or any mod-cons, or any interest in them. They also provide their own entertainment and, during an after dinner session, when Martin sings a particularly commercialised version of ’Tis the Season of Christmas (“Come Westinghouse, Philco! Come Hotpoint, G.E.! Come Sunbeam! Come Mixmaster! Come to the Tree!”), the atmosphere sours. Then, when he later arranges for the visit of a Santa Claus and the Elves sales team to the house, the relationship breaks down completely. Eventually (spoiler), at the suggestion of his boss, Martin proposes to Lilymary (“Why not marry her for a while?”), she rejects him, and then he finds out the family is leaving once again for Borneo, so he tries again. He eventually succeeds when he tracks them down to a church service, prays with Lilymary, and then gets religion.
This is okay I guess, but it would have been a more interesting piece if it had concentrated on the Christmas satire and not the boy-wants-girl story.
** (Average). 8, 250 words.

Splitting a Dollar by Meghan Hyland

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Splitting a Dollar by Meghan Hyland (Analog, January-February 2022) is narrated by an AI which supervises a cache of advanced tech that has been left on the Moon by a previous human diaspora for future generations. The story opens with the AI watching two humans (“let’s you and I call them Amy and Brad”) approach.
The rest of the story is mostly about the disagreement between Amy and Brad about what they should take back to Earth: Amy wants equipment that will augment human intelligence; Brad wants to take back bacteria that can sieve out gold from mud. Then (spoiler) Brad punctures his suit, and Amy offers to trade her emergency O2 for his pouch space: he attacks her, she fends him off, and he is eventually forced to concede.
This is okay, I suppose, but I didn’t really buy the set-up, or the fact that they were supposed to be a couple (their arguments are contrived as well as irritating). And, a more minor point, the AI addressing the reader at the beginning of the story breaks suspension of disbelief.
** (Average). 5,200 words.

Christmas on Ganymede by Isaac Asimov

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Christmas on Ganymede by Isaac Asimov (Startling Stories, January 1942)1 opens with Olaf Johnson hanging decorations in the colony’s dome when he and all the other men are summoned to a meeting with their boss: they learn that, thanks to Johnson, the native Ossies (who are the colony’s labour force) have learned about Christmas and will go on strike unless Santa Claus visits. Johnson is nominated to be Santa.
The rest of the story sees the conversion of an anti-grav sled into a sleigh, the capture and sedation of Ganymedean spineybacks for use as reindeer, and the costuming of Johnson:

“I’m not going anywhere in this costume!” he roared, gouging at the nearest eye. “You hear me?”
There certainly was cause for objection. Even at his best, Olaf had never been a heartthrob. But in his present condition, he resembled a hybrid between a spinie’s nightmare and a Picassian conception of a patriarch.
He wore the conventional costume of Santa. His clothes were as red as red tissue paper sewed onto his space coat could make it. The “ermine” was as white as cotton wool, which it was. His beard, more cotton wool glued into a linen foundation, hung loosely from his ears. With that below and his oxygen nosepiece above, even the strongest were forced to avert their eyes. p. 88

Johnson’s perilous flight to the Ossies’ camp is made even more dangerous when the spineys wake up en route, but he eventually gets there safely. The Ossies get Christmas tree ornaments for presents (they think the globes are “Sannyclaws eggs”), and then demand a visit every year—which to them is a seven-day revolution around Jupiter.
This is an early work by Asimov that’s longer than it needs to be and whose characters are rather cartoonish (one of the prospectors—sorry, colonists—chews tobacco). But it’s a pleasant enough piece that produced a couple of smiles.
** (Average). 5,450 words. Story link.

1. This was published around the same time as Nightfall and the first ‘Foundation’ stories (late 1941 to mid-1942), but was written a year or so earlier, as Asimov notes in The Early Asimov:

The success of “Reason” didn’t mean that I was to have no further rejections from Campbell.
On December 6, 1940, influenced by the season and never stopping to think that a Christmas story must sell no later than July in order to make the Christmas issue, I began “Christmas on Ganymede.” I submitted it to him on the twenty-third, but the holiday season did not affect his critical judgment. He rejected it.
I tried Pohl next, and, as was happening so often that year, he took it. In this case, for reasons I will describe later, the acceptance fell through. I eventually sold it the next summer (June 27, 1941, the proper time of year) to Startling Stories, the younger, sister magazine of Thrilling Wonder Stories.

The Beast of Tara by Michael Swanwick

Posted on by Paul Fraser 2 Comments on The Beast of Tara by Michael Swanwick

The Beast of Tara by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2022) is a “companion piece” to last year’s Dream Atlas (Asimov’s SF March/April 2021)1 and, by the by, also has similarities with Scherzo with Tyrannosaur (Asimov’s SF, July 1999).2 All these (spoiler) involve people from the future interfering with the past.
In this story that intervention comes in the form of a young schoolboy called Gallagher, who turns up at an Irish archaeological site because he wants to write an article for his school paper. The team he visits are using an experimental machine to recover historical sounds (“A stone contains within itself the diminishing vibrations of every sound that ever bounced against it”), and Gallagher “accidentally” damages it on two separate occasions. On his third attempt to do so, Finn, the local fixer/bouncer, intervenes, and Gallagher reveals he is an agent of (not from) the future. He explains he is there to stop development of their new technology because, once they progress, they will find that they will be able to recover sounds from the future as well as the past (there is some waffle about the “quantum realm” here).
After Gallagher disappears in a puff of dust, the team leader, Dr Leithauser, decides to continue with their work, and the story concludes with the revelation that Finn is also an agent from the future (from a faction opposed to Gallagher’s). The team then recover the sound of a harpist playing at the coronation of an Irish king.
This is okay, but the the not entirely convincing plot is formulaic time-traveller material—and tarting it up with bits of Ireland, old and new, doesn’t disguise that.
** (Average). 3,400 words.

1. My review of Dream Atlas.

2. My review of Scherzo with Tyrannosaur.