Tag: 2022

Charioteer by Ted Rabinowitz

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Charioteer by Ted Rabinowitz (Analog, January-February 2022) is essentially a re-do of Arthur C. Clarke’s Sunjammer, except this one has a woman pilot: she is a prisoner who is racing around the sun trying to win her freedom from the tyrannical “Executive”, and someone has sabotaged her sail-ship.
Most of the story tells of how she engineers her way out of her predicament, and a lot of this is written in that jargon-filled Analog prose that makes your eyes bleed:

Now that power was flowing, the sensor net was active throughout the entire field of sail. It told her that the power spike had done more than blow out the main nodes; it had deactivated the carcerands in the sails. Each carcerand was a molecular cage trapping a second, free-spinning cluster of atoms inside. The inner cluster could be oriented by a magnetic field. Polarized in one direction, it rendered a sail opaque; in another direction, it created the brilliant mirror of a lightsail.
The power spike had fused 90 percent of those inner clusters with their carcerands. She was riding a giant disc of ashes.  p. 73

That last sentence isn’t bad, but I’m pretty sure there is a more elegant way to write the paragraph that precedes it.
Ultimately (spoiler) she manages to fix things but discovers she has received a fatal dose of radiation—so she crashes her ship into the station where the politicians are watching the race.
Apart from the bad writing (mostly too much engineering jargon), the political prisoner gimmick doesn’t convince.
* (Mediocre). 3,300 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.

Soroboruo Harbormaster’s Log by David Whitaker

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Soroboruo Harbormaster’s Log by David Whitaker (Analog, January-February 2022) is a short piece told in the form of AI diary entries (mostly) and tells of the arrival of a colony ship at a planet. Later entries tell of other ships that arrive later, some of which had been dispatched earlier than the first arrivals:

Soroboruo Colony
Sol Standard 16.42.12.18.2792
Arrival of Colony Ship Abel Tasman.
Vessel shows signs of minor damage, to be expected for pre-light-drive tech and duration of crossing. Still plenty of value, salvage crews dispatched.
Passengers surprised to find planet already settled, despite pre-launch briefing that postlaunch technological developments may present this possibility. Work force assignments drawn up and distributed.
Planetary Population: 16,973  p. 86

As earlier and earlier ships arrive, we see that some of them have fared poorly (especially the generation ones). Finally there is reasonably neat twist ending where (spoiler) they leave the planet for another one (humanity still hasn’t learned to live in harmony with its environment and has laid waste to the planet and surrounding solar system).
This isn’t bad (and is a lot better than most short-shorts) but some of the middle sections aren’t as effective as the others, and don’t seem to contribute to the thread of the story (the Junta one for instance). I think in something this short all the parts need to add something.
**+ (Average to Good). 700 words.

On the Rocks by Ian Randall Strock

Posted on by Paul Fraser

On the Rocks by Ian Randall Strock (Analog, January-February 2022) is a short-short1 about a billionaire who tells of an effort to save Earth from global warming by bringing back “ice cubes” from the Kuiper Belt. These hollowed out ice asteroids will then be floated in the atmosphere to cool it down.
This references two other SF stories to tell the tale, and doesn’t articulate why the idea doesn’t work. It’s more ridiculous musing than story-telling.
* (Mediocre). 1,000 words.

1. I’m not sure when short-shorts became “flash-fiction” (as this is described in the table of contents), or why. I’m not fan of the category, given that the average standard of these is far below other lengths of story.

Orientation by Adam-Troy Castro

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Orientation by Adam-Troy Castro (Analog, January-February 2022) takes the form of an alien giving an orientation briefing to a human abductee (or more accurately, a facsimile of a human—we learn from the briefing that the original remains untouched). We also learn, after various reassuring digressions caused by the off-stage questions from the human, about what is happening to them, where they are going, and the experiment in which they will have to participate.
This latter part, where the abductee is told (spoiler) that they will have to cooperate with another person—someone they can’t stand—stretches credulity somewhat, and the story doesn’t really convince. That said, this is entertainingly told, and has a great line: “It has become much more difficult to explain ourselves to our human test subjects, this past century or so. So many of you think you know everything.”
**+ (Average-Good). 3,250 words.

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.