Tag: Asimov's SF

GO. NOW. FIX. by Timons Esaias

Posted on by Paul Fraser

GO. NOW. FIX. by Timons Esaias (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2020) sees a PandaPillow (an AI comfort accessory) in the overhead locker of an aeroplane sense an explosive decompression in the cabin:

A haze of powders and exploded aerosols hung in the cabin, but was already clearing. The scene made PandaPillow’s systems surge. Everything was wrong. People were dazed, some were hurt. There was blood. The air was going away.
With its selfie app PandaPillow recorded two panorama shots and two closeups before its battery finally declared the need for emergency shutdown. Shutdown initiated.
PandaPillow took one last survey of the area. A few rescue masks were dropping, here and there. And why was the air all nitrogen?
COMFORT, DEFEND, said its pillow programing. Powering down wouldn’t do that.
PandaPillow #723756 invoked Customer Support.  p. 89

This call to a (perplexed) customer support team is the only distress message sent from the aircraft and, while they raise the alarm, the PandaPillow starts doing what it can to help the other bots in the cabin deal with the unconscious human passengers and seal the hull. It performs a number of key actions during the emergency and, ultimately, glues itself over a failing window. Eventually (spoiler), a limpet repair missile docks with the plane’s hull, takes control, and lands the aircraft safely.
Despite its heroic actions the PandaPillow is initially overlooked after they land, but is later fêted as a hero.
Some of the early action is hard to visualise but this is an entertaining piece, and the touching last section drags it up another notch.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 3,900 words.

The Conceptual Shark by Rich Larson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Conceptual Shark by Rich Larson (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2020) opens with Adam washing his hands in the sink when the bottom of it disappears and becomes the ocean. Worse, he knows there is a shark down there coming towards him: he runs out of his bathroom.
The next part of the story sees him at Nora the therapist’s office, where he tells her about what he has seen that morning and, later, about a childhood essay he wrote on sharks. Nora suggests the next time he has an episode, he should tell the shark how much he admired them when he was a kid. Adam tells her that sharks don’t talk, and she replies that they don’t live in bathroom plumbing either! When he leaves Nora’s office Adam bumps into Bastian, her boyfriend, who reappears later in the story.
The next day Adam decides he has to have a shower—by now he can smell himself—and during this he falls through the bottom of the shower tray:

A wave crashes over him and yanks the showerhead out of his hand. He struggles his way vertical again, treading the choppy water, but not before he catches an upside-down glimpse of a dark shape below him. The sight sends a surge of chemical terror through his whole body; he feels a tiny warm cloud against his thigh before the current whisks it away.
Adam knows that people do die in the shower—they slip, they fall, they break their necks. It’s almost definitely more common than dying in a shark attack. He doesn’t think there are statistics for shower deaths by shark attack.
His outflung fingers touch the plastic-coated edge of the stall just as another wave hits. He tumbles backward, nearly bangs his head on the opposite wall. The fear ratchets up to frenzy. He can feel the size of the shark circling below him, the water displaced by its powerful slicing tail.
Something nudges against his right arm. Retreats. Terror is paralyzing him in place; he can feel his limbs locking up. In a second he’ll sink like a stone whether the shark eats him or not. Sandpaper skin rasps against his other forearm. He pictures the blunt nose of the shark, pictures its maw opening up. It triggers another cascade of chemicals in his nervous system, and this time flight beats freeze.
He throws himself at the edge of the stall, seizes it with both hands. He hauls himself out of the shower and flops onto the dirty bathroom floor just as the shark breaches. Over his shoulder he sees its massive head breaking the surface in a spray of foam, sees row on row of razor teeth, sees one dull black eye staring back at him.
The showerhead is sheared off its mount, dangling from the shark’s mouth like a bit of dental floss.  p. 173

After this Adam’s problem only gets worse, and he sees the shark everywhere there is water—washing machines, stacked water bottles, etc.
At this point, what is a very weird (but engrossing) story (spoiler) gets even weirder when he goes to see Nora again, and opens the office door to see Bastian pointing a gun at him. Nora is tied up, and in the middle of the office is a kiddies paddling pool that has been partly filled from water containers. There is also a spear gun nearby.
Bastian orders Adam into the office, reassures him that he’ll walk out alive, and begins to explain that the “conceptual shark” is real, not an illusion, and that he has been hunting it since childhood (when it killed his grandmother). What Bastian plans to do is use Adam as bait and, when the shark appears, kill it. Adam eventually agrees to go along with his plan, and Bastian releases Nora from the office.
The climactic scene sees Adam standing in the paddling pool wearing a lifejacket attached to a rope that Bastian will use to pull him out of the pool when the shark arrives. When it doesn’t seem like the pool is going to change into the ocean, Adam pricks his finger with a paperclip to produce a drop of blood—at which point he plunges down into cold seawater. When the shark arrives it’s like the climactic scene of the Jaws movie played out in an office setting and, if that isn’t sensational enough, we also discover that the shark has been hunting Bastian, not the other way around.
Then the story bootstraps up another level when the paddling pool splits and the office fills up with the sea: the roof becomes the sky, sunlight warms Adam’s face, and he sees he is floating on a vast ocean.
This is an impressively original piece that crams a big plot and a thoroughly worked out idea into very little space.
**** (Very Good). 3,750 words.

Tunnels by Eleanor Arnason

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Tunnels by Eleanor Arnason (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2020) is the sixth of the author’s ‘Lydia Duluth’ stories to appear. This one finds her in Innovation City, an island on the planet Grit, and she is there, as usual, on a work assignment for her employer, the holoplay production company Stellar Harvest. Most of the first part of the story is a mixture of background material (including a previous run-in she had with the owners of the island, a genemod company called BioInnovation), a description of the local silicon and carbon based lifeforms, and travelogue.
The story finally gets going when she meets an actor’s agent for tea to discuss a production in progress on Grit. Before this, however, Duluth feels like she is coming down with a cold and, after the meal, she feels worse. Not only does it feel like she has caught the flu, she also has a compunction to go down into the railway system tunnels under the city. Her inbuilt AI, which hasn’t said a lot until this point, tells her to phone for help, but she can’t remember how. Then she sees a “Gotcha” on the inside of her eyelids, and realises she has been infected with a hacked flu virus.
The second part of the story sees Duluth wake to find herself in a dark tunnel, with her AI silent. She starts walking and eventually finds a lit water fountain where, a little bit later, an alien Goxhat turns up:

[She] saw something by the drinking fountain, her size, but lower to the floor. The way it moved was distinctive. She came closer. The creature had an oval body that rested on four legs, and four arms, two on each side of the oval body. One arm in each pair ended in a formidable-looking pincher. The other ended in a cluster of tentacles. The creature was holding a cup in one of its tentacle-hands and dipping it into the fountain. There was no head. Instead, its brain was housed in a bulge atop its body. There ought to be four eyes in the bulge, though Lydia couldn’t see them. The Goxhat was facing away from her.
“Hello,” she said in humanish.
The alien spun. The four blue eyes glared. “Dangerous!” it cried in humanish. “Beware!” It waved the cup, spilling water. “Fierce! Fierce!”
“I’m not a threat,” Lydia said, trying to sound reasonable and unafraid. As far as she knew, the Goxhat were never dangerous to members of other species, but this one looked agitated and poorly groomed. The black hair that covered its body was spiky in some places and matted in others. What the heck was this guy doing here in this condition, and where was the rest of it?
“Where are your other bodies?” Lydia asked.
The Goxhat screamed and ran into the darkness.
Well, that had certainly been the wrong question to ask.  p. 21

Eventually, Duluth manages to talk to the creature and discovers that it knows other humans in the tunnels, and she manages to convince it to take her to them. She later meets three others that have been trapped underground for years because they too caught the hacked flu virus, and one of the side effects is that trying to climb up any of the stairways incapacitates them. Duluth also learns that the tunnels aren’t actually in use, but are a result of a BioInnovation genmod product that has run wild and spread under the planet.
Further adventures follow, beginning with the four of them (and the Goxhat) going to a vagrants camp (this other group of humans aren’t infected, but refuse to help those who are because they variously use them for stories, provided by Genghis the professor, and sex, from Tope the courtesan, etc.). This encounter is rather irrelevant to the story because when Lydia later talks to the Goxhat and asks it its name, it hoots three times, and adds that no-one has ever asked, before offering to lead her to the surface. However, the meeting provides an amusing after dinner episode where (a) Duluth is quizzed by the tunnel dwellers about a holo star she knows and (b) Genghis’s story about Thor losing his hammer is subject to a relentless analysis of the character’s attitudes and behaviour (“You can’t be killing people, even if they’re giants. It’s illegal.” “And wrong,” etc.).
The last section (spoiler)—where Duluth and Three Hoots reach the surface, steal a boat and escape to the mainland, and then BioIn and Stellar Harvest (Duluth’s employers) security get involved—is routine stuff and not as engaging as the previous part (even with Three Hoots’ revelation about how its other bodies died after they discovered financial irregularities in BioIn’s accounts). The story also feels longer than it needs to be (it is just short of novella length).
Overall an entertaining and amusing, if minor, piece.
*** (Good). 17,400 words.

Father by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Father by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) is set in an alternate 1950s America,1 and begins with the narrator of the story, a young boy, answering the door to find that the Veterans Administration have sent his mother a robotic “father unit”; it starts to perform that role for the boy (whose real father died in the Afterwar—the invasion of the Soviet Union after WWII) by pitching baseballs to him.
Later on, after some more robot-boy bonding, a local delinquent called Archie—who has previously verbally abused the narrator, mother and robot—does a low-level fly-by in his aircar and hits father with a baseball bat:

We ran out of the house in time to see Archie’s hot rod arcing off into the sky, wobbling dangerously from side to side on its aftermarket stabilizers.
There were four or five faces sticking out of it. Laughing faces: a girl in red lipstick with her hair up in a kerchief, and the hard, narrow greaser faces of Archie’s friends. As the hot rod zipped off one of them yelled: “Home run!” and hooted, the sound doppling off in the crickety night as they lurched away against the stars.
Father was laying on the ground. His head was dented, and one of his eyes had gone dark. As we came over to him, he was already getting up to his feet.
“Are you all right, Father?” I said.
He swung around to look at me. It was awful—his dented head, the one eye snuffed out. But the other one glowed, warm as a kitchen window from home when you’re hungry for dinner.
“That’s the first time you called me Father,” he said. “I couldn’t possibly feel better, hearing that word from my boy.”
“We should call the cops,” my mom said.
“I doubt they’ll do much,” Father said. “And that young man and his friends really have trouble enough as it is. I feel none of them are headed toward a good end.”
“I’ve said the same myself, many times,” Mom said. She was rubbing a dirty mark off of Father’s head with a kitchen cloth. “What did they get you with?”
“A baseball bat, I’m afraid.” He paused. “Perhaps they mistook me for a mailbox.”
“Hilarious,” Mom said.
“I’m here all week, folks . . .” Father’s bad eye flickered back to life for a moment, then went dead again.  p. 49

The rest of the story largely develops around Archie’s continued persecution of the family, which includes the house getting bricked from the air when the father-robot and the narrator are out trick-or-treating (although the next time Archie flies over, the robot throws a hammer at him and hits him in the face). During this period there are also a couple of visits by an ex-military repairman, the first time to fix the robot’s head and the second time to visit the narrator’s mother. On the latter occasion the repairman says something vague that suggests that father-robot may be partially or all of Archie’s real father and, re the hammer attack by the robot on Archie, something about malfunctioning “sub-routines”.
The final part of the tale (spoiler) involves Archie supposedly making peace with the narrator by taking him to Woolworths for a milk shake—while the rest of his gang lure the robot out of town and attack and kill it (but not before the robot gets one of them). The repairman appears again at the narrator’s house in the aftermath of this event, discusses with another military man the robot’s lethal behaviour, and then what the pair did in the war (which includes a mention of their sub-routines).
The bulk of this story, with its small town America, father-robots, air-cars, and amateur rocket fields, has a likeable Bradburyesque vibe. That said, the later material about the robot’s true identity and its sub-routines is never adequately resolved, and it almost unravels the last part of the story. A pity—if this had continued in the same vein as it started, it would have been a pretty good piece rather than a near-miss.
**+ (Average to Good). 7,200 words.

1. The alternate world pivot point in this story is the same as in Nayler’s two ‘Sylvia Aldstatt’ stories (also published in Asimov’s SF): the recovery of a crashed flying saucer by the USA in 1938, and the subsequent use of the discovered technology.

Ex Vitro by Daniel Marcus

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Ex Vitro by Daniel Marcus (Asimov’s SF, mid-December 1995) is set on Titan, where a couple, Jax and Maddy, do science work on the geology of the planet and its slug-like aliens. In the background there are rumbles about a possible nuclear war on Earth between PacRim and EC.
The second chapter switches the point of view from Jax to Maddy (as does the fourth). She is worried about her family in Paris, a likely target, and this causes an argument between them. Maddy later thinks about a embryo of theirs she has in cold storage, but about which she hasn’t told Jax.
The third chapter sees Jax observing the slugs on the surface when Maddy calls: there has been a war on Earth and her parents are dead. She wants to leave Titan for the Moon or the L-5 colonies, so Jax calls their boss at Sun Group, who tells them that Naft and Russia came through alright and that he can send a ship for them later if they want.
The last chapter sees Jax lie to Maddy about the timescale of a likely pickup. Later on Maddy goes out on the surface and opens the canister holding the embryo, destroying it.
I guess this okay for the most part—if you are interested in dysfunctional relationships against a backdrop of a dysfunctional Earth—but it just grinds to a halt. I’d also have to say I’m not a fan of overly contrived writing like this:

They cycled through several iterations of crash and burn, learning each other’s boundaries, before they settled into a kind of steady state. Still, their relationship felt to Jax like a living entity, a nonlinear filter whose response to stimuli was never quite what you thought it was going to be.  p. 68

* (Mediocre). 4,750 words.

All Under Heaven by John Brunner

Posted on by Paul Fraser

All Under Heaven by John Brunner (Asimov’s SF, mid-December 1995) begins with a young man called Chodeng watch a military procession arrive in a Chinese town as he helps his uncle mend the temple roof. When his uncle catches Chodeng looking at the scribe sat among the visitors, he chastises him for daydreaming. Later that evening though, as they all gather for a meal, Chodeng is the one who translates for the visitors (who speak a different dialect). During this Chodeng and the villagers learn from General Kao-Li and his scribe, Bi-tso, that they are headed towards the next village to look for meteorites. Chodeng is ordered to go with them.
When they arrive at Gan Han (meaning “not enough water”) after an arduous journey through the hills, they are surprised at to find a verdant oasis, with rice-filled paddies, frogs and ducks. Chodeng is dispatched to speak to one of the young women in the paddy fields, and he quickly finds that (a) they speak the same language as the visitors (they were banished to this area by a previous emperor) and (b) the village bloomed into this paradise after the arrival of the meteorites. Then matters take an even stranger turn when the rest of the locals turn up:

Can this be how a dragon looks? The question sprang unbidden to Chodeng’s lips, but Bi-tso spoke before he had time to utter it.
“A phoenix? Are there still phoenixes in our decadent age?”
Mention of such a legendary, powerful creature dismayed their escorts. They exchanged glances eloquent of apprehension, only to be distracted a second later as the pack animals caught—what? The scent, perhaps, of what was approaching. Or maybe they saw it, or detected strange vibrations in the air, or registered its approach by some sense too fine for coarse humanity. At all events it frightened them, and for the next few minutes the men had all they could do to prevent the beasts from shucking their loads and bolting.
[. . .]
A phoenix, was it? Well, if a scholar so identified it. . . . On first seeing it he had at once felt a dragon to be more likely. Yet—
Yet was he seeing it at all? Seeing it in the customary sense of the term? Somehow he felt not. Somehow he felt, when he tried to stare directly at it and focus its image, to get rid of the shiny hazy blur that seemed like a concentration of the strange luminosity he had already detected in the local air, what he had mentally compared to the nimbus round figures in religious paintings, that the—the creature wasn’t there to be seen. Not there there. Nearby. In a perceptible location. But not there in the sense that one might walk, on his own sore human feet, to where it was. One couldn’t judge how tall, how wide, how deep from front
to back…. In fact, apart from the bare fact of its existence, one could describe it in no terms whatsoever.  p. 91-92

It soon becomes apparent that the creature is an alien when it starts mind to mind communication with Chodeng. During a long conversation he finds out that it arrived with the meteorites (the remaining parts of its spaceship) and compelled the villagers to help it, later rewarding them with improved living conditions. After some more chat it disappears—but Chodeng senses it is still there. Then the head man invites the visitors to eat and rest.
The back half of the story sees Chodeng slip away with the girl he saw earlier, Tai Ping, during dinner—at which point the alien starts mentally communicating with him, stating that it needs his help to organise the collection of the scattered parts of its ship. The alien offers him the girl’s sexual favours in return, but when Chodeng approaches Tai Ping he realises that the alien is controlling her, and he refuses. He then tells the alien that they will help it retrieve the various parts of its ship in the morning. After the alien leaves the girl’s father arrives and thanks Chodeng for sparing his daughter.
The final act (spoiler) sees the visitors and locals arrive at the meteorite/crash site. The alien starts talking to Chodeng, who relays its messages to the General and Bi-tso, and they hear of its extra-terrestrial origins and how, after Chodeng’s actions the night before, it realises that it has underestimated humanity’s potential to be civilized. The alien then reveals its physical body to the humans (as opposed to the projection they all saw before), at which point the General tells the soldiers to kill it for its various breaches of Imperial law (forced labour, etc.), After it dies, and they all turn back towards the village, they see the barren scene and realise that the greenery and water was an illusion.
This has some good local colour and characterisation, but the stranded alien plot isn’t particularly original, and the flip-flops at the end (the alien’s change of heart, the General’s execution order) make the story too busy and too contrived.
** (Average). 11,450 words.

Nic and Viv’s Compulsory Courtship by Will McIntosh

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Nic and Viv’s Compulsory Courtship by Will McIntosh (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) sees Viv and her partner Ferruki out on a date when the Hempstead town AI texts her:

GOOD EVENING VIV. THIS IS TO INFORM YOU THAT, BASED ON AN ADVANCED ROMANTIC COMPATIBILITY ANALYTIC I’VE BEEN DEVELOPING, I HAVE IDENTIFIED AN IDEAL PARTNER FOR YOU. I’D LIKE THE TWO OF YOU TO MEET TOMORROW AT 6 P.M., AT TANGERINE TOWER ROOFTOP CAFE. IN FACT I’M SO CONFIDENT IN MY CALL ON THIS THAT I THINK WE SHOULD TENTATIVELY SCHEDULE THE WEDDING DATE! THIS IS A NEW SERVICE I’M PERFORMING TO IMPROVE THE WELL-BEING OF OUR COMMUNITY, AND NO ONE WILL BENEFIT MORE THAN YOU AND NICHOLAS.
LOVE,
JOURNEY

Viv calls Journey to protest, pointing out she is already engaged to Ferruki (as the AI knows) and, in any event, she doesn’t need its advice on dating. However, when Viv refuses to meet her suggested date, Journey threatens to throw her out of the high-tech paradise that is Hempstead. Although Viv realises she could appeal to the Town Council, that would (a) take time, and (b) probably be futile as the council usually agrees with the AI’s decisions—so she decides to go through with the date. Then she finds out that Nic is the janitor at the hospital where she works as a doctor.
The rest of the story proceeds along standard rom-com lines with the two of them reluctantly meeting for their date. When they do so Viv sees that Nic looks like a Neanderthal type who (a) also has a girlfriend, Persephone, and (b) doesn’t know the difference between “moot” and “mute”. Then Viv’s fiancé Ferruki arrives and drops a hint about his forthcoming karate black belt test. After Ferruki leaves, Nic tells Viv her fiancé is obviously insecure, but Viv defends Ferruki’s “enrichment activity” and then asks what Nic’s is: he says he does interpretative dance.
Their date does not go well so Journey ends up insisting that they make a proper effort to get to know each other. It then offers them 10,000 bucks if they meet for eight dates—or else. The pair reluctantly agree, and these dates (the Mars sim, a visit to a food bank, etc.) provide some hilarious set pieces, in particular the one where they are both in a steam tent with a female “experience leader” called Sharon who is trying to get the group to connect with their inner selves. Sharon hears one member’s traumatic experience before moving on to Nic:

Sharon pressed her fist to her palm and bowed slightly to Rita. “That’s a powerful insight. Thank you for sharing.” She looked at Nic, who was next in the circle. “Nic? Do you have anything to share?”
Nic wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve. “I’m hot. I’m really hot.”
Sharon’s smile was kind, if a little tight. It had grown tighter each time Nic’s turn had come around. “Dig deeper, Nic. What do you feel?”
Nic squeezed his eyes closed. “I feel hot. I wish I had a giant block of ice I could lie on.”
Viv bit her lip, keeping her gaze on the flames. She knew if she looked at Nic, she’d lose it.
“Okay. We’ll come back around to you. Keep digging.” Sharon looked at Viv, her smile relaxing. “How about you, Viv? How do you feel?”
Viv stifled a laugh. Hot, she was dying to say. Really, really hot. This was serious, so she kept the joke to herself. “I was thinking about the purpose of this ritual, whether we create this artificial suffering as a means of reaching an altered state of consciousness, or if it’s really some sort of proving ground, to show we can take it, something to brag about to our friends.”
“Interesting,” Sharon said. “Try to draw that back to your own experience. Are you, personally, using it as a proving ground? Do you feel you have something to prove to your friends? Try to push through your intellect, dig down to how you feel.”
I feel hot. It was on the tip of her tongue, and it was suddenly the funniest thing Viv had ever thought. She bit her lip harder, trying not to laugh. Everyone in the circle had been pouring out their souls, speaking their truths. Except Nic. Each time his turn had come, he’d said the same thing: I feel hot. Each time he said it, it got funnier.
Sharon moved on. “Beto. How do you feel?”
I feel really fucking hot. Viv burst out laughing. She couldn’t hold it in anymore. She laughed so hard her stomach hurt, even though everyone was staring at her, confused.
“I’m sorry,” she managed. “I’m just so hot.”
“Right?” Nic said. “Thank you.”  p. 29

As well as the set pieces the story is also peppered with some very funny one liners:

“Shoot. I just remembered I have work in the morning,” Viv said.
“Yeah. Me, too. There’s a toilet I need to replace.”
Viv laughed. “You sound almost eager to get in there and replace that toilet.”
Nic shrugged. “I get a lot of satisfaction from replacing a toilet, so it’s a win-win for me.”
“What is it about replacing a toilet that gives you satisfaction?”
Nic studied her face. “Is that a serious question, or are you just mocking me?”
“Mostly I’m just mocking, but I’d like to hear your answer, in case it’s mockable, too.”  p. 32

Apart from the almost continual hilarity (I laughed out loud several times) provided by both Viv and Nic and their partner’s interactions, the pair also discover that the reason that Journey has embarked on this matchmaking endeavour is because its contract is up for renewal, and it fears it will be scrapped in favour of a newer model AI. Viv also finds out that Journey is partly made of human material and is a cyborg of sorts.
The story eventually rolls round to its (spoiler) admittedly predictable but satisfying conclusion. The dates end without the successful conclusion that Journey wanted to show its continual worth, and it then finds out that it is going to be replaced. Nic (who has now split up with Persephone) confesses his love to Viv, but she knocks him back. Then Nic invites Viv to his solo dance recital, another hugely funny set piece that shows Nic to be a not particularly skilled but wildly enthusiastic dancer. During his performance Nic offers to improvise to any music or sounds the audience offers, and we subsequently see his car-crash interpretation of drum music, a baby crying (Ferruki’s sniping choice), an Albanian ballad, a bear roaring, etc. During this, Ferruki, who has accompanied Viv to the perfomance, provides a constant stream of sarcasm and disdain and, when he and Viv are later trapped in an elevator for several hours, she eventually climbs out of the top of it to get away from him. They later split up.
The final section sees Viv and Nic get together. Then they rescue Journey, and take the AI to improve a neighbouring township that is less successful. The story ends a few years on with Journey talking to the couple’s daughter Lucy.
With this level of comedic talent, McIntosh should be working in Hollywood, not SF.
****+ (Very good-Excellent). 17,600 words.

Semper Augustus by Nancy Kress

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Semper Augustus by Nancy Kress (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2020) opens (after a somewhat irrelevant introductory passage where a young woman gives birth in the back of a truck) with a grandmother telling a young child called Jennie to stop repeating what is said to her (Jennie turns out to have “selective savant memory” or “echo-memory”).
We then see that the grandmother is highly protective of Jennie and has never lets her go out to play but eventually, when the child turns eight, she has to go to school. Before this Gramma shows her, as a warning about the world, a graphic news clip about a young girl who has been murdered. On the way to school Gramma continues the child’s education when they pass wealthy professionals helicoptering into their workplace:

Gramma stopped tugging at Jennie’s hand. “Okay, I guess you need to know some things before you start school. I should of said it before. The aliens, ‘Lictorians’ the government calls them, have all kinds of fancy tech. They landed in China, so the Chinese got the tech and then sold some of it to companies in America. All that means is rich people got richer, like always. But this time, way way richer. And those of us on the bottom lost more and more jobs to the Likkie robots and AI and supertrains and all the rest of it. I used to have a good factory job at Boeing, before automation. Between the Likkies and your grandfather, I lost everything. And welfare just gets less and less. So now you understand.”  p. 135

This future world of economic inequality is the backbone of the story (although the explanation for the way things are is fairly superficial and never really explored in any detail—why would the masses not vote for change, for example?)
Jennie is tested at school and put into Ms Scott’s class for gifted children, where she meets Imani, the alpha female of the class, and then Ricardo, who modestly identifies himself as a “genius.” As Jennie settles into her education we find out more about the world around her, and her grandmother’s precarious financial situation. Then, one day on the way to school, the nearby robot factory blows up and Jennie learns about “T-boc”, the Take Back Our Country rebels who target the wealthy or “blingasses” living with their robots behind Q-field force shields.
In Jennie’s teenage years there are more significant developments. On one occasion she is told by her grandmother that her mother is being prosecuted for murder. Gramma takes Jennie to the city where the trial is but leaves her alone in a rented “coffin room” with instructions not to leave, but Jennie slips out to an internet café and finds that her mother, apparently a prostitute, is on trial for the murder of a client. Later Jennie also learns about an aunt called Grace, but Gramma refuses to tell Jennie anything about her. Then, in her final teen years at school, she comes home one day and finds that Gramma has been murdered.
All these events take place against a background of closer bonds with her school friends, gang problems at school, and what is now an insurgency between T-boc and the government/rich.
The second part of the story sees Jennie discover a valentine card (presumably sent to her mother) in her dead grandmother’s papers, which prompts a car journey with her friends to two log cabins in the middle of nowhere, one of which is burnt out. On return she meets Grace at her grandmother’s house. Grace has inherited Gramma’s property, and Jennie ends up going to stay with her.
Grace is a dress designer and Jennie eventually becomes, over the next couple of years, a famous and wealthy model with a rich boyfriend. We now see how the rich live behind their Q-shields, and later get a brief glimpse of one of the enigmatic Lictorians at a fashion show (which suffers a T-boc cyberattack that sets some of the models’ clothes on fire). Grace and the friends that Jennie makes in this rich society are, needless to say, selfish, shallow types unconcerned about the welfare of the less well off.
The third leg of the story sees Ricardo tell her (in a rare call—she has lost touch with her childhood friends) that Imani’s mother and brother have been murdered in a gang-related incident. Jennie visits them and there is some social awkwardness. Then, after her trip, when a wealthy boyfriend’s robofactory is blown up (along with a demand for UBI—universal basic income), and a T-boc supporting village razed in reprisal, his vicious response (“Barbecue T-boc! Yum!”) provokes Jennie to leave him, give up modelling, and join T-boc.
Jennie becomes increasingly involved with the group, and eventually takes part in an operation that kills sixteen humans. When a pro-UBI Senator is shot, however, Jennie confides her growing doubts about T-boc’s strategy to an elderly woman psychologist, who tells Jennie she also wants T-boc to change direction. Their conversation is overheard by one of the other cell members, and they are eventually put on trial. During this the cell leaders get Jennie to use her echo-memory to repeat every conversation that she and the old woman have had.
It’s in this part of the story that my interest began to fade. Before this it is a reasonably good piece about a young woman growing up in a deprived and challenging environment, but the T-boc section is boilerplate resistance/us-and-them material populated with two dimensional characters. Unfortunately much worse follows in the final part, where (spoiler) Jennie flees T-boc and goes back to the log cabins to hide with her friends. When T-boc sends a helicopter to bring them back, and the pilot moves to kill them, who should pop up but her mother Cora, who shoots the pilot. If this co-incidence isn’t enough, she also commits her own terrorist attack on the rest of the story, blowing it up with revelations of her infection by a meteor-borne space virus in the 1970s, which made her near-immortal and of interest to the Lictorians (who seem to be the ones that were behind her earlier jail break). And we also learn that Cora was Gramma’s mother!
More plot explosions follow, including an extraction by the Lictorians, and Jennie telling their alien ambassador about her echo-memory, which indicates she also has the mutation. After negotiations she agrees to co-operate with the aliens and help with their research (we find the reason they are here is to try and get the secret of immortality for their own people) but only if they agree to several demands—at this point in the story we get Jennie’s mini-manifesto: nullify Q-shields, unless the government taxes robots and provides UBI; set up a foundation to aid small business; sell the US advanced tech like the Chinese; etc., etc. Oh, and the Semper Augustus/tulip mosaic virus stuff mentioned by Ricardo early in the story gets trotted out again.1
As I mentioned above, for the first half/two-thirds or so this isn’t bad but it goes spectacularly off the rails at the end. Jennie’s naivety about what T-boc becomes isn’t convincing, and the story never really has anything sensible to say about how to fix the structural inequalities of the world it sets up, short of trotting out the idea of UBI, which sounds like a good idea but may have its own problems (Finland trialled it and then stopped2).
The main problem, though, is that the final immortality section is just a huge deus ex machina that creates an ending at odds with the rest of the story, and introduces a huge new subplot in the last few pages. A kitchen-sink piece, and probably longer than it needs to be too (by the time you get to the end of the story a lot of the preceding detail about Jennie’s life is completely irrelevant).
* (Mediocre). 40,300 words.3

1. The Wikipedia page on the Tulip mania, perhaps the first speculative asset bubble, is here.
2. The Wikipedia page on Universal Basic Income is here.
3. As this is on the borderline (40,000 words) between a novella and a novel I’ve gone with Asimov’s categorisation as a novella.

Life on the Moon by Tony Daniel

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Life on the Moon by Tony Daniel (Asimov’s SF, April 1995) opens at a party where Henry, a poet, meets Nell, an architect. They start dating:

Those first moments were so abstract, urban and—formed, as Henry later recalled them. Like a dance, personifying the blind calls and pediments of nature. That was what it felt like to be alive in the houses of people you didn’t really know, of living hazy days in parks and coffee shops and the chambers of the university. Nell and he met the next day for espresso like two ballet dancers executing a maneuver. Touch lightly, exchange, touch, pass, pass, pass.
But something sparked then and there, because, of course, he had asked her to drive out to the Ozarks to see the flaming maples, and Nell had accepted. And in the Ozarks, Henry could become himself, his best self.
Nell had found one of his books, and when they stopped to look at a particularly fine farmhouse amidst crimson and vermilion foliage, she quoted, from memory, his poem about growing up in the country.
They kissed with a careful passion.  p. 233

Well, at least they didn’t tell each other, “You complete me.”
They get married, and Nell begins a two year building project, a major construction in Seattle called the Lakebridge Edifice. They are given an apartment on the Alki-Harbour Island Span and, while Nell plays with her cement mixer, Henry writes his nature-based poetry:

In the nucleus of our home, my wife draws buildings
in concentrated silence, measured pace
as daylight dapples through the walls and ceilings
of our semi-permeable high arch living space.
While I, raised young among the cows and maize,
garden the terrace by my hand and hoe
and fax her conceptions out to their next phase,
she makes our living—and your living too.
Near twilight, I osmose from room to room
feeling vague, enzymatic lust for her  p. 234-235

The project is a triumph, and Nell then is offered a commission to build a lunar colony. Nell asks Henry to come with her, but he is concerned about what the lack of nature on the Moon will do to his poetry:

Henry had almost turned to go when the sun broke out from behind the clouds, and shattered the falls, and the surrounding mist, into prismatic hues.
This is as loud as the water, Henry thought. This is what the water is saying. It is talking about the sun. The possibility of sunlight.
The light stayed only for a moment, and then was gone, but Henry had his poem. In an instant, I can have a poem, Henry thought, but I look at the moon, and I think about living there—and nothing comes. Nothing. I need movement and life. I cannot work with only dust. I am a poet of nature, of life. My work will die on the moon. There isn’t any life there.
He must stay.
But Nell.
What would the Earth be like without Nell? Their love had not been born in flames, but it had grown warmer and warmer, like coals finding new wood and slowly bringing it to the flash point. Were they burning yet? Yes. Oh, yes.  p. 241

The agonies of being an artist compel Henry to stay on Earth while Nell goes to the Moon, and he moves to his grandfather’s log cabin to write. He passes up the chance to make a yearly visit, but this is something he agonises about after their regular VR calls. Then, one day (spoiler), he gets a call from her boss saying she has been killed in an accident. He also tells Henry that she left something for him in a crater on the Moon, but that they don’t know what it is. When Henry goes up there he sees it is a sculpture of a garden animated by micro machines (obviously not a very good one if the others couldn’t figure out what it was).
Okay, it’s probably pretty obvious by now that I wasn’t a fan of this: I found it a ponderous and pretentious piece (see above), and one in which the protagonist’s problems are not only self-created, they aren’t that believable (I can just about understand why he didn’t want to go to the Moon for an extended period, but why would you pass up the yearly visit?) What makes the story even more tiresome is that there are screeds of Henry’s really, really bad poetry used as interstitial material (see above for an example) And when we aren’t being exposed to that, we get extracts from Nell’s dry as dust architectural essays (I’ll spare you an extract from those—you’ve suffered enough).
I’m baffled as to how this was both a Hugo finalist and the winner of that year’s Asimov’s poll for Best Short Story.
* (Mediocre). 6,500 words.

Jigoku No Mokushiroku by John G. McDaid

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Jigoku No Mokushiroku by John G. McDaid1 gets off to an intriguing start with an AI elevator called Hitoshi talking to Crazy Bob, a visitor to a huge futuristic library built and run by the Koreshians. Although Hitoshi thinks that Bob might be mad, the AI chats to him when he can (partially as part of the building’s security protocols), and reveals that it is named after Hitoshi Igarashi (the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, who was assassinated by Moslem extremists in 1991). Hitoshi even quotes parts of Bob’s books back to him when he stops in-between floors to allow Bob to have an illicit cigarette:

“If I may quote your last book, ‘The vacuum of disbelief sucked the rationality out of culture.’”
“Yeah. We started ringing like a bad circuit. Any control was better than none. Until finally, here I am, in a nation of nonsmoking, nondrinking, vegetarian strangers, stripped of all weaponry in the name of safety, with no culture in common, each plugged into their own unique digital information environment, under a government financed by 40 percent tax and the forfeiture of every convicted criminal’s assets.” He took a long drag and exhaled slowly through his nose. “And I can write all this stuff down, blast it out on the net, and there’s not even anybody left who cares enough to read it.”  p. 109

This feels as if it is, or will be, remarkably prescient.
As the story progresses Bob asks Hitoshi about a woman called Aki who, on one elevator trip, gets on along with a couple of “Koreshi suits” (we learn along the way that the library, a huge underground structure, has been constructed by followers of The David (David Koresh of the Waco siege2) and that each of the disciples is required to emulate The David, usually in some act of self-immolation).
Later on in the story Bob becomes involved in Aki’s plan to nuke the library but, as they are in the process of smuggling the bomb down to the basement, Hitoshi convinces them to let him do it so it can be freed from its current constraints as an elevator AI. After they leave the elevator Hitoshi takes the bomb down to the sub-levels and disarms it for possible future use.
This is a witty and entertaining piece but I’m not sure the satire, which mostly seems to be aimed at mad millennial types, has much point—it’s a pretty obvious target—and I’m not sure I understand Aki’s motivation in wanting to bomb her own library.
The story has a pretty good start but a weaker ending; I think its Sturgeon Award overrates it.
*** (Good). 5900 words.

1. The full title given on the opening page is Jigoku No Mokushiroku (The Symbolic Revelation of the Apocalypse). Google translates the title as “Book of Revelation”.
2. The Wikipedia page on the 1993 Waco siege.