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(Emet) by Lauren Ring

Posted on by Paul Fraser

(Emet) by Lauren Ring (F&SF, July-August 2022)1 opens with Chaya in her countryside home watching a golem dig up dandelions in her garden—these creatures of Jewish folklore are created daily by Chaya and linked to her home network:

After a few false starts, Chaya has the bestowal of life down to a science. Each morning at dawn, she molds assistants from clay, connects them to her wireless network just like any smart watch or Bluetooth dongle, and passes them the day’s variables: a list of chores, with each step painstakingly defined. The golem in charge of the dandelions finished early, but there are others of various sizes lumbering about the yard, carrying eggs from Chaya’s chicken coop and clearing loose stones from her long, winding driveway.  p. 67

We learn that Chaya is a teleworker for Millbank Biometrics, a company that is developing facial recognition software. Then, after some backstory about how Chaya’s mother taught her how to make golems and the generalities of Chaya’s job, Chaya virtually attends a company meeting where she and the other employees are given a list of thirty-six protestors that law enforcement want to track:

Confusion spreads across the faces on Chaya’s monitor. If her camera was on, she is sure that she would see the same expression reflected in her own frown. Tracking protesters isn’t exactly what she signed up for when she applied to Millbank. Sure, it’s what their software was ultimately going to be used for, but she wasn’t supposed to have to do it.
“Are there any questions?”
Chaya expects someone to ask what crimes these people committed, or what is going to happen to them when the information is turned over to the police, even though she already knows the dark answer to that. She expects questions about ethics and precedent and nondisclosure. At the very least, she expects someone to ask how they are supposed to check every partial match from every instance of every client’s software without neglecting all their other work.
No one asks any questions, though, not even her manager, so Chaya stays in line and keeps quiet. She sets the thirty-six faces to display on one of her monitors and returns to her code. What else can she do? She’s only one person, after all.  pp. 72-72

The next section of the story sees, among other things: (a) Chaya remember a childhood incident when a black friend was arrested on a false positive match (Chaya’s family didn’t do anything before the child was eventually released); (b) Chaya spot one of the thirty-six protestors in a local shop (when they talk to each other, Chaya is told about a surveillance protest in a couple of weeks); (c) Chaya garble the code for one of her golems—this makes it create another one, which in turn creates one more (“like a line of self replicating code”); (d) Chaya’s mother’s death due to cancer and health algorithms; and (e) Chaya realise, when she receives another dubious request from her company, that she is little better than a golem herself.
The story ends (spoiler) with Chaya’s long simmering rebellion, which sees her create self-replicating golems with the same faces as the target individuals, something designed to overload Millbank’s servers (she is helped with this by the man from the shop, who she meets again at the protest, and who gets the dispersing protesters to take a self-replicating golem with them to increase the area where Millbank will record sightings).
I found this story interesting but something of a mixed bag. On the plus side, the gimmick (golems controlled by computer code) is original, and the story is more multi-layered and complex than most but, on the minus side, the golem/computer mix feels a bit odd (a fantasy idea mixed with science fiction), and the politics of the story (surveillance + algorithms = bad) feels a bit simplistic (look at how much surveillance data we give away willingly).
I’d also add that the very last part, where Chaya conflates her actions with the idea of “truth” (“Emet” in Hebrew) doesn’t make much sense as they seem to be more about political values or freedom. Finally, I didn’t understand why “Emet” is the word that brings the golems to life.
*** (Good). 7,800 words. Story link.

1. This won the 2022 World Fantasy Award for best short story. It was also a Nebula finalist.

Just Enough Rain by P. H. Lee

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Just Enough Rain by P. H. Lee (Giganotosaurus, 1st May 2021)1 opens with an arresting first line:

I wasn’t surprised when God showed up for Mom’s funeral. They’d always been close.

After the funeral service is over, Annie goes over to talk with God and they have a long and wandering conversation (His friendship with her mother, His sending angels to remove the sarcomas produced by a previous bout of cancer, etc.) before God tells her He is thinking of bringing Annie’s mother back to life. Once He ascertains that Annie has no objections (expected inheritance, etc.) there are sounds of movement from inside the coffin.
This opening passage is followed by a short second chapter which tells of the parable of Honi the Circle-Drawer (Honi asks God to provide rain, and then the correct amount of rain when there is a flood) before the rest of the story settles into its groove, which is that of Annie’s love life. This latter begins with her resurrected mother telling Annie that she wants grandchildren:

“You know,” she’d say, as if I hadn’t heard it a hundred times before, “one of my great regrets was dying without getting to meet my grandchildren.”
“Mom,” I’d say, “you’re still alive.”
“Only because of a miracle, dear,” she’d say, “and we mustn’t count on miracles. What happened to Brett, anyway? I liked Brett. Good Jewish boy. And a doctor!”

After more of this kind of thing, and some of Annie’s backstory (a vision she had at 15 about saving monarch butterflies from extinction), Annie’s mother calls her and says that she has phoned God and had a word with him about Annie’s love life. Annie later experiences the result of this intercession in a hilarious passage:

I was on the Blue Line, reading The Guermantes Way–the new translation–when I noticed him–her? them?–sitting across from me, beautiful.
It was their skin, I think, that caught my attention. Strong, muscled, but still soft as a feather. I sucked in my breath and, without thinking, bit my lower lip. There was no question of going back to The Guermantes Way. I just sat, and looked at them, beautiful, God they were beautiful.
Then, just as we left Elmonica/SW 170th, they stood up–tall, broadshouldered, the slowest curve of their chin–and unfurled their wings of holy light, almost the length of the entire train car.
“Oh no,” I said, but I couldn’t look away.
“HARK,” they said, their voice filling the entire railcar. “BE NOT AFRAID, FOR I AM A MESSENGER OF THE LORD YOUR GOD.”
Some people were fumbling with their phones, but most of them just gawped, open-mouthed. I felt the cold-warm rush of embarrassment and I wanted to hide under my seat almost as much as I wanted to keep staring.
He’d sent an angel. Of course He’d sent an angel.
The angel turned to a slightly paunchy man–nice curly hair, though–in glasses, khakis and a polo shirt. “DAVID ELIAS RUTENBERG,” it said.
David blanched and looked for all the world like he’d just had a dream about taking a final exam in his underwear. “Y-yes?” he finally managed.
The angel pointed to me and I tried my very best to blend into the seat cushion. “THIS WOMAN, ANAT BETHESDA MEAGELE, IS SINGLE. SHE HAS A GOOD JOB AND SHE’S EMOTIONALLY MATURE AND READY FOR A COMMITMENT. YOU SHOULD ASK FOR HER NUMBER. SO SAYETH THE LORD.”
David stared at me and swallowed hard. His face was covered in sweat.
“TAKE HER SOMEWHERE NICE, NOTHING TOO FANCY, IN THE $20-30 RANGE,” continued the angel, just when I thought that this couldn’t get worse. “ARGUE ABOUT WHETHER TO SPLIT THE CHECK BUT THEN PRETEND TO GO TO THE BATHROOM AND SECRETLY PAY.”
David, still sweating, gave me an appraising look that made me instantly aware of every wrinkle and sag. “She’s, uh” he started.
“YES,” said the angel, turning their magnificent gaze upon me. “HURRY IT UP.”
“She’s a bit old for me, isn’t she?”
The angel snapped their gaze back to him. “WELL YOU’RE NO SPRING CHICKEN YOURSELF, DAVE.”
Dave looked like he’d just swallowed a toad. “I-is that also the word of G-G-God?” he managed.
“NO, DAVE, THAT’S JUST A SIMPLE OBSERVATION THAT ANYONE COULD MAKE. YOU’RE NOT EXACTLY GOING TO LAND A SUPERMODEL.”
“Uh, well,” said Dave, and pulled the emergency brake.

Annie subsequently phones God and tells him not to intercede again, before asking for the angel’s telephone number. God phones her back with it, and Annie and the (monomaniacally dull) angel subsequently go on a car crash date. Worse, he then pesters her with a series of texts asking to see her again and, when those are unanswered, another series asking what went wrong.
Annie (bearing in mind her mother’s comments about being too quick to judge) eventually agrees to another date with the angel. This one works out better, even though their dinner conversation spans an eclectic range of topics (the semiotics of the translations of Remembrance of Things Lost, Korean Food, angelic languages, etc.). By the fourth date they are having sex, or whatever word you would use to describe congress between a woman and a being who, unclothed, has a distinctly inhuman form:

Their human guise–clothes, but also skin and eyes and everything–lay in a pile beneath them. What remained was a great cloud of a thousand different hands, in each hand a different eye, in each eye a different name of God, all wreathed in light and holy fire.
“THIS IS ME,” said the angel, with a voice that seemed to come from everywhere.
I stepped forward, took one of the hands, and kissed it. “You’re beautiful,” I said, and meant it.

Eventually, and after sections that detail Annie’s conversations with (a) her mother about the parable of Honi the Circle-Drawer, and (b) the angel about the unpublished Rimbaud translations in her notebooks (the story is fairly discursive throughout), Annie phones her mother to tell her that she is pregnant. The story ends with, among other things, a discussion of God’s likely reaction, what Annie intends to do with her child, and what happened “last time” (i.e. with Jesus).
This is not only an original story (the idea of a slightly bumbling God manifest in the world is relatively novel or at least underused in genre fiction) but also an amusing, and sometimes hilarious, one. It is, however, slightly more sprawling than it needs to be (the ending is a bit wafflely, for instance) and some tightening up would have benefited the whole piece. That said, I enjoyed the story’s various diversions—the parable, Annie’s butterfly vision and whether saving them was God’s purpose for her, the discussions about Proust’s Remembrance of Things Lost, etc., etc. These gave what could have been a piece of froth some thoughtful heft and, at times, made it a wise and reflective work.
Well worth a look.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 9,550 words. Story link.

1. Giganotosaurus pays $100 for its stories, which is about 1 cent a word for this piece. I’m surprised this 2022 Nebula Award finalist didn’t end up in a better paying market.

A Pall of Moondust by Nick Wood

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Pall of Moondust by Nick Wood (Omenana, April 2021) opens with the female narrator dreaming about an airlock accident on the Moon:

I dreamed, and shook awake, as the two bodies flew away from me.
Dreams live.
Scott is the one keying in the Airlock code, mouth O-ing in shock at the tug and hiss of escaping air behind her. “Helmets on,” she says, but it is already too late, the door to the Moon behind her is wide as a monster’s maw.
Bailey is fiddling with the solar array on the Rover, his helmet playfully dangled on the joystick for a second, before being sucked out and beyond my reach. Scott pushes me backwards and the inner door closes, leaving me safe on the inside. The wrong side?
The Airlock explodes with emptying air and a spray of moon dust.
Two die, while I live.

Most of the rest of the story tells of the narrator’s therapy sessions, during which she is questioned about the accident, and the death of her grandfather when she was young (he is referenced at the very start of the story and is the source of more unresolved guilt and grief).
The story concludes with the narrator later going out on a therapeutic moonwalk with two others and, during this (spoiler), she has a momentary vision of her grandfather and his dog. He waves at her, and behind him she sees the two people who were killed in the airlock accident.
This is a rather slight mood piece and the African flavour of the story didn’t quite mask that for me—but it’s not a bad effort, and at least the writer avoided the temptation to expand it into six thousand words of angst.
** (Average). 2,050 words. Story link.

Hunting Problem by Robert Sheckley

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Hunting Problem by Robert Sheckley (Galaxy, September 1955) opens with Drog arriving late at a meeting of Soaring Falcon Patrol (Drog “hurtles down from the ten thousand foot level”). Drog is chastised by his Patrol Leader, who then recites the Scouter Creed to the assembled scouts:

“We, the Young Scouters of the planet Elbonai, pledge to perpetuate the skills and virtues of our pioneering ancestors. For that purpose, we Scouters adopt the shape our forebears were born to when they conquered the virgin wilderness of Elbonai. We hereby resolve—”
Scouter Drog adjusted his hearing receptors to amplify the Leader’s soft voice. The Creed always thrilled him. It was hard to believe that his ancestors had once been earthbound. Today the Elbonai were aerial beings, maintaining only the minimum of body, fueling by cosmic radiation at the twenty thousand-foot level, sensing by direct perception, coming down only for sentimental or sacramental purposes. They had come a long way since the Age of Pioneering. The modern world had begun with the Age of Submolecular Control, which was followed by the present age of Direct Control.
“. . . honesty and fair play,” the Leader was saying. “And we further resolve to drink liquids, as they did, and to eat solid food, and to increase our skill in their tools and methods.”  p. 36

Drog is then told by his Patrol Leader that, if he wants to get his first-class scouter award before a forthcoming Jamboree (Drog is the only second-class scout in the patrol), he needs to bring back the pelt of a Mirash, a “large and ferocious animal”. The Patrol Leader states that three of these previously thought extinct animals have been spotted to the north. The story point of view then switches to three human prospectors who have recently landed on the planet—they are the Mirash that are going to be hunted by Drog.
The next part of the story sees Drog stalking the humans, a task which does not begin well when one of the prospectors tells his colleague that he saw a tree move—and one of them subsequently blasts it:

Slowly Drog returned to consciousness. The Mirash’s flaming weapon had caught him in camouflage, almost completely unshielded. He still couldn’t understand how it had happened. There had been no premonitory fear-scent, no snorting, no snarling, no warning whatsoever. The Mirash had attacked with blind suddenness, without waiting to see whether he was friend or foe.
At last Drog understood the nature of the beast he was up against.1  p. 40

There are a couple more conventional efforts by Drog to trap the humans (these include a steak dinner waiting when they arrive back at camp—they avoid the tangle-grass and rising disc of earth—and then the sounds of a damsel in distress—which they ignore). Drog (spoiler) finally catches one of the humans by using “ilitorcy” (the use of a thick mist, essentially). The story then closes with both first-class scout Drog flying the pelt of a Mirash at the Jamboree and all three humans escaping alive in their spaceship. The pelt turns out to be an environmental suit that one of the men was wearing.
I suppose this is a moderately enjoyable, if slight, YA piece. The ending may provide more of an uplift to others than it did for me.
** (Average). 3,950 words. Story link.

1. Robert Sheckley’s stories often have mordant asides about the nature of humanity, e.g. his description of humans as “pushers” in the superior Specialist (Galaxy, May 1953)—if you want a piece that has a YA feel but which also works for adults (and has a great sense of wonder ending), I’d read that instead.

Let All the Children Boogie by Sam J. Miller

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Let All the Children Boogie by Sam J. Miller (Tor.com, January–February 2021) starts with the narrator Laurie remembering the time she first heard Iggy Pop’s The Passenger on the radio and how, at the end of the track, there was an interruption, “staticky words, saying what might have been ‘Are you out there?’”
Then, next day in a local thrift shop, Laurie hears someone singing the song:

The singer must have sensed me staring, because they turned to look in my direction. Shorter than me, hair buzzed to the scalp except for a spiked stripe down the center.
“The Graveyard Shift,” I said, trembling. “You were listening last night?”
“Yeah,” they said, and their smile was summer, was weekends, was Ms. Jackson’s raspy-sweet voice. The whole place smelled like mothballs, and the scent had never been so wonderful. “You too?”
My mind had no need for pronouns. Or words at all for that matter. This person filled me up from the very first moment.
I said: “What a great song, right? I never heard it before.
Do you have it?”
“No,” they said, “but I was gonna drive down to Woodstock this weekend to see if I could find it there. Wanna come?”
Just like that. Wanna come? Everything I did was a long and agonizing decision, and every human on the planet terrified me, and this person had invited me on a private day trip on a moment’s impulse. What epic intimacy to offer a total stranger—hours in a car together, a journey to a strange and distant town. What if I was a psychopath, or a die-hard Christian evangelist bent on saving their soul? The only thing more surprising to me than this easy offer was how swiftly and happily my mouth made the words: That sounds amazing.

This passage pretty much limns the the story, which is that of one odd sock finding another and becoming a pair. The next day they set off together on a trip to a record store and, during their journey, they hear another interruption on the radio after David Bowie’s Life on Mars (the comments include mention of an airplane crash—which occurs later that day—and a “spiderwebbing” epidemic).
The rest of the tale sees the pair spend their time (in between further, increasingly meaningful, radio messages) navigating the mostly self-inflicted emotional dramas of teenage life in 1991 (during which Laurie seems perpetually on the verge of a nervous breakdown). These tempests-in-teapots include, among other situations, dealing with both sets of parents—and when Fell first meets Laurie’s parents, Laurie tells them that Fell is also a “she” to placate any potential concerns about what might happen to their daughter upstairs. Laurie then feels sick at having done so, as “It was a negation of who Fell was”. I assume from this that Fell is a biological woman who has chosen to be a trans man (but, as I find this stuff of little interest, and can’t be bothered trying to confirm my impressions, I could be wrong). Later, we also get a look at Fell’s dysfunctional family set up, which essentially consists of an alcoholic and hostile mother who apparently uses the wrong pronouns for her child (something I didn’t think you could do in 1991).
Eventually (spoiler), the content of the messages (“I don’t know if this the right . . . place. Time”; “To tell you the future can be more magnificent, and more terrifying, than what you have in your head right now”; “Two soldiers trapped behind enemy lines”, etc.) leads the pair to triangulate the signal to a nearby record shop (the massed Air Force trucks nearby seem unable to do so)—but there is no-one there. Fell concludes that an earlier hypothesis—about the affirmatory messages coming from their future selves—is correct.
This story will probably only work for those interested in safe, non-threatening (the only drama here occurs in Laurie’s head), and emotional YA material about insecure teenagers. The SFnal idea is weak and not really developed in any meaningful way (the series of transmissions from the future are concluded by the “answer” being given by Fell). It is essentially a mainstream story about growing up.1
I’d also note in passing that the gender pronoun handwringing that goes on in this seems wildly ahistorical.
* (Mediocre). 7,000 words. Story link.

1. Unless the SFWA has suddenly been swamped by emotional teenage writers, this seems like another mystifying Nebula Award short story finalist (it also placed sixth in the Locus Poll).

Laughter Among the Trees by Suzan Palumbo

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Laughter Among the Trees by Suzan Palumbo (The Dark #69, February 2021)1 opens with Ana driving to a park in Canada, during which she recalls (a) her arrival in the country as the child of West Indian immigrants, (b) her early days in school, and (c) the birth of her sister Sab. Ana then recalls a childhood family camping trip where her younger sister disappeared during the night (Sab left the tent—against Ana’s wishes—with Greg, a boy she had been playing with earlier that day). Sab was never seen again, nor was the boy—and there was no evidence he had ever been at the campsite.
The story then moves forward in time to when Ana has grown up, her father has died, and her mother is in a care home. During one of Ana’s visits to see her mother, the old woman talks about the disappearance of Sab and shows Ana a picture of a boy that looks like Greg—it materialises that Greg was a cousin of Ana’s mother who drowned back in the West Indies in 1962 when Ana’s mother wanted to go swimming in a flooded river. She tells Ana, “‘dis go haunt you here.’ You can’t outrun the past, Ana, even if it’s dead and drowned in another country.”
The story closes with Ana going back to the camp site. Then (spoiler), on the second night, a ghostly Sab appears and tells Ana to follow her. They go to a cave, where Ana finds Sab’s remains and later lies down beside her bones. The story closes with Ana feeling a dense cold, and something gripping her throat.
This is reasonably well told, but it seems to be more an autobiographical slice-of-life than a ghost story (the immigrant background, the family accounts, and the dysfunctional relationship with her sister, etc.). I’d also add that the internal logic of the haunting doesn’t really convince: I can see why Greg would kill the mother or Sab for revenge, but why would Sab lead Ana to the same fate given it was her own childhood stupidity and wilfulness that got her killed?
Finally, there are one or two sentences or word choices that could do with being changed, e.g. the very clunky first sentence:

The highway to the campground cuts through the granite Laurentian Plateau like a desiccated wound.

What’s a “Laurentian Plateau”? Do wounds become “dessicated”? Why distract your reader with this kind of thing? Wouldn’t, “The highway to the campground cuts through the plateau like an old wound” be a simpler and more apt beginning (the story is in large part about an old wound)?
** (Average). 5,950 words. Story link.

1. This was a 2022 Nebula Award finalist in the short story category. Another mystifying choice.

For Lack of a Bed by John Wiswell

Posted on by Paul Fraser

For Lack of a Bed by John Wiswell (Diabolical Plots #74, 16th April 2021) opens with Noémi trying to relieve her constant pain by sleeping on the floor. While she distracts herself with social media, her friend Tariq texts with the offer of a sofa. But there is a catch though—apparently someone died on it. But, as the sofa is clean, Noémi accepts the offer, and Tariq, who is actually standing outside her door, brings it in. Noémi subsequently sleeps well.
Noémi is then woken late the next morning by Lili, her boss at the pet shop where she works; Lili (who is a succubus) tells Noémi that there has been trouble with the mogwai overnight and to head in to work (we later find that the shop also stocks gryphons and basilisks, etc.)
The story’s only real complication comes later that day when Noemi is woken again (she fell asleep after the call) by someone knocking on her door. It is Lili, it is six-thirty at night, and, after checking that Noémi is okay, Lili points at the sofa:

Lili looked like she’d bitten into an extremely ripe lime. “When did you invite her?”
“Her? Are you gendering my furniture?”
Lili pointed a sangria red fingernail at the sofa. “That’s not furniture. That’s a succubus.”
Noémi tilted her head. Giving it a few seconds didn’t make it make any more sense. “I know you’re the expert, but I’m pretty sure succubi don’t have armrests.”
“Come on. You know my mom is a used bookstore, right?”
“I thought she owned a used bookstore.”
“The sex economy sucks. With all the hook-up apps and free porn out there, a succubus starves. My mom turned into a bookstore so people would take bits of her home and hold them in bed. It’s why I work at the pet store and cuddle the hell hound puppies before we open.”
Noémi asked, “Is that why they never bite you?”
“What do you think? Everybody else gets puppy bites, except me. I get fuzzy, affectionate joy-energy. Gets me through the day, like a cruelty-free smoothie.” Lili blew a frizzy strand of gold from her face.
“But this sofa has devolved really far into this form. I know succubi that went out like her—she’s just a pit of hunger shaped to look enticing. No mind. Just murder. Where’d you even find her?”

The rest of the story (spoiler) sees Noémi, Tariq and Lili burn the sofa outside the apartment block. We subsequently learn that Noémi is till sleeping well because she kept one of the cushions.
This is a slight tale with an odd setting (e.g. a fantasy world where a succubus can become a sofa or a bookstore) and I don’t think it really works. I’d also add that the fact that it ended up as a Nebula finalist is baffling and seems to indicate a group of voters who are over-enamoured with frothy, feel-good pieces (or perhaps suffer from chronic pain themselves).
* (Mediocre). 2,750 words. Story link.

The Metric by David Moles

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Metric by David Moles (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2021) opens on a far future Earth with a spaceship crashing near the city of Septentrion after the vessel is forced out of the metric (a universe wide system developed aeons ago which has its nexus on Earth). When a rescue party from the nearby city of Septentrion arrives, one of the members called Piper spots something in the wreckage, and he races his twin Petal to get to it.
When Petal arrives first and picks up a small sphere a stranger appears beside him and starts talking to the pair in an unknown language. One of the other group members gets their armour to translate what he is saying: they learn that the universe is ending.
Piper and Petal subsequently take the sphere and its intelligence, which calls itself Tirah, back to the city. Tirah applies for provisional citizenship and requests the fabrication of a body. While this happens, we learn about Tirah’s home world:

Hoddmimis Holt, the world that had sent Tirah, had been built perhaps two hundred million years ago, as Septentrion counted years; built when there were still stars in the sky, and when ships like Thus is the Heaven still plied the metric, knitting a web that spanned galaxies, even as the quintessence was drawing those galaxies apart, emptying the spaces between the stars to drown each galaxy alone in red darkness. It was a great city, as Petal understood it, built mostly of things more clever and more enduring than brute matter: nootic mass, dissociated fields, knots of space-time akin to the metric itself; and home only to purely computational intelligences, as far beyond the computationals of Septentrion as the Holt itself was beyond Septentrion’s towers of carbon and crystal.
The Holt was made in nearly full knowledge of the inevitability of the quintessence and the limitations of the metric, and made to last. Its makers poised it on the edge of a singularity with the mass of twenty billion stars, the core of a galaxy far from humanity’s birthplace, a black hole so enormous that even light would take days to girdle its vast event horizon; and there it spun, balanced at the equilibrium point between the singularity’s hungry mass and the even hungrier quintessence.  p. 26

The passage above gives you a good idea of the baroque and information-dense style of the story but, in the next few pages, the detail of Tirah’s warning becomes clearer and we learn that the quintessence is slowly destroying the universe. The metric, a system built to ameliorate the effects of the quintessence, needs to be shut down otherwise space-time will not come to an end—and this will prevent a new universe being born.
Tirah subsequently petitions the City Authority to shut down the metric but is unsuccessful (funnily enough, no-one wants the Earth and the Universe to come to an end before it has to). Tirah is then confined to the Archive grounds, but Petal, after discussing the matter with Gauge (a “motile” from the Archive), helps Tirah escape. When Piper realises that Petal and Tirah intend making the long overland journey to another city called Meridian, he and the rest of what remains of the rescue team are tasked to follow and retrieve them.
The second half of the story is devoted to the long overland trek that Petal and Tirah (and their pursuers) make in arctic conditions that prevail over most of this far-future Earth. Along the way there are deserted wastelands, buried cities, messages from their pursuers which make the pair detour, and periods when there is no light at all:

Petal and Tirah made more than twenty leagues that first day, the flat land of the lakeshore giving way to rolling hills, and there was just no reason to stop, not when Petal didn’t feel tired, not when the going was so easy, and Tirah so light in Petal’s arms. Petal could have kept on, continuing into the dark. But the scale of what they’d done, what Petal was committing to, was starting to sink in.
They’d outrun the storm, or it had passed over them, and they were under a clear black sky with only a faint dusting of silver sparks, very high up, that Tirah said was probably debris from colliding mirrors. The snow was smooth and very flat and seemed, through the armor’s eyes, to shine with its own light.
“What will it be like?” Petal asked—meaning the new cosmos. “Will there be stars?”
“Not to be known,” Tirah said. “It might be the same. It might be different. What’s most important is that it will be.”
Petal’s hand sought and found Tirah’s.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Petal said.
Tirah said nothing.
They couldn’t really touch, not through the armor, and in this cold the armor wouldn’t have opened if Petal had asked. But it was almost as though they could.
Three thousand leagues, Petal and Tirah, just the two of them.
And at the end of it, the end of the world.  p. 36

Eventually, after a hundred and seventy days on the ice, Petal and Tirah reach Meridian, only to see that parts of the city are on fire because of misaligned orbital mirrors. Then they realise that they are going to have to go through a restricted area (Petal’s armour and life support system tells him, “Under the terms of the 57th Diatagmatic Symbasis and its implementing regulations and orders, entry to the peripheral conservation area is permitted only to authorized persons”). They nearly make it, but are caught by the city cohorts.
Petal is taken to a cell and (spoiler) is surprised to see it is already occupied by Piper—he and his team arrived earlier as they used a crawler to travel overland. Petal also learns that several members of his old team died on the way.
Petal and Piper are then taken to the city, where they meet another old colleague, Hare, and then learn that Tirah will be allowed to see the sacella to make his case for shutting down the metric. Petal wants to go with him, and tells Piper to come along.
The final scene sees Tirah attempt to approach the sacella, but he is a machine and is disintegrated before he can speak with them. The twins, after some existential agonising, take his place—and the story ends with the implication that they are successful (the chapter headings form a temporal countdown throughout the story, with the last one being TΩ-2×103—thirty three minutes before TΩ).
This story struck me as the kind of piece that a more cerebral and current day Planet Stories might use—a enjoyably high density (there is as much detail here as some novels) super-science tale set on an exotic, far-future Earth, and one which ends with the death and rebirth of the universe!
***+ (Good to Very Good).1 16,300 words. Story link.

1. I liked this story (a Theodore Sturgeon Award finalist, by the way) better than all the other novelette finalists in the Asimov’s Readers’ Poll for 2021. I don’t know how this one didn’t make the cut—too complex, too hard a read?

The Dark Ride by John Kessel

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Dark Ride by John Kessel (F&SF, January-February 2021)1 gets off to an engrossing start at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, where Leon Czolgosz is trying to assassinate President McKinley. When the crowds prevent Leon from getting near enough he decides to wait until the President returns to visit the Temple of Music.
To fill the time Leon wanders around the grounds of the Exposition looking at the exhibits and later decides to go on “A Trip to the Moon”. This is supposedly an aerial trip to the moon followed by an excursion to an underground city for an audience with the ruling Grand Lunar.
As Leon listens to the guide’s entertaining pre-flight briefing he wonders if McKinley has been on the ride, and thinks about the possibility of assassinating him on the surface of the Moon. Then his thoughts turn to a woman called Emma Goldman, an anarchist activist Leon has seen speaking and has briefly talked with. (Later on in the story, Leon goes to her home in an attempt to become more involved in the anarchist movement, and his infatuation with Goldman is one of the factors influencing his desire to kill the President). Eventually, after the guide has finished the briefing, Leon and the other passengers go through a set of double doors to board the airship:

As they ascended, they passed through clouds of mist. A storm arose. The wind increased, lightning flashed, thunder echoed, the airship shook. The young women clutched their boyfriends’ arms. The breeze became a gale.
Then they were past the storm and into outer space. Below, Leon could see the outline of Lake Erie shrinking until all of North America was visible. As they continued to rise, the entire Earth shrank to a disk, falling back into the distance.
It was a vision of the world that one never had. The entire human race lived on that one planet. All history, the rise and fall of nations, the great conflicts, the great achievements, had occurred on that sphere. What differences existed between human beings that could compare with the fact that they shared the Earth? Except they didn’t share it. Some people owned it, and others did not. Humans had invented ownership, and it had taken over their minds.
He observed his fellow passengers. The bourgeois man held his wife’s gloved hand and whispered something into her ear. The two couples were laughing, the fellow with his sleeves rolled up sliding his arm around the blonde’s waist.
The clouds began to clear and stars came out on all sides, bright, clear pinpoints in the blackness. Ahead, the Moon hove into view, with the grinning face of the Man in the Moon.
What hokum. Leon shifted in his seat.  p. 96

After Leon arrives on a vegetation covered Moon the story cuts to Leon outside the attraction after the trip is complete. He decides to go to the Temple of Music and join the queue to meet the President and, in the line, he gets talking to a tall, black man called Parker (Leon can’t work out why a black man wants to shake McKinley’s hand given the Republicans sold out the blacks in the election of 1896).
As Leon waits in line we also get more backstory about his family background (his mother died and his father remarried an unsympathetic woman), his involvement in labour politics (dangerous practices and strikes and black-listing), and his general disillusionment with capitalism and the church. Leon also finds a baby bottle-like nipple in his pocket but can’t remember where he got it, or what happened on the trip after they arrived at the Moon.
McKinley eventually arrives, the queue moves forward, and Leon reaches the President and shoots him twice. Leon is restrained by Parker and almost shot out of hand by a soldier shortly afterwards, but McKinley (who is injured and will die of an infection two weeks later) intervenes.
The rest of the story mostly alternates between an account of Leon’s subsequent treatment and questioning by the authorities, and flashbacks to what happened after he arrived on the Moon during his trip. During these latter scenes the trip metamorphoses from an exhibition attraction to what appears to be a pulp adventure:

Dark at first, the cave grew darker still as they advanced, and the women drew closer to their escorts. Gradually a blue light rose around them. Farther in were lights of crimson and gold. Jewels gleamed in the rough walls. The cave opened into a chamber large enough to hold all of the earthlings. Here were more Selenites, small females whose long hair draped undone over the shoulders of their glittering gowns. A couple of them played stringed instruments. All bowed their heads when the visitors were assembled.
The little males bent sideways and looked up at them. The spiky tops of their heads looked like cactus plants. They smiled and shook hands with the passengers.
All this struck a chord in Leon. Earlier that summer, lying around his rented room in West Seneca through a sweltering July, out of work, spending down his savings, Leon had passed his time reading newspapers and magazines. In Cosmopolitan he had read a scientific romance by the British writer H. G. Wells titled The First Men in the Moon, about a failed businessman named Bedford and a crazy scientist named Cavor who flew to the Moon in an antigravity ship. Wells’s moon had giant fungi on its surface and was honeycombed with caverns where lived insectile Selenites. Clearly the designers of the Trip to the Moon had read Wells’s story and turned it into this exotic music hall show.
Although these were midgets and children, and the grotto was constructed of plaster, in the blue light and the play of shadows the faux rock looked real, and out of the corner of his eye, Leon was startled when one or another of the Selenites moved in a way that no human might move. That one in the corner, bent forward, head wobbling—it looked more like a big drunken grasshopper than a person. But when Leon peered at it, he saw it was just a sideshow midget dressed up in green tights and bloomers.
To the right and left, visible between glowing stalactites, shadowed galleries ran off into darkness, giving the illusion that this complex must reach far below the Pan-American fairgrounds. The air was cool. They followed the guide and the Selenite captain through another tunnel. The floor trembled with a vibration that made Leon think of the machines in the wire mill, and in the distance he thought he heard twittering. As he passed one of the openings, he glimpsed some large, pale thing in the darkness, something like a huge slug, heaving along the floor on no legs.  pp. 104-105

The rest of the story limns Leon’s interrogation and trial, and also his escapades on the Moon. The former thread begins with Leon’s examination by two alienists (during this we learn of a infatuation with a prostitute who eventually refuses to marry him as she earns more than he does), his dissociation from the events surrounding the assassination, and then his regret at his actions (he thinks at length about the effect on his family and the on the President’s epileptic wife, “In killing her husband, Leon was killing her as surely as if he had put a bullet in her belly, too”).
Meanwhile on the Moon, Leon rescues Wilma, one of the dancing slave girls from the court of the Grand Lunar and, after Leon kills a number of pursuing Selenite warriors (“Leon’s fist broke through the thing’s skull as if it were an eggshell”), the pair descend down into the lunar tunnels. They briefly stop to eat some of the mushrooms that grow everywhere and drink the glowing water (Wilma says it glows because “it is infused with a miraculous invigorating element, radium”). Next, they arrive at a child factory, where the next generation of human slaves are grown—soon to become “cogs in the Grand Lunar’s industrial machine”. Leon is particularly horrified when he sees very young children crammed into bottles with only their arms free, a modification intended to make them more efficient machine tenders. Finally, the pair arrive at the secret chamber of the Brotherhood of Lunar Workers, where Wilma’s comrades thank Leon for her rescue. Then, after he learns more about the evil rule of the Selenites, he agrees to use his pistol to assassinate the Grand Lunar.
So far, so anti-capitalist (and, in places, anti-church). However, the last section of the story (spoiler) did not go where I thought it was going (e.g. a successful anti-capitalist uprising on the Moon as opposed to Leon’s presumed failure to change anything on Earth). Instead we see Leon’s attempt to kill the Gran Lunar fail when he is disarmed by a whip-like tentacle as he draws his pistol during another tour party visit.
Finally, as Leon argues with a priest in his cell shortly before his execution, the two threads of the story merge together:

The priest sighed. It was dark in the cell, and Leon could not make out his expression. Leon looked out of the cell into the gallery, where the sunset light had turned everything so bright that he had to squint.
“Many things you think you know are wrong,” the priest said.
His voice sounded different, sibilant and high pitched.
Leon turned to face him, and everything was changed. The cell was altered, larger, much larger. It wasn’t a cell anymore; it was a vast cavern dimly lit with blue light. His cot and his shit bucket were gone. It was foolish even to expect such things in this place, ornately decorated and suffused with a glowing blue mist. Around them stood a horde of misshapen, dark figures. The priest, too, was changed. He did not sit on the wooden stool but on a dais, and it was not the priest at all, but rather some monstrous thing with a huge head and a tiny face. Around it hovered insectile creatures carrying odd devices. One of them sprayed a cooling mist around the monster’s great dome of a skull.
“You are about to die,” the Grand Lunar said, “but before you do, we would take it as a courtesy if you would answer some questions for us.”  pp. 144-145

The next two pages sees the Grand Lunar give a spirited defence of the benefits of Lunarian society, and a critique of Leon’s ideas about freedom. Some of the Grand Lunar’s comments are sophistry, but the pair’s final exchange suggests that the story may be more about the use of political violence to achieve one’s aims rather than the shortcomings of capitalism:

The Grand Lunar said, “Your heart is full of anger. Tell me this: What happens when a free human wants something, and another wants the same thing?”
“They share.”
“Is this what happens on Earth?”
Leon would not lie. “Sometimes they fight, and one wins and the other loses.”
“So the freedom you speak of only means that people will discover reasons to fight one another.”
“They have the ability to share. No one has to own or be owned. We can preserve good things and make new ones that are equally good. We can give ourselves freely and love one another.”
“And that is why you attempted to kill me? You would bring down the order that we have created over generations, which has tamed the lunar world and created this vast number of variegated beings, in order to replace it with a teeming conflict of individuals in the hope that they will not fall to killing each other. They will ‘give themselves freely and love one another.’”
“Yes. They will.”
“Why, then, is your Earth not a paradise?”
“Not everybody can do it, yet. The powerful ones repress the others. The violent ones insist on imposing their will. There are—”
“Yes, I see. I see one such in front of me.” The Grand Lunar slowly closed his eyes and opened them again. He waved a feeble arm at one of his attendants. “Take this one to be executed.”  pp. 146-147

The last scene sees Leon back in prison and in the execution room. Then, after he is strapped in to the electric chair, the Grand Lunar gives the order to proceed (we are back on the Moon again), but Wilma and her rebels arrive to rescue him—presumably this Leon’s dying fantasy.
This a very impressive piece of work that manages to blend a historical account of a real event, the psychological study of an assassin, political commentary about capitalism and resistance to that system, and a pulp action adventure into a highly readable, entertaining and thought provoking piece (and one which, I suspect, will bear several re-readings). It also, perhaps, provides a timely examination of the use of political violence to achieve one’s ends.
****+ (Very Good to Excellent). 23,850 words. Purchase link (USA).

1. This was a finalist for the 2022 Theodore Sturgeon Award. I am really surprised that it was not on the Hugo and Nebula final ballot (especially the latter).

Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison (Amazing, June 1976) begins with two Highway Patrolmen taking Willis Kaw to identify the body of his daughter after she has been involved in a car accident (“The dark brown smear that began sixty yards west of the covered shape disappeared under the blanket”). We then see more of Kaw’s travails: he is a diabetic; his son, who is ninety-five per cent disabled, lives in a hospital; his house roof leaks in heavy rain; and so on. During these various trials Kaw thinks that he may be an alien:

He dreamed of his home world and—perhaps because the sun was high and the ocean made eternal sounds—he was able to bring much of it back. The bright green sky, the skimmers swooping and rising overhead, the motes of pale yellow light that flamed and then floated up and were lost to sight. He felt himself in his real body, the movement of many legs working in unison, carrying him across the mist sands, the smell of alien flowers in his mind. He knew he had been born on that world, had been raised there, had grown to maturity and then. . .
Sent away.
In his human mind, Willis Kaw knew he had been sent away for doing something bad. He knew he had been condemned to this planet, this Earth, for having perhaps committed a crime. But he could not remember what it was. And in the dream he could feel no guilt.  p. 35

Kaw later visits a psychotherapist and tells him about these alien thoughts and feelings, and speculates that Earth is a planet where bad people are sent to atone for their crimes. After listening his patient for some time, the psychotherapist recommends that Kaw places himself in an institution.
The story ends with Kaw committing suicide and (spoiler) he then finds himself being welcomed back to his home world by the Consul. When Kaw (now called Plydo) asks the Consul what he did to be banished to such a terrible place, the story flips the paradigm and Kaw/Plydo is told that he wasn’t being punished but honoured—life on Earth is so much better than on his home world!
The sophomoric message1 in this story, and the way it is delivered, is a useful reminder that Ellison didn’t do subtlety (or use Western Union).
* (Mediocre). 2,800 words. Story link.

1. Earth may have provided a pleasurable existence for a few but, for the vast majority of humanity throughout the ages, life has been short and brutal.