Return to the Red Castle by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2020) is another of his ‘Istanbul Protectorate’ stories (these are set in a future where people’s minds can be read and then written onto ‘blank’ bodies). This one begins with a woman called Irem being debriefed about her trip to a distant planet called Halis-3. During the interview we learn that, despite five attempts to survive there, she found the planet uninhabitable and died, and eventually her mind was transmitted back to Earth (we learn this abortive mission was due to terrorists tampering with the code of the exploratory ships that were sent out many, many years before).
When Irem arrives back on Earth she finds herself living in a society two hundred years in her future (due to the time it took her mind to be sent out to Halis-3 and come back again) and everyone she knew when she was last there is now dead. However, she eventually tracks down an android called Umut which taught in the Red Castle, her childhood school, but finds that it cannot remember her.
The rest of the story sees Umut being taken to the Institute by Irem to see if it is possible to retrieve the android’s memories. Initially it seems that Umut is suffering from “bitrot”, a sort of data decay, but later on the Institute contacts Irem and tells her it looks like the android’s memories were deliberately wiped by an “icepick”, a computer virus. This leads to Irem researching historical anti-android prejudice and discovering that many of them served as mercenaries in a vicious war to gain citizenship.
Umut eventually tells Irem it is aware of the war atrocities it participated in and deliberately erased its recollections of those times. Irem replies that the Institute gave her a copy of the Red Castle memories, and that they can visit that period together.
I suppose that this is a piece about people wanting to return to an earlier time in their lives, but what it feels like is two different stories welded together with a lot of Protectorate history dropped in. I’m beginning to wonder if Nayler is better at writing longer work where he has the room to more fully develop his ideas; there is just too much going on in this short piece.
** (Average). 7,250 words.
Rena in the Desert by Lia Swope Mitchell
Rena in the Desert by Lia Swope Mitchell (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2020) opens with Rena driving across the Nevada desert in a barely functioning electric car when she comes upon a deserted automotel:
[Here] sat the Rock Springs AutoMotel like a postcard from the past, its electric sign flashing SWIM and AC and VACANCY: a single-story, L-shaped building, spread low beside a parking lot with one lonesome, dust-coated truck. Behind a chain-link fence the pool sparkled in the sunlight, a cleaning skimmer dancing across its surface. It had to be real, that water—maybe those Rock Springs still existed, underground somewhere now. Next to the pool, dangling small plump feet, sat a little girl, staring back.
How was that even possible? Settlement was illegal from the Rockies to the Sierras. Back in Chicago the tabloids babbled about outlaw gangs preying through the mountains, doomsday cults, radioactive corpses piled by the roadside. Military escorts guarded cargo trucks driving between Vegas and LA. But on 50 Rena had seen nothing and nobody—only the remnants of gas stations, dried-out husks of ruined towns, and dispirited clumps of dead brush. From horizon to horizon, nothing was moving but her and a few wary birds.
On the Coast, with its forests and desalinization plants and fish-filled oceans, tourists still drove up and down, burning money on hotels and restaurants. Or so people said back home, wondering in hushed tones, dreaming in the winter cold. So Rena wanted to believe. p. 58
Rena tries to communicate with the eight-year-old girl but her Spanish lets her down, so she goes into the reception and gets a room from the automated system. Then she has a shower, and is delighted that the motel seems to have plentiful water. But, when she tries to order food, she finds that there isn’t anything available.
The rest of this post-apocalypse story includes some backstory about Rena’s trans lover Mike (who has ended up somewhere else for a reason I can’t remember), and her discovery of a smuggler who has been locked in a room by the motel’s security software. Rena also eventually realises that the automotel AI has been looking after the young girl.
The story ends (spoiler) with Rena freeing the man, who has promised to drive her to Tahoe. After some discussion, including about how much food the motel has left, Rena manages to convince the AI to let the girl go with them to the coast.
This is an engaging and well told story but matters rather work out of their own accord—which makes for a rather pedestrian ending.
*** (Good.) 6,000 words.
Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars by Mercurio D. Rivera
Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars by Mercurio D. Rivera (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2020) begins with an introduction (supposedly Chapter 63 of a book) which shows a group of lizard-like creatures called “The People” taking part in a purification rite at Verdant Cove. They are praying for clean air (and we learn that they have a climate warming problem similar to Earth’s).
The next section opens with a journalist called Cory arriving at the laboratory of Milagros Maldonado, an old flame, to interview her about her research. Milagros says she has a big story for him and, as she used to work for a multinational R&D company called EncelaCorp until leaving on bad terms, Cory is hoping for something juicy that will help save his precarious blogging job. However, before Milagros agrees to talk she insists on locking his “retinal readers” (which means he can’t publish the interview without her permission). Then she talks instead about the Simulation Hypothesis (which posits that humanity is living in a simulated or virtual universe), before going on to say that she has created a simulated reality where life on Earth took a different evolutionary path:
“Every change to prehistory resulted in the rise of a different apex form of intelligent life. In this version, no asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula. No extinction of the dinosaurs took place at that time. Instead, a disease I introduced a million years later wiped out most of the large dinosaurs along with small mammals, allowing an amphibious salamander-like creature to survive and multiply. And—voila!—one hundred million years later we have the Sallies.”
The magnified image displayed three reptilian creatures at the base of a palm tree. One stood on its hind legs, four feet tall with slick, lime-green skin and a prehensile tail. The second had yellow skin and bore translucent wings, allowing it to hover a few feet off the ground. These were the ones flying over the city. The third, a grey-scaled creature, skittered on all fours and had larger, saucer-shaped eyes and a thicker tail. Patches of fungus spread thickly across their torsos. p. 71
Then she tells him that the salamanders—the same creatures we read about in the introduction—are the ultimate problem solvers, and that their “thinknests” have created an carbon dioxide extraction device that will solve not only their climate problem but Earth’s as well. Then Milagros asks Cory what problem he thinks the salamanders should be made to solve next, and he replies “cancer” (as he has just completed a course of radiotherapy for the disease).
So far, so Microcosmic God (a Theodore Sturgeon story where evolutionary stresses are applied to fast-living and breeding creatures to provide a series of miracle inventions). The next part of the story continues along similar lines with an account of the cancer-like “Black Scythe” plague that Milagros introduces into the Salamander population. However, unlike the Sturgeon story, we get an intimate account of the dreadful pain and suffering the Salamanders experience:
The great plague descended upon the People of La Mangri first, killing innocent larvae in their developmental stages, rendering entire populations childless. Then the cell mutations spread to adults, bringing a slow and agonizing death to millions.
As the decaying corpses gave rise to more disease, my great-grandmother Und-ora devised stadium-sized pyres to mass-incinerate thousands of the dead at once.
She also led local thinknests in their frenzied attempts to determine the origin of the disease and stop its spread. When the cell mutations proved to be non-contagious, they studied possible environmental causes of the illness. But hundreds of Houses of different regions with radically different diets, customs, and lifestyles were all similarly stricken. With no natural explanation at hand, thinknests around the globe independently arrived at the same inescapable conclusion: the plague was another Divine test. The People assumed they had proven themselves worthy when they implemented the Extractors, purifying the atmosphere of the gods’ deadly gases.
But the gods were capricious. p. 72
Then, after the Salamanders develop a cancer-curing Revivifier, Milagros causes an asteroid strike, which forces the thinknests to create an Asteroid Defence program. These events cause the Salamanders to turn away from their devotional religion and to an examination of the nature of their (unknown to them, virtual) reality.
Matters develop when Cory (under pressure from his boss to publish) interviews Milagros in bed (they have become lovers again), during which they discuss whether the Salamander’s suffering is “real”. Then, after Milagros falls asleep, Cory goes into the lab to record an “alien attack” on the creatures so he has some material to fall back on in case she doesn’t allow him to publish. When the Salamanders subsequently defeat the aliens that Cory has introduced into their world, he then programs “cosmic hands” to give their planet a shake. During this second event the salamanders see “God’s fingers” and realise that it is another divine attack.
It’s at this point that the story takes an ontological swerve away from the Microcosmic God template and becomes something else entirely (spoiler): Milagros arrives in the lab (presumably the next morning) to see Cory lying on the floor. She asks him what he has done—and then the Salamanders appear:
[Cory] blinked and the Sally leader disappeared. Blinked again and she stood nearer, locking eyes with him. A forked tongue with mods flicked out of the Sally’s mouth, pressing against his eyelids.
My God, what was happening?
The cold, wet tongue retracted and time stood still. Then the Sally leader sighed deeply. “This explains so much.” She turned to face Milagros. “Finally we meet face to face, Cruel God. I am Car-ling of House Jarella.”
“How—This isn’t possible!” Milagros said, tapping the mods on her face.
“You,” the Sally said to him. “When you clutched our world in your hands every thinknest across the globe isolated the frequency of the projection and used the planetary shieldtech to trace the signal back to its point of origin. Here.” The Sally waved her thin arms in the air, turning back to Milagros. “You turned us into the ultimate problem-solvers. And at last we’ve identified our ultimate problem: You.” p. 80
After some more j’accuse, the Salamanders spirit Milagros away to their world, and Cory sees an image of her being abused by an angry mob as she is marched towards a huge crucifix. Then the salamander who is still in the lab with Cory says that they have much in common—because they have both suffered at the hands of a cruel creator. When Cory tells the salamander that Milagros didn’t hurt him, the creature replies he wasn’t talking about Milagros, but the true Creator, “millions of simulations up the chain,” before adding, “I aim to find her and make her pay.”
This sensational revelation flips the story into another paradigm completely (one where mankind isn’t God but subject to the capricious whims of one) as well as providing a pronounced sense of wonder.
The story ends with Cory’s cancer returning, and the salamanders living in an age of peace.
Although Rivera recently stated he hasn’t read Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God1 (although he has read George R. R. Martin’s Sandkings), it’s interesting to compare the differences in the two works. Rivera’s story:
(a) is more contemporary—it has better prose and a modern setting, and Milagros’s aims are probably more in tune with a modern readership, i.e. altruistic rather than the monetary/political aims of the two main characters in the Sturgeon;
(b) is more empathetic—we see the struggles of the Salamanders and the cruelties visited upon them from a first person point of view, whereas the Neoterics in the Sturgeon are offstage or more generally described (and that story never addresses the moral or ethical problems of their appalling treatment);
(c) shows more agency—the Salamanders are players who transcend their reality, whereas the Neoterics are largely pawns;
(d) is more complex—the simulation chain idea makes it a Microcosmic God-plus story;
(e) is more reflective—the occasional meditations on suffering and supreme dieties, and the fact that the story moves away from the idea of “man as God” in the Sturgeon tale to one of “man as cog” (in a larger machine or sequence of realities).
Rivera’s story is an impressive piece, both in its own right, and as a riff on a well-known genre story. It really should have been a Hugo finalist.
****+ (Very Good to Excellent). 8,350 words.
1. Ray Nayler (another Asimov’s SF regular) interviewed Rivera about his story here. I think Nayler lets his preoccupation about the shortcomings of capitalism somewhat blindside him to the more obvious themes of the story, i.e. man as God, and humanity’s appalling treatment of other species. These two issues appear, to a greater or lesser extent, in the two stories already mentioned as well as another two related pieces, Crystal Nights by Greg Egan (Interzone #215, April 2008), and Sandkings by George R. R. Martin (Omni, August 1979). The theme of man as God is particularly prominent in the Egan (and it is the only one of the four pieces where the protagonist alters his behaviour towards the subject species when he realises they are suffering) whereas the Martin is almost entirely about the main character’s sadistic treatment of his alien “pets” (the piece is essentially a “let’s set an anthill on fire for fun” story but, notwithstanding this, a gripping story and a worthy multiple award winner).
GO. NOW. FIX. by Timons Esaias
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
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
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
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.
Nic and Viv’s Compulsory Courtship by Will McIntosh
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
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.