Tag: novelette

A Mastery of German by Marian Denise Moore

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Mastery of German by Marian Denise Moore (Dominion, Volume One, 2020) opens with a woman called Candace being appointed as the project leader of an R&D project called Engram. Her boss tells her to either “kill it or bring it to a conclusion”.
The next part of the story sees Candace learn, from both Helene, the previous project leader, and Dr Walker, the team leader, that the project is about genetic memory:

[Dr Walker] hummed thoughtfully, leaned back in his chair and asked, “What do you want to know about Engram?”
“All I know is that it is some type of research on memory enhancement or memory retrieval. I looked online but the closest that I could find were some studies done around 2010. Some researchers taught rats how to run a maze and then found that their descendants were able to run the same maze without training.”
“Did you find anything else?”
I grimaced. “Five years later, some researchers were saying that the experience of American slavery was passed on to the descendants of the enslaved via the same process.”
“Yes,” Dr. Walker said. “That’s one of the few follow-ups to the research at Emory University.”

The rest of the story develops this idea further and (spoiler), when Walker realises that Candace is now his boss (something that she didn’t reveal in their first meeting) he gives her a much more detailed explanation about the project, starting first with parental genetics—haplogroups—and then revealing that his project has made it possible for people to share their memories with those in similar groups. So Candace would be able to share her German language ability with anyone in her (for example) L1b group. Of course, the wider reveal is that the human race is a descendant of one person, L0, so there is the possibility that, with further development, people could share their memories with everyone, and possibly access their ancestors’ memories too.
Wrapped around this plot thread is a lot of characterisation-related material that nicely balances the above (e.g. Candace talks on a couple of occasions with her widowed father, who is doing family tree research but is struggling to track down their black ancestors because of societal conditions at the time, etc.)
Unfortunately, though, all of this just peters out: at the start of the story there is brief section about one of the project’s janitors who is imprinted with Candace’s German skills but, in another short passage at the end of the story, he just wanders off. So the piece ends with the development of a major technological invention that will have profound societal implications, but there is no account of any of the subsequent changes that result. It all feels like we have been served up the opening chapters of a longer novel. Still, it’s probably a worthwhile piece for all that.
*** (Good). 8,400 words.

When God Sits in Your Lap by Ian Tregillis

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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

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

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

You and Whose Army? by Greg Egan

Posted on by Paul Fraser

You and Whose Army? by Greg Egan (Clarkesworld, October 2020) gets off to a fairly leisurely start with Rufus meeting a woman who knows Linus, his brother: it materialises that Rufus and Linus share memories, and that he has disappeared. We also learn, later on in the story, that there are four brothers (the others are Caius and Silus), and that they were originally part of a cult that biologically modified them as a part of an attempted hive-mind project that was later shut down by the authorities (we find most of this out when Rufus consults a PI called Leong about his brother’s disappearance):

Leong paused expectantly, giving him a chance to explain what he meant, but when he remained silent she tried prompting him. “You live in Adelaide, right? So do you meet up in person regularly?”
“Not in person.” Rufus clenched his fists and inhaled slowly. “We have neural links. All four of us. We share each other’s memories. They took us off the boat when we were eight.”
Leong was clearly thrown for a moment, but she retained a professional demeanor. Rufus guessed she was in her early forties, so mid-twenties when the story broke. Unless she’d been living in a cult of her own, she’d know exactly what he was talking about.
“You were born on the Physalia?”
“That’s right.” Rufus had to give her full marks for not only recalling the name, but pronouncing it correctly.
“And you and Linus are quadruplets?”
“Yes. The others are overseas, studying.” No idiotic blather confusing them with “clones.” Rufus’s experience had set the bar low, but he felt entitled to a small celebration at every sensible word that came out of her mouth.
“Forgive me if I’m not clear on exactly how this works,” Leong said. “When you say you share each other’s memories . . . ?”
“We wake up recalling what the other three did,” Rufus replied. “When we sleep, as well as consolidating our own experience into long-term memory, we receive enough data to do the same with the others’. We remember being them, as well as ourselves.

The rest of this piece is, essentially, a missing person story. When Leong produces a picture of Linus leaving Sydney airport the brothers don’t have the money to fund a worldwide search, so they create a social media app that scans submitted photographs for evidence of their brother in the background. Eventually (spoiler), they track him down to a college in France where he has won a scholarship. Further investigation reveals that Linus is being sponsored by an aging billionaire called Guinard (who may have part-funded the Physalia project).
Caius flies to France to question Linus (the point of view moves through all the four brothers during the story), and discovers that Guinard is sharing his memories with Linus and grooming him to become his successor (this is portrayed as a form of immortality for Guinard).
Events then see the three brothers attempting to kidnap Linus when they can’t convince him to spend some time on his own, unconnected to either them or Guinard—so Linus can learn to be himself, neither in their shadow, as he complains, nor as a receptacle for Guinard.
The kidnapping attempt fails when it is stopped by Guinard’s security, and the story ends with Linus thinking to himself that he doesn’t intend to be a receptacle for Guinard, only his protégé, and that he cannot reveal this deception to his brothers until the billionaire dies.
This is pretty good in parts—there is commentary about personhood, and some dry humour—and it is generally interesting, but the ending doesn’t really convince, and a lot of the story is taken up with inter-brother relationship tensions. Although this is a solid story, it struck me as Egan on cruise-control.
*** (Good). 13,050 words. Story link.

Blood Music by Greg Bear

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Blood Music by Greg Bear1 (Analog, June 1983) opens (after a short and essentially irrelevant passage) with a doctor called Edward meeting an old university friend called Vergil, an odd-ball whiz kid who, among other japes, “wired door knobs, [and] gave us punch that turned our piss blue”. After some social chit-chat, and discussion of some of Vergil’s changed physical characteristics (he’s fitter and more tanned), Edward learns that his friend has been working for a company called Genetron developing medical microchips. Edward also learns that Vergil was fired, but has been continuing his research outside the lab. Virgil then tells Edward he wants him to put him through a thorough physical exam.
When Edward conducts the examination, he finds that Vergil has a lot of very odd physical characteristics:

“Look at my spine,” he said. I rotated the image in the video frame. Buckminster Fuller, I thought. It was fantastic. A cage of triangular projections, all interlocking in ways I couldn’t begin to follow, much less understand. I reached around and tried to feel his spine with my fingers. He lifted his arms and looked off at the ceiling.
“I can’t find it,” I said. “It’s all smooth back there.” I let go of him and looked at his chest, then prodded his ribs. They were sheathed in something tough and flexible. The harder I pressed, the tougher it became. Then I noticed another change.
“Hey,” I said. “You don’t have nipples.” There were tiny pigment patches, but no nipple formations at all.
“See?” Vergil asked, shrugging on the white robe. “I’m being rebuilt from the inside out.”

Vergil explains that the changes are a result of his work with Genetron which, essentially, was to do with designing nano-biotechnology (although this phrase isn’t used). He explains how he injected the company’s smart proteins into bacteria, which could then repair themselves, compare memories, and evolve:

“By God, you should have seen some of the cultures a week later! It was amazing. They were evolving all on their own, like little cities. I destroyed them all. I think one of the Petri dishes would have grown legs and walked out of the incubator if I’d kept feeding it.”

So far, so Microcosmic God,2 and Vergil goes on to explain that, by the time he exponentially improved his cell cultures, the company had discovered what he was doing and forced him to destroy his work. Before that Vergil injected himself with some of his own altered white blood cells, and they have since been modifying his body. Vergil then tells Edward he is worried that the cells will eventually cross the blood-brain barrier and “find him”—so he wants them destroyed.
The rest of the story (spoiler) sees Edward run more tests but, by the time visits Vergil a few days later, his friend says he can hear the cells talking to him—“blood music”. By this time they know who he is, that they are inside his body, and they are trying to understand the concept of space. On a later visit Edward finds out that Vergil has been examined a second time by a Dr Bernard, an associate of Vergil’s old company, and also that Vergil’s physical changes have become more pronounced. Edwards asks Vergil to tell the cells to slow down the changes:

“You’re . . . you can talk to them, tell them to slow down,” I said, aware how ridiculous that sounded.
“Yes, indeed I can, but they don’t necessarily listen.”
“I thought you were their god or something.”
“The ones hooked up to my neurons aren’t the big wheels. They’re researchers, or at least serve the same function. They know I’m here, what I am, but that doesn’t mean they’ve convinced the upper levels of the hierarchy.”
“They’re arguing?”
“Something like that. It’s not all that bad. If the lab is reopened, I have a home, a place to work.” He glanced out the window, as if looking for someone. “I don’t have anything left but them. They aren’t afraid, Edward. I’ve never felt so close to anything before.” Again the beatific smile. “I’m responsible for them. Mother to them all.”

Edward thinks Vergil is more of a host than a mother (or “super-mother” as Vergil later refers to himself) and arranges to meet Dr Bernard to see if he can help.
When Edward next visits Vergil he finds him sitting in a bath tinged pink with his blood—“astronauts” sent out by the cells to explore the exterior environment. When Vergil goes to pull the plug and release them the world, Edwards ends his agonising about the threat that Vergil poses (this dilemma has played out in parallel to the above in scenes where Edward has been sleeping—“Vergil Ulam is turning himself into a galaxy”—or with his wife), and he throws an electric sunlamp into the bath killing Virgil and the cells.
The last act of the story sees Edward go home. He and his wife subsequently fall ill, and Edward deduces that Dr Bernard infected him (from the damp handshake he received). The white cells take over Edward and his wife’s bodies, communicate with them, and then meld the pair together biologically. The organism created then grows to fill the apartment, and spreads out beyond it: mankind is doomed.
This is a very good piece of work which manages a tour de force combination of several SF tropes including scientist-as-God/messiah, alien body horror, the end of mankind, and, ultimately, the Fermi Paradox (why is there no sign of other intelligent life in the Universe?) The last two transform the story from one that begins on a microscopic level to one that eventually has cosmic implications.
****+ (Very good to Excellent). 8,750 words.

1. This was expanded into a novel of the same name published in 1985.

2. Microcosmic God by Theodore Sturgeon (Astounding Science-Fiction, April 1941) is reviewed here.

Kitecadet by Keith Roberts

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Kitecadet by Keith Roberts (Interzone #6, Winter 1983) is the second in his series of ‘Kiteworld’ stories, all of which are set in a post-holocaust world where Kitemen fly patrols in huge kites over the radioactive badlands which surround the Realm: this one opens with a newly graduated Kitecadet called Raoul getting on a transport to go to Middlemarch, the Realm’s main settlement.
During Raoul’s preparations to leave, and his journey to the city, we see the day to day detail of a Kitecadet’s life, and learn that (a) Raoul is newly qualified (despite not having completed his first operational flight) and (b) that he and another cadet called Olsen bear a serious grudge against each other.
Later in the journey, Raoul gets his first sight of Middlemarch:

Far off, the mountains of the Westguard loomed in silhouette, like pale holes knocked in the sky. To right and left, as far as the eye could reach, the land rose to other heights; while below, dwarfed by the vast bowl in which it lay yet still it seemed stretching endlessly, lay Middlemarch, greatest city in all the Realm.
Somebody whooped; and abruptly the spell was broken. The Cadets fell to chattering like magpies as the Transports began their slow, cautious descent. Raoul joined in, pointing to this and that wonder; the Middle Lake, the great central parkland where on the morrow the Air Fair would begin, the pale needle-spires of Godpath, Metropolitan Cathedral of the Variants. The sprawling building beside it, he knew from his books and lectures, was the Corps headquarters; beyond was the Mercy Hospital, the Middle Doctrine’s chief establishment. Beyond again loomed other towers, too numerous to count; while in every direction, spreading into distance, were the squares and avenues, the baths and libraries and palaces of that amazing town. To the south Holand, the industrial suburb, spread a faint, polluting haze, but all the rest was sparkling; clear and white, like a place seen in a dream.  p. 29

The next day the cadets go to the Air Fair and see a character from the first story, the legendary kiteman Canwen, make a record breaking altitude attempt. Then they attend a ceremonial dinner attended by another first story character, Kitemaster Helman. After this they go out on the town and, at one bar, Raoul starts chatting up one of the local barmaids. Later, when a drunk Olsen steams in and starts pawing her, a violent fight breaks out between Raoul, Olsen and some of the others, leaving Olsen badly beaten. The barmaid takes Raoul to her place before the Variant police arrive, and there she attends to his wounds before they later make love. Raoul leaves to return to base the next day.
After this the structure of the story becomes quite choppy—the next scene leaps forward in time to Raoul’s second visit to Middlemarch and the barmaid, where he is obviously traumatised by something that has happened to him. Then the story flashes back to his first operational flight (which presumably occurs between their first and second encounters). During this (spoiler), and as a result of the sabotage of his kite by Olsen, Raoul crashes in the badlands and has an encounter with one of the creatures that live there:

The shouts carried to him. ‘The basket, the basket. . . .’ He understood, at last; it was tilted to one side, carrying far too much weight. He grabbed the pistol from its wicker holster, but he was too late; the thing that had boarded him already had his wrist. It was no bigger, perhaps, than a three or four year child, and its skin was an odd, almost translucent blue. It was mature though, evidently; he saw that it was female. Dreadfully, appallingly female. The gun went off, wildly; then it was jerked from his hand. The basket rebounded again; but the other didn’t relax its grip. He stared, in terror. What he saw now in the eyes was not the hate he’d read about, but love; a horrifying, eternal love. She stroked his arm, and gurgled; gurgled and pleaded, even while he took the line axe, and struck, and struck, and struck. . .  p. 42

The last short scene sees Raoul fleeing from the barmaid in some distress.
This is a story that, although I enjoyed its separate parts, doesn’t work structurally. Part of the reason for this is the change of pace and time that occurs in the last part—for most of its length it is a slow-moving piece that describes the character’s world and his place in it; at the end the climactic scenes jump about in time and the kite accident section is much faster paced. I’d also add that the first time I read this piece I had no idea that the blue creature was a mutant and not some other demon or monster. There is probably be an argument for this story and the third one, Kitemistress, being combined into a longer piece, but I’ll perhaps come back to that with the next story.
**+ (Average to Good). 7,900 words. Story link.

Fasterpiece by Ian Creasey

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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

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

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

The Santa Claus Planet by Frank M. Robinson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Santa Claus Planet by Frank M. Robinson (The Best Science-Fiction Stories: 1951) opens with a spaceship landing on a planet to celebrate Christmas; two of the crew are later sent to a nearby village to greet the humans that settled there previously and invite them to the ship.
En-route the pair are met by the natives, who proffer gifts, and a voice from the sleigh tells them to destroy the gifts and hand over their pistols. After some reluctance the two crew members do so, whereupon the natives break the pistols into pieces. Then they discover that the man who spoke is a recent arrival called Reynolds, who they subsequently take back with them.
The rest of the story consists (apart from another bookend to finish the story) of Reynolds telling of how he came to be on the planet, which starts with him arriving after he damaged his spaceship tubes. While he was trying to repair his ship the natives arrived, and he was drawn into their strange gift giving custom (which is later explained by a friendly female tribe member called Ruth):

She thought for a minute, trying to find a way to phrase it. “We use our coppers and furs in duels,” she said slowly. “Perhaps one chief will give a feast for another and present him with many coppers and blankets. Unless the other chief destroys the gifts and gives a feast in return, at which he presents the first chief with even greater gifts, he loses honor.”
He was beginning to see, Reynolds thought. The custom of conspicuous waste, to show how wealthy the possessor was. Enemies dueled with property, instead of with pistols, and the duel would obviously go back and forth until one or the other of its participants was bankrupt—or unwilling to risk more goods. A rather appropriate custom for a planet as lush as this.
“What if one of the chiefs goes broke,” he said, explaining the term.
“If the winning chief demands it, the other can be put to death. He is forced to drink the Last Cup, a poison which turns his bones to jelly. The days go by and he gets weaker and softer until finally he is nothing but a—ball.” She described this with a good deal of hand waving and facial animation, which Reynolds found singularly attractive in spite of the gruesomeness of the topic.

This unlikely gimmick works through a few gift-exchange plot loops until (spoiler) Reynolds runs out of potential gifts, and also realises that Ruth is also going to be poisoned for helping him. He avoids this unpleasant end by giving the impression that he is going to destroy the planet with fire (I think) after they destroy his rocket. The chief concedes before the oil fire Reynolds previously set burns out.
There is another twist revealed at the end (when Reynolds is once again on the visiting ship): Reynolds married Ruth and became the wealthiest man on the planet because they had 15 children, each of which attracted ever-increasing dowries.
This story revolves around an unconvincing and contrived gimmick, the ending is a fudge, and the last twist just adds even more nonsense to what has come before (and seems to be the only reason the sections that book-end the piece are there). Why Bleiler and Dikty (the editors of the ‘Best of the Year’ anthology where this first appeared) thought it a good idea to use this original story beats me (and I can only assume Terry Carr reprinted it1 for Towering Inferno2 name recognition).
* (Mediocre). 8,500 words.

1. Terry Carr used this story in his Christmas SF anthology, To Follow a Star (1977).

2. The Glass Inferno by Thomas N. Scortia and Frank M. Robinson (1974) was made into a big-budget disaster film called The Towering Inferno (1974), more here.

Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus by Frederik Pohl

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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

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

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

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

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

Miracle by Connie Willis

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Miracle by Connie Willis (Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 1991) gets off to a leisurely start with some office chit-chat about Christmas between the protagonist, Lauren, and one of her office colleagues, Evie, and this lays out most of the elements that will feature in this tale: two of their co-workers, Scott Buckley (“too cute to ever notice someone like me”), and Fred Hatch (“the fat guy in documentation”), and the movies Miracle on 34th Street and It’s Wonderful Life.
The final character in this Unknown-like fantasy appears when Lauren gets home, and she is door-stepped by an irritating young man saying he is there to give her a Christmas Present. Despite her shutting the door on him twice, he appears in the apartment:

The young man was sitting on the couch, messing with her TV remote. “So, what do you want for Christmas? A yacht? A pony?” He punched buttons on the remote, frowning. “A new TV?”
“How did you get in here?” Lauren said squeakily. She looked at the door. The deadbolt and chain were both still on.
“I’m a spirit,” he said, putting the remote down. The TV suddenly blared on. “The Spirit of Christmas Present.”
“Oh,” Lauren said, edging toward the phone. “Like in A Christmas Carol.”
“No,” he said, flipping through the channels. She looked at the remote. It was still on the coffee table. “Not Christmas Present. Christmas Present. You know, Barbie dolls, ugly ties, cheese logs, the stuff people give you for Christmas.”
“Oh, Christmas Present. I see,” Lauren said, carefully picking up the phone.
“People always get me confused with him, which is really insulting. I mean, the guy obviously has a really high cholesterol level. Anyway, I’m the Spirit of Christmas Present, and your sister sent me to—”
Lauren had dialed nine one. She stopped, her finger poised over the second one. “My sister?”
“Yeah,” he said, staring at the TV. Jimmy Stewart was sitting in the guard’s room, wrapped in a blanket. “Oh, wow! It’s a Wonderful Life.”
My sister sent you, Lauren thought. It explained everything. He was not a Moonie or a serial killer. He was this year’s version of the crystal pyramid mate selector. “How do you know my sister?”
“She channeled me,” he said, leaning back against the sofa. “The Maharishi Ram Das was instructing her in trance-meditation, and she accidentally channeled my spirit out of the astral plane.” He pointed at the screen. “I love this part where the angel is trying to convince Jimmy Stewart he’s dead.” pp. 143-144

After this he tells her that he is there is give what she really wants for Christmas, “her heart’s desire”, before going on to criticise her computer addressed cards, store wrapped presents, etc. Then he disappears, along with her cards, and leaves a Christmas tree growing out of her kitchen floor.
The rest of the story sees Lauren recruit Frank to help her deal with her spirit problem, and the two of them work together to try and get rid of him, as well as cope with various other changes Chris the spirit makes, such as Lauren’s off-the-shoulder black party dress—bought to impress Scott—being changed into a Yanomano Indian costume (Frank helpfully suggests she could wear last year’s pretty red number).
At this point (spoiler) I could see that Lauren was going to end up with Frank and not Scott, and so it materialises (dates with Scott are thwarted by Chris, Frank and Lauren have to come up with last minute gifts for everyone at the office when only Office Depot is open, Fred arrives at the party with the cheese puffs Lauren was meant to bring, Evie arrives wearing the black dress, etc., etc.). Finally, Chris arrives at the party dressed as Santa Claus.
This is an entertaining fantasy rom-com that gets off to a very good start, but I thought it tailed off towards the end (I’m not sure if this is because of pacing/padding problems, or because I guessed where it was going). I also thought that the two movies are referenced too much—but this is maybe a function of describing enough about them to those who aren’t familiar with them. Overall, though, not bad.
***+ (Good to Very Good, or, more accurately, Very Good to Good). 14,000 words.

Invisible People by Nancy Kress

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Invisible People by Nancy Kress (Entanglements: Tomorrow’s Lovers, Families, and Friends, 2020) gets off to a lively start with a couple dealing with their two young kids at breakfast time. After an amount of porridge slinging from the younger of the two, the house system tells them there are two strangers of the front porch.
These visitors turn out to be FBI agents, and they tell the parents that their adopted daughter Kenly has come to their attention as part of a RICO investigation into an adoption agency. They then tell the confused parents that her genes were tampered with before she was placed with them.
The next part of the story sees husband (and lawyer) Tom go to his office, where he has to deal with a wife who wants a punitive divorce from her cheating husband, the commander of a nuclear submarine in the Arctic. After this appointment (the wife’s hostility is obliquely relevant later on in the story), he briefs his (sexually transitioning) PI George about his problem, and orders a “no expense spared” investigation into the adoption agency.
The next major event occurs weeks later—and after a period of Kenly being kept at home because of possible risk-taking behaviour associated with the genetic changes—when the couple’s upset babysitter comes home from the park with Kenly. She gives an account of how Kenly ran to the homeless camp in the park and started giving away toys. Then, when one of the men grabbed her and asked for money, the babysitter used a concealed weapon to fire a warning shot. The couple scold Kenly, but she insists she would do the same thing again, as the camp has “kids with no toys”.
The rest of the story sees George the PI discover that there are a group of international scientists in the Cayman Islands behind the adoption/gene-modification scheme, and that the alterations include a “gene drive”, which means that the changes will be more widely passed on to any descendants. After Tom tells his wife about this at home, the very rich Kathleen McGuire turns up and tells the couple the same thing happened to her (now dead) six-year-old boy. She suggests that the affected parents should band together to have their children’s DNA/genes scanned so they can find out what changes have been made, and why.
This all comes to a head (spoiler) when Kenly rescues a baby from a dog, and Tom realises what the modifications are, and why they have been done: he later tells McGuire that the genetic changes were to increase empathy, not risk-taking.
Apart from the main story there are other sub-plots/elements that will allow readers to guess what the genetic changes are intended to do—such as (a) the fragments from an essay written by Kenly about leopards which show she sympathises not only with the baboons they kill, but with the leopards too, or (b) the account of the nuclear submarine stand-off in the Arctic that rumbles on in the background throughout.
The final section sees the couple offered gene therapy for their daughter, a procedure that will reverse the changes the adoption centre made. They discuss the matter: do they choose the increased risk that comes with increased empathy, or not? We don’t find out what their decision is, and the story finishes (like C. M. Kornbluth & Frederik Pohl’s The Meeting) with Tom picking up the phone to make a call.
This is a pretty good piece overall, but the quality varies from the okay/good (e.g. the more formulaic and preachy elements) to the very good (e.g. the revelation of what the genetic modifications mean).
***+ (Good to Very Good). 8,900 words.