Tag: 1*

The Ethnomusicology of the Last Dreadnought by Yoon Ha Lee

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Ethnomusicology of the Last Dreadnought by Yoon Ha Lee (The Sunday Morning Transport, 5th February 2023) starts with this:

It is not true that space is silent.
The darkness between stars is full of threnodies and threadbare laments, concertos and cantatas, the names of the dead and the wars that they’ve fed. Few people are unmoved by the strenuous harmonies and the strange hymns. Fewer people still understand their significance, the decayed etymologies and deprecated tongues.
It is your solemn task, as an archivist of the last dreadnought, to preserve its unique ethnomusicology for rising generations.

After this portentous start the rest of the story develops the idea of a space dreadnought as a musical instrument and its battles as performances:

In any case, the plan directed the last dreadnought, with its hypertrophied weapons, to open with a power chord against the more discordant forces of the Diamantines’ enemies. The orchestration manuals of the day called for a ratio of a single dreadnought to one hundred battle cruisers or equivalent. The percussion line alone should have demolished the other side, especially with the chimera missiles deployed as a basso continuo.

An unconvincing idea, and one made worse by the style, which seems to be a weird mix of pretentious academese and instruction manual.
* (Mediocre). 1,500 words. Story link.

The Monogamy Hormone by Annalee Newitz

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Monogamy Hormone by Annalee Newitz (Entanglements, 2020) opens with the narrator, Edwina, smearing bacterial slime on the wall of a preschool lunchroom: this introduces one of the two pieces of SF decoration in this essentially mainstream story (“twenty years ago, nobody would have believed that smearing germs on the walls of schools could save a whole generation from asthma and irritable bowel syndrome”). The other piece of decoration appears when Edwina discusses her love-life problems with two of her friends at lunch1 (Edwina has two lovers), and they suggest that she take a magic pill (sorry, a “Eternalove” hormone pill) to help her work out which one she truly wants.
Edwina then spends the weekend with her girlfriend Augie and decides she is the one. However, after subsequently spending time with Chester, Edwina realises she is equally in love with him.
Edwina calls her friends for more help, and Alyx puts her right:

Edwina could feel tears in her eyes, and her contacts started to drift off her irises with an annoying string of error messages. She blinked them back into place and used one finger to draw circles on the bar with a blob of water. “I want to have kids. Nobody will let you marry two people and have kids with them.”
Alyx looked more serious than she had ever seen them. “You know that’s bullshit, right? I can’t think of a better place to raise kids than with grownups who love each other.” They drummed their fingers on the bar and seemed lost in thought for a moment. “Marriage is like every other brand that has staying power. Think about YouTube. It used to be part of a private company, and it was full of really bad stuff, like Nazis and crazies talking about rounding up gay people. But then YouTube spun off and became part of the public broadcasting network, and now it’s all educational programs and people gardening and stuff. That was a major rebrand, but it worked. Most people don’t even know that it used to be dangerous for kids to go there.”
“And this is related to my situation how?” Edwina drained her glass.
“Marriage is another changing brand. It used to be only for cis heterosexuals, but now gay people can get married—at least, in a lot of places. People don’t think of marriage the same way anymore. Even in North Carolina, where they have those Family First laws, people are protesting. Here in California, you can create an indie brand marriage. And you know what happens to indie brands, right?” Alyx winked. “They get appropriated by giant megabrands. Pretty soon, ProTox will be marketing a placebo for people who want to fall in love with more than one person. I guarantee it.”2

Fortunately, when Edwina later discusses the matter with Augie and Chester (each of who know about the other), they are both super fine with the arrangement because Edwina can do things with the other person that they don’t want to. And they all lived happily ever after.
This is a modern day relationship story pretending to be an SF one, and the fact that it is also inane and naïve (its view of human relationships reads like something written by a bright 14-year-old that has never had one) makes it even less attractive. It is also, ultimately, dramatically flaccid as it turns out there is no problem to solve here other than the one in Edwina’s head. At least it is breezily written.
* (Mediocre). 5,200 words.

1. A fellow Facebook group member remarked that, in this type of story, none of the characters ever seem to have a particularly demanding job and spend most of their time hanging out.

2. Mmm, I’m not sure YouTube is “full” of Nazis, etc.—I only ever see a lot of very useful clips that help people accomplish all sorts of different things. I also doubt there is a huge pent-up demand for polyamorous relationships.

Algy by L. Sprague de Camp

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Algy by L. Sprague de Camp (Fantastic, August 1976) is a ‘Willy Newbury’ story,1 and one which sees Willy and his new wife Denise arriving at his aunt’s vacation camp at Lake Algonquin to rumours of a sea monster. An old friend who works there fills them in:

Mike scratched his crisp gray curls. “They do be saying that, on dark nights, something comes up in the lake and shticks its head out to look around. But nobody’s after getting a good look at it. There’s newspaper fellies, and a whole gang of Scotchmen are watching for it, out on Indian Point.”
“You mean we have a home-grown version of the Loch Ness monster?”
“I do that.”
“How come the Scots came over here? I thought they had their own lake monster. Casing the competition, maybe?”
“It could be that, Mr, Newbury. They’re members of some society that tracks down the shtories of sea serpents and all them things.”  p. 72

The rest of the story revolves around the aunt’s daughter Linda and two men who are keen on her: one is George Vreeland, an unreliable local character, and the other is Ian Selkirk, one of the Scots who is there to investigate the sightings. Matters develop at a ball where Selkirk cuts in on Vreeland and Linda—to the displeasure of the former—and then, when Selkirk and Linda are later canoodling in a canoe, matters come to a climax when the monster surfaces besides them. Selkirk jumps out of the canoe and swims to shore, not because he is fleeing the monster but because he has spotted that it is a fake and that Vreeland has been operating it from the pump house on the edge of the lake. It later materialises that Vreeland’s boss (another camp site owner) hired him to set up the hoax to attract tourists to the area. Vreeland was only supposed to surface the fake monster at night but, jealous of Selkirk, he used it to try and scare him away.
Finally (spoiler), when Willy and Lord Kintyre (Selkirk’s boss) go out on the lake to examine the fake, something drags it under the water and rips it to shreds.
I suppose this is well enough executed, but the story mostly involves cardboard characters going through the motions of a mainstream plot—with a brief supernatural twist tacked on the end.
* (Mediocre). 4,750 words. Story link.

1. The ‘Willy Newbury’ series at ISFDB.

What We Call Science, They Call Treason by Dominica Phetteplace

Posted on by Paul Fraser

What We Call Science, They Call Treason by Dominica Phetteplace (Asimov’s SF January–February 2023) opens with a billionaire called Rodrigo asking the female narrator of the story to wear a new invention (an “emotional fitness tracker”) to a lunch date with an old college acquaintance.
After a long lunch with Will, and surveillance drones photographing them outside the restaurant, he and the narrator are picked up by Rodrigo the billionaire. Rodrigo reveals that he is from a parallel world, and they drive to a building and go through a portal to Rome 2, where they speak Latin, have to wear the bracelets, and learn that the citizens are panicking because the planet is going to be hit by an asteroid in 19 hours. Rodrigo wants to transfer useful technology before the asteroid hits, but the narrator thinks they can save the planet—so she goes back for her world’s “Space Codex,” while Will gathers hard drives full of Rome 2’s knowledge. Then, after the narrator delivers the Codex and returns to her own world for the second time, the portal dies.
The narrator subsequently becomes a billionaire thanks to the cold fusion technology of Rome 2 (but there are still problems with climate change and the super-rich) and the story eventually ends years later with Rodrigo arriving out of a portal (a “white hole”). He tells her that they managed to save Rome 2 from the asteroid but now have a problem with a black hole in the upper atmosphere. He also adds that Will is sending more files through a white hole to the Burning Man festival, and he’ll meet them there.
This is all narrated in a vaguely satirical tone—but I’m not really sure what the point of this piece is other than to make a number of glib contemporary observations:

I also wanted to solve the prison problem. The police drones took all “unregistered” citizens to nasty offshore islands. It seemed unnecessarily cruel once you looked into the details.
I spent my fortune several times over trying to fund alternatives but never succeeded. It turns out that having money isn’t enough to effect change: you also have to get other people with money to agree with you. Otherwise, their billions act as anti-matter to your own, totally canceling each other out. The other billionaires were fine with me trying to fix the climate, but they thought having a large, incarcerated class of people was essential to their economy. How else would you motivate everyone else to work for you?

It certainly doesn’t work as any sort of believable story.
* (Mediocre). 5,050 words.

The Garden Where No One Ever Goes by P. H. Lee

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Garden Where No One Ever Goes by P. H. Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #373, 3rd December 2020) sees a young girl meet her lover in a deserted garden in the middle of a city; there, she gives them a pale red rose and they make love.
Later, as the young girl and her sister are getting magic lessons from their mother, the sister mentions that there are pale red roses growing in the deserted gardens, and that it appears like “the sort of magic a foolish young girl might make, if she were slipping away from her house to meet her lover in the middle of the night.”
The young girl continues to meet her lover there (the deserted garden is now full of roses) until, eventually, the Inquisition comes to question her about her liaison. The story then ends (spoiler) with the lover being hanged and the girl witnessing the event, whereupon her magic causes water to pour out of her and wash everything away.
This tale of forbidden and doomed love was too slight and too dreamlike for me.
* Mediocre. 1500 words. Story link.

The Answer by Fredric Brown

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Answer by Fredric Brown (Angels and Spaceships, 1954) opens with a scientist called Dwar Ev completing a connection and then moving towards a switch:

The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe—ninety-six billion planets—into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one super-calculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.  p. 36

Ev then asks the super-computer if there is a God, and it replies (spoiler), “Yes, now there is a God”. Then, when Ev rushes towards the switch to turn the computer off, it zaps him with a lightning bolt.
This is one of these squibs (it is less than a page long) that you find (a) pretty neat when you are twelve, but (b) a not very good gimmick story when older. The real sense of wonder here lies in the idea of ninety-six billion inhabited and interconnected planets.
* (Mediocre). 250 words. Story link.

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).

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.

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.

Stone Circle by Lisa Tuttle

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Stone Circle by Lisa Tuttle (Amazing, March 1976)1 opens with the narrator (after a short passage where, I think, she fantasises about being a huge stone statue) performing oral sex on a government inspector in exchange for meat (there are further indications that set this story in a totalitarian and oppressive society). After the inspector leaves, the building manager comes sniffing around and agrees to cook the meat for her.
When the narrator is later out in the street she ends up saving a young woman called Kit (who is under the influence of a drug called “Chill”) from being run over by a vehicle. Kit ends up going home with her and they become lovers.
After the couple have been together for a while, Kit—previously described as a “young revolutionary”—discovers there is an underground movement and starts meeting with two young men. The narrator isn’t interested in becoming involved, but agrees to let Kit and the men meet in her flat when one of the men loses his.
The final part of the story (spoiler) sees another government agent arrive at the flat to question the narrator about Kit, who is out at the time. He threatens to take the narrator’s flat away from her, before suggesting he will overlook the matter in exchange for sex. She gets undressed and he toys with her for a while before leaving abruptly. He tells her he will be back.
The narrator subsequently sees Kit kissing and groping one of the men in the stairwell of the building. Then, the next day, the narrator watches as the couple enter her flat on their own—at which point she betrays them to the government agent. Kit is not in the flat that evening, but the agent later turns up for sex.
There isn’t much to this brief piece apart from sexual exploitation and betrayal, a dystopian background, and some stone based imagery (“my marble flank”, “he’ll get no milk from my granite teat”, etc.). It’s hard to see what the point of all this is.
* (Mediocre). 4,150 words. Story link.

1. This story was a Nebula Award finalist.