Tag: 1989

Dilemma by Connie Willis

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Dilemma by Connie Willis (Foundation’s Friends: Stories in Honor of Isaac Asimov, 1989) opens with three robots trying to arrange an appointment with Isaac Asimov’s secretary Susan (another robot). They the want to talk to the famous author about repealing the First Law of Robotics1 (one of them is a medical robot and cannot make a surgical incision as it would harm a human). Susan tries her best to fob them off but, when Asimov arrives unexpectedly and talks to the three robots and is flattered by their comments, he tells her to arrange an appointment for the next day (which Susan then double books after they leave).
The rest of the story details the robots’ further attempts to talk to Asimov and Susan’s efforts to stop them. In among this are many references to Asimov’s work, in particular the Positronic Robot stories (those unfamiliar with his work may be a bit lost), and a running joke where he is wrongly identified as the author of other books (by, in order, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, and Harlan Ellison):

“Do you know how late for lunch Al Lansing was? An hour and fifteen minutes. And when he got there, do you know what he wanted? To come out with commemorative editions of all my books.”
“That sounds nice,” Susan said. She took [Asimov’s] coordinates card and his gloves out of his pockets, hung up his coat, and glanced at her watch again. “Did you take your blood pressure medicine?”
“I didn’t have it with me. I should have. I’d have had something to do. I could have written a book in an hour and fifteen minutes, but I didn’t have any paper either. These limited editions will have cordovan leather bindings, gilt-edged acid-free paper, water-color illustrations. The works.”
“Water-color illustrations would look nice for Pebble in the Sky,” Susan said, handing him his blood pressure medicine and a glass of water.
“I agree,” he said, “but that isn’t what he wants the first book in the series to be. He wants it to be Stranger in a Strange Land!” He gulped down the pill and started for his office. “You wouldn’t catch those robots in there mistaking me for Robert Heinlein.”

At the end of the story Asimov does some investigation (as he previously pointed out to the three, he only wrote about the Laws of Robotics, he didn’t build them), and he eventually reveals (to the assembled group, which includes Susan) that he has discovered that their complaint about the First Law (spoiler) has been a red herring, and that the real issue is that Susan has been working part-time for one of the three robots (the Accountant)—who is leaving the area and wants Susan to go with him. She has refused as she thinks Asimov would be lost without her (a First Law violation). Asimov tells her that she is free to go as (a) he managed on his own in the previous decades, and (b) he will train up one of the other two robots (the Book Shelver) to be her replacement.
This story is essentially an extended in-joke that has a concealed mystery at its end. A pleasant enough piece.
*** (Good). 6,500 words. Story link.

1. I’m not convinced the first law restriction on surgery is valid—surely the second part of that law would override the first:

“‘First Law: A robot shall not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm,’” the varnished robot quoted. “‘Second Law: A robot shall obey a human being’s order if it doesn’t conflict with the First Law. Third Law: A robot shall attempt to preserve itself if it doesn’t conflict with the First or Second Laws.’ First outlined in the short story ‘Runaround,’ Astounding magazine, March 1942, and subsequently expounded in I, Robot, The Rest of the Robots, The Complete Robot, and The Rest of the Rest of the Robots.”


Icicle Music by Michael Bishop

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Icicle Music by Michael Bishop (F&SF, November 1989) starts with a twelve-year-old called Danny getting up early on the Xmas morning of 1957. When he goes downstairs he finds that his (single) mother has scrimped and saved to find the money to buy him a shotgun. As he loads the gun and plays with it, Danny hears what he thinks may be a burglar coming down the chimney; eventually, a grungy looking man in a heavy red coat and khaki trousers appears.
Danny challenges the intruder and, after ducking an ornament thrown at him, shoots. His mother hears the altercation and comes downstairs, taking the shotgun from Danny and reloading. But by the time she is ready to shoot, the man is almost at the top of the chimney—so she goes outside to get a clear shot:

Unless [Danny] was imagining things, there was a deer on their roof, a buck with twelve to fifteen points. The guy who’d tried to steal their Christmas was mounting the jumpy creature. He encouraged it—“Up, Blitzen, up!”—to fly him to safety over both the riverside dump and the rooftops of their sleeping town.
“Stop!” Mom shouted. “Stop or I’ll shoot!” She sounded just like a sheriff on a TV cowboy show.
“No, Milly!” the man on the roof pleaded. “Don’t!”
“Clifton?” Mom murmured. Then, louder: “Clifton?”
The compact little buck (a courser, Danny thought, like in “The Night Before Christmas,” which Mrs. French had read them on the day before their holidays) soared up from the house. It lifted like a dream creature, pawing the night air and defining both itself and its desperate, neck-clutching rider against a blowing purple scrim of stars. All Danny could do was marvel. There should have been seven other reindeer (if the words of that silly poem counted for anything), but one was about all Danny could handle.
The deer—the courser—drew an invisible circle over their backyard. Mom and he looked up to see its glinting hooves and white belly. Then the thief sprawled across the deer took a shiny ball from the pocket of his coat and nearly unseated himself sidearming it with all his wounded strength at Mom and him.
“Here’s something for you, Milly!” And the stolen ornament—a second one, Danny realized—shattered on Mom’s forehead.
“Ouch!”
“Merry Christmas to both you and the brat, bitch! And to all a good ni—”

Danny’s mother shoots, and (spoiler) the man falls off. The reindeer then crash-lands into a barbed wire fence. Both die. The mother subsequently takes her ex-husband’s body to the dump and burns it, while Danny butchers the reindeer for meat.
After this captivatingly bizarre start the story leaps forward thirty years, and we find Daniel in hospital. He has just finished telling a man called Philip about the incident, and goes on to tell him about what happened on the tenth anniversary of the altercation in 1967, when he was camping alone in the wilds: Danny was visited by the ghost of his father, and his sleeping bag and tent disappeared (presumably his father’s doing) while he was following the apparition. He almost died from exposure.
Danny then recounts what happened on the twentieth anniversary in 1977, when his father’s ghost came and took the soul of his terminally ill mother.
After listening to all this, Philip gets up to leave. He kisses Danny on the forehead, and notes that it is the thirtieth anniversary that day. Daniel then asks Philip to get Gary to visit him, but Philip has to remind Danny that Gary is “gone” (there are hints in the latter section that Danny is gay, and presumably in hospital with AIDS). Philip leaves.
The story ends with this:

Outside Daniel’s window, faint icicle music. The glassblower’s panpipe hanging from the cornice had begun to melt, releasing long-pent melodies.
“Come on,” Daniel murmured. “Come on.”
He couldn’t wait. He wanted his father’s bitter ghost to get a move on. If it materialized in the room and stole his soul, that would be a welcome violation: a theft and a benediction, the first Christmas present his daddy had given him in over thirty years.
Come quickly, Father. Come.

This is an odd and very dark Xmas story but it works, and I suspect it’ll stay in reader’s heads for some time.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4,400 words.