Tag: 2*

The Moon Fairy by Sofia Samatar

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Moon Fairy by Sofia Samatar (Conjunctions #74, 2020) begins with a moon fairy arriving in the life of a young girl called Sylvie. Most of the rest of the story details their relationship (as well as Sylvie’s domestic arrangements):

[Poor] Mittens, whom no one loved more than Sylvie, was given away to the neighbor children soon after the fairy’s arrival. From the window on the landing overlooking the neighbors’ garden, Mittens could be observed in her new circumstances, mewling piteously as the children forced her into doll clothes, tied her up in a wagon, and dragged it over the grass. “Poor creature!” Sylvie was heard to murmur, standing at the window. However, she made no attempt to rescue the cat, which had scratched her darling’s wing, leaving a gash that took days to heal. As she looked down, holding the curtain back with one hand, the Moon Fairy curled up in its customary place on her shoulder, sighing placidly and nuzzling her neck.
It really was a charming creature. It smiled, laughed, turned somersaults in the air, played hide-and-seek among the clothes on the line, danced when Ellen played Chopin—did everything but speak. In the evenings, when its energy tended to rise, it would fly round the room up close to the ceiling, emitting a happy buzzing sound. Sylvie said it was singing, but Uncle Claudius, who often dropped by in the evening to have a drink with Father, opined that the buzzing was caused by the movement of the fairy’s wings, “in the manner of a bumblebee or other insect.” “Nonsense,” said Sylvie, frowning. She disliked hearing the fairy compared to an animal. Since the fateful evening when the young man she’d been walking out with that summer (the son of some family friends, a law student with excellent prospects) had rashly referred to the Moon Fairy as “your new pet,” he had been forbidden the house, and the increasingly desperate telephone messages from him we wrote down were crumpled up unread.

Sylvie’s intense relationship with the fairy eventually starts to unravel (Sylvie becomes possessive—she ties a thread to its ankle—and the fairy later turns on her). Then the fairy returns to the Moon, leaving the girl broken-hearted and inconsolable, a condition that still pertains years afterwards.
It is hard to see what point this is trying to make, unless it is an allegory for love affairs in general (dump your current attachments—the cat and the suitor—then get dumped yourself and pine away). If it is about that then the twee tone and content undermine the message.
** (Average). 3,150 words. Story link.

Toy Planes by Tobias S. Buckell

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Toy Planes by Tobias S. Buckell (Nature, 13th October 2005) begins with the pilot of a rocket plane that is about to be launched from an “island nation” having his dreadlocks cut off by his sister:

I’d waited long enough. I’d grown dreads because when I studied in the United States I wanted to remember who I was and where I came from as I began to lose my Caribbean accent. But the rocket plane’s sponsor wanted them cut. It would be disaster for a helmet not to have a proper seal in an emergency. Explosive decompression was not something a soda company wanted to be associated with in their customers’ minds. It was insulting that they assumed we couldn’t keep the craft sealed. But we needed their money. The locks had become enough a part of me that I winced when the clippers bit into them, groaned, and another piece of me fell away.

The next part of the story follows the pilot to the local market where he buys a toy plane to make up weight for the mission. During the journey the driver suggests that the money spent on the spaceship could be better spent on roads or schools, but the pilot sidesteps the question by saying that most of the money has come from private investors or advertisers, and very little from the government (and that the latter will eventually be repaid).
The final paragraphs describe his embarkation, and the balloon used to get to launch altitude. The story closes with the line “We’re coming up too”.
This is an overly fragmentary piece but perhaps it will appeal more to those who appreciate its atypical (“diverse”) setting. I’d note, however, that this is as much a story about private space flight and as such is part of a long tradition of in SF.1  
** (Average). 1,000 words. Story link.

1. Robert Heinlein’s Waldo, The Man Who Sold the Moon, etc., were published in the early 1940s.

A Feast of Butterflies by Amanda Hollander

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Feast of Butterflies by Amanda Hollander (F&SF, March-April 2020) opens with a constable, in a far-flung outpost of what seems to be an Asian empire, summoned to see one of the village elders called the “Judge”. When he arrives the constable is told that five boys have gone missing (one of them is the Judge’s grandson), and that a young woman who lives on the other side of the mountain may be responsible.
When the constable later arrives at the village where the boys went missing he speaks to an old woman who subsequently takes him to “the girl who eats butterflies” (a habit she acquired after her brother died in suspicious circumstances, possibly involving roving young men):

The young woman was crouched by a large spider web stretched between whorls in the tree bark. She did not appear to notice them. But could she even see them, he wondered, for butterflies of every color of the rainbow fluttered around her hands and face, some even trying to alight on her eyelashes. They beat the air with light wings. The young woman’s attention, though, was intensely focused on the lines of the spider web. Near the web’s center, a butterfly struggled against the threads that bound it. The young woman’s delicate fingers pulled the creature’s quivering body from the sticky strands. The insect beat its crimson wings furiously as the girl plucked its legs free, one by one. She examined the lines of red and black, glowing in the afternoon sun. Then, as gently as she removed the insect from the web, she folded it into her mouth. Her sharp teeth bit into the butterfly. The wings twitched fiercely, then not at all. Legs crunched and divided between the river stones of her teeth. Antennae hung over her lip. She looked up and saw them watching her. Her tongue slipped out to catch the ends of the legs and swept them into her mouth. She chewed for a moment, then swallowed.

Further developments (spoiler) see the constable (a) read his predecessor’s report about the brother’s death, which indicates there were signs of foul play, (b) surreptitiously observe the woman and see her turn into a spider, (c) get punched in the mouth by the Judge when the latter runs out of patience, and (d) write a letter to the woman (who reads it and then nods to him).
Finally, the Judge, his servants, and the constable go to the woman’s house. When they finally force their way into the building they see five cocooned bodies hanging from the ceiling. The woman vanishes, the servants take the bodies back to the village, and the Judge is bitten by a snake and dies.
The final scene sees the constable kill a rat that he has seen once before in his office:

The constable shifted in his seat. His muscles coiled and he sprang across the room, his teeth sinking into the fur and flesh. Venom quickly stilled the rodent’s twitching. The constable withdrew his fangs and tried to take the paralyzed creature into his mouth. It didn’t fit. He unhinged his jaw and swallowed the animal whole, the tail the last bit to slip past his lips and down his gullet.

This piece gets off to an intriguing start but eventually devolves into a fairly standard were-animal/shapechanger story, and one with an ending that pretty much comes out of nowhere (there are, at best, a couple of vague suggestions that the constable is a were-snake). I also have reservations about were-animal or shape-changer stories that don’t adhere to conservation of mass principles (I know this will sound daft, but I can suspend disbelief if a person turns into a person-sized spider or snake, but not if the creature is much smaller).
** (Average). 6,050 words.

Evil Robot Monkey by Mary Robinette Kowal

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Evil Robot Monkey by Mary Robinette Kowal (The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Two, 2008) starts with an augmented chimpanzee called Sly working at a potters’ wheel in what appears to be a zoo enclosure. When a passing school kid bangs on the window, Sly loses his temper and throws clay at his tormentor; then the chimp writes “Ass” on the window and makes explicit sexual gestures at the teacher.
Later, one of the chimp’s handlers, a sympathetic man called Vern, comes to talk to Sly about his behaviour, and tells him that his supervisor has instructed him to take Sly’s clay away as a punishment. The chimp almost loses control again but channels his rage into his wheel and, while doing so, makes a vase. Vern takes the vase away to be oven fired, and also takes Sly’s clay—adding “I’m not cleaning your mess” (hinting to Sly that he will still have the clay he threw at the window).
This is a pretty good scene (***+ quality), but it is a fragment (imagine reading two pages of Flower for Algernon). Awful title.
** (Average). 1,000 words. Story link.

Beyond the Dragon’s Gate by Yoon Ha Lee

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Beyond the Dragon’s Gate by Yoon Ha Lee (Tor.com, 20th May 2020) opens with Anna, an ex-academic who used to work in AI research, arriving at an orbital fortress after being abducted by the military. After seeing the wreckage of several spaceships she learns from the Marshal commanding the military that the AIs that control these vessels have been committing suicide. He then tells her that he wants her to communicate with them mind to mind to find out why (even though her academic partner Rabia died from this process during their research).
When the Marshall takes her to see one of the surviving ships, Proteus Three, Anna sees how radical the previously discussed modifications have been:

They’d emerged above what Anna presumed was a ship’s berth, except for its contents. Far below them, separated from them by a transparent wall, the deck revealed nothing more threatening—if you didn’t know better—than an enormous lake of syrupy substance with a subdued rainbow sheen. Anna gripped the railing and pressed her face against the wall, fascinated, thinking of black water and waves and fish swarming in the abyssal deep.
[. . .]
“You’re going to have to give me an access port,” Anna said after she’d taken two deep breaths. She stared at the beautiful dark lake as though it could anesthetize her misgivings. “Does it—does it have some kind of standard connection protocol?”
The Marshal pulled out a miniature slate and handed it over.
Whatever senses the ship/lake had, it reacted. A shape dripped upwards from the liquid, like a nereid coalescing out of waves and foam, shed scales and driftwood dreams. Anna was agape in wonder as the ship took on a shape of jagged angles and ragged curves. It coalesced, melted, reconstituted itself, ever-changing.
“Talk to it,” the Marshal said. “Talk to it before it, too, destroys itself.”

The story ends (spoiler) with Anna communicating with the ship until she starts having convulsions. The Marshal breaks the link and then, after Anna recovers, she tells him the modifications that they have made to the spaceships have left the AIs with suicidal levels of dysphoria.
This story has a colourful setting and some interesting detail (the background war, the fish-dragon pets, the orbital fortresses, etc.), and the amorphous, water-like spaceships are intriguingly strange—but the resolution is too abrupt, and leaves the story feeling like an extract from a longer work. I’d also add that the reason for the AIs’ suicides reduces what is here to a simplistic trans message.
** (Average). 3,900 words. Story link.

The Past, Like a River in Flood by Marissa Lingen

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The Past, Like a River in Flood by Marissa Lingen (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #311, 27th August 2020) sees a geomancer returning to the magical university where she studied twenty years after a disaster that occurred there. She meets her former tutor/advisor, and they go to the walled up “Vault of Potions”—the site of two recent deaths—with the with the aim of opening it and forcing the university to deal with the contamination that has been festering inside ever since:

I’d handed those very stones to the professors who were standing in the entrance walling up the Vault, me and Ev Minor, shin-deep in the floodwaters with that eerie pink glow from the spilled potions’ ill-fated summonings getting brighter every second. That was the night everything I owned washed away and it was the least of my troubles. That was the night we lost Alden Glasshand, my first-year Incantations professor, and two students whose names I’ll never forget but whose faces I can never remember, pulled under the waters by the vortices that had suddenly surged beneath their feet when the powerful magics in the potions were accidentally combined. That was the night we slept on the top floor of the Library and didn’t know if we’d get down in the morning.

The only complication in this otherwise straightforward account is (spoiler) an alchemy professor who intervenes and stabs the narrator’s tutor as they are in the process of opening the vault (the alchemist wants them to leave it alone so the university can continue on as before). The narrator subdues her, and then makes what I presume in the story’s point:

“Putting something behind you doesn’t mean ignoring it. It means making sure it can’t hurt you anymore. It means making sure it can’t hurt anybody anymore.”

The setup/resolution structure of this piece is too simple,1 and seems constructed with the sole purpose of delivering the story’s message. That said, the setting and events are evocatively described.
** (Average). 4,450 words. Story link.

1. I’ve found that a lot of BCS stories feel rather fragmentary.

Choke by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

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Choke by Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Tor.com, 14th September 2022) sees the narrator, Kédiké, accompanying Afonso, a fellow academic and friend who “worships free food”, to a family assigned by the International Friends program:

The house, when you arrive, is more conspicuous than you had expected. Apparently, it used to be a church, back when this town was still a part of Mexico. The Spanish architecture and Infant of Prague statues, both of which you recognize from your Catholic upbringing, are huge tells. When you go past the motion-sensored outdoor lights, the statues come to life, casting slant shadows, like sentries over something poached.
The gate swings open into a large compound containing multiple buildings. The door at the top of the steps is open, ushering you in. From inside: the smell of good food, laughter, a cat meowing. Afonso beams. There is joy here.
You have forgotten your ancestors’ whisper that you will choke.

This passage pretty much presages the three narrative threads that are developed in the story. First, there are the whispered warnings and statements (of variable reliability) that Kédiké regularly receives from his dead ancestors in the “Great Across”—and they have already warned him that he will “choke” at this gathering; second, we learn about Kédiké’s abusive religious upbringing in Nigeria; and, third, it becomes obvious that the hosts of the meal, the Paxton family, are proselytizing Christians using the Friendship program to recruit new converts.
During the evening the ancestors continue to give Kédiké nudges and brief visions at the meal, and he also becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the religious observance that occurs (prayers and passages from the bible between courses, etc.). This discomfort increases when (spoiler) a final member of the family arrives, Elijah Paxton, who, after an aggravated assault on a woman with a baseball bat (he called on the “LGBT slut” to repent), was banned from all campuses in a fifty-mile radius.
The story climaxes with Kédiké experiencing an intense vision:

The world flickers, and the last light in the room is snuffed out. Your ancestors, tired of waiting, step forward.
Every guest at the table is a faceless two-dimensional darkness, bodies draped over furniture and cutlery, trapped in the plane of shadows. They speak but are unheard; scream but are stifled by a form too shallow to hold all their selves. The only bodily parts spared are their fingers, fleshy ends clinging to the flattened shadows at the table. With these they call for attention, scratching at the wood, pulling splinters, drawing blood.
But the sound of water drowns them out.
Each Paxton is a white robe wearing a stole, like the men from your exorcisms. Sticky gray tendrils, borne of each utterance, each interaction, connect the whites to every guest, bonding all in a closeknit web. Water so saline you can taste it pours from the depths of each Paxton to the dining room floor, enveloping the slant shadow-selves. Alessia’s ejections happen, like her words, in drips, slipping down the sides of her mouth. Charlotte and Donny, Hollywood smiles still intact, spout huge bucketfuls. But no one gushes into the fast-rising lake like Elijah, from whom water pours out of every orifice: eager, hungry, restless.
Young Joshua is the only Paxton left untouched. He is still stroking the cat. But rather than the vacant expression he has presented all evening, his face is warped by fear as he watches the water rise. His eyes turn, slowly, and find you, realizing you have joined him in this separate reality.
“Help,” he whispers, choking. “Help me.”
The flesh-fingered shadows scratch the table, echoing his words in wood. HELP. HELP ME.

The narrator quickly leaves, and realises that the ancestors were warning him that he might drown (in the host’s religion, presumably).
For the most part this is a readable piece (and economical, too—it does a lot with its four thousand words) that slowly and successfully builds unease in the reader—but it is somewhat anti-climactic (Kédiké runs away), and unsatisfyingly open-ended (what does he subsequently do to help Joshua, who appears to be in a similar situation to the younger Kédiké?) It also feels a bit like an anti-Christian hit job, and an unsubtle one at that.
All in all it reads like the beginning of a longer story, and I wonder if it is a novel in progress.
** (Average). 3,950 words. Story link.

Of All the New Yorks in All the Worlds by Indrapramit Das

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Of All the New Yorks in All the Worlds by Indrapramit Das (Tor.com, 19th October 2022) opens with the narrator, a multiple worlds traveller, meeting Aditi-0, the original iteration of his ex-girlfriend Aditi-1, who he met in New York City-5 while travelling across the timelines (NYCs 2-4 didn’t have an Aditi in them). We subsequently learn that he met Aditi-1 after he was tasked to take a message from Aditi-0 to the versions of herself on other Earths (her “altselves”).
The rest of the story is mostly an account of the time he spends with Aditi-0, during which they talk about his failed affair with Aditi-1 (which he is still moping about). The story ultimately (spoiler) subverts reader expectation by having the narrator and Aditi-1 become friends instead of lovers at the end of the story (or perhaps it just describes what happens when people break up but remain in touch). I am not sure what the point of this is.
The story essentially appears to be a piece about failed relationships even though it is decorated with SFnal furniture, e.g. the physical effects of timeline travel (nausea, etc.), futuristic jargon (“altselves,” “sticers”), and one scene that describes a trans-timeline node in operation:

Time appears to slow, and sound with it, flooding my ears with a low hum.
Everything. The people, the stars in the sky, the ruddy smear of sunlight still burning in the clouds behind Manhattan, the lights of New York City, the glowsticks now arcing through the air above us. Everything grows persistent trails that crawl across the dark blue evening air in shimmering banners and strings. Aditi0 is replicated a hundred times until she is surrounded in a glimmering tracery of herself. The entire world etches the expanding mark of its passage on to the surface of reality. We see the potentialities of past and present grow around us for what seems like infinity but is actually just a few moments. As this multi-hued, crystalline geometry of our movement and Earth’s movement through spacetime grows more and more complex it begins to ripple and fade like a wake, so the tearing meteoric lines of the city’s lights fracture into what looks like a thousand overlapping New Yorks and a thousand starscapes splayed out across the horizon, before vanishing into the singular skyline we know.
The dancing replications decorating reality stream away to nothing and time hits its normal pace again, letting sound rush in like an explosion. I stagger back at this effect, gasping as I take in the world, which now seems to be moving too fast. It takes a few seconds of staying still to keep from throwing up at the contrast. Aditi0 lets her shoulder sag against mine.

This is probably the only truly SFnal part of what is essentially a slow-moving mainstream story about relationships.1
** (Average). 6,350 words. Story link.

1. Contrast and compare this story with the decidedly SFnal Weep for Day (reviewed here).

Skeleton Song by Seanan McGuire

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Skeleton Song by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com, 26th October 2022) is one of her “Wayward Children” series (Every Heart a Doorway, etc.)1 and opens with sunset on Mariposa, with the abuelas singing the summoning song that reanimates the dead skeletons of this world:

In the palace, in the curtained bower reserved for the Princess, a scattering of bones dusted with diamond and amber began to stir, tempted into motion by the song rising from below. On the other side of the room, a terrible creature raised its head and watched.
It was strange and fleshy, shaped as a skeleton was shaped, but with a covering of fat and skin stretched across it, concealing it from proper view. It hid most of its body under rags it called “clothing,” which had grown tattered and worn, developing holes where none had been before. Some among the palace staff had hoped, for a time, that the same might happen to the terrible creature’s “skin,” leaving proper, honest bone to shine through. It had not. When the creature broke its skin, as happened from time to time, it bled and wept and hurt, and took to the pile of rags it had claimed as a “bed.”
They would never have allowed it to remain in the palace were it not for one strange truth: hideous as the creature was, impossible as it seemed, the Princess loved it.

We learn that the fleshy creature is Christopher, a human who arrived in this world of living skeletons via a portal. The Princess saw that this new arrival was ill and drew all the sickness into a bone, later extracting it from Christopher’s body. Christopher now uses the bone as a flute.
The rest of the story sees the Princess paint her bones (a skeleton’s equivalent of dressing, I guess) before they go to see her parents in the depths of the catacombs (Christopher loves the Princess and does not want to go back to his world, so she says he must meet her parents). When the pair eventually arrive at the bottom of the catacombs, they learn from the Princess’s father that he also came to Mariposa as a human—but he kept his fleshly memories by having his mother plunge a gilded bone into his heart on their wedding night and then cut away his flesh (this resolves a memory problem mentioned by Christopher during an earlier discussion with the Princess about him becoming a skeleton).
The story concludes with the couple returning to the surface. The Princess wants “to sleep in the flowers” with him one last time (her bones are inanimate during the daytime) and then, when she rises that sunset, they will follow the ritual outlined by her father. When the Princess wakes that evening, however (spoiler), she finds that Christopher has had second thoughts and vanished.
This isn’t badly done (there are some nice touches, e.g. the journey down into the catacombs) but the idea of a man falling in love with a skeleton requires a little too much suspension of disbelief. I suspect this story will appeal more to those already invested in the series and who are interested in interstitial material.
** (Average). 5,000 words. Story link.

1. “The Wayward Children” series at ISFDB.

A Pall of Moondust by Nick Wood

Posted on by Paul Fraser

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

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

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