Tag: 2021

The Dark Ride by John Kessel

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Dark Ride by John Kessel (F&SF, January-February 2021)1 gets off to an engrossing start at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, where Leon Czolgosz is trying to assassinate President McKinley. When the crowds prevent Leon from getting near enough he decides to wait until the President returns to visit the Temple of Music.
To fill the time Leon wanders around the grounds of the Exposition looking at the exhibits and later decides to go on “A Trip to the Moon”. This is supposedly an aerial trip to the moon followed by an excursion to an underground city for an audience with the ruling Grand Lunar.
As Leon listens to the guide’s entertaining pre-flight briefing he wonders if McKinley has been on the ride, and thinks about the possibility of assassinating him on the surface of the Moon. Then his thoughts turn to a woman called Emma Goldman, an anarchist activist Leon has seen speaking and has briefly talked with. (Later on in the story, Leon goes to her home in an attempt to become more involved in the anarchist movement, and his infatuation with Goldman is one of the factors influencing his desire to kill the President). Eventually, after the guide has finished the briefing, Leon and the other passengers go through a set of double doors to board the airship:

As they ascended, they passed through clouds of mist. A storm arose. The wind increased, lightning flashed, thunder echoed, the airship shook. The young women clutched their boyfriends’ arms. The breeze became a gale.
Then they were past the storm and into outer space. Below, Leon could see the outline of Lake Erie shrinking until all of North America was visible. As they continued to rise, the entire Earth shrank to a disk, falling back into the distance.
It was a vision of the world that one never had. The entire human race lived on that one planet. All history, the rise and fall of nations, the great conflicts, the great achievements, had occurred on that sphere. What differences existed between human beings that could compare with the fact that they shared the Earth? Except they didn’t share it. Some people owned it, and others did not. Humans had invented ownership, and it had taken over their minds.
He observed his fellow passengers. The bourgeois man held his wife’s gloved hand and whispered something into her ear. The two couples were laughing, the fellow with his sleeves rolled up sliding his arm around the blonde’s waist.
The clouds began to clear and stars came out on all sides, bright, clear pinpoints in the blackness. Ahead, the Moon hove into view, with the grinning face of the Man in the Moon.
What hokum. Leon shifted in his seat.  p. 96

After Leon arrives on a vegetation covered Moon the story cuts to Leon outside the attraction after the trip is complete. He decides to go to the Temple of Music and join the queue to meet the President and, in the line, he gets talking to a tall, black man called Parker (Leon can’t work out why a black man wants to shake McKinley’s hand given the Republicans sold out the blacks in the election of 1896).
As Leon waits in line we also get more backstory about his family background (his mother died and his father remarried an unsympathetic woman), his involvement in labour politics (dangerous practices and strikes and black-listing), and his general disillusionment with capitalism and the church. Leon also finds a baby bottle-like nipple in his pocket but can’t remember where he got it, or what happened on the trip after they arrived at the Moon.
McKinley eventually arrives, the queue moves forward, and Leon reaches the President and shoots him twice. Leon is restrained by Parker and almost shot out of hand by a soldier shortly afterwards, but McKinley (who is injured and will die of an infection two weeks later) intervenes.
The rest of the story mostly alternates between an account of Leon’s subsequent treatment and questioning by the authorities, and flashbacks to what happened after he arrived on the Moon during his trip. During these latter scenes the trip metamorphoses from an exhibition attraction to what appears to be a pulp adventure:

Dark at first, the cave grew darker still as they advanced, and the women drew closer to their escorts. Gradually a blue light rose around them. Farther in were lights of crimson and gold. Jewels gleamed in the rough walls. The cave opened into a chamber large enough to hold all of the earthlings. Here were more Selenites, small females whose long hair draped undone over the shoulders of their glittering gowns. A couple of them played stringed instruments. All bowed their heads when the visitors were assembled.
The little males bent sideways and looked up at them. The spiky tops of their heads looked like cactus plants. They smiled and shook hands with the passengers.
All this struck a chord in Leon. Earlier that summer, lying around his rented room in West Seneca through a sweltering July, out of work, spending down his savings, Leon had passed his time reading newspapers and magazines. In Cosmopolitan he had read a scientific romance by the British writer H. G. Wells titled The First Men in the Moon, about a failed businessman named Bedford and a crazy scientist named Cavor who flew to the Moon in an antigravity ship. Wells’s moon had giant fungi on its surface and was honeycombed with caverns where lived insectile Selenites. Clearly the designers of the Trip to the Moon had read Wells’s story and turned it into this exotic music hall show.
Although these were midgets and children, and the grotto was constructed of plaster, in the blue light and the play of shadows the faux rock looked real, and out of the corner of his eye, Leon was startled when one or another of the Selenites moved in a way that no human might move. That one in the corner, bent forward, head wobbling—it looked more like a big drunken grasshopper than a person. But when Leon peered at it, he saw it was just a sideshow midget dressed up in green tights and bloomers.
To the right and left, visible between glowing stalactites, shadowed galleries ran off into darkness, giving the illusion that this complex must reach far below the Pan-American fairgrounds. The air was cool. They followed the guide and the Selenite captain through another tunnel. The floor trembled with a vibration that made Leon think of the machines in the wire mill, and in the distance he thought he heard twittering. As he passed one of the openings, he glimpsed some large, pale thing in the darkness, something like a huge slug, heaving along the floor on no legs.  pp. 104-105

The rest of the story limns Leon’s interrogation and trial, and also his escapades on the Moon. The former thread begins with Leon’s examination by two alienists (during this we learn of a infatuation with a prostitute who eventually refuses to marry him as she earns more than he does), his dissociation from the events surrounding the assassination, and then his regret at his actions (he thinks at length about the effect on his family and the on the President’s epileptic wife, “In killing her husband, Leon was killing her as surely as if he had put a bullet in her belly, too”).
Meanwhile on the Moon, Leon rescues Wilma, one of the dancing slave girls from the court of the Grand Lunar and, after Leon kills a number of pursuing Selenite warriors (“Leon’s fist broke through the thing’s skull as if it were an eggshell”), the pair descend down into the lunar tunnels. They briefly stop to eat some of the mushrooms that grow everywhere and drink the glowing water (Wilma says it glows because “it is infused with a miraculous invigorating element, radium”). Next, they arrive at a child factory, where the next generation of human slaves are grown—soon to become “cogs in the Grand Lunar’s industrial machine”. Leon is particularly horrified when he sees very young children crammed into bottles with only their arms free, a modification intended to make them more efficient machine tenders. Finally, the pair arrive at the secret chamber of the Brotherhood of Lunar Workers, where Wilma’s comrades thank Leon for her rescue. Then, after he learns more about the evil rule of the Selenites, he agrees to use his pistol to assassinate the Grand Lunar.
So far, so anti-capitalist (and, in places, anti-church). However, the last section of the story (spoiler) did not go where I thought it was going (e.g. a successful anti-capitalist uprising on the Moon as opposed to Leon’s presumed failure to change anything on Earth). Instead we see Leon’s attempt to kill the Gran Lunar fail when he is disarmed by a whip-like tentacle as he draws his pistol during another tour party visit.
Finally, as Leon argues with a priest in his cell shortly before his execution, the two threads of the story merge together:

The priest sighed. It was dark in the cell, and Leon could not make out his expression. Leon looked out of the cell into the gallery, where the sunset light had turned everything so bright that he had to squint.
“Many things you think you know are wrong,” the priest said.
His voice sounded different, sibilant and high pitched.
Leon turned to face him, and everything was changed. The cell was altered, larger, much larger. It wasn’t a cell anymore; it was a vast cavern dimly lit with blue light. His cot and his shit bucket were gone. It was foolish even to expect such things in this place, ornately decorated and suffused with a glowing blue mist. Around them stood a horde of misshapen, dark figures. The priest, too, was changed. He did not sit on the wooden stool but on a dais, and it was not the priest at all, but rather some monstrous thing with a huge head and a tiny face. Around it hovered insectile creatures carrying odd devices. One of them sprayed a cooling mist around the monster’s great dome of a skull.
“You are about to die,” the Grand Lunar said, “but before you do, we would take it as a courtesy if you would answer some questions for us.”  pp. 144-145

The next two pages sees the Grand Lunar give a spirited defence of the benefits of Lunarian society, and a critique of Leon’s ideas about freedom. Some of the Grand Lunar’s comments are sophistry, but the pair’s final exchange suggests that the story may be more about the use of political violence to achieve one’s aims rather than the shortcomings of capitalism:

The Grand Lunar said, “Your heart is full of anger. Tell me this: What happens when a free human wants something, and another wants the same thing?”
“They share.”
“Is this what happens on Earth?”
Leon would not lie. “Sometimes they fight, and one wins and the other loses.”
“So the freedom you speak of only means that people will discover reasons to fight one another.”
“They have the ability to share. No one has to own or be owned. We can preserve good things and make new ones that are equally good. We can give ourselves freely and love one another.”
“And that is why you attempted to kill me? You would bring down the order that we have created over generations, which has tamed the lunar world and created this vast number of variegated beings, in order to replace it with a teeming conflict of individuals in the hope that they will not fall to killing each other. They will ‘give themselves freely and love one another.’”
“Yes. They will.”
“Why, then, is your Earth not a paradise?”
“Not everybody can do it, yet. The powerful ones repress the others. The violent ones insist on imposing their will. There are—”
“Yes, I see. I see one such in front of me.” The Grand Lunar slowly closed his eyes and opened them again. He waved a feeble arm at one of his attendants. “Take this one to be executed.”  pp. 146-147

The last scene sees Leon back in prison and in the execution room. Then, after he is strapped in to the electric chair, the Grand Lunar gives the order to proceed (we are back on the Moon again), but Wilma and her rebels arrive to rescue him—presumably this Leon’s dying fantasy.
This a very impressive piece of work that manages to blend a historical account of a real event, the psychological study of an assassin, political commentary about capitalism and resistance to that system, and a pulp action adventure into a highly readable, entertaining and thought provoking piece (and one which, I suspect, will bear several re-readings). It also, perhaps, provides a timely examination of the use of political violence to achieve one’s ends.
****+ (Very Good to Excellent). 23,850 words. Purchase link (USA).

1. This was a finalist for the 2022 Theodore Sturgeon Award. I am really surprised that it was not on the Hugo and Nebula final ballot (especially the latter).

The Album of Dr. Moreau by Daryl Gregory

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Album of Dr. Moreau by Daryl Gregory (Tor Novellas, 2021)1 opens with Bobby, a human-ocelot hybrid and one of the members of the boy band WyldBoyz, waking up after a huge after-tour drink and drug taking binge to find his manager, Dr M., lying beside him in bed. He has been brutally murdered and Bobby is covered in blood.
Bobby goes to get hold of the rest of the band members, who are also human-animal hybrids, and they assemble in Bobby’s room to examine the body and discuss what they are going to do. During this they talk about what happened the previous night and also allude to matters that they must not mention to the police.
At the end of this section Bobby says, “I’m going to need a really good publicist”. This, and an earlier hopeful comment, “Please don’t be a dead hooker”, are the first glimmerings that this is going to be an overtly humorous piece (I didn’t realise for sure until further on in the story).
After this set-up the point of view switches to Detective Lucia Delgado, who is assigned to the case with her partner detective Banks. Co-incidentally, Delgado has a daughter interested in the band:

[Melanie] was nine years old—dead center in the band’s demographic sweet spot of preteen females—and a huge fan. A poster of the band—the one where they’re wearing space suits from the Unleashed album—hung over her bed. Luce knew the names of every member of the band, because Melanie talked about them as if they were her personal friends. Devin, “the romantic one,” was three-quarters bonobo; Tim, “the shy one,” was a large percentage of pangolin; Matt, “the funny one,” was a giant bat; and Tusk, “the smart one,” was a hybrid elephant. Last but by no means least in the heart of Luce’s daughter (and on the LVMPD person-of-interest list) was “the cute one,” Bobby O.
Next to her mirror Melanie had pinned up a Tiger Beat cover filled with Bobby O’s face. The headline read: “O Is for Ocelot! We Luv a Lot!” And indeed, Melanie adored him. Last week Luce was feeling bad she hadn’t ponied up the $38.50 a ticket for the WyldBoyZ show at the Matador. She had zero interest in watching a bunch of genetically engineered manimals sing and dance like some Chuck E. Cheese nightmare, but Melanie would have lost her mind with joy. Now Luce was grateful she’d skipped.

The rest of the story sees Delgado and Banks investigate the murder and interview the members one at time (we get these interviews from Delgado’s point of view, and then a chapter from the band member’s point of view—which sometimes varies significantly from what they have told Delgado).
Sequentially, we see: (a) Bobby remembering a huge argument between the band and Dr M. about the imminent break-up of the group; (b) Devin revealing that he and Tusk created the songs (lyrics and music respectively) but that Dr M. owned the rights; (c) Tusk telling the detectives about the band’s escape from a barge that went on fire; (d) Luce and Banks finding a costume and the murder weapon in the toilets after watching a security video; and (e) Tim (the pangolin-hybrid) worrying about shell cancer and giving the detectives a one-page lecture on pop-song construction (an atypically dull section in the story2).
During this latter interview we also get the band’s origin story when Tim reveals that, after a fire on an illegal floating laboratory where they were experimental subjects, they drifted on a life-raft in the Pacific for two weeks before being rescued:

The fishermen towed them east for two days and cut them loose at Isla Isabella. “Oh my God,” Matt had said. “We’re in the Galápagos Islands. This is where Darwin figured out evolution.”
“Why are you laughing?” Tim asked.
“Because a hundred years ago, we could have fucked his shit up.”

We also learn that when the group finally got to mainland Peru they met Dr M. and Kat, their roadie (who Luce later discovers is pregnant).
Although this has the structure of a mystery story, a lot of it is played for laughs (Luce’s partner Banks has a stream of puns and one liners, e.g., “I’m sure we can get the pangolin to come out of his shell”), and hits peak humour when Luce interviews two members of the fan-club, who are as deranged and pedantic as you would expect—they explain in depth the differences between the two fan types that are “zoomies” and “zoomandos”. We also go beyond puns, one-liners and amusing scenes to metafictional humour in Matt’s interview, when he reels off a list of murder mystery writers and their asides to readers about the stories:

“I hate metafiction,” Delgado said.
Banks said, “A couple hours ago she was telling me we’re either in a locked-room mystery or a science fiction story. She said she really doesn’t want to be in sci-fi.”

A little while after this interview, Luce announces to Banks that she knows who committed the murder. Then, after a few more puzzle pieces are presented—there is a interview with Dr M.’s wife, the recovery of a missing laptop, and a short conversation with her Captain and two men who are supposedly “Fish and Wildlife” agents (and who who have a photograph of someone who looks like Kat’s twin brother)—Delgado discovers the laptop files include a capella versions of the band’s songs and a list of the subjects at the floating lab. She notes that all of them were terminated apart from the band members and the original experimental subject.
The climactic scene of the story (spoiler) sees the band flee the hotel (much to the chagrin of the two agents) but they later turn up at Delgado’s house. She tells them how she thinks the murder was committed (she thinks Matt is the murderer, if I recall correctly), and then the band tell her what actually occurred: Matt glided/bungee-jumped onto Dr M.’s balcony and opened the door so the rest of the band members and Kat could enter. They searched the room for the laptop and its incriminating information, and then Kat killed Dr M. to prevent him revealing the band’s secrets, mutilating his body to make it look like a deranged fan did it. Finally, we learn (a) Kat is the mother of all the WyldBoyz—she is the original protean subject on the list (I presume “protean” in this case means that she is able to give birth to various types of life), and (b) the Feds are closing in (the Fish and Wildlife guys actually work for a much more sinister department, the one that detained Kat during WWII and repeatedly made her give birth3). Also, during all this back and forth, Delgado’s daughter Melanie comes through briefly and ends up singing with her favourite band (this will no doubt be the finale in the musical of the story).
Overall this is an enjoyable read and one that is quite funny in places—as well as Banks’s puns, there are numerous amusing exchanges and scenes, mostly about boy bands, animals and their habits, and, as already mentioned, fans. There are also a lot of throwaway references to pre-2000 music, e.g. when the lack of a female band member comes up, one of them says “We’re not The Cure”—presumably a joke at the expense of the singer Robert Smith; also, when Dr M. forms the band in Peru, The Animals is discounted as a name.
I note that most of the humour is in the middle part of the story as, at the beginning and end, the mystery requirements are prioritised. And, while we are talking about the murder mystery aspects, I doubt that anyone could figure out the circumstances of the murder from the clues that are presented. The story is also a bit longer than it needs to be (it’s a very long novella), and there is no convincing explanation as to why the Feds, having let them remain free for so long, suddenly become interested in them at the end of the story.
*** (Good). 37,750 words. Purchase link.

1. This was a finalist for the 2022 Theodore Sturgeon Award.

2. The Apologies section at the end of the book reveals the song construction lecture comes from Gregory’s son, “I asked my second born, Ian Gregory, to write the first draft of Tim’s impassioned defense of pop music, and they gave me the perfect rant.”

3. It becomes obvious at this point in the story that Kat is a survivor from The Island of Dr Moreau.

If the Martians Have Magic by P. Djèlí Clark

Posted on by Paul Fraser

If the Martians Have Magic by P. Djèlí Clark (Uncanny, September-October 2021)1 appears to be set in an alternate world where magic was discovered between the second and third Martian invasions of Earth and then used to defeat the aliens in that final encounter (the first invasion, in 1897, is presumably the one recounted in H. G. Wells The War of the Worlds; the third encounter takes place in 1903).
The story itself opens in Marrakesh some thirty years after the end of the war and sees a Mambo (voodoo priestess) called Minette, after initially negotiating the city traffic in a conventional way, make a deal with a loa (spirit intermediary) to loft her up to the Flying Citadel where The Council of Magical Equilibrium are assembled. Minette subsequently gatecrashes the meeting and pleads for the lives of three Martians.
During the exchanges that follow we learn that Minette has been studying (and joining with) a Martian triad (the Martians are only sentient when they join together in threes), and that the aliens may be on the verge of discovering a Martian form of magic (which would then alter their position under human law). Several of the council see any possible breakthrough as a threat, the most outspoken of whom is the war-mongering General Koorang. During the arguments between him and Minette we get an insight to this world’s complex background, which is full of throw away detail like this:

“Not every Martian was a soldier,” Minette reminded, speaking as much to the others gathered. “The One I joined with were worker drones. They never even saw fighting. That’s why it was so easy for the Central Intellect to abandon Them in the retreat.”
“And what did they work on?” the general asked, unmoved. “Was it their stalking dreadnoughts? Their infernal weapons what almost blew us to hell? Come visit the Archipelago sometime, Professor, and I’ll show you Martian gentleness.”
Minette bit her lip to keep from replying. That was unfair. The Archipelago was all that was left of what used to be Australia. The waters of the South Sea were mostly off-limits now: teeming with monsters that wandered in through torn rifts between worlds. That it was humans playing with Martian weapons who had brought on the disaster seemed to matter little to the general.

When the Council finally vote they decide that the prospect of Martian magic is too much of a threat to ignore but, rather than have Minette’s Martians euthanized, the Council decides to separate the creatures so they cannot form their sentient triad.
After the meeting Minette returns to the Martians and joins with them, after which they learn about what happened in the Council. Then the Martians give Minette a vision that suggests they are close to discovering their old magic.
The rest of the story sees the “mist-faced” woman from the Council meeting, who voted against Minette, secretly visit her and offer sanctuary to the Martians in exchange for some of their magic if they are successful. Then she and Minette plan how to smuggle the Martians out of the Academy.
The climactic scene (spoiler) sees Minette and the Martians intercepted by General Koorang and another man called Aziz as they try to leave. Minette then combines with the three Martians and, in a moment of insight, realises what she has to do to help them summon their magic:

Papa Damballah appeared. But not like Minette had ever seen.
This Damballah was a being made up of tentacles of light, intertwined to form the body of a great white serpent. And she suddenly understood what she was seeing. The loa met the needs of their children. Papa Damballah had left Africa’s shores and changed in the bowels of slave ships. He changed under the harsh toil of sugar and coffee plantations. And when his children wielded machetes and fire to win freedom, he changed then too. Now to protect his newest children, born of two worlds, he changed once again.
Minette opened up to the loa and Martian magic coursed through her, erupting from her fingertips. The guards, General Koorang and Aziz drew back, as the great tentacles of Papa Damballah grew up from her, rising above the market tents as a towering white serpent: a leviathan that burned bright against the night. For a moment brief as a heartbeat—or as long as the burning heart of a star—it seemed to Minette she saw through the loa’s eyes. The cosmos danced about her. It trembled and heaved and moved.
And then Damballah was gone.

Aziz tells the general the Martians are now protected under the charter, and Minette and the Martians get on the mist-faced woman’s airship and quickly leave.
This has an inventive and entertaining setting—the mixture of War of the Worlds Martians, magical councils and voodoo shouldn’t really work as well as it does—but the ending is weaker (it is literally a deus ex machina).
*** (Good). 7,050 words. Story link.

1. This is a Sturgeon and World Fantasy Award finalist, and placed third in the Locus Poll.

That Story Isn’t the Story by John Wiswell

Posted on by Paul Fraser

That Story Isn’t the Story by John Wiswell (Uncanny, November-December 2021)1 opens with Anton leaving a vampire household with the help of an old friend called Grigorii. As they leave the house in Grigorii’s car, Anton sees Mr Bird (the vampire) return:

A black town car trails up the street toward them. Sleek and black, with that short club of a man Walter at the wheel. Mr. Bird’s senior familiar. Anton knows who sits in the tinted windows and the shadows of the rear seats.
From inside the Kia, Grigorii pops the passenger door open. “Come on, man.”
Is blood spotting in Anton’s jeans? He gropes at his thighs, unsure if the moisture is sweat on his palms or if he’s bleeding. The car is getting closer. Mr. Bird definitely sees him. Anton sinks into the car. He clutches his seatbelt until they are doing forty in a twenty mile zone. He’s too worried to turn around, and too afraid not to fixate on the rearview mirror.
The black car stops in the middle of the street. A rear door opens, and a dark thing peers out. There is no seeing any detail of that figure—no detail except for his mouth. It is open and sharp. Distance doesn’t change how clearly Anton sees the teeth.

Anton then meets Luis, another stray, at Grigorii’s house, and worries about Mr Bird before examining himself in the toilet to see if the bite wounds in his thighs are still bleeding (these are semi-permanent, and bleed in the presence of Mr Bird). They aren’t, which means that Mr Bird is not nearby, or not yet.
This background feeling of menace and unease pervades most of the rest of the story, and rises and falls as different events play out. To begin with, Luis is attacked on the way back from his job, something Anton thinks may be related to his departure and which causes a fight between the two when Anton tried to inspect Luis for bites. Then Walter, Mr Bird’s familiar, approaches Anton to tell him that he must return, the first of two visits (during the second one Walter tells Anton that the twins, two of the vampire’s other victims, have also run away).
There is never any force or violence used to get Anton to return, oddly enough and, towards the end of the story, the contacts stop and Anton transitions to a normal life. Then, one evening when Anton and a new boyfriend called Julian go out for a meal, Anton sees Walter working in the restaurant and realises that he has left Mr Bird too.
The story closes a few weeks later, when Anton goes out of town with Julian for the weekend and detours past Mr Bird’s house: Anton sees the building is in an obvious state of disrepair and then, while he sketches the house, it collapses.
This has the trappings of a vampire story but is really a mainstream piece about escaping abusive relationships or situations, and one which suggests that people can choose their own destinies—the line “that story isn’t the story” is used a couple of times:

Walter asks, “What made you think you could survive without him?”
“That story is not the story I’m telling today.” [Anton replies.]

[Anton] asks [Grigorii], “What happened to your [abusive] mom? Do you ever see her?”
“That story is not the story I’m telling today, man.”

This would have been a reasonably good straight piece, but the story undermines itself somewhat by setting up the vampire menace at the beginning of the piece and then letting it fade away. That said, I realise that the idea of a perceived threat being more perception that reality may be one of the points the story is trying to make.2
** (Average). 9,000 words. Story link.

1. This was a 2022 Hugo and Nebula Award novelette finalist, and won the Locus Poll.

2. I subsequently found this comment from Wiswell in a short interview in the same issue of Uncanny:

The other thing I knew was coming was Anton wouldn’t have a normal ending. No confrontation with Mr. Bird. No fight to the death. No self-sacrifice. No diabolical master plan. Everything that we sometimes dread will happen to us, or our loved ones, because of our trauma? That is partially because we’ve been harmed. It’s also partially an illusion. I wanted to let Anton slowly recognize what was a trauma mirage, while his worthiness of self-respect wasn’t illusory at all.

I didn’t get the self-respect part (if you don’t feel that way by default then maybe perhaps that is more apparent), but the rest makes sense.

Unseelie Brothers, Ltd. by Fran Wilde

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Unseelie Brothers, Ltd. by Fran Wilde (Uncanny, May/Jun 2021)1 begins with Mrs Vanessa Saunders and her Fête Noire Charity Ball co-chairs receiving a photo message informing them that Unseelie Brothers Ltd., a shop that makes bespoke ball gowns, are back in town.
Saunders quickly returns home to tell her daughter Rie (Merielle), and her niece Sera (from whose point of view the rest of the story is told) to go and find the shop. When the pair eventually locate the premises of Unseelie Brothers Ltd. (it does not give out its address or phone number), the story starts falling into standard “magic shop” territory, i.e. it is closed when they find it but opens when Saunders arrives and writes a message on a glove and puts it through the letterbox.
When the door opens, Sera hears “the rustle of wings” and sees a face that she thinks might be her lost mother (we learn along the way that Sera’s mother vanished years before, and that she, along with Mrs Saunders, wore Unseelie Brothers’ dresses when they were young):

from The Social Season, plate 76. The Butterfly Gown, worn by a Serena (née) _____ (unknown) Sebastian to the Spring Charity Gala of 1998. She attended with her sister Vanessa (née) ______ (unknown) Saunders, and soon after married one of the event’s busboys. Saunders herself married the scion of the Saunders soap fortune. The event was notable in that several young women and men were discovered the following morning, on the roof, wearing bacchanalian-styled greenery and nothing more, by hotel staff at The Pierre. Photo by Mrs. Vanessa Saunders. Designers: Dora Unseelie and Beau Unseelie, Sr.

The central part of the story then sees: (a) Rie fitted for a dress, (b) Sera given a pearl necklace and a job offer from Dora, one of the Unseelie employees, and (c) Sera (a student dressmaker) design a “Crown of Thorns” dress for the company, which they subsequently make and sell to Rie instead of the one she had originally chosen during her fitting. During all this there are various magical occurrences (at one point Sera loses track of time, and emerges to find days have passed and the shop has moved location).
The last part of the story (which somewhat lost me) sees Sera discover that (spoiler) her mother is trapped in the dress that Unseelie Brothers made for her, and which Mrs Saunders still has in her wardrobe. However, when Sera (at Dora’s suggestion) unseams the dress to release her mother, only butterflies emerge. Then Sera discovers that that her mother and aunt were both Unseelie shop workers who managed to escape their employer.
Sera later (a) rewrites the contract given to her by Unseelie Brothers to give her and the other workers an ever-increasing share of the business, (b) alters Rie’s Crown of Thorns dress to remove any risk that it will hurt her (the dresses usually bring good fortune, but not always), (c) publishes the emergency number for the shop and, as a consequence, sells many dresses (which, we learn, no longer cause problems). Finally, Beau (the owner/manager) finds he cannot move the shop.
I found this story engaging enough for the most of its length, but the ending, which seems to tack on a magical realist/empowerment ending onto a more-or-less conventional magic shop story, makes it falls apart.
* (Mediocre). 8,600 words.

1. This was runner up in the novelette category of the 2022 Hugo Awards, and was fourth in the Locus Poll.

Open House on Haunted Hill by John Wiswell

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Open House on Haunted Hill by John Wiswell (Diabolical Plots, June 2020) is narrated by a haunted house, and sees it on its best behaviour when Mrs Weiss, a local realtor (estate agent), puts the house on the market:

The house misses 1989. It has spent so much of the time since vacant.
Today it is going to change that. It is on its best behaviour as the realtor, Mrs. Weiss, sweeps up. She puts out trays of store-bought cookies and hides scent dispensers, while 133 Poisonwood summons a gentle breeze and uses its aura to spook any groundhogs off the property. Both the realtor and the real estate need this open house to work.
Stragglers trickle in. They are bored people more interested in snacks than the restored plumbing. The house straightens its aching floorboards, like a human sucking in their belly. Stragglers track mud everywhere. The house would love nothing more than any of them to spend the rest of their lives tracking mud into it.

A widower and his rumbustious four-year-old daughter later arrive at the open house and start viewing the property. As they do so the house makes a number of minor interventions (it blows the door shut, gives the father a vision of his daughter’s vertigo, etc.) before finally showing them a hidden room. Unfortunately, Ana runs into a spinning wheel she sees in the room and knocks it over, cutting her hand and losing a bracelet into a crack in the floor. The father grabs his daughter and leaves. The house resists the urge to trap the pair in the room, but realises in that moment why other houses sometimes go bad.
Later that day (spoiler), the father and Ana, having realised she has lost her bracelet (which was previously her dead mother’s), return to find it. The house helps them to do so, and during the process we learn more about the pair’s backstory and the death of Ana’s mother. The father finally decides to buy the house.
A charming (and feel-good) haunted house story.
*** (Good). 3,000 words. Story link.

1. This story won the 2021 Nebula Award for Best Short Story. It was also the runner up in its Locus Poll category, fourth in the Hugo Award, and was also a World Fantasy Award finalist.

L’Esprit de L’Escalier by Catherynne M. Valente

Posted on by Paul Fraser

L’Esprit de L’Escalier by Catherynne M. Valente (Tor.com, 25th August 2021)1 opens with a man making breakfast for his apparently undead wife:

She slices through an egg and lets the yolk run like yellow blood. Severs a corner of toast and dredges it in the warm, sunny liquid, so full of life, full enough to nourish a couple of cells all the way through to a downy little baby birdie with sweet black eyes. If only things had gone another way.
Eurydice hesitates before putting it between her lips. Knowing what will happen. Knowing it will hurt them both, but mainly her. Like everything else.
She shoves it in quickly. Attempts a smile. And, just this once, the smile does come when it is called.
[. . .]
Then, her jaw pops out of its socket with a loud thook and sags, hanging at an appalling, useless angle. She presses up against her chin, fighting to keep it in, but the fight isn’t fair and could never be. Eurydice locks eyes with Orpheus. No tears, though she really is so sorry for what was always about to happen. But her ducts were cauterized by the sad, soft event horizon between, well. There and Here.
Orpheus longs for her tears, real and hot and sweet and salted as caramel, and he hates himself for his longing. He hates her for it, too. A river of black, wet earth and pebbles and moss and tiny blind helpless worms erupts out of Eurydice’s smile, splattering so hard onto his mother’s perfect plate that it cracks down the middle, and dirt pools out across the table and the worms nose mutely at the crusts of the almost-burnt toast.

The rest of the piece (I wouldn’t call it a story) shows us variously: the daily life of, and tensions between, the couple; a visit from Eurydice’s mother, who bathes her daughter; a trip to the therapist; the arrival of Orpheus’s father Apollo and his groupies (there are various rock music and Greek myth references throughout the story—this chapter sees Prometheus giving Apollo a light2); Eurydice heating her body up with a hairdryer so Orpheus will want to make love with her; and, finally, a visit to Sisyphus, who asks Eurydice if she wanted to come back from the dead.
This piece is, according to the introduction to the story, supposed to be a “provocative and rich retelling of the Greek myth”, but it is actually a borderline tedious non-story apparently written for goths and classics students. Another effort from Valente that is both plotless and overwritten.
* (Mediocre). 9,300 words. Story link.

1. This story was fifth in the Hugo Award novelette ballot, and runner-up in the Locus Poll.

2. The Eurydice and Orpheus myth at Wikipedia.

No Stranger to Native Shores by Matt McHugh

Posted on by Paul Fraser

No Stranger to Native Shores by Matt McHugh (Analog, November/December 2021)1 begins with Minister Geddek asking Nurse Betta if the young child she has in her charge is well before telling her that a ship similar to the one used by the child’s people is approaching (it isn’t obvious that Geddek and Betta are aliens at this point—and that their charge is a human child—but we soon find out). After this brief exchange the story switches to the approaching human ship, Bellerophon, and we are introduced to another of the main characters, a Senator Susan Tristam Cowley of the Allied Human Territories. She and the crew discuss the information they have gathered about the alien society on the planet ahead, and we also learn about an earlier expedition—which included Cowley’s sister and her husband—whose ship, Outreach, disappeared (although it left its “frame” in orbit).
The rest of the story is a cat-and-mouse piece that sees the humans land, meet the aliens, and try to discover what happened to Outreach. Meanwhile, the Minister tells the child, Topper, that they arrived on the planet when Outreach crashlanded there—but does not tell them that the aliens summoned an electrical storm to destroy the ship and subsequently built a research building around the wreckage.
Eventually, Cowley and her crew discover (a) that her sister was pregnant and had a child, (b) that the aliens destroyed the ship, and (c) that the aliens have the child captive. The Bellerophon sends in an armed team in to recover the child, and Geddek’s city simultaneously comes under attack from another alien nation. Betta takes Hopper and makes a run for it (the alien loves its human charge and is is determined not to give up the child) but Geddek intercepts the pair and tells them about the circumstances behind the destruction of the Outreach, his subsequent subterfuge to keep Topper safe, and that giving the child to the humans is the only way he can prevent further bloodshed.
The climax of the story sees Cowley meet Topper—her sister’s daughter—in an emotional scene. Geddek then explains the complex political situation on the planet to Cowley (Topper translates the alien’s clicking and popping speech), and how certain factions want to profit off the wreckage of a second ship. It becomes clear that Geddek is on Cowley’s side, and she arranges for the Outreach’s orbital frame to land and serve as a decoy to draw off the attacking forces. While Geddek passes the position of the frame to the attacking forces, Betta and Topper leave with Crowley on the Bellerophon. Meanwhile, a human couple stay on the planet to work with Geddek. (I may have missed out one or two points in this synopsis as the plot has a lot of moving parts and it’s been a couple of weeks since I read it—but most of it is there).
All things considered this is a pretty good traditional science fiction yarn, but the ending is overplotted, and this sees the story jump through a lot of unlikely hoops—the crash deception plan, the overly neat alien/human exchanges, etc.
A First Contact piece that is almost there.
**+ (Average to Good). 9,150 words. Story link.

1. This placed third in the novelette category of the 2022 Analog Readers’ Poll Awards.

O2 Arena by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

Posted on by Paul Fraser

O2 Arena by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki (Galaxy’s Edge, November 2021)1 opens with a short fight section before the story flashbacks to a point a few months earlier where the narrator, a new student at the Academy of Laws, is listening to his induction lectures. We later learn that the academy is located in a future Nigeria where climate change has damaged the atmosphere so badly that people need masks and portable air when they go outside (and where they use oxygen as a currency):

Mrs. Oduwole was at the podium now. The Head of Hostels began by stating that the generators would be on until midnight for reading and for the making of breathable air. After midnight, we would revert to our O2 cylinders which we must keep by our bedsides throughout the night.
The tuition was expensive but was only meant to cover the central hall’s oxygen generation when lectures were on. O2 masks filtered the bad air temporarily, for the brief periods when moving between places. O2 cylinders were for longer periods when there were no O2 generators.
We weren’t allowed to be in the hostels during the day when lectures were on, for any reasons. She didn’t care if you were a girl on your flow, no matter how heavy. And this was apparently the only example she felt obligated to give.

During this series of lectures the narrator goes outside the hall for a break and meets Ovole, a female friend/undisclosed love interest. During their bantering exchanges we find out she has cancer (“Do you want to feel [the tumour]?” she asks at one point).
After several pages of the above, and other data dump information about the narrator’s academy and society (various forms of institutional and political oppression make the narrator struggle to breath in more ways than one it would seem), the story kicks up a gear when he decides to visit his old gang on the mainland, a part of the story that has some interesting local colour. When the narrator later talks to an old gang acquaintance, he learns that Dr Umez, one of the induction lecturers, has a reputation for molesting both male and female students. Then, when the narrator tells the acquaintance that he needs to earn some money (for Ovole’s medical needs), they go to the O2 arena and watch a cage fight that ends when one of the combatants is killed.
The narrator subsequently decides not to take the risk of entering the cage fights, but (spoiler) he then learns that Ovoke is in hospital and needs expensive ICU treatment. So, after a visit to hospital to see Ovoke and her parents, he returns to the arena and enters the fights. After a vicious bout he kills his opponent and wins a substantial prize pot, but it is too late—Ovoke has died in the meantime.
The story closes with the narrator using the prize money to form his own gang, and their first action is the killing of the abusive Dr Umez.
This is a bit of a mixed bag. The opening set-up (about ten pages) is overlong and plodding, and the story only really gets going when the narrator goes to the mainland. I also didn’t care for the political messages that were constantly telegraphed throughout the story (“You see, the rich deserved to breathe”, “She thought she would be nothing in a patriarchal society that valued men for their ability to provide, and women for reproduction”, etc., etc.—the author is not a fan of show don’t tell). On the other hand the mainland setting and culture is interesting, as is the idea of oxygen as a currency—so a promising piece, but not an even or polished one (its Nebula Award and Hugo nominations way overrate the story).
** (Average). 8, 150 words. Story link.

1. This story was (unusually) reprinted in Apex, another online magazine, two months later. I cannot see the point of Galaxy’s Edge putting it online for a month and then taking it down, only to let another publication reprint it almost immediately (my understanding is that most venues have a period of exclusivity in their contracts).

Colors of the Immortal Palette by Caroline M. Yoachim

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Colors of the Immortal Palette by Caroline M. Yoachim (Uncanny March-April 2021)1 is set in Paris in the time of Manet and Monet (the mid- to late-1800s, I guess), and opens with a Japanese woman called Mariko posing for an unnamed immortal artist (who is also referred to as a “vampire” at points in the story, although he takes life energy from others rather than their blood).
Then, at the end of the session:

I’m about to give him up as hopeless when he turns to look at me. I’m lost in the darkness of his eyes, drowning in the intensity of his attention. I can barely breathe, but I repeat my invitation, “I could show you other poses.”
“Yes.” He sweeps me into an embrace that is strong and cold. White. He is snow and I am determined to melt it.
The sex builds slowly, deliberately, like paint layered on a canvas in broad strokes—tentative at first as we find our way to a shared vision, then faster with a furious intensity and passion.
After, when other artists might hold me and drift off to sleep, he dissipates into a white mist that swirls in restless circles around the room, chilling me down to the bones when it touches my skin. His mist seeps into me and pulses through my veins for several heartbeats. I feel energized, an exhilaration more intense than watching him work, a connection closer even than our sex.
He withdraws, and I am diminished. I hadn’t known until this moment what I was lacking, but now I am filled with a keen sense of my incompleteness. I long for him, for the sensation of vastness I felt when we were one.

Subsequently she becomes his lover, poses for another painting, becomes jealous of his other models, and thinks of the extra time that immortality would give her for her own art (she is a painter too). Later, she convinces him to make her immortal, a process leaves him unable to take any form but mist for over a year.
The rest of the story concerns her subsequent life and development as an artist, and telescopes in time from the point she paints another model called Victorine (which gives Mariko a new found awareness of the woman’s mortality) to (spoiler) her final painting, a self-portrait that will change with time, and which is painted after she learns that her jaded benefactor has dissipated into mist, never to recohere.
There are various other significant events for Mariko during this period: she gets married, achieves artistic success, learns of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the birthplace of her mother), and, in one of the pivotal passages of the piece, receives a telegram in 1927 informing her of Victorine’s death:

The world has been a week without her in it, but her death did not become a truth for me until the telegram arrived. She is the last. Even Monet has ceased his endless paintings of water lilies, having passed in December. I’ve not seen either of them for decades, but tonight I feel the loss as keenly as if I’d sat with them yesterday, all of us gathered at the Café Guerbois, Victorine and I engaging the men in passionate discussions on the purpose of art, the role of the model, and whether critical outrage was an attack on the honor of the painter, this last being a topic that always irritated Manet.
They were my cohort—Édouard, Émile, Claude, Paul and Camille, and of course Victorine. I met them not knowing that I would outlive them, and without having the distance that knowledge brings. My immortal artist was right—I don’t get quite so close to mortals now, I no longer see myself as one of them. But I’m accustomed to navigating a world I do not feel a part of, a place where I am unlike all the others. This has always been my truth.
[. . .]
I have outlived my friends, my colleagues, and for what? All my paintings combined have not garnered the renown of Olympia or Impression, Sunrise. I am best known as the model from Woman, Reclining (Mari), and maybe my lack of success is not—as I have always told myself—because I am a woman and an outsider, but because I am lacking in talent.
Even being immortal, which should be simple enough, is a task that I am failing for I cannot bear the thought of stealing time from mortals whose lives are already so fleeting. I take just enough here and there from models—always with their consent—to maintain a human form, but if I cannot create beauty, cannot leave my mark on the world of art, their time is wasted, and nothing is so precious as time.

I liked this piece well enough but there isn’t much here apart from an extended historical slice of life, the angst of immortals, and talk about artists and painting. This may not be to everyone’s taste.
*** (Good). 12,800 words.