Tag: 3+*

Victory Citrus is Sweet by Thoraiya Dyer

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Victory Citrus is Sweet by Thoraiya Dyer (Tor.com, 7th September 2022) has an intriguing opening where the narrator of the piece, Victory Citrus, details one of the hazards of space travel:

Cosmic rays buggered up my right arm just after we took the mission.
That is, some stupid high-energy proton started up an osteosarc in my ulna, which is a new one for me. Last cancer I got was lympho, in my lung. Which was annoying, because you can’t isolate and freeze a lung and keep working.
Lung isolation means a stupid induced coma while the new cells grow and Printer Two compiles a clean, connective tissue scaffold. It means sitting still for six weeks after the graft, somewhere with one-third G or more, waiting for it to take.
It means someone else gets the good jobs. Steals your promotion. I’m not bitter. Who can blame protons? They do what they do. Planet-bounds call us bobble-heads, because of the thick shielding on our helmets. One thing we can’t replace are our brains. But high-mass, high-density helmets don’t weigh anything up here. We take them off when we land, and the smart suits hold our spongy skeletons upright until the dirt jobs are done.

That’s a data-dump beginning, but it works, and we soon find out that Citrus has had to freeze her arm in nitrogen (which is in short supply) to stop the cancer growth so she can do a job on Mercury (her ship Whaleshark is headed to Gog’s Gorge to investigate a mass driver that is slinging refined uranium to the wrong hemisphere on Mars). Further information follows about (a) the nitrogen availability problem; (b) her childhood upbringing in a crèche run by bots; and (c) her apprentice Naamla (who at the end of the story we learn is the daughter of the spacer that Citrus was apprenticed to and who she now views as a rival). This is all reminiscent of the level of novel detail that you get in the early short work of John Varley, as is the chirpy conversational style of the piece:

I won an astronaut’s apprenticeship in a lottery my parents entered me in before I was born.
Don’t really remember them. Bots raised me in a creche. The bots came cheap, secondhand, from an Earth retirement village, and asked questions like, Are your bowel movements within normal parameters? Does the fleeting beauty of the blossoms make you ache with bittersweet memories? Your cortisol levels are high, do you feel you have failed your family members?
One of those was semi-appropriate for toddlers, I guess?
My personal bot had previously cared for someone with very specific music tastes, which is how I got acquainted with Earth sounds of the 1960s.
According to my EleAlloc service record, my worst hangover from being raised by bots is that I get squicked out by the sight of human eyeballs moving in their sockets.
I mean, anyone could get squicked out by that, right?
When I have to do my self-health-checks, and see my own reflected eyeballs moving, it makes me shout, “NO!”
Without fail. Every time. And I’m twenty-three years old, so I shouldn’t be shouting at myself in the mirror. I can’t help it. Eyeballs are so gross.

The main action occurs when the pair arrive on Mars and discover, in short succession, a gas vent near the drilling site, electron bursts that are transmitting the Fibonacci Sequence, and then (spoiler) animal/fish/lobster-like beings exiting crevasses in the ground—to their death—seventy clicks south of the first vent.
The rest of the story sees Citrus and Naamla investigate the body fragments of the dead aliens (they have a sulphur chemistry instead of a carbon one) and then attempt to communicate with them—they succeed, whereupon the Mercurians provide the nitrogen that Citrus needs. Then Citrus and Naamla realise that the mining operation has caused catastrophic damage to the underground Mercurian civilization, so they attempt to convince the Martian authorities to start slinging bismuth back from Mars to fill in the holes (and they enlist Naamla’s father to help them do this). Finally, having been over-exposed to radiation and developed multiple cancers, the pair enter comas to regrow their affected body parts.
The last section sees Naamla’s father wake them up—their limbs have been regrown, the Mercurians have been saved, and we learn Citrus’s apprentice name: Hogwash Perjury.
This is a fast paced, inventive, and colourful First Contact story. That said, the scene where Citrus almost effortlessly communicates with the Mercurians stretches credulity to breaking point.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 7,450 words. Story link.

The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories by Gene Wolfe

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories by Gene Wolfe1 (Orbit #7, 1970) is one of his ‘Archipelago’ series and opens with its child protagonist, Tackman Babcock, going to the store with Jason, a man who appears to be his ill mother’s boyfriend. When they get there Tackman sees a book he wants but Jason refuses to buy it. However, when they get back to the car, Jason takes the book out from under his jacket and presents it to the boy. Tackman is delighted, and flicks through the pages while Jason makes unsettling comments about his mother (he is told not to come into her room that evening, and that she is so soft that, when Jason climbs on her, “it’s just like being on a big pillow.”) This begins a thread of domestic unease that runs throughout the story.
The next section of the story is an extract from the book that Tackman has been given, which involves a Captain Philip Ransom floating alone on a raft in the middle of the sea. When he sees land in the distance he starts paddling towards the shore.
Then, when Tackman goes outside the next morning:

A life raft. You run to the beach, jump up and down and wave your cap. “Over here. Over here.”
The man from the raft has no shirt but the cold doesn’t seem to bother him. He holds out his hand and says, “Captain Ransom,” and you take it and are suddenly taller and older; not as tall as he is or as old as he is, but taller and older than yourself. “Tackman Babcock, Captain.”
“Pleased to meet you. You were a friend in need there a minute ago.”
“I guess I didn’t do anything but welcome you ashore.”
“The sound of your voice gave me something to steer for while my eyes were too busy watching that surf. Now you can tell me where I’ve landed and who you are.”
You are walking back up to the house now, and you explain to Ransom about you and Mother, and how she doesn’t want to enroll you in the school here because she is trying to get you into the private school your father went to once. And after a time there is nothing more to say, and you show Ransom one of the empty rooms on the third floor where he can rest and do whatever he wants. Then you go back to your own room to read.  p. 200-201

The rest of the book mixes three layers of reality: the first is Tackman’s real world (we learn that his mother is separated from his father but she is shortly to be remarried to a Dr Black); the second is the book’s pulp story (Ransom is caught and held captive by Dr Death, a scientist who is undertaking Moreau-like2 experiments); and the third involves scenes where both the real and book worlds merge, such as the one where Tackman talks to Dr Death on a restaurant balcony when he goes out for a meal with his mother, two aunts, and Dr Black.
The rest of the piece sees the appearance (in the story thread) of, among others, Talar of the Long Eyes (a female love interest for Ransom) and Bruno (an uplifted dog), the latter of which later visits Tackman in his bedroom. The climax of the real world thread (spoiler) eventually sees Tackman finding his mother overdosed at a party in the house and calling the police. The culpability (or otherwise) of Jason and Dr Black in her drug use remains ambiguous.
The final paragraphs show that Tackman is probably a character in a story too:

[The police] go away and you pick up the book and riffle the pages, but you do not read. At your elbow Dr. Death says “What’s the matter, Tackie?” He smells of scorched cloth and there is a streak of blood across his forehead, but he smiles and lights one of his cigarettes.
You hold up the book. “I don’t want it to end. You’ll be killed at the end.”
“And you don’t want to lose me? That’s touching.”
“You will, won’t you? You’ll burn up in the fire and Captain Ransom will go away and leave Talar.”
Dr. Death smiles. “But if you start the book again we’ll all be back. Even Golo and the bull-man.”
“Honest?”
“Certainly.” He stands up and tousles your hair. “It’s the same with you, Tackie. You’re too young to realize it yet, but it’s the same with you.”  p. 214

The last line arguably introduces a fourth level of reality into the narrative, that of the reader who is finishing Wolfe’s story.
I really liked this piece when I first read it but this time it struck me as a slighter effort—Tackman’s “real” life isn’t a particularly well-developed arc as much of the piece relates to what happens in the book and to Tackman’s interactions with the characters. That said, the story merges the various realities of the story in a highly accomplished (and for the time novel) manner, and I was attracted to the story’s evocation of the complete immersion of youthful reading—what a pity that seems to disappear with age.
***+ (Good to Very good). 6,050 words. Story link.

1. Gene Wolfe was on the Nebula Award final ballot with this story and was initially announced as the winner—until the master of ceremonies, Isaac Asimov, was told that it had placed second to No Award. Gardner Dozois picks up the story in Jo Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugo Awards (Tor, 2018):

I was there, sitting at Gene Wolfe’s table, in fact. He’d actually stood up, and was starting to walk toward the podium, when Isaac was told about his mistake. Gene shrugged and sat down quietly, like the gentleman he is, while Isaac stammered an explanation of what had happened. It was the one time I ever saw Isaac totally flustered, and, in fact, he felt guilty about the incident to the end of his days. It’s bullshit that this was the result of confusing ballot instructions. This was the height of the War of the New Wave, and passions between the New Wave camp and the conservative Old Guard camp were running high. (The same year, Michael Moorcock said in a review that the only way SFWA could have found a worse thing than Ringworld to give the Nebula to was to give it to a comic book.) The fact that the short story ballot was almost completely made up of stuff from Orbit [Damon Knight’s anthology series] had outraged the Old Guard, particularly James Sallis’s surreal “The Creation of Bennie Good,” and they block-voted for No Award as a protest against “nonfunctional word patterns” making the ballot. Judy-Lynn del Rey told me as much immediately after the banquet, when she was exuberantly gloating about how they’d “put Orbit in its place” with the voting results, and actually said, “We won!”

2. The book appears to reference H. G. Well’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and Richard Shaver’s ‘Lemuria’ stories, but I have no idea where Tala of the Long Eyes comes from.

The Realms of Water by Robert Reed

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Realms of Water by Robert Reed (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2021) is one of his “Great Ship” series and gets off to a picturesque start with a group of travellers crossing a desert in a slow and uncomfortable six-legged machine (the native Grand Many make travellers endure this to dissuade them from making the journey to their city). The story opens with one of the passengers, the male of a Janusian couple (who grows out of the back of his female partner) addressing the other seven humans in the cabin about the illusion of friendship produced while travelling in such straitened circumstances. After going on at some length, he eventually concludes with this:

A little laugh. Then, “Now imagine that we remain trapped inside this minuscule space for even longer. Oh, let’s say for the next three hundred cycles. I guarantee, it won’t matter how noble and decent each one of you believes yourself to be. You will come to hate everyone else. Indeed, after three hundred cycles inside this miserable cabin, you’ll find yourself wanting the strange old lady in back to please, please step outside and die. And why? Because you’ve grown so tired—all of us are so very tired—of that goddamn endless smile of hers.”
The janusian fell silent, and everyone else laughed.
Loudest of all was the old woman sitting in back.  p. 165

The woman at the back is eventually revealed to be Quee Lee, a very old and wealthy woman from the Great Ship who, when their machine is damaged after stumbling into a pothole, suggests they divert to a nearby house where one of the Grand Many lives in isolation.
When they arrive Lee pleads for help at the door of the home, but they are ignored until, eventually, two robots appear and begin repairing their machine. Then Lee wanders off into the desert night and stumbles upon one of the Grand Many (presumably the owner of the house). Lee and the huge creature start talking, and she provides, at its request, and after “ripping away thousands of years of existence,” a brief autobiography. Then she learns that the creature she is talking to is a male, and his name is The Great Surus:

“I took the name from human history.” Then he said it again, in a very specific way. “Surus.”
She repeated the word.
“Do you know the name?”
Quee Lee asked her bioceramic mind for advice, a thousand potential answers dislodged from a long life full of curiosity. Because of cues in the diction, one possibility felt a little more appropriate than the rest.
She began to answer, offering a first word.
And Surus repeated the word. “‘Elephant,’” he said. “Yes. To be specific, Surus was Hannibal Barca’s favorite war elephant.”
“And why take that name?” she asked.
“I was studying your species,” he said. “Long before I arrived on the Great Ship, I came across the elephant’s story. And somehow his life and his miseries found a home inside me.”
“Oh,” was the best reaction that she could manage.
Silence came, and then a distant voice crossed the ridge. A human male was calling to someone else. But whoever was shouting fell silent again. Just the two of them were sitting on that slope together, and looking at the golden dome, Quee Lee finally asked, “Did you also walk across the Alps?”
The giant’s hand moved, swift and gentle, one finger touching the human shoulder and then gone again. Leaving behind the heat of a giant electrically charged body, and stealing some of her perspiration, too.
“The Alps would be nothing,” said that quiet, sorrowful voice. “You cannot begin to guess the life that I have marched.”  p. 171

Most of the remainder of the story tells of The Great Surus’s life history, something that, in some respects, parallels the story of Hannibal and his elephants (this and the Roman Carthagian wars are mentioned in the introduction to the story). This account begins with the birth of the city of Samoon, and how their army one day marches to the Lithium Wash to dig up thirty-nine Grand Many orphans. The Great Surus is one of them, and we see how he and the others are raised by an old woman of their kind, and later trained for the defence of the city. We also learn of the Grand Many’s electrical physiology, and how they communicate by microwaves (one day, when Surus climbs a mountain, he can hear many others of his own kind in the distance).
Then the commander of the army dies and his son takes over, starting a war with the Mistrials. The next few chapters detail the long conflict (spoiler): how the Samoon army cross the mountains by using carriages and massive batteries to extend the range of the Grand Many; the use of the Many as fireships in a huge land battle; the siege of The City of Promises and the near mutiny among the Many, only prevented when they smell the “sweet electric” over the wall. Eventually, after a huge battle on a peninsula, the Samoons build a fleet of rafts to return home, but are ambushed at sea. Surus walks off the raft to avoid capture and descends into the depths.
The story then skips forward eight hundred thousand years, to a point in time where the seas of the planet have boiled into the atmosphere. Surus’s body is found by scientists and recharged, and he comes back to consciousness. Eventually he decides he doesn’t like talking to the scientists and he leaves, travelling to the mountain that separates the lands of the Many and the water people.
At this point in the tale Lee’s machine is fixed, so The Great Surus brings his story to an end. She travels on to the City of Copper Salts, where the natives’ initial irritation at the modifications to their machine is quelled by the revelation that they were completed on the orders of The Great Surus.
I’m not sure this story forms a particularly coherent whole but the individual parts are fascinating and, if you are looking for a story that is part Roman history, part weird alien ecosystem, and part time-spanning epic—a story that is vast—then this will fit the bill. I almost rated it as very good, and probably would have if it hadn’t been for one or two parts that are not as clear as they could be (e.g. the initial meeting between Lee and Surus is a little confusing when it comes to what he looks like). Nevertheless, possibly one for the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 19,850 words. Story link.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce

Posted on by Paul Fraser 1 Comment on An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce (San Francisco Examiner, July 13, 1890) is a story that is presumably familiar to American readers (British ones less so, perhaps), and the only reason I read it was because of a mention in relation to Gene Wolfe’s The Ziggurat (there is more on this below1).
Bierce’s tale takes place during the American Civil War and is set on a bridge across a river. There, a southerner called Peyton Fahrquhar is about to be hanged by Union troops.
After the preparations are complete he is left standing on a plank held in place by the weight of the sergeant on the other end; when the latter steps away, Fahrquhar will fall between the cross ties of the bridge to his death:

His face had not been covered nor his eyes bandaged. He looked a moment at his “unsteadfast footing,” then let his gaze wander to the swirling water of the stream racing madly beneath his feet. A piece of dancing driftwood caught his attention and his eyes followed it down the current. How slowly it appeared to move! What a sluggish stream!
He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and children. The water, touched to gold by the early sun, the brooding mists under the banks at some distance down the stream, the fort, the soldiers, the piece of drift—all had distracted him. And now he became conscious of a new disturbance.
Striking through the thought of his dear ones was a sound which he could neither ignore nor understand, a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of a blacksmith’s hammer upon the anvil; it had the same ringing quality. He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably distant or near by—it seemed both. Its recurrence was regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death knell. He awaited each new stroke with impatience and—he knew not why—apprehension. The intervals of silence grew progressively longer; the delays became maddening. With their greater infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They hurt his ear like the trust of a knife; he feared he would shriek. What he heard was the ticking of his watch.

I like that comparison between the ticking of a watch and the tolling of a death knell.
Fahrquhar then thinks about how, if his hands were free, he could remove the noose and dive into the river, and escape back through the front line to his family. But then the sergeant steps off the plank, and Fahrquhar starts the long drop.
The second chapter is a brief passage which shows how Fahrquhar came to be in this situation, which was by making the mistake of suggesting sabotage to a passing horseman (who turns out to be a Union scout).
The third chapter sees Fahrquhar fall to what should be his death but ends up with him partially strangled in the water below. The rope has apparently broken, and the exciting narrative that follows tells of how he manages to release his hands and swim away from the Union troops (and the resultant rifle and cannon fire). Eventually, he manages to get far enough downstream that he is out of immediate danger, and pulls himself onshore and begins to make his way through the forest to his home.
Then (spoiler), when he arrives at his house the next morning, he sees his wife standing at the bottom of the steps waiting to greet him; he reaches for her but then feels a “stunning blow upon the back of his neck.” The rope did not break, and his escape was a momentary fantasy.
I liked the evocative description in this piece and, even if the twist-ending of the story is a variant of the “and then I woke up and found it was all a dream” sub-genre, I thought it pretty good. At a stretch you could probably call this a fantasy story.
***+ (Good to very good). 3,750 words.

1. The reason I read this is because it was mentioned in an essay by Marc Aramini on Gene Wolfe’s The Ziggurat. Aramini states, “If we accept that Wolfe might occasionally present delusion as objective narrative fact (as Ambrose Bierce does when detailing his main character’s dying fantasy in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”), then some aspects of “The Ziggurat” become easier to contextualize.”
I wanted to get a better idea of what he meant and, having now read the story, I’d say that Bierce’s use of this narrative device is transparent; Wolfe’s, not so much, if at all.

The Ziggurat by Gene Wolfe

Posted on by Paul Fraser 3 Comments on The Ziggurat by Gene Wolfe

The Ziggurat by Gene Wolfe (Full Spectrum #5, edited by Tom Dupree, Jennifer Hershey, Janna Silverstein, 1995) wasn’t, given that the last two stories of his I read were Seven American Nights and The Fifth Head of Cerberus, exactly what I was expecting, and the piece initially feels more like something from Stephen King. To that end, the beginning is not only evocative of place—a snowed-in log cabin in the woods—but also of character—Emery is estranged from his wife Jan and is waiting in his cabin for her and their children to arrive, along with the divorce papers she is bringing for him to sign. While he tidies up before their arrival he broods about this, and also thinks about a visiting coyote1 he has been feeding and trying to tame:

The coyote had gone up on the back porch!
After a second or two he realized he was grinning like a fool, and forced himself to stop and look instead.
There were no tracks. Presumably the coyote had eaten this morning before the snow started, for the bowl was empty, licked clean. The time would come, and soon, when he would touch the rough yellow-gray head, when the coyote would lick his fingers and fall asleep in front of the little fieldstone fireplace in his cabin.  p. 391 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

While he is outside, Emery also gets the impression he is being watched from the woods, a feeling that is confirmed when he sees a flash of a mirror . . . .
The rest of the first half of the story proceeds at a brisk pace. Emery gets dressed and goes to the area he saw the light, only to look back at his cabin to see he is being burgled. When he shouts at one of the small, dark figures, they raise the rifle they have taken from cabin and shoot. He takes cover. Five minutes later Jan and the three kids arrive, but when Emery hurries back he sees the interlopers have vanished. He decides to keep quiet about what has just happened.
The next part of the story switches temporarily from thriller to family soap opera, with a conversation between Emery and Jan about the details of the their divorce (and an allegation of child abuse by Emery on the twin girls). This culminates in Emery’s refusal to sign the papers, and Jan and the two girls leaving the cabin (unlike the twins, Brook is Emery’s biological son and he stays). Shortly after the mother and daughters exit Emery and Brook hear a scream, and rush outside to see the burglars under the hood of the car, seemingly once again looking for parts (as they did with Emery’s Jeep earlier on). There is a struggle, and a shot is fired: the interlopers flee. After the family regroup, they realise one of the twins, Aileen, is missing.
Emery then drives through the snow towards the lake to see if he can find her, eventually coming upon the burglars, who are dark-skinned and petite young women. They have Aileen, but Emery manages to trade the car for her—although the women don’t speak throughout the exchange—and, after another scuffle during which he is shot (a flesh wound in his side), father and step-daughter walk back to the cabin.
At this point (a third of the way through) the story starts becoming SFnal: Aileen says that she has been in a ziggurat (she later clarifies that it wasn’t actually an ancient terraced structure, it just had the same shape), where she was stripped and examined, shown pictures of things she didn’t recognise, and given food before she slept for a while. Emery is puzzled, and tells her she has only been gone a couple of hours.
When they get back to the cabin domestic hostilities resume as Emery undresses to tend his wound, and the girls are told not to look:

Jan snapped her fingers. “Oil! Oil will soften the dried blood. Wesson Oil. Have you got any?”
Brook pointed at the cabinet above the sink. Emery said, “There’s a bottle of olive oil up there, or there should be.”
“Leen’s peeking,” Brook told Jan, who told Aileen, “Do that again, young lady, and I’ll smack your face!
“Emery, you really ought to make two rooms out of this. This is ridiculous.”
“It was designed for four men,” he explained, “a hunting party, or a fishing party. You women always insist on being included, then complain about what you find when you are.”  p. 425

There is more of this kind of thing:

Privately [Emery] wondered which was worse, a woman who had never learned how to get what she wanted or a woman who had.
“You actually proposed that we patch it up. Then you act like this?” [said Jan.]
“I’m trying to keep things pleasant.”
“Then do it!”
“You mean you want to be courted while you’re divorcing me. That’s what’s usually meant by a friendly divorce, from what I’ve been able to gather.”  p. 426-427

“Emery, you hardly ever answer a direct question. It’s one of the things I dislike most about you.”
“That’s what men say about women,” he protested mildly.
“Women are being diplomatic. Men are rude.”
“I suppose you’re right. What did you ask me?”
“That isn’t the point. The point is that you ignore me until I raise my voice.”  p. 430

Emery finally agrees to take his wife and daughters into town and, for the next part of the story, it is just the two men, Emery and Brook, who are left to deal with any remaining problems back at the cabin. (Apart from a couple of phonecalls, the weather conveniently keeps the local sheriff and the other authorities away.)
As they drive back, Emery does some more pontificating to Brook on the nature of women (“For women, love is [. . .] magic, which is why they frequently use the language of fairy tales when they talk about it.”). Then there is talk of “Brownies” (fairies) and the like, and an information dump where Emery speculates (spoiler) about the women landing the “ziggurat” in the lake; that they are afraid of men and want to leave the area; and a possible time-distortion effect that would explain Aileen’s experience.
They sleep, and when Emery wakes up the next morning he realises Brook isn’t there. When he goes outside to find him he discovers one of the women has killed him with the axe. After he covers the body and puts it by the woodpile, he then calls the undertaker and sheriff. Then he calls the mobile phone in Jan’s car: one of the women answers, and Emery tells her he is going to kill them for what they did to his son.
The last section of the story sees the climactic encounters between Emery and the women, which take place in both the ziggurat/space-time ship (where he fights a woman with an axe) and in the cabin (where the other two ambush him, and he kills one and injures the other.
The final scene has him tending the wounded woman: Emery tells her he us going to burn the ziggurat and that she will just have fit into current day society. While she sleeps he plans a new company which will exploit the time-travellers’ technology. He also determines to make the woman, who he calls Tamar, his new wife. Emery talks to himself while she sleeps, saying that they’ll have a family, and build a house on the lakeside to take advantage of the still functioning time distortion device. She squeezes his hand, and the story ends.
Now the unfortunate thing about reducing this story to a plot summary is that it makes it sound like something that A. E. van Vogt might have cobbled together in one of his wilder moments, and I’d have to concede that at times it does have a whiff of that about it. However, it is a very readable piece. The problem is that is it a mixed bag, and the second half is not as good as the first. Part of this is due to the wild plot, and the way that key information is delivered (apart from the dumping a lot of this in the middle section, I’m not sure that there is a clear mention of a ziggurat in the middle of the lake until he goes into it later on). Then there are the Emery’s actions and his character: the former seem borderline reckless and/or idiotic at times, and he comes over, at best, as a complex character, or, at worst, as having patriarchal, misogynistic, and abuser tendencies. Whichever side you come down on regarding Emery’s character, this is something which threatens to bend the story into a no-man’s land between a dark, mainstream examination of a complicated man, and a highly entertaining SFnal potboiler (or as I found out later, make the account the delusions of a madman2). At times it’s an uneven mix.
These reservations notwithstanding, it is a fast paced read with some good description and characterisation, and, if you don’t pay too much attention to the bonkers plot, and the distractions of Emery’s character, it’s a pretty good read. I enjoyed it.
***+ (Good to Very Good) 27,200 words.

1. No doubt the coyote reference is Wolfe inserting himself into the narrative as per The Fifth Head of Cerberus.

2. After posting this review, one of my Facebook group members posted a link to a draft of an article by Marc Armani (a Wolfe scholar) which describes what the story is really about (spoiler): Emery is delusional and has killed/raped the members of his family (or something like that). I wonder what my blood pressure was when I read the line “If we accept that Wolfe might occasionally present delusion as objective narrative fact [. . .] then some aspects of “The Ziggurat” become easier to contextualize.”
I think I am now officially past caring about what this story, or any of Wolfe’s work, is about. But those of you who like walking on quicksand, knock yourself out.
The discussion thread and link to the Armani article are here (although the Armani link may have expired by now—buy the book).

Martian Heart by John Barnes

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Martian Heart by John Barnes (Life on Mars: Tales from the New Frontier, edited by Jonathan Strahan, 2011) opens on Mars with an old man talking to a botterogater (robot interrogator or interviewer) about his life. He begins by talking about his partner and later wife, Samantha, and tells how, as teenage vagrants in LA, they got picked up by the police. After that their options in this punitive future world were (a) twenty years in the military, (b) ten years in the “glowies,” (radioactive decontamination squads) or (c) going to Mars as settlers. They choose the latter option (after marrying to qualify) as the much smarter Samantha realises it is the only way they can stay together.
Most of the rest of the story tells of their time as Martian prospectors, an occupation that takes them to distant parts of Mars in the rover Goodspeed, until, eventually (spoiler), Samantha’s well-telegraphed heart problems (caused by the reduced Martian gravity that affects a substantial proportion of the new settlers) leads to her death. Before she dies she gets him to promise to cremate her—she doesn’t want to be buried in the freezing ground—and also that he will continue with his ongoing education (earlier on in the story he is illiterate, but she manages to cajole him to learn to read on the long trip out to Mars).
When he later crashes the rover trying to get back to base with her body it lands on its roof and damages the radio. He realises that he won’t be rescued, and so decides to use the remaining oxygen to burn the rover with her in it—that way he can keep at least one of his promises to her. He’s subsequently knocked out by the explosion, but a satellite detects the flash and the AI sends an auto-rocket to rescue him. He is later indentured for the cost of his recovery and treatment, but eventually buys his freedom, partly because of his continual program self-improvement. The final scenes show him having become vastly wealthy, and the founder of a huge Martian city called Samantha.
This may seem a relatively uncomplicated piece, but the pleasure is in its telling: the narrative is delivered by a man whose other half is obviously his better half (and who continuously works on his improvement); it is set in a frontier, Old West-like Mars, which is explored in the story; and the scene where he cremates his dead wife (and indeed the greater love story included in the piece) is affecting without being mawkish:


I carried Sam’s body into the oxygen storage, set her between two of the tanks, and hugged the body bag one more time. I don’t know if I was afraid she’d look awful, or afraid she would look alive and asleep, but I was afraid to unzip the bag.
I set the timer on a mining charge, put that on top of her, and piled the rest of the charges on top. My little pile of bombs filled most of the space between the two oxygen tanks. Then I wrestled four more tanks to lie on the heap crosswise and stacked flammable stuff from the kitchen like flour, sugar, cornmeal, and jugs of cooking oil on top of those, to make sure the fire burned long and hot enough.
My watch said I still had five minutes till the timer went off.
I still don’t know why I left the gig. I’d been planning to die there, cremated with Sam, but maybe I just wanted to see if I did the job right or something—as if I could try again, perhaps, if it didn’t work? Whatever the reason, I bounded away to what seemed like a reasonable distance.
I looked up; the stars were out. I wept so hard I feared I would miss seeing them in the blur. They were so beautiful, and it had been so long.

This is a pretty good old-school story that will appeal to lovers of mid to late 20th Century SF.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6,650 words.

Downloading Midnight by William Browning Spencer

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Downloading Midnight by William Browning Spencer (Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, December 1995) is a noir detective/cyberpunk mashup that starts with Captain Armageddon, a hologram from a virtual reality show called American Midnight, going amok on the “Highway”. Initially Marty, the narrator, hires a young hacker called Bloom to go in and delete the “ghosts” but several days pass and nothing happens. This leads him to go and check on Bloom, who he finds floating in a tank and wired up to VR. Marty’s subsequent exchange with the VR technician supervising Bloom gives a taste of the strangeness of this future world and the wit of the story:

Techs always tell you everything is under control. That’s what this one said.
“Save it for a gawker’s tour,” I told her. “I’ve been doing maintenance for fourteen years now. I know how it goes. You’re fine, and then you’re dead.”
“This is poor personal interaction,” the tech said. “You are questioning my professional skills and consequently devaluing my self-image.”
I shrugged. Facts are facts: in over eighty percent of the cases where neural trauma shows on a monitor, the floater is already too blasted to make it back alive.
I thanked the tech and apologized if I had offended her or caused an esteem devaluation. She accepted my apology, but with a coolness that told me I’d have another civility demerit in my file.  p. 173 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

Later Marty has an unsuccessful date with Gloria, an event that shows us another aspect of this strange future world (his relationship is subject to a tangle of restrictive contracts and conditions which, presumably, satirise what actually goes on in real life). After this he goes into the VR Highway to find Bloom, buying information from a tout in the under-Highway which eventually leads him to Bloom, who he finds talking to a woman in a bar in a seedy part of the Bin:

The woman looked at me. She was a guy named Jim Havana, a gossip leak for the Harmonium tabloids. Havana always projected a woman on the Highway. In the Big R he was a bald suit, a white, dead-fish kind of guy with a sickly sheen of excess fat and sweat. Down here, Havana was a stocky fem—you might have guessed trans—with dated cosmetics and a big thicket of black hair. She was an improvement, but only by comparison to the upside version.
“This is wonderful,” Havana said, glaring at Bloom. “I said private, remember?
“It’s good to see you,” Bloom said to me.
“Don’t let me interfere with this reunion. I’m out of here,” Havana said. “I don’t need a crowd right now, you know?” Havana shook her curls and stood up. She headed toward the door.
“Wait,” Bloom said. He got up and ran after her.
I followed.
The street was wet and low-res, every highlight skewed. The shimmering asphalt buckled as I ran. An odor like oily, burning rags lingered in the V. Bloom and Havana were ahead of me, both moving fast.
I heard Havana scream.
Something detached from the shadows, rising wildly from an unthought alley full of cast-off formulae, dirty bulletin skreeds, trashed fantasies. An angry clot of flies hovered over the form. It roared—the famous roar of Defiance, rallying cry of Captain Armageddon!  pp. 178-179 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

Bloom fires an encrypted burst that destroys the creature, but we later find that this doesn’t fix the Highway’s problems. The rest of the story sees further adventures that eventually (spoiler) lead to Captain Armageddon’s sidekick and sex star, Zera Terminal; Bloom’s subsequent relationship with her; and how the source for her character (the human that was “mapped” as a starting point) was “raped”. This latter event refers, I think (this is the story’s weakest point), to the illegal mapping of a nine year old child as the source for Zera Terminal:

You’ve seen her, those big eyes and the fullness of her mouth. Her features are almost too lush for the chiseled oval of her face, but somehow it works, probably because of the innocence. This is a woman, you think, who trusts. This is a woman who finds everything new and good.
There is usually some chill to a holo, some glint of the non-human intelligence that runs the programs. Zera almost transcended that. There was a human here, lodged in that sweet, surprised voice, that gawky grace, that wow in her eyes.
It came down to a single quality, always rare, rarer in a land of artifice: Innocence.  p. 187 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

This is quite a convoluted (and at times dark) story, and it is occasionally hard to work out what is going on (it would have benefited from another draft). On the other hand it is engrossing, and convincingly depicts both of its colourful worlds, the real and the virtual. This latter effect is partly achieved by a skilful use of altered social customs, and also by an extensive invented vocabulary (“Highway,” “Big R,” “go flat,” etc.), none of which the author explains to the readers but leaves to be understood from context or repeated use.
I’m not sure it’s an entirely successful story, but its mix of ambition and what it does achieve makes it my second favourite story in the Hartwell volume so far.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 9,000 words.

Who’s Cribbing by Jack Lewis

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Who’s Cribbing by Jack Lewis (Startling Stories, January 1953) is one of the short-shorts we’re currently group reading in my Facebook group1 from the 1963 anthology Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales, edited by Isaac Asimov & Groff Conklin. I’m not sure I’d want to review all fifty of those here (most are inconsequential squibs) but I really liked this one, so thought I’d mention it.
The story is written as a series of letters between Lewis, a budding writer, and the editors of various SF magazines. The correspondence begins with this:

Mr. Jack Lewis
90-26 219 St.
Queens Village, N.Y.
Dear Mr. Lewis:

We are returning your manuscript THE NINTH DIMENSION.
At first glance, I had figured it a story well worthy of publication. Why wouldn’t I? So did the editors of Cosmic Tales back in 1934 when the story was first published.
As you no doubt know, it was the great Todd Thromberry who wrote the story you tried to pass off on us as an original. Let me give you a word of caution concerning the penalties resulting from plagiarism.
It’s not worth it. Believe me.

Sincerely,
Doyle P. Gates
Science Fiction Editor
Deep Space Magazine  p. 83

Lewis writes an indignant reply wherein he protests his innocence, and further states he has never heard of Thromberry in the ten years he has been reading the field. This is met by a world weary letter from Gates stating that he realises there are overlapping plots and ideas in SF stories, but not word for word replicas.2 Lewis cancels his subscription.
This back and forth continues with various other editors and fans, during which Lewis finds out that Thomberry’s works are very hard to come by, and that the writer specialised in electronics. More rejections follow, and Lewis (spoiler) eventually suggests to Gates (who he has contacted again) that the chances of him accidentally producing several stories similar to Thromberry’s are astronomical, and suggests that maybe Thromberry used his electronics expertise to travel through time to steal his manuscripts. He gets a short, blunt reply to this, and the final act has Lewis submit his letters and the responses he received in the form of a story to Sam Mines at Startling Stories—with the inevitable response.
This is a clever and amusing piece, and it is also pitch perfect (apart from the tone of both Lewis’s and the various editor’s letters, there are other neat touches like Lewis stating in one cover note that, because of the extensive research that went into a story, he must “set the minimum price on this one at not less than two cents a word.”)
This is one I’d probably use in my Best for 1953 (although, if I recall correctly, there is a lot of competition from that year).
***+ (Good to Very good). 1300 words.

1. Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction is the name of the Facebook group.
2. Talking of word for word replicas, someone recently tried to sell a copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God to Clarkesworld.

Dream Fighter by Bob Shaw

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Dream Fighter by Bob Shaw (F&SF, February 1977) takes place after the “Dust-Up” (which appears to have been a limited nuclear war), and starts with Victor Rowan and his wife Jane checking into a dilapidated hotel. Rowan is a dream fighter, a mutant who can project images, and we get an early demonstration of his abilities when the couple decide to take their disagreement about the quality of their accommodation out of the hotel corridor and into their room:

“Do you mind if we continue the conversation inside? If we’re paying for the room, we might as well make use of it.”
Jane nodded, turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open.
Just beyond it, in the shabby dimness of the room, stood a grinning, scaly horror — part man, part dragon — which raised a clawed hand in menace. Jane drew breath sharply, but stood her ground.
“Victor,” she said. “Victor!”
“I’m sorry,” Rowan mumbled. He closed his mind, painfully, and the creature vanished into nothingness.  p. 65

We then learn that Rowan is due to compete in a dream fighter competition that evening and, in the rest of this section, we also find out that (a) his ability is due to a small walnut shaped mutation on the top of his head, (b) he has lost twelve fights in a row, and (c) Grumman, his next opponent, is very good.
There is also a scene where Rowan’s agent, Sammy Kling, meets with Tuck Raphael, who manages Grumman. Raphael has big plans for Grumman (who Kling quickly identifies as a psychopath) and bribes Kling to get Rowan to “accept defeat gracefully.” Kling takes the money but does not tell Rowan, who he figures will lose the fight anyway.
The climactic scene opens with Rowan meeting Grumman at the stadium for the first time:

A strongly built man he recognized as Grumman emerged from another corridor and reached the foot of the ramp at the same time. Rowan was instantly aware of his opponent’s chilling psychic aura, but he went through it, like a swimmer breasting an icy tide, and held out his hand.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said.
Grumman looked down at the outstretched hand and conjured a piece of brown, smoking filth into it. The image was too close to Rowan’s sphere of influence to last for more than a fraction of a second before he blanked it out of existence, but the accompanying mental shockwave had the force of a physical blow.  p. 70

Just before the fight begins, Rowan gets another taste of things to come:

At the head of the ramp, one on each side, were two low circular bases. Grumman went to the one on the left. Rowan turned right and was still a couple of paces from his base when there was an abrupt silence, followed by the sound of a woman screaming. He spun and found himself facing a thirty-foot high demon.
A red light began flashing in the judges’ kiosk, to indicate that Grumman had made a foul play by leading off before the signal.
Rowan’s senses were swamped by the reality of the beast towering over him. He had seen many monsters during his career, beings designed to inspire fear and thus weakness, but this one was in a class of its own. Its face was a compound of things human and things animal, and of things the earth had never seen. Its body was grotesquely deformed, yet true to alien symmetries — black, powerful, matted with hair in some places, glistening naked in others. And above all, the demon was obscene, massively sexual, with an overpowering realization of detail which had the intended effect of cowing the beholder’s mind. Rowan was closest to the apparition, and he took the full projected force of it.  p. 71

The fight initially goes as expected, with Rowan taking a psychic beating as his images are overpowered. Later in the contest however (spoiler), Rowan manages to recover when Grumman is briefly distracted:

[Rowan] summoned up an old friend — one who had settled many issues for him in the past.
Valerius was a professional soldier, a scarred and weather-beaten veteran who had served with three different legions in Syria, Gaul and Britain. He had withstood rain, snow and desert heat with equal stoicism, and he had slain the varied enemies of Rome with impartial efficiency, regardless of whether they wore silks or skins, regardless of which gods those enemies believed to be giving them protection. He was a stolid, unimaginative man — as plain, functional and uncompromising as the short sword he carried — and in all his years of service he had never encountered a creature which could survive having an iron blade driven through its guts. And, as Valerius saw things, this meant that no such creature existed.
Rowan — knowing by heart every detail, every rivet and thong of the legionary’s equipment and armor — snapped him into existence in microseconds. He was much smaller than the demon, a sign that Rowan’s strength was nearly spent, but his sword was sharp, and he struck with economical swiftness. The blade went deep into the demon’s protruding belly, and puslike fluids gouted. Rowan heard Grumman grunt with pain and surprise, and he guessed at once that the younger man had never experienced neuro-shock before.
This is what it’s like, he thought savagely, directing onto the demon a flurry of hacking blows which transmitted their fury to its creator, convulsing him with sympathetic shock.  p. 73

Rowan wins the fight but, of course, he is later accosted in the street by Raphael’s thugs, and revenge taken when they cut off his “walnut,” which robs him of his powers. After the spade strikes down, there is a great line:

And, in that ultimate pang of agony, Rowan was born into the world of normal men.  p. 74

The story should probably have stopped there but it continues on for another few paragraphs as Rowan returns to his concerned wife, and asks her whether she wants to hear “the bad news, or the good news.”
When I first read this is 1977 I thought it was excellent, partly because of the 1950s post-nuclear holocaust feel of the story, partly because I didn’t see the end coming, and partly because of the great line above. This time around I didn’t find it quite so good, probably because I knew what was coming, and I could also see one or two areas where it could be slightly improved (see my comment about the ending above). One other thing that tripped me up a little—and this isn’t the story’s fault—is that I remembered a great scene that isn’t in this story but another one!1
Still, this is a pretty good piece, and I’d probably have it in my ‘Best Of’ for 1977.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4200 words.

1. I think that other story is Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by James Quinn (F&SF, December 1977).