Tag: 3.5*

Track 12 by J. G. Ballard

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Track 12 by J. G. Ballard (New Worlds #70, April 1958) opens with Maxted listening to a sound Sheringham is playing to him through headphones. When Maxted fails to guess what the sound is—:

‘Time’s up,’ Sheringham cut in. ‘A pin dropping.’ He took the three-inch disc off the player, and angled it into its sleeve. ‘In actual fall, that is, not impact. We used a fifty-foot shaft and eight microphones. I thought you’d get that one.’  p. 63

The men take a break and go outside for a drink. We learn more about this new science of microsonics—very quiet sounds hugely amplified—and, as the story develops, we also discover that Maxted has been having an extra-marital relationship with Sheringham’s wife.
Maxted is waiting for a confrontation about this latter matter but, before one occurs, he starts to feel cold and mentions this to Sheringham. Sheringham tells him to stay where he is and goes to fetch the final recording.
Maxted’s condition continues to deteriorate, and it soon becomes apparent that (spoiler) Sherringham has poisoned him:

He strolled leisurely around the patio, scrutinizing Maxted from several angles. Evidently satisfied, he sat down on the table. He picked up the siphon and swirled the contents about. ‘Chromium cyanate. Inhibits the coenzyme system controlling the body’s fluid balances, floods hydroxyl ions into the bloodstream. In brief, you drown. Really drown, that is, not merely suffocate as you would if you were immersed in an external bath. However, I mustn’t distract you.’
He inclined his head at the speakers. Being fed into the patio was a curiously muffled spongy noise, like elastic waves lapping in a latex sea. The rhythms were huge and ungainly, overlaid by the deep leaden wheezing of a gigantic bellows. Barely audible at first, the sounds rose until they filled the patio and shut out the few traffic noises along the highway.
‘Fantastic, isn’t it?’ Sheringham said. [. . .] ‘These are 30-second repeats, 400 microsones, amplification one thousand. I admit I’ve edited the track a little, but it’s still remarkable how repulsive a beautiful sound can become. You’ll never guess what this was.’  p. 65-66

Sheringham then reveals his knowledge of Maxted’s liason—there are microphones all around the patio, an area that the couple used for one of their liaisons—and he continues to goad Maxted until finally revealing that he is drowning in a kiss.
This story doesn’t really lend itself to a convincing synopsis but Ballard successfully combines the two disparate story elements (the new science of microsonics and a cuckolded husband seeking revenge) with the almost poetic idea of drowning in a kiss. If that latter image/thought doesn’t appeal then I suspect you will not like it as much as I did.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 1,850 words. Story link.

Sole Solution by Eric Frank Russell

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Sole Solution by Eric Frank Russell (Fantastic Universe, April 1956)1 opens with a being trapped in a dark void where only he exists. He realises that the only resources available to overcome his predicament are “secreted within himself” and that he must “be the instrument of his own salvation”.
Eventually, after further exploration of his environment, and much thought, he conceives of a solution that will provide what he wants:

He created a mighty dream of his own, a place of infinite complexity schemed in every detail to the last dot and comma. Within this he would live anew. But not as himself. He was going to dissipate his person into numberless parts, a great multitude of variegated shapes and forms each of which would have to battle its own peculiar environment.
And he would toughen the struggle to the limit of endurance by unthinking himself, handicapping his parts with appalling ignorance and forcing them to learn afresh. He would seed enmity between them by dictating the basic rules of the game. Those who observed the rules would be called good. Those who did not would be called bad. Thus there would be endless delaying conflicts within the one great conflict.
When all was ready and prepared he intended to disrupt and become no longer one, but an enormous concourse of entities. Then his parts must fight back to unity and himself.

If this (spoiler) doesn’t give the game away, then the neat payoff lines, “‘Let there be light.’ And there was light.” confirm his identity.
I’d read this story before and remembered the ending, but I still thought it was pretty good: adroitly laid out, and the last lines bootstrap the story to another level. I’d also add that I was quite taken, even though I’m an atheist, with the conceit that we are all parts of a disassembled God trying to distract himself.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 700 words. Story link.

1. This is the first story in Brian W. Aldiss’s anthology Penguin Science Fiction, which is a group read starting in one of my Facebook groups today, 27th November 2023 (private group, so you will have to join).

The Big Flash by Norman Spinrad

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Big Flash by Norman Spinrad (Orbit #5, 1969) opens with a music club manager signing a rock group called The Four Horsemen to perform at his venue. This initial scene displays the story’s entertaining period style:

First, the head honcho, lead guitar and singer, Stony Clarke—blonde shoulder-length hair, eyes like something in a morgue when he took off his steel-rimmed shades, a reputation as a heavy acidhead and the look of a speed-freak behind it. Then Hair, the drummer, dressed like a Hell’s Angel, swastikas and all, a junkie, with fanatic eyes that were a little too close together, making me wonder whether he wore swastikas because he grooved behind the Angel thing or made like an Angel because it let him groove behind the swastika in public. Number three was a cat who called himself Super Spade and wasn’t kidding—he wore earrings, natural hair, a Stokeley Carmichael sweatshirt, and on a thong around his neck a shrunken head that had been whitened with liquid shoe polish. He was the utility infielder: sitar, base, organ, flute, whatever. Number four, who called himself Mr. Jones, was about the creepiest cat I had ever seen in a rock group, and that is saying something. He was their visuals, synthesizer and electronics man. He was at least forty, wore Early Hippy clothes that looked like they had been made by Sy Devore, and was rumored to be some kind of Rand Corporation dropout. There’s no business like show business.

In the next section of the story we hear from a Presidential advisor planning to manipulate US public opinion to accept the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam (he complacently states, “the risks, while statistically significant, do not exceed an acceptable level”). It then becomes apparent, as the story progresses, that The Four Horsemen, with their disturbing visuals, very dark, death-metal like music (“I stabbed my mother and I mugged my paw. Nailed my sister to the toilet door….”, etc.), and other subliminal effects, are a psychological operation designed to achieve that end. Later, a TV network executive is compelled to screen their show uncut, something that disturbs him and others in the network, not least because the performance climaxes with a song called “The Big Flash” (which ends with the repeated refrain, “Do it! Do it! Do it! Do it!”, and film of a nuclear explosion).
The rest of the tale mixes up scenes that involve, variously, military personnel (including two Minutemen missile operators and a Polaris Captain who are increasingly hypnotised by the band), a nuclear test at Yucca Flats, and then, finally, a climactic TV performance. Of course (spoiler), The Four Horsemen’s brain-washing has worked far better than planned, and causes the Minutemen and Polaris crews to launch their ICBMs.
This is an original piece that unusually combines rock music and nuclear weapons into an entertaining if disturbing piece. If I have one minor criticism it is that the final countdown goes on for too long.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 8,200 words. Story link.

Salvador by Lucius Shepard

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Salvador by Lucius Shepard (F&SF, April 1984)1 opens with a scene that will be familiar to anyone who has seen any of the many Vietnam War movies that were released from the late 1970s onwards2—except that in this case the conflict is in Central America, and the soldiers use combat drugs to enhance their abilities and supress their fear:

The platoon was crossing a meadow at the foot of an emerald-green volcano [. . .] when cap-pistol noises sounded on the slope. Someone screamed for the medic, and Dantzler dove into the grass, fumbling for his ampules. He slipped one from the dispenser and popped it under his nose, inhaling frantically; then, to be on the safe side, he popped another — “A double helpin’ of martial arts,” as DT would say — and lay with his head down until the drugs had worked their magic. There was dirt in his mouth, and he was very afraid. Gradually his arms and legs lost their heaviness, and his heart rate slowed. His vision sharpened to the point that he could see not only the pinpricks of fire blooming on the slope, but also the figures behind them, half-obscured by brush. A bubble of grim anger welled up in his brain, hardened by a fierce resolve, and he started moving toward the volcano. By the time he reached the base of the cone, he was all rage and reflexes. He spent the next forty minutes spinning acrobatically through the thickets, spraying shadows with bursts of his M-18; yet part of his mind remained distant from the action, marveling at his efficiency, at the comic-strip enthusiasm he felt for the task of killing. He shouted at the men he shot, and he shot them many more times than was necessary, like a child playing soldier.  p. 8

After this we learn more about DT (presumably the platoon’s psychotic NCO) and see his craziness at first hand when he throws a young prisoner (who says his father is a “man of power”) out of the chopper on the way back to base.
The next section sees Dantzler (whose anthropologist father did field work in Salvador) talking to his buddy Moody about the spirit world of the local Sukias (magicians). When Moody asks why the Sukias aren’t helping the natives, Dantzler tells him that they don’t believe in interfering in worldly affairs. However, after the platoon raze a village to the ground and kill all the occupants, Dantzler has a supernatural experience that proves this isn’t quite correct—as the men camp for the night in a cloud forest, a dark shape comes towards him and a voice says that Dantzler killed his son. Dantzler realises that it is the Sukia from the young man’s village, and he opens fire indiscriminately; the blackness disappears, and he sees he has killed several members of his platoon. Then he notices a girl in the golden light that has replaced the darkness and, after she speaks to him for a while, she asks him to “let them know about the war” when he returns home. Dantzler subsequently comes upon Moody and DT, shoots the former and drowns the latter:

Darttzler planted a foot in the middle of his back and pushed him down until his head was submerged. DT bucked and clawed at the foot and managed to come to his hands and knees. Mist slithered from his eyes, his nose, and he choked out the words “…kill you….” Dantzler pushed him down again; he got into pushing him down and letting him up, over and over. Not so as to torture him. Not really. It was because he had suddenly understood the nature of the ayahuamaco’s laws, that they were approximations of normal laws, and he further understood that his actions had to approximate those of someone jiggling a key in a lock. DT was the key to the way out, and Dantzler was jiggling him, making sure all the tumblers were engaged.
Some of the vessels in DT’s eyes had burst, and the whites were occluded by films of blood. When he tried to speak, mist curled from his mouth. Gradually his struggles subsided; he clawed runnels in the gleaming yellow dirt of the bank and shuddered. His shoulders were knobs of black land floundering in a mystic sea.
For a long time after DT sank from view, Dantzler stood beside the stream, uncertain of what was left to do and unable to remember a lesson he had been taught. Finally, he shouldered his rifle and walked away from the clearing. Morning had broken, the mist had thinned, and the forest had regained its usual coloration. But he scarcely noticed these changes, still troubled by his faulty memory. Eventually, he let it slide — it would all come clearer sooner or later.  p. 20-21

The last part of the story (spoiler) takes place back in the United States, and the final scene sees Dantzler entering a night club with a knife after popping two combat ampules:

[He] felt a responsibility to explain about the war. More than a responsibility, an evangelistic urge. He would tell them about the kid falling out of the chopper, the white-haired girl in Tecolutla, the emptiness. God, yes! How you went down chock-full of ordinary American thoughts and dreams, memories of smoking weed and chasing tail and hanging out and freeway flying with a case of something cold, and how you smuggled back a human-shaped container of pure Salvadorian emptiness. Primo grade. Smuggled it back to the land of silk and money, of mindfuck video games and topless tennis matches and fast-food solutions to the nutritional problem. Just a taste of Salvador would banish all those trivial obsessions. Just a taste. It would be easy to explain.  p. 23

This is an immersive story, an impressively descriptive and atmospheric piece which also manages, unusually, to combine its near future SF setting (the combat drugs, etc.) with supernatural events to produce an effective anti-war/revenge fantasy.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 7,450 words. Story link.

1. This story won the Locus and SF Chronicle (both SF news magazines) polls for Best Short Story; it also placed 4th in the Hugo Award for that year and was a Nebula Award finalist too.

2. Military Times’ 10 Best Vietnam War Movies.

Retention by Alec Nevala-Lee

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Retention by Alec Nevala-Lee (Analog, July-August 2020)1 is in the form of a customer service call where the caller is continually fobbed off when he tries to cancel his contract:

Thank you, Perry. How can I help you today?
I want to disconnect my security system and close my account, please.
I see. Just so we’re on the same page, you’re saying that you have some issues with your current service, and you want to explore your options?
That’s not what I’m saying. I’ve decided to disconnect my security system and close my account.
I understand. We know that your needs can change and that you want your services to reflect this. But we appreciate your business, and we hate to lose you. To help you figure out your options, I’d like to ask you a few questions. Okay?
I’m not sure why you need to ask me anything. I just want to cancel.
It helps me put together a package that meets your budget and your needs.
The price isn’t the problem.
You see, it helps me to know that. What do you value the most in your current package?
Again, I don’t see why you need to ask this.
Well, my job is to have a conversation with you about your service.
With all due respect, I don’t think your job involves having a conversation with me at all. I’d just like to cancel my account, please. Is that something you can do? Yes or no?

It soon becomes apparent that (a) the answer is “no” and (b) that he is talking (spoiler) to an AI. Then we discover that the caller isn’t human either, but an algorithm that reflects his dead owner’s tastes and needs. The story ends with the two still going round in circles hundreds of years later.
This has an amusing beginning, and becomes pleasingly and quirkily existential later.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 2,750 words.

1. Nevala-Lee notes on his blog that there are three versions of the story available (two are audio recordings).

Stepsister by Leah Cypress

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Stepsister by Leah Cypress (F&SF, May-June 2020) opens with King Ciar’s friend, “Lord” Garrin, telling tales of his youth in a tavern. During this we get a chunk of backstory about his royal castle upbringing and, in particular, the story of how Garrin was once whipped for hitting the prince too hard (they were practise-sparring with wooden posts). We also learn that Garrin is a potential claimant for the throne. Then, towards the end of this scene, he is summoned by King Ciar and told to go and retrieve the Queen’s stepsister.
We don’t actually see Garrin set off on his quest but instead see a twisty plot set in motion, during which we learn that (a) the Queen had a cruel step-family who tortured her, and that she ordered them stoned to death after she got married, (b) the King intervened and ordered Garrin to take one of the step-sisters, Jacinda, far away and hide her from the Queen, and (c) that Garrin once danced with Jacinda after meeting her as she fled from the castle on the night of the Fae Ball:

We all grew up knowing that we shared our world with the fae. They lent magic and wonder to our grinding lives, favored us with the occasional sprinkle of miracle or tragedy, and all they asked in return was for us to dance. Once at midsummer and once at the winter solstice: a grand ball, for royalty and commoners alike, where the dancing gets wilder all through the night and our movements shimmer with beauty and abandon. Nights when the ugly appear beautiful and the beautiful transcendent, when the melancholy turn joyful and the happy go insane, when romance turns into a solid reality and princes fall in love with peasant girls.

I knew her name by then: Jacinda. And I had seen and recognized the token tucked into the bodice of her gown, a lock of golden hair bound with silver thread. Ciar gave one like it to every girl he fancied.
But she had left Ciar and danced with me, and though I knew I should not have allowed it, I was filled with a tender joy. It was the music and the magic strumming through my skin, turning my mind inside out and making me forget the rule my safety was built around: You must never take anything from Ciar.
But she was so fierce and so real, and for the first time in my life, I wanted something so badly I didn’t think about the consequences. (A foolish mood, not a brave one. The consequences, like the morning, would come anyhow.) I reached for her hand and pulled her closer, and her dark eyes watched me, then slowly closed as I bent my head to hers.
Our lips barely touched. She made a small, pained sound and stepped back.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Jacinda subsequently explains that what he is feeling isn’t love but fae magic (she has enchanted her glass slippers with her own “blood and pain, to ensnare a suitor of royal blood”). After she leaves Garrin remains smitten.
All of this, and more that follows, has led many commentators to refer to this as a Cinderella story, but you could change some of the previous details (the step-sisters, the glass slippers, etc.) and you’d pretty much have the same story—one which, if you are looking for literary comparisons, probably has more in common with Game of Thrones given its tale of bastards, royal succession, and palace intrigue.
The rest of the tale (spoiler) further complicates the story, and sees Garrin get a note from Jacinda asking him to stay away, and the Queen’s maid trying to stab him to prevent him going on his journey. Then the Queen tries to get Garrin to betray the King while the latter is in earshot. Garrin manages to avoid this trap, and listens outside the door as the King and Queen argue about her inability to conceive and how they need to go to Jacinda to undo a fae curse.
The last scene sees the King and Queen, Garrin, and Amelie the Queen’s maid go to Jacinda’s cottage (and before they leave Amelie reveals to Garrin that she is fae and tells him how Queen Ella got her own enchanted slippers).
At the cottage they find that Jacinda has a baby boy, which is obviously King Ciar’s child—but Garrin saves the boy’s life by claiming it as his own.
This is a readable piece with well-drawn characters (Garrin’s endless vigilance is particularly well done) and a satisfyingly twisty plot. The fae magic and the Cinderella references are also well integrated into the story and don’t distract from the main thrust of the tale.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 14,000 words.

Tideline by Elizabeth Bear

Posted on by Paul Fraser 1 Comment on Tideline by Elizabeth Bear

Tideline by Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s SF, June 2007) opens with Chalcedony, a damaged combat vehicle, prospecting for “trash jewels” as it works its way along the beach in what eventually turns out to be a devastated future world. Then it meets a feral child called Belvedere. Belvedere asks the robot what it is doing, and Chalcedony tells him that it is gathering “shipwreck beads” to make necklaces. We later find out that it intends making 41 necklaces, one to commemorate each of the members of its combat unit, all of whom are now dead.
A relationship develops between the two, beginning with Belvedere picking up a chain with a Buddha figure on it and passing it up to the robot—Chalcedony has a damaged leg, which makes it difficult to stoop to ground level—and it reciprocates by microwaving a bag full of seashells and seaweed for the child. Chalcedony tells Belvedere to eat the seaweed too (“rich in nutrients”), the first instance of the robot mentoring and caring for the child over the following days and months (and which includes, at one point, the robot saving his life by killing two men who attack him). During this period Chalcedony also tells Belvedere stories about the members of its platoon.
Over the course of the story Chalcedony’s batteries run down—the solar charge it gets each day isn’t enough to keep it at full power—and it is also stuck between the cliff and the sea. The robot realises that it will not survive the approaching winter, so it works as quickly as it can on finishing its memorial necklaces before then.
The final part of the story (spoiler) sees the robot use some of the last of its precious energy reserves to save the life of an injured German Shepard found by Belvedere:

When the sun was up and the young dog was breathing comfortably, the gash along its haunch sewn closed and its bloodstream saturated with antibiotics, she turned back to the last necklace. She would have to work quickly, and Sergeant Patterson’s necklace contained the most fragile and beautiful beads, the ones Chalcedony had been most concerned with breaking and so had saved for last, when she would be most experienced.
Her motions grew slower as the day wore on, more laborious. The sun could not feed her enough to replace the expenditures of the night before. But bead linked into bead, and the necklace grew—bits of pewter, of pottery, of glass and mother of pearl. And the chalcedony Buddha, because Sergeant Patterson had been Chalcedony’s operator.

When Chalcedony wakes the next day after being recharged by the sun, the robot sees that Belvedere has finished assembling the necklace; Belvedere hands it over so Chalcedony can finish the job by hardening the links. Chalcedony then tasks Belvedere to go on an errantry, to find people to learn the platoon members’ stories and to wear the necklaces that commemorate them. When Belvedere asks what sort of people he should give them to, Chalcedony replies:

“People who would help a child,” she said. “Or a wounded dog. People like a platoon should be.”

This is a slow burn piece that is effectively done, but the degree of anthropomorphism in the story is both (a) its weak point (do we really believe a sentient war machine is a “she”, or would be grieving its comrades and making necklaces to remember them?1) and (b) its strength (this kind of sentimentality goes down big with SF readers in general and awards voters in particular2).
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4,400 words. Story link.

1. The more you consider the way Chalcedony behaves, the less likely it all seems.

2. This story won the 2008 Hugo, Sturgeon, and Asimov’s Reader’s Poll Awards. Of course.

Laws of Impermanence by Ken Schneyer

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Laws of Impermanence by Ken Schneyer (Uncanny #36, September-October 2020) is set in a world where text is never permanent but constantly changes:

In his Physics, Aristotle declared that textual transmutation accelerates over time, and that its rate depends on the length of the manuscript. No one questioned this doctrine until after Gutenberg, when it was found that even moveable type metamorphosed on its racks. Galileo Galilei was the first to test Aristotle’s assertion by rigorous experiment, creating multiple copies of manuscripts of various length, as well as printed books, and examining them against correctors’ copies repeatedly over a period of a decade. He determined, first, that all texts transmute at the same rate, roughly one word out of every fifty in a year; second, that this rate does not change with time; and third, that all changes are what he called “sensible,” meaning that they fit logically within the framework of the larger document and do not betray themselves by presenting apparent gibberish. Indeed, it was his assertion that the Holy Bible would be no less prone to sensible transmutation than secular texts that eventually led to his censure and permanent house arrest.
But it was Isaac Newton who demonstrated that textual transmutation was an inherent property of writing itself, devising his three Laws of Impermanence and describing mathematically the forces that make them inevitable.

Interwoven with the conceptual development of this idea are two other narrative threads: one is a story of a lawyer and a client family who have only two original copies of their father’s will (both of which have suffered 25 years of transmutation); the other concerns a letter from the estranged wife of Philip, the grandfather of that family, to her friend:

I’m writing this in a hurry and I’m going to put it someplace safe. I hope to God that you’ll never have to read it, that I’ll be able to tell you in person. But I thought I’d better get it down on paper in case the worst happens.
I’m frightened that Philip wants to kill me. He threatened to do it right after the divorce, and I almost went to the police, but he never repeated the threat, and I thought I was safe.
But today I’m not so sure. A neighbor on the island who’d been down at the port said she saw a tall man with a beard and a coat that sounded just like Philip’s, and I’m afraid he’s come here to do what he said he’d do.
I’m going to try to get away right now, to hide somewhere on the other side of the island. But if, God forbid, I wind up dead, remember: it’s Philip who killed me.

During the story (spoiler) this letter metamorphoses into one that is more vague (this second version suggests that, if anything happens to her, Philip is “morally responsible”) and then, finally, into a suicide note.
This is a conceptually clever piece of ideation that is well developed (I liked all the scientific references to scientists we know for other discoveries) and has a neat twist ending. I suspect it will appeal to, among others, admirers of Ted Chiang’s work.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 4,100 words. Story link.

How the Crown Prince of Jupiter Undid the Universe, or, The Full Fruit of Love’s Full Folly by P. H. Lee

Posted on by Paul Fraser

How the Crown Prince of Jupiter Undid the Universe, or, The Full Fruit of Love’s Full Folly by P. H. Lee (Tor.com, 12th October 2022) opens with the Crown Prince of Jupiter becoming infatuated with the Princess of the Sun:

He was in love, and his heart knew no persuasion. “Oh look at her,” he would say, admiring the tiny portrait, “what radiant beauty!”
“Her radiance,” commented his advisors, “is due entirely to her nuclear fusion. If your royal highness was in her presence, even a moment, then by those self-same processes you would find yourself instantly annihilated.”
“Are we not all slain by the self-same arrows of true love?” answered the Prince. Which, of course, was not any sort of answer, except to a young man in love.

The Prince subsequently stops eating and drinking, so his advisors implore his Aunt to intervene. She initially reiterates what he has already been told but, when she sees he is smitten, tells him that his only hope lies with Ursula, a witch who lives on Earth.1
In the second part of the story we see the Prince and Alisterisk (an advisor) journey to Earth suitably attired in pressure armour. There they meet Ursula and the story takes a meta-fictional turn:

Ursula’s eyes came at last on the Crown Prince and on Alisterisk beside him. In their pressurized armor, they looked to her as bluewhite gleams in a beam of sunlight. “Ah,” she said, relaxing. “I see now that this is a science fiction story. And I suppose you want me to write the end of it. All right then. What’s the matter?”

There is more of this kind of thing when (after the Prince tells his story and Ursula tells him that he should seek out the wizard Stanislaw) Alisterisk momentarily stays behind to thank her:

“Do not thank me yet,” said the Earth Witch. “For the matter is not done. I am afraid, Alisterisk, that you shall come to no good end in this affair. The side characters seldom do.”

The final section sees the Prince and Alisterisk meet Stanislaw1 who, after hearing their story (spoiler), tells them he can help, but that there may be consequences:

“I have in my possession,” said the wizard Stanislaw, “a Metaphoricator, left for me by the Constructor Trurl when he sojourned in my company these many years ago. A Metaphoricator is a most particular device. Operated properly, it can transform any real thing into a metaphor, merely a story meant to illustrate its point.”
“So you mean to transform us into metaphors?” asked Alisterisk hesitantly.
“Oh no!” said the wizard Stanislaw, “You are quite clearly metaphors already. Just think of it! How could there be such a thing as a real Crown Prince of Jupiter, a real Princess of the Sun? Your entire narrative is quite clearly a farce.”
“But then what do you intend to do?” asked Alisterisk
“By means of a few simple re-arrangements and jerry-rigs,” said the wizard Stanislaw, “my Metaphoricator can be transformed into a Demetaphoricator. And that is the machine I intend to operate.”
“What good is a Demetaphoricator to our present difficulties?” asked Alisterisk.
The wizard snapped his fingers. “With a single application of a Demetaphoricator, I can transform all of your story—the Crown Prince, Esmerelda, the Coreward Palace, Ursula the Earth Witch, even myself the wizard Stanislaw, into real people and real events, actually existing in the world beyond this story. At such time, both your Crown Prince and his beloved Esmerelda shall be rendered as real people, with no physical impediments to their romance. Of course, they may still encounter other difficulties, but that is simply the course of being human.”

The story ends with the characters having escaped the story and the writer quizzing the reader as to whether or not they have ever known archetypes like the Prince or Princess (the boy who became infatuated with a girl who could do nothing but destroy him), whether they helped, and what their role was, if any (were they like Alisterisk the advisor?)
This story probably sounds like an unlikely and unsuccessful combination of elements, but the quirky beginning, the meta-fictional development, and the story-transcending ending makes for an original, entertaining, and accomplished piece.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 3,650 words. Story link.

1. Ursula the Earth Witch is obviously Ursula K. LeGuin (the Earthsea series), and Stanislaw is obviously Stanislaw Lem (Trurl is from The Cyberiad).

Just Enough Rain by P. H. Lee

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Just Enough Rain by P. H. Lee (Giganotosaurus, 1st May 2021)1 opens with an arresting first line:

I wasn’t surprised when God showed up for Mom’s funeral. They’d always been close.

After the funeral service is over, Annie goes over to talk with God and they have a long and wandering conversation (His friendship with her mother, His sending angels to remove the sarcomas produced by a previous bout of cancer, etc.) before God tells her He is thinking of bringing Annie’s mother back to life. Once He ascertains that Annie has no objections (expected inheritance, etc.) there are sounds of movement from inside the coffin.
This opening passage is followed by a short second chapter which tells of the parable of Honi the Circle-Drawer (Honi asks God to provide rain, and then the correct amount of rain when there is a flood) before the rest of the story settles into its groove, which is that of Annie’s love life. This latter begins with her resurrected mother telling Annie that she wants grandchildren:

“You know,” she’d say, as if I hadn’t heard it a hundred times before, “one of my great regrets was dying without getting to meet my grandchildren.”
“Mom,” I’d say, “you’re still alive.”
“Only because of a miracle, dear,” she’d say, “and we mustn’t count on miracles. What happened to Brett, anyway? I liked Brett. Good Jewish boy. And a doctor!”

After more of this kind of thing, and some of Annie’s backstory (a vision she had at 15 about saving monarch butterflies from extinction), Annie’s mother calls her and says that she has phoned God and had a word with him about Annie’s love life. Annie later experiences the result of this intercession in a hilarious passage:

I was on the Blue Line, reading The Guermantes Way–the new translation–when I noticed him–her? them?–sitting across from me, beautiful.
It was their skin, I think, that caught my attention. Strong, muscled, but still soft as a feather. I sucked in my breath and, without thinking, bit my lower lip. There was no question of going back to The Guermantes Way. I just sat, and looked at them, beautiful, God they were beautiful.
Then, just as we left Elmonica/SW 170th, they stood up–tall, broadshouldered, the slowest curve of their chin–and unfurled their wings of holy light, almost the length of the entire train car.
“Oh no,” I said, but I couldn’t look away.
“HARK,” they said, their voice filling the entire railcar. “BE NOT AFRAID, FOR I AM A MESSENGER OF THE LORD YOUR GOD.”
Some people were fumbling with their phones, but most of them just gawped, open-mouthed. I felt the cold-warm rush of embarrassment and I wanted to hide under my seat almost as much as I wanted to keep staring.
He’d sent an angel. Of course He’d sent an angel.
The angel turned to a slightly paunchy man–nice curly hair, though–in glasses, khakis and a polo shirt. “DAVID ELIAS RUTENBERG,” it said.
David blanched and looked for all the world like he’d just had a dream about taking a final exam in his underwear. “Y-yes?” he finally managed.
The angel pointed to me and I tried my very best to blend into the seat cushion. “THIS WOMAN, ANAT BETHESDA MEAGELE, IS SINGLE. SHE HAS A GOOD JOB AND SHE’S EMOTIONALLY MATURE AND READY FOR A COMMITMENT. YOU SHOULD ASK FOR HER NUMBER. SO SAYETH THE LORD.”
David stared at me and swallowed hard. His face was covered in sweat.
“TAKE HER SOMEWHERE NICE, NOTHING TOO FANCY, IN THE $20-30 RANGE,” continued the angel, just when I thought that this couldn’t get worse. “ARGUE ABOUT WHETHER TO SPLIT THE CHECK BUT THEN PRETEND TO GO TO THE BATHROOM AND SECRETLY PAY.”
David, still sweating, gave me an appraising look that made me instantly aware of every wrinkle and sag. “She’s, uh” he started.
“YES,” said the angel, turning their magnificent gaze upon me. “HURRY IT UP.”
“She’s a bit old for me, isn’t she?”
The angel snapped their gaze back to him. “WELL YOU’RE NO SPRING CHICKEN YOURSELF, DAVE.”
Dave looked like he’d just swallowed a toad. “I-is that also the word of G-G-God?” he managed.
“NO, DAVE, THAT’S JUST A SIMPLE OBSERVATION THAT ANYONE COULD MAKE. YOU’RE NOT EXACTLY GOING TO LAND A SUPERMODEL.”
“Uh, well,” said Dave, and pulled the emergency brake.

Annie subsequently phones God and tells him not to intercede again, before asking for the angel’s telephone number. God phones her back with it, and Annie and the (monomaniacally dull) angel subsequently go on a car crash date. Worse, he then pesters her with a series of texts asking to see her again and, when those are unanswered, another series asking what went wrong.
Annie (bearing in mind her mother’s comments about being too quick to judge) eventually agrees to another date with the angel. This one works out better, even though their dinner conversation spans an eclectic range of topics (the semiotics of the translations of Remembrance of Things Lost, Korean Food, angelic languages, etc.). By the fourth date they are having sex, or whatever word you would use to describe congress between a woman and a being who, unclothed, has a distinctly inhuman form:

Their human guise–clothes, but also skin and eyes and everything–lay in a pile beneath them. What remained was a great cloud of a thousand different hands, in each hand a different eye, in each eye a different name of God, all wreathed in light and holy fire.
“THIS IS ME,” said the angel, with a voice that seemed to come from everywhere.
I stepped forward, took one of the hands, and kissed it. “You’re beautiful,” I said, and meant it.

Eventually, and after sections that detail Annie’s conversations with (a) her mother about the parable of Honi the Circle-Drawer, and (b) the angel about the unpublished Rimbaud translations in her notebooks (the story is fairly discursive throughout), Annie phones her mother to tell her that she is pregnant. The story ends with, among other things, a discussion of God’s likely reaction, what Annie intends to do with her child, and what happened “last time” (i.e. with Jesus).
This is not only an original story (the idea of a slightly bumbling God manifest in the world is relatively novel or at least underused in genre fiction) but also an amusing, and sometimes hilarious, one. It is, however, slightly more sprawling than it needs to be (the ending is a bit wafflely, for instance) and some tightening up would have benefited the whole piece. That said, I enjoyed the story’s various diversions—the parable, Annie’s butterfly vision and whether saving them was God’s purpose for her, the discussions about Proust’s Remembrance of Things Lost, etc., etc. These gave what could have been a piece of froth some thoughtful heft and, at times, made it a wise and reflective work.
Well worth a look.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 9,550 words. Story link.

1. Giganotosaurus pays $100 for its stories, which is about 1 cent a word for this piece. I’m surprised this 2022 Nebula Award finalist didn’t end up in a better paying market.