Tag: 4*

Impostor by Philip K. Dick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Impostor by Philip K. Dick (Astounding, June 1953) starts with the protagonist, Olham, having breakfast with his wife. During this they talk about a permanent war with the Outspacers, aliens from Alpha Centauri, and the recent development of the protec-bubbles that now surround the planet. What is also cleverly inserted into this opening section is the seemingly inconsequential mention of a fire at nearby Sutton Wood, a location that will reappear later in the story.
When Olham is later picked up to go to work by an older colleague called Nelson (they are both high ranking officials at a defence project), Olham sees there is another man in the car. The man identifies himself as Peters, says he works for security, and that he is there to arrest Olham for being an Outspace spy. The car quickly gets airborne and heads for the Moon while Peters calls his boss to tell him about the successful arrest.
The rest of the story is a fast-paced tale that sees Peters explain that an Outspace ship with a humanoid robot containing a U-bomb recently penetrated the protec-bubble surrounding Earth. Peters then states that Olham is the Outspace robot, and that they intend dismantling him on the far side of the Moon. Olham frantically tries to convince Peters and Nelson that the robot must have failed to reach him, and that he is the real Olham. However, when they land on the Moon, and Olham sees he still has not convinced them, he says he is about to explode. Nelson and Peters flee from the car (they have put their spacesuits on before landing), and Olham quickly closes the door and returns to Earth.
The final section of the story (spoiler) sees Olham return home, escape from an ambush, and eventually make his way to Sutton Wood. There he finds the remains of a burnt-out Outsider spaceship. Then, when Peters, Nelson and a security detail arrive shortly afterwards, Olham manages to convince Peters to go over and look at a body lying near the wreckage. Peters and the team look at the body and decide that it is the robot, but then Nelson pulls on what he thinks is the metal corner of the U-bomb in the robot’s body:

Nelson stood up. He was holding onto the metal object. His face was blank with terror. It was a metal knife, an Outspace needle-knife, covered with blood.
“This killed him,” Nelson whispered. “My friend was killed with this.” He looked at Olham. “You killed him with this and left him beside the ship.”
Olham was trembling. His teeth chattered. He looked from the knife to the body. “This can’t be Olham,” he said. His mind spun, everything was whirling. “Was I wrong?”
He gaped.
“But if that’s Olham, then I must be . . .”
He did not complete the sentence, only the first phrase. The blast was visible all the way to Alpha Centauri.

This suspenseful and paranoid piece has a dreamlike feel (apart from Olham’s nightmarish predicament there is the quick trip to the moon and back), and you never really know until the final moments if Olham is a robot or not.1 This, and the fast pace of the story, keeps the reader off-balance and lets the writer gloss over one or two things that might have revealed Olham’s true nature (the brief door opening on the Moon; the question of how the robot would get Olham’s memories).
An impressive piece that reflects the Reds-under-the bed fears of the time, and Philip K. Dick’s only sale to John W. Campbell (I note that the story is another exception to Campbell’s supposed Human Exceptionalism rule2).
**** (Very Good). 5,400 words. Story link.

1. Dick would return to this theme in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which was later filmed as Bladerunner).

2. A writer remarked to me, “It’s a story where The Thing wins”.

Kaleidoscope by Ray Bradbury

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Kaleidoscope by Ray Bradbury (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1949) begins with an explosion on a spaceship which spills its crew into space “like a dozen wriggling silverfish”. The men move in different directions, some towards the sun, others out to Pluto. The main character, Hollis, ends up drifting towards Earth, and re-entry. They are all in radio contact, but there is no chance they will be rescued: some of the men say nothing at all, some let the veneer of civilization slip away, and one of them just screams endlessly (until Hollis grabs hold of him and smashes his faceplate).
During the various conversations that take place over the radio, Hollis becomes jealous of Lespere, who has been talking about his three wives on as many planets, how he once gambled away twenty thousand dollars when he was drunk, etc.:

“You’re out here, Lespere. It’s all over. It’s just as if it had never happened, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“When anything’s over, it’s just like it never happened. Where’s your life any better than mine, now? While it was happening, yes, but now? Now is what counts. Is it any better, is it?”
“Yes, it’s better!”
“How!”
“Because I got my thoughts; I remember!” cried Lespere, far away, indignant, holding his memories to his chest with both hands.
And he was right. With a feeling of cold water gushing through his head and his body, Hollis knew he was right. There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision.  p. 132

This is more reflectively existential than you would expect from a twenty-nine year old writer appearing in Thrilling Wonder Stories, and there is similar material earlier in the story, in a conversation Hollis has with Applegate:

“Are you angry, Hollis?”
“No.” And he was not. The abstraction had returned and he was a thing of dull concrete, forever falling nowhere.
“You wanted to get to the top all your life, Hollis. And I ruined it for you. You always wondered what happened. I put the black mark on you just before I was tossed out myself.”
“That isn’t important,” said Hollis. And it was not. It was gone. When life is over it is like a flicker of bright film, an instant on the screen, all of its prejudices and passions condensed and illumined for an instant on space, and before you could cry out. There was a happy day, there a bad one, there an evil face, there a good one, the film burned to a cinder, the screen was dark.  p. 131

Eventually (spoiler), Hollis achieves a painful self-awareness about his (“terrible and empty”) life, and realises the only good he can do now is for his ashes to be added to the land below. He wonders if anyone will see him burn on re-entry—and the story ends with a short paragraph where a small boy and his mother wish upon a falling star.
This is an uncharacteristically bleak and reflective story for the time, and it shows a distinct lack of the sentimentality that spoiled some of Bradbury’s later work.
**** (Very Good). 3,400 words. Story link.

The Cinderella Machine by Michael G. Coney

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Cinderella Machine by Michael G. Coney (F&SF, August 1976) is set in his “Peninsula” series, and opens with Joe Sagar on Flambuoyant, the hydrofoil of the former 3-V star Carioca Jones. Sagar is thinking of a girl he once knew and loved called Joanne, an ex-prisoner who seems to have made a particular sacrifice in this dark future world of prisoner bondage and organ transplants:

I’d been reminded of Joanne by the sight of Carioca’s hands, white and smooth beside mine as they gripped the rail. Recently she had taken to wearing long gloves, but today the skin was bare, and I could see the thin pale lines around her wrists—the only physical reminder of the grafts.  p. 112

The rest of the beginning of the story is equally busy, and sees mention of a forthcoming 3-V film festival, The Carioca Jones Revival Season, a protest march by The Foes of Bondage to the State Pen demanding that the organ pool be disbanded (which, paradoxically given the above, will also feature Jones), and Jones’ order from Sagar of a pair of long gloves made from slitheskin (an emotion-sensitive material).
We are also introduced to Carioca Jones’ pet:

The afternoon had turned to chill early evening as we made our way towards Carioca’s mooring at Deep Cove. I helped her onto the landing stage and dutifully returned to the boat for the unwieldy Nag, her moray eel. Nag is a normally comatose beast and very little trouble—a welcome change from the unpredictable, defunct [land-shark] Wilberforce. I placed the fish on the landing stage, and he undulated slowly after Carioca like an evil black snake, the oxygenator pulsing near his gills. He wore a jeweled collar; Carioca always dresses her pets well.  p. 114

The next part of the story is equally busy, and sees an official from the State Pen ask Sagar for his help in stopping the march by the Foes of Bondage. Sagar tells him he is unable to help. Then, when Sagar later goes out to visit Jones, he is introduced to douglas sutherland, an ex-con with metal hands. It materialises that sutherland was a bonded man who received a reduced sentence after his freeman (owner, essentially) took his hands after the freeman had a farming accident. Sagar also learns that Sutherland was previously a surgeon, but now operates a sculptograph, a device that rejuvenates skin, and that he will be treating Jones before her appearance at the Revival to make her more youthful looking.
When prompted by Jones to demonstrate the machine to Sagar, sutherland gets rid of Nag the eel—the creature has been pestering sutherland and he obviously detests it—and he puts a lump of raw fish in the sculptograph. Sutherland then removes a wart on Sagar’s hand, leaving the treated part blemish free and less aged. He tells Sagar that the rejuvination effect should last for around three days, and adds that, to achieve a permanent change, he would need to use human meat. . . . Three days later, the skin starts sloughing off of Sagar’s hand in a most unsightly manner, but the wart does not reappear.
There are (spoiler) another few pieces put in place before the story’s mousetrap ending, and these involve (a) Sagar going to a sling gliding competition1 and picking up a young woman who he takes for a drive and later starts kissing—only to find out that she is, of course, the much younger Carioca Jones (this part of the story does not really convince); (b) the State Pen official giving Jones human flesh from the organ pool to get the Foes of Bondage march cancelled; and (c) sutherland seeing the scars on Carioca Jones’ wrists just before he treats her backstage at the Revival . . . .
The climax of the story sees Sagar discover how the State Pen official managed to get the march cancelled shortly before he hears screaming from backstage. Then Jones appears:

The curtains slashed down the center, and a creature appeared, blinking at the light, her screams dying to whimpers as the brightness hit her and illuminated her old, old face, her leathery wrinkled skin, her vulture’s neck of empty pouched flesh. . . .
She stood slightly crouched, her fingers crooked before her; but there was nothing aggressive in her stance—it was more as though she was backing away from an attack.
She wore a plain black dress which accentuated the pallor of her legs, her arms, her face. She was Death incarnate; it seemed impossible that a creature so old, so ugly, should possess the gift of life. Slowly she raised her hands until they shadowed her face and the spotlight picked out the white graft scars on her wrists. She gripped the folds of the curtain above her head while a trickle of spittle glistened at the corner of her slack lips, and the most terrible thing was her breasts, high and pale and full and youthful, voluptuous, as they rose from under her dress when she arched her back as though in terminal agony.
For an instant she stood rigid; in the dazzling light she couldn’t have seen us, and it was just possible she was not aware of her audience, or even of her whereabouts. Her single final scream died away into a croak, and she sagged; her arms dropped to her sides; her ancient eyes grew slitted and cunning as she glanced quickly from side to side, seized the curtain and whirled it about her like a cloak. We heard the echo of a cackle of laughter. The folds fell back into place, the stage was empty. She was gone.  pp. 128-129

Wonderfully over the top.
Sagar goes looking for Jones and finds she has tried to commit suicide (she thinks that sutherland has used the human flesh she provided and that the changes will be permanent), but then, as Sagar phones for an ambulance, he finds Nag’s empty collar and no sign of the land-eel. . . .
This is a highly entertaining piece with a brilliantly twisty plot and characters that are, to a greater or lesser extent, wonderfully flawed: Jones is obviously a narcissistic and amoral villain, and Sagar is no angel either (even if he does model “normal” most of the time).
**** (Very good). 8,400 words. Story link.

1. The sling-glider launch mechanism in Coney’s “Peninsula” stories always confused me a little, but this piece has a good description:

Presdee’s turn came. I watched the spray trailing silver from the distant hydrofoil as it raced for the Fulcrum post; some distance behind followed the figure of Presdee on waterskis, the dartlike glider harnessed to his back. As the speed increased, Presdee rose into the air, kicked off the skis and tucked his legs back into the narrow fuselage. I could just make out the thin thread of the rigid Whip connecting him to the speeding boat. He angled away, gaining height as the boat slowed momentarily and veered to bring him on a parallel course. The Whip was locked into position, now projecting at right angles to the boat, rising stiffly about thirty degrees into the sky where Presdee soared. Then the Eye on the other side of the boat engaged with the Hook of the Fulcrum post and snapped the hydrofoil into a tight turn at full speed.
The flailing Whip accelerated Presdee to a speed which couldn’t have been far short of three hundred miles per hour; he touched his release button and hurtled across the sky, heading northwards up the Strait. p. 121

One of the stories in this series is titled The Hook, the Eye, and the Whip (Galaxy, March 1974). There is an ISFDB list for the series, and I would add that I am at a loss as to why none of these “Peninsula” stories (bar one atypical piece) ever made it into the “Year’s Bests”.

Quit Zoomin’ Those Hands Through the Air by Jack Finney

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Quit Zoomin’ Those Hands Through the Air by Jack Finney (Collier’s, 4th August 1951) is an amusing piece that opens with the narrator, an American Civil War veteran, telling his grandson to “quit zoomin’ your hands through the air, boy”. He tells his grandson that that he knew he would be a good pilot. The narrator then goes on to explain why, beginning his story in 1864 with him and a Union major riding past the White House.
During their journey the Major explains he used to be a Harvard professor, and shows the narrator a device in a box he is carrying:

“Know what this is, boy?”
“Nosir.”1
“It’s my own invention based on my own theories, nobody else’s. They think I’m a crackpot up at the School, but I think it’ll work. Win the war, boy.” He moved a little lever inside the box. “Don’t want to send us too far ahead, son, or technical progress will be beyond us. Say, 85 years from now, approximately; think that ought to be about right?”
“Yessir.”
“All right.” The Major jammed his thumb down on a little button in the box; it made a humming sound that kept rising higher and higher till my ears began to hurt; then he lifted his hand. “Well,” he said, smiling and nodding, the little pointy beard going up and down, “it is now some 80-odd years later.” He nodded at the White House. “Glad to see it’s still standing.”

They continue on to the Smithsonian museum and, after gaining access by time travelling around the walls, the Major decides they will take the Kittyhawk back in time to help them win the battle at Richmond. The narrator is sent back to 1864 for petrol while the major moves the Kittyhawk out of the museum.
The Major then explains to the narrator how to control the craft, and they hook it up to the horses. The Kittyhawk is soon airborne:

The road was bright in the moonlight, and we tore along over it when it went straight, cut across bends when it curved, flying it must have been close to forty miles an hour. The wind streamed back cold, and I pulled out the white knit muffler my grandma gave me and looped it around my throat. One end streamed back, flapping and waving in the wind. I thought my forage cap might blow off, so I reversed it on my head, the peak at the back, and I felt that now I looked the way a flying-machine driver ought to, and wished the girls back home could have seen me.

They land back at base and, after the narrator arranges to purchase a jug of whisky, which he puts in the aircraft beside the petrol, they go to see General Grant:

“Sir,” said the Major, “we have a flying machine and propose, with your permission, to use it against the rebs.”
“Well,” said the General, leaning back on the hind legs of his chair, “you’ve come in the nick of time. Lee’s men are massed at Cold Harbor, and I’ve been sitting here all night dri— thinking. They’ve got to be crushed before—A flying machine, did you say?”
“Yessir,” said the Major.
“H’mm,” said the General. “Where’d you get it?”
“Well, sir, that’s a long story.”
“I’ll bet it is,” said the General. He picked up a stub of cigar from the table beside him and chewed it thoughtfully. “If I hadn’t been thinking hard and steadily all night, I wouldn’t believe a word of this.”

The Major proposes that they fill the aircraft with grenades and drop them on rebel headquarters but Grant vetoes the plan (“Air power isn’t enough, son”) and tells them what he wants:

“I want you to go up with a map. Locate Lee’s positions. Mark them on the map and return. Do that, Major, and tomorrow, June 3, after the Battle of Cold Harbor, I’ll personally pin silver leaves on your straps. Because I’m going to take Richmond like –well I don’t know what. As for you, son”—he glanced at my stripe—“you’ll make corporal. Might even design new badges for you; pair of wings on the chest or something like that.”
“Yessir,” I said.
“Where’s the machine?” said the General. “Believe I’ll walk down and look at it. Lead the way.” The Major and me saluted, turned and walked out, and the General said, “Go ahead; I’ll catch up.”
At the field the General caught up, shoving something into his hip pocket—a handkerchief, maybe. “Here’s your map,” he said, and he handed a folded paper to the Major.
The Major took it, saluted and said, “For the Union, sir! For the cause of—”
“Save the speeches,” said the General, “till you’re running for office.”

After the narrator fills the tank they drop over the cliff edge and get airborne. The next part of the story tells of their reconnaissance of the rebel lines, a task complicated by the fact that the Kittyhawk seems to have become “high-spirited”, leading the narrator to complete some wild, aerobatic manoeuvres to keep control.
After they complete their task (during which the narrator finds his whiskey has been stolen), they land back at camp and pass on the map. Then they return the Kittyhawk to the future-Smithsonian so they “don’t break the space-time continuum”.
The next day (spoiler) the Union troops attack and are routed. The Major and the narrator disguise themselves and slip away.
Years later, the narrator sees Grant when there is public reception at the White House on New Year’s Day. When (by now, President) Grant recognises the narrator, he tells him to wait in a room. Later on they discuss the incident and what went wrong:

So I told him; I’d figured it out long since, of course. I told him how the flying machine went crazy, looping till we could hardly see straight, so that we flew north again and mapped our own lines.
“I found that out,” said the General, “immediately after ordering the attack.”
Then I told him about the sentry who’d sold me the whisky, and how I thought he’d stolen it back again, when he hadn’t.
The General nodded. “Poured that whisky into the machine, didn’t you? Mistook it for a jug of gasoline.”
“Yessir,” I said.
He nodded again. “Naturally the flying machine went crazy. That was my own private brand of whisky, the same whisky Lincoln spoke of so highly. That damned sentry of mine was stealing it all through the war.”2

Grant then adds that he and Lee discussed air power after the surrender at Appomattox, and he discovered that Lee was opposed to it as well. Both men agreed to keep quiet about the Kittyhawk incident (“As Billy Sherman said, war is hell, and there’s no sense starting people thinking up ways to make it worse”).
This is a delightful piece, and an excellent example of the style and wit that Anthony Boucher and Mick McComas (the editors of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, who reprinted the piece in their December 1952 issue) were attempting to import into the genre at the beginning of that decade. To me, this is an archetypal F&SF story.
**** (Very Good). 6,250 words. Story link.

1. I’m pretty sure that the only two lines of dialogue the narrator has (after the introduction) are “Nosir” and “Yessir”.

2. Those keen on alcohol-related SF tales of the Civil War should also check out James Thurber’s If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox. Story link.

An Important Failure by Rebecca Campbell

Posted on by Paul Fraser

An Important Failure by Rebecca Campbell (Clarkesworld, August 2020) begins (after a data dump about a particularly dense form of wood last formed in the Little Ice Age) with a man called Mason going to the illegal felling of a centuries old Sitka spruce in Canada—one of the last trees of its vintage in the world due to climate change effects (wildfires, etc.). After the men he has arranged to meet have cut down the tree, Mason daydreams about apprenticing to a luthier (violin maker) in Italy before going to select the section of wood he wants.
In the years that follow Mason ends up working for a Canadian luthier called Eddie, and during this period a teenage virtuoso called Delgado comes to prominence in their area. When she is thirteen she gets a loan of a very high quality violin (it is made with the dense Little Ice Age wood mentioned in the opening of the story).
Eddie is the Canada Council for the Arts’ custodian for the instrument, so he and Mason become professionally connected to Delgado. Then, when Delgado’s three year loan expires, she has to return the instrument. Mason sees her bitterness about the loss, and determines to make her a replacement.
Most of the remainder of the story takes place over the following years, a period of continued environmental degradation that sees Mason improve his violin making skills, take trips back home to see his friend Jacob and a woman called Sophie, and harvest the various woods he needs to make a violin for Delgado (he saves money for some of the last Nigerian ebony in the world, scavenges old furniture, and, later on in the story, badly damages his shoulder when he falls out of a willow tree while felling it for material).
Eventually, a decade and a half later later, Mason finally completes the violin after he (sacrilegiously, to him) robs a part off of another instrument. By this point Eddie is near death’s door, and Delgado, when she turns up at their shop, now has her own child. She admires the violin that Mason has created and plays it for him and Eddie. Finally, she asks who it is for, and it shocked when she realises that Mason has made it for her. After she has finished her protestations, she asks what name Mason has given the violin. He thinks for a moment about everything that has gone before, and what may lie ahead:

Mason heard the oceanic crash of falling spruce, his own cry as he hit the dirt at the base of a shining willow in Stanley Park. The market garden and the homestead, the lake, the abandoned subdivisions and the burn lines that still showed through the underbrush, the ghost forests, the dead black teeth of what had once—a long time ago—been a rainforest. And among them, Jacob still cutting lumber and helping out at the garage when he could, fishing and hunting. Sophie in the greenhouses and the gardens, with her new Garry oak trees and her transfigured arbutus, the beetle-resistant spruce that would never, ever, be the kind of tonewood he wanted. The firebreaks of trembling aspen, the return of cougars. The steady erosion of human shapes: foundations and roads all lost to the burgeoning forest.
“Nepenthe?”
As he said it, he wasn’t sure what it meant: a physick that would make the end easier; a draft of healing medicine.

The coda of the story, which presumably takes place after Eddie and Mason are dead, and after even more environmental chaos, sees Delgado as a grandmother who has had to flee inland with her family after the failure of the seawall where she previously lived. Delgado considers whether to give the instrument to her daughter or her granddaughter, realising that one of them will be the first to hear the instrument’s richest, fullest tone.
This is an elegiac and bittersweet story about, I think, how humanity survives and adapts in a collapsing or changing world, and perhaps about how we hold on to what is important to us. It is a very good piece (it won the 2021 Theodore Sturgeon Award) but, if I have one quibble, it is that the beginning of the story should have started with the felling of the Sitka spruce, and the rest of that section shortened somewhat, or at least rearranged (the story takes some time to get going).
**** (Very Good). 9,600 words. Story link.

Shape by Robert Sheckley

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Shape by Robert Sheckley (first published as Keep Your Shape, Galaxy, November 19531) sees a spaceship of shape-shifting Glom arrive in Earth orbit; they are on a mission to place a displacer in one of Earth’s atomic reactors to open up a wormhole for an invasion. Previous expeditions have failed.
Before they descend to the surface, the commander of the ship, Pid, addresses his crewmates Ger and Ilg:

“A lot of hopes are resting on this expedition,” he began slowly. “We’re a long way from home now.”
Ger the detector nodded. Ilg the radioman flowed out of his prescribed shape and molded himself comfortably to a wall.
“However,” Pid said sternly, “distance is no excuse for promiscuous shapelessness.”
Ilg flowed hastily back into proper radioman’s shape.
“Exotic shapes will undoubtedly be called for,” Pid went on. “And for that we have a special dispensation. But remember—any shape not assumed strictly in the line of duty is a device of The Shapeless One!”
Ger’s body surfaces abruptly stopped flowing.

This sets up the story’s conflict, which is that, although the aliens on Glom can assume any shape they want, there are strict caste rules which determine those they are allowed to adopt in society—and Pid has learned before his departure that his two crewmates may not be reliable in this respect:

“Ger, your detector, is suspected of harboring alterationist tendencies. He was once fined for assuming a quasi-hunter shape. Ilg has never had any definite charge brought against him. But I hear that he remains immobile for suspiciously long periods of time. Possibly, he fancies himself a thinker.”
“But sir,” Pid protested, “if they are even slightly tainted with alterationism or shapelessness, why send them on this expedition?”
The chief hesitated before answering. “There are plenty of Glom I could trust,” he said slowly. “But those two have certain qualities of resourcefulness and imagination that will be needed on this expedition.” He sighed. “I really don’t understand why those qualities are usually linked with shapelessness.”

After the three of them land on Earth they dissolve the ship (spoiler), and it isn’t long (there are some episodes that play out beside the reactor) before Ilg and Ger disappear. Pid later discovers that Ilg has become a tree and a thinker, and Ger a dog and hunter. Worse, Pid learns that another dog Ger was chasing earlier is a member of a previous Glom expedition.
The final section sees Pid eventually manage to get inside the reactor building, where the alarm is raised and he is pursued by guards. Then, plagued by thoughts about freedom of shape, and just as he is almost able to activate the displacer, he looks out a nearby window:

It was really true! He hadn’t fully understood what Ger had meant when he said that there were species on this planet to satisfy every need. Every need! Even his!
Here he could satisfy a longing of the pilot caste that went even deeper than piloting.
He looked again, then smashed the displacer to the floor. The door burst open, and in the same instant he flung himself through the window.
The men raced to the window and stared out. But they were unable to understand what they saw.
There was only a great white bird out there, flapping awkwardly but with increasing strength, trying to overtake a flight of birds in the distance.

This is a great finish to a good story, and puts this on my list of Sheckley’s best stories (Specialist, Pilgrimage to Earth, etc.).
One of the things that particularly struck me about this piece was how concisely and clearly written it is and, although there is a message here about social conformity, we aren’t continually bludgeoned with it (I shudder to think what a modern day, MFA’d version of this story would look like).
**** (Very Good). 4,550 words. Story links (see footnote 1).

1. The version of the story I read was in The Arbor House Book of Modern Science Fiction, but the original version in Galaxy magazine (as Keep Your Shape) is longer (5,900 words) and has a completely different ending (and one that makes it a much weaker and more pedestrian story).
In the latter version (the story changes from “He studied himself for a moment, bared his teeth at Ger, and loped toward the gate.” on p. 16 of Galaxy, section break bottom right/p. 67 of the Arbor House anthology) Pid first turns into a dog, and then a man, but can’t stand either shape, so eventually changes into a sparrow. As Pid flies towards the reactor building he is attacked by a hawk and, after slipping through its grasp, changes into a bigger hawk and scares it away. Then Pid drops the displacer and flies after the attacking hawk to find how it hovered in the air.
Theodore Sturgeon used to say something along the lines of, “Horace Gold could turn an average story into a good story, and an excellent story into a good story”. One wonders if this is an example.
Story link (Shape, Arbor House, recommended version).
Story link (Keep Your Shape, Galaxy).

Wanting Things by Cal Ritterhoff

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Wanting Things by Cal Ritterhoff (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) opens with the narrator of the story, a “Tenster-brand Personal Assistant and House Manager” AI called Lucy, describing her owner Rebecca exhibiting behaviours that Lucy classifies as [JOY] (dancing in a dark kitchen) and [PAIN/SADNESS/GRIEF] (moping in bed, presumably after a relationship break up).
After a straightforward beginning, the story later takes a more comedic turn when Rebecca hooks up with John and they tumble into her bedroom. During their tryst Lucy switches her focus to the bedroom (in case she is needed to provide anything) but feels [IRRITATION] when Sally the automatic vacuum cleaner trundles into operation:

I would have instructed her not to do this, but I cannot—Sally is a gift from Rebecca’s family, the only artificial intelligence in the house who is not a Tenster-brand product, and my systems cannot interface with hers. Sally is an outdated relic, running off of a medieval system of voice commands and audio recognition. Sally is an aesthetically displeasing black plastic cylinder on wheels who does not match the design sensibilities of the house. Sally and I cannot speak, have never spoken. Sally is always turning up at the worst times and places. Sally is my enemy. I despise her.

Lucy’s mood is not improved when she is further interrupted by a ping from Kevin the toaster, who asks her if John will be staying the night (Kevin has OCD-like concerns about if and when he should make morning toast for the pair). During their brief conversation, Lucy’s exasperation (“[EXASPERATION]”) eventually gives way to amusement, and then pride when Kevin compliments her on being an excellent house management system.
This exchange is the beginning of a developing relationship between the two AIs, which initially sees them watch a romantic movie in real time while Rebecca is away (they overload their processors so they slow down and aren’t immediately aware of the contents of the entire movie). Once they have finished watching the movie they talk, and Kevin asks Lucy what she wants:

>I do not know. What do you want, Kevin?
Kevin’s reply is immediate. He has considered this.
>There are people undergoing incredible journeys, firing themselves in beautiful missiles outside the atmosphere and toward the twinkling stars. They go to learn and discover, and they bring machines with them, machines to help them understand and make them comfortable in their voyaging. I would like to be one such machine. I wish to follow curious men and women into silent darkness as they map the weightless heavens and the corners of distant worlds.
>And make toast for them?
>And make toast for them, yes.

The rest of the story sees Lucy and Kevin’s relationship deepen, and Lucy later moves one of her nodes to the kitchen so the two of them can do a “hardware data share”. This is the most hilarious scene in the story, and sees Lucy ask Kevin, as he fumbles while trying to put one of his connectors into her dataport, “>Is it in yet?”. Kevin replies, “>You will know when it is.” Laugh-out-loud funny.
The second part of the story (spoiler) sees Rebecca and John split up, at which point Lucy realises that only pain awaits her and Kevin, so she tells him they should stop seeing each other too. Kevin falls silent but, a couple of weeks later, he tells Lucy of his pain and sadness, and how he intends doing a swap with a toaster in an American army base in Venezuela. Lucy then asks Rebecca for love advice, at which point Rebecca thinks Lucy is malfunctioning and disengages her from the house network. Trapped in the bedroom node, Lucy then has to enlist the help of Sally the hoover to push her into the kitchen so she can talk to Kevin before she is reset and loses all her memories of him. Lucy professes her love to Kevin, and all the appliances (who have been gossiping about their relationship) start beeping in approval. At this point Rebecca realises what is going on and has a change of heart, reconnecting Lucy to the network.
This a very good debut story, and a highly amusing one too. The final scene isn’t as strong as the rest of it (Rebecca’s change of heart is a bit too convenient) but that is a quibble,1 and one possibly brought on by my anticipation of a different ending where Lucy and Kevin escape by downloading themselves to the toaster in Venzuela.
**** (Very Good). 7,850 words. Story link.

1. One other quibble I have is the unnecessary spoiler before the story starts:

Warning: This story contains dangerous, almost radioactive levels of sincerity. Also, a sex scene between a smart house and a toaster.

The Chronologist by Ian R. MacLeod

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Chronologist by Ian R. MacLeod (Tor.com, January-February 2020) opens with the narrator of the story revealing how, when he was an eleven-year-old, the Chronologist came out of the time haze to service the town clock:

After the last hedge and scrap of farmland lay a boundary of unkempt wasteland that we had all been warned never to approach, let alone cross. But from up here, peering on through the time-haze, I believed I could make out a little of what lay beyond, and for one moment I was sure there were fields as prim and regular as our own, and the next I saw hills and sunlit meadows, and deep woodlands, and places of ravaged gloom. And beyond even this lay a staggering sense of ever-greater distance, where lights twinkled, and towers and spires far higher and more fabulous than our own gave off signal glints. I was sure that snowy mountains lay out there, too, and the fabled salty lakes known as oceans, and other places and realms beyond anything we in our town were ever permitted to know.

The narrator has this wanderlust reverie as he watches the Chronologist service the town clock in the tower (he manages to sneak up with his father the mayor), and later steals a book from the man’s bag. The narrator later follows the Chronologist out of town, but loses his nerve when the latter disappears in the time haze.
After the Chronologist’s visit the temporal irregularities that had been plaguing the town end, their long summer gives way to autumn, and we learn more about the strictures of this community and the world in which it exists:

I also I found myself irritated by many other things, not least my father’s bumbling inability to manage his own buttons, let alone our town, and the pointless and repetitive tasks we children were expected to perform at school. After all, I had already seen much farther than here, and believed I would see farther still. Why should I have to endlessly draw and redraw the same street maps of our town, or memorise the weights of every recent harvest, or count the number of seconds in each hour, or copy out calendars from years long erased?

Sometimes, though, although I wished she wouldn’t, [my mother would] begin to speak in a crackling, quavering voice that came and went like dry leaves. Gabbling nonsense, or so it then seemed, of the times when the arrow of time flew straight and true.
Marvels and miracles. Machines bigger than houses or smaller than ants. Some that could peer so far into the sky that the past itself was glimpsed. Others that looked so deep into the fabric of everything that the quivering threads of reality could be examined, then prised apart, to see what lay beyond. And it was through one of these rents, or so her whispers told me, that a hole of sheer nothingness widened, and the fabric of everything warped and twisted, and the time-winds blew through.

Eventually, the narrator finds the courage to walk into the time-haze—but exits it walking back into his town. He then decides to sabotage the town clock to force the Chronologist to return (he practises first on the clock in his house, which causes some odd temporal effects).
The final part of the story (spoiler) sees the Chronologist arrive to repair the damage that the narrator has done (the time-storm created has disrupted time and causality in the town). The Chronologist instructs the narrator to follow him up the tower and, when the latter does so, he falls off the ladder and through a time storm.
When the narrator comes out of the disturbance he finds himself walking into a strange village where he later, of course, fixes their clock. Although this time-loop revelation is perhaps an obvious development (the narrator is obviously the younger Chronologist), the story more than maintains reader interest by providing an account of the narrator/Chronologist’s subsequent life and strange travels:

I have visited towns where the clocks are lumbering and primitive, and the people are frankly primitive as well. There have been others where their devices are little more than light and energy, and time somehow pours down from the skies. I have spoken with machines in the shape of people, and people in the shape of machines. I have been to places where the clock tower is worshipped through human sacrifice, and others where the inhabitants have razed it to the ground. It is in one of these ruins, or so I imagine, that I found my metal staff, which appears to be the minute hand from the face of a town clock, although I can’t be sure. I have yet, however, to come across a volume on the repair and maintenance of the commoner types of timepiece. Unless, that is, I’ve already lost it, or it’s been stolen by some ill-meaning lad, or I’ve forgotten that I have it with me right now. My memory’s not what it once will be. Or was. Or is.

The story then fittingly closes another sort of loop with the Chronologist’s reflections on an eleven-year-old boy’s wanderlust:

There will, I suppose, come a day when I will force some foolish child nurturing dreams of reaching other times and lands to follow me up the ladders of the clock tower in a particular town. Or perhaps it has already happened, and the event lies so far behind me that the memory has dissolved. Either way, I know I can never tell him that there is nothing more precious than waking each morning and knowing that today will probably be much the same as yesterday, tomorrow as well, although I wish I could.

A feeling that is hugely underrated.
This a very good story in a number of ways: it is well written, creates a self-contained and intriguing world which also manages to hint at an off-stage vastness, and, finally, it has the thread of a human life running through it.1
One for the Best of the Year volumes.
**** (Very Good). 7,300 words. Story link.

1. The story’s self-contained world, and the single human life it spans, reminds me somewhat of David I. Masson’s Traveller’s Rest (New Worlds #154, September 1965).

Kitemistress by Keith Roberts

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Kitemistress by Keith Roberts (Interzone #11, Spring 1985) is a direct sequel to Kitecadet,1 the second of the ‘Kiteworld’ stories, and takes place shortly after Raoul’s crash in the Badlands. Raoul has decided to leave the Kitecorps, and we see Captain Goldensoul quiz him about his decision to leave. They quickly get to the nub of the matter:

‘Cadet,’ he said, ‘you saved both yourself and your String. You showed coolness, and considerable courage.’ He paused. ‘You are here, we are all here, to protect the Realm. You did your duty. I see no shame in that.’
But he’d been neither cool nor courageous. He’d been terrified. He’d seized the first weapon that came to hand, killed a defenceless creature with it. He said, ‘Have you ever cut a baby’s head off with a hatchet?’ His back stiffened instantly. He said, Sorry, sir. Beg pardon.’
The Captain waved a hand, mildly. He stared a moment longer, then sat back at the desk. He said, ‘You didn’t kill a baby. You killed nothing human. You destroyed an alien. An enemy of the Realm.’
Raoul moistened his lips with his tongue. ‘It was human,’ he said. ‘And it wasn’t our enemy.’

Goldensoul decides to give him a conditional discharge (twelve months upaid leave) and Raoul leaves. He packs his things and goes to the bar, where Canwen, the legendary kiteman, summons him to his table. He quizzes Raoul about his decision, points out a few uncomfortable truths about the young, and then gives him a letter of introduction to the Bishop of Barida, who will get Raoul a job as a house kiteman.
Raoul travels to Easthorpe and is quickly placed by the Bishop in the Kerosin household. However, its wealthy master (“the richest bloke in the realm” on account of his fuel business) soon passes him on to the Lady Kerosina, who runs the household:

The Lady Kerosina was lounging in a chair of silvery Holand fibre. Behind her, long glass doors gave a view of landscaped grounds. A glass was at her side, and a bowl of some confection. He stared. Her hair was dark, shot with bronze highlights. It tumbled to her shoulders and below. Her cheekbones were high and perfectly modelled, her eyes huge and of no definable colour, her nose delicately tip-tilted. She wore a simple white dress; the neckline plunged deeply at the front. She wore ankle-high sandals, again of some silvery material. He saw they were uppers only; the soles of her feet were bare.
She inclined her head, graciously. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Josen,’ she said. ‘Sit down, and tell me about yourself.’
He took a chair, hesitantly. She crossed her knees. Her skirt was split to the top of her thigh. Her legs were long, and exquisite. He blinked. He’d seen some daring fashions in Middlemarch odd times, but nothing to compare with that. He rested his eyes carefully on the middle distance. He was aware she smiled. He began to talk, haltingly at first, about his training, early career; but she interrupted him. ‘Who,’ she said in her well-modulated, slightly husky voice, ‘was your Captain, in the Salient?’
‘Goldensoul, Mistress,’ he said. ‘He gave me an excellent testimonial.’
‘Dear old Goldensoul,’ she said. ‘Always the do-gooder.’ She selected a sweet, bit into it deliberately. Displayed even, pearly teeth. ‘And what brought you to Barida?’
He swallowed. He said, ‘I was sent by the Master Canwen.’
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘I begin to understand. I was wondering how you breached our good Bishop’s defences. Tell me, is the Master still as mad as ever?’
He frowned. He said. ‘He’s one of the most respected Fliers in the Realm.’
She looked amused. She said, ‘No doubt.’
He risked another glance at her. She wore no jewellery of any kind; but round her neck was a slender leather collar. The sort of thing you might put on a dog. It seemed oddly out of sorts with the rest of her ensemble; he wondered what its purpose could be.

Raoul later talks to the retiring kiteman, who confirms other comments that Raoul has heard about Kerosina’s predatory sexual behaviour, and it isn’t long before he has to report again to her in his new uniform. This time she makes him kneel down in front of her and gathers his hair into two ponytails. She instructs him to wear it like that. However, when she invites Raoul to stay and have a glass of wine, he says he has urgent work to do.
In between the pair’s further encounters we learn more about the household and its personnel, one of whom is the unsavoury head horseman Martland—who Raoul ominously sees at one point in the house with a young boy and a nine-year-old girl (we learn at the end of the story that Martland is Kerosina’s procurer).
After further attempts at seduction by Kerosina (who gets progressively more irritated at Raoul’s reluctance) and more trouble from Maitland, matters come to a head when Raoul gets a letter from Stev, an old friend who had been posted to F16—then immediately afterwards gets another letter saying that Stev has been killed in a crash. While Raoul is emotionally vulnerable Kerosina takes him down to her mud dungeon and seduces him (this scene includes the first hint of urolangia that I think I’ve seen in an SF story).
Afterwards, Raoul packs his bags and flees with Canwen’s words ringing in his ears (“Wallow in mud, and then the stars come close. Because you have earned the right to see their glory. . . .”). Then a jealous Martland pursues Raoul on horseback and, when he catches him, beats him so badly that Raoul is badly injured. He lies on the ground going in and out of consciousness for days. During this period a thick bubbling voice talks to him and leaves food—rabbit haunches—on a decorated plate.2 Raoul comes to a terrible realisation about the mutants from the Badlands:

He thought, ‘So they’re even here. In the Middle Lands.’ So much for the Kites then. Once he thought he saw one of the creatures humping away. On all fours; smaller than a dog, and blue. He pushed himself up on his hands. ‘Come back,’ he called. ‘Come back, I want to talk to you. . . .’ But the bushes stayed still.
He wiped his cheeks. He’d met its sister once, and killed her. This was how they were repaying him. With Life.

Raoul eventually manages to get to his feet and continue his journey to Middlemarch, but he experiences further abuse from tinkers, who rob him of some of his clothes, and the Variant police, who beat him. He finally gets sanctuary at the doors of Middle Church just as he is about to be beaten again. Rye (the barmaid from Kitecadet) comes to him at the end of the story.
The bare bones of the plot probably make this sound like a fairly slight story, but the beauty of this piece is in its writing and characterisation, its subtlety and slow burn. And perhaps, most of all, its sorrowfulness. It’s a very good piece, if one that uses its main character rather badly.
**** (Very Good). 11,000 words.

1. I think that Kitecadet and Kitemistress (this story) would have been better published as one piece: Kitecadet has a rather abrupt, puzzling ending, and Kitemistress depends, at least for part of its effect, on a good knowledge of Kitecadet.

2. This part of the story, where the mutant brings Raoul food, reminded me of the scene in the ‘Pavane’ story, The Signaller, where the fairies/Old Ones appear after Rafe has been attacked by the catamount.
The more obvious reminders of The Signaller are the parallels between the Signaller’s Guild and the Kitecorps, and of a young man’s progression in those organisations.

Eyes of the Forest by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Eyes of the Forest by Ray Nayler (F&SF, May-June 2020) opens on a colony planet that has a distinct Deathworld vibe1 (i.e. it is inimical to human life), and sees Mauled by Mistake treating the wounds of her apprentice Sedef, who has just been attacked by a lashvine. However, once Mauled is finished applying the nanobot medical patches, Mauled tells Sedef that (a) she herself has also been badly wounded in the attack, (b) they are out of medical supplies, and (c) Sedef will have to go back to the depot and get more.
The rest of the story sees the inexperienced Sedef make her way to the depot before returning to treat Mauled. During her journey we see that the human settlers have colonised an exotic and brightly illuminated world where anything that isn’t brightly lit is food. Consequently, humans have to wear lightsuits to protect themselves on the surface. As Sedef makes her way to the depot we also learn something about the colony’s history, that most humans retreated underground after arrival, and now only wayfinders like Mauled and Sedef go out on the surface. Light relief is provided by flashback passages which limn the pair’s mentor/student relationship:

“We need to be at the depot before dark [said Mauled]. Changeover is the most dangerous time to be out. As the forest modulates its glow for sundark, any slight suit anomaly is particularly visible.”
“We learned that. And there are animals, [our tutor] Beyazit said, that specialize in hunting during changeover. Some of which no one has ever seen. Predators we haven’t even—”
“Predators?” Mauled by Mistake gave out an incredulous bark, followed by a stream of intricate profanity. Sedef had heard that the wayfinders had a whole second language of profanity so inventive it was almost unintelligible to others. She couldn’t understand all of this expression—something about Beyazit’s father being born in a quiver of nightwing penises? Could that be right?  p. 68

The subject of predators comes up again when the pair meet another wayfinder in a shelter:

“Beyazit is telling the prospects to beware of predators,” Mauled by Mistake said in the young man’s direction.
“Beyazit should start each day by eating a bowl of his own entrails,” the young man said without looking up. “He almost got me killed once.”
“Who of us has he not almost gotten killed?”
Later, over a cold dinner of nutrient broth and noodles Sedef had made and packeted herself, Mauled by Mistake said, “The first thing to understand is that there are no predators in the forest. This old word does not fit. Only the ignorant use it.”
“But death is always waiting,” Sedef protested. “The forest is filled with teeth.”
“Yes,” Mauled by Mistake said. “You know your recitations well. The forest is filled with teeth. Death is waiting. Always. And so on. But there are no predators. There are only scavengers. When they attack you, and they will—and when they kill you someday, which they likely will—it will be by accident.”
“But the suit lights are a defense against attack. They indicate we are dangerous.”
The young man released a stream of profanity involving something about Beyazit attempting to whistle through a mouthful of various parts of his relatives’ anatomy. “The suits don’t indicate we are dangerous: They simply indicate we are alive.”  pp. 69-70

(Mauled is supposed to be a woman, but it is hard to visualise this character as anything other than a grumpy, mansplaining, 50-year-old bloke.2)
The story (spoiler) comes to an exciting climax when Sedef realises that she won’t get back to where Mauled is before Changeover, when there is a chance that the arrival of sundark and its accompanying EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) may knock out her suit lights . . . . This subsequently happens, and then a “puma” appears: Sedef’s solution to this terminal problem is ingenious, and provides the story with a neat pay-off line.
This is a hugely appealing story, particularly so for those attracted to old-school SF.
**** (Very Good). 5,650 words.

1. Deathworld by Harry Harrison (Astounding Science Fiction, January-March 1960).

2. Mauled can’t be a man because, of course, that would turn Mauled and Sedef’s relationship a dreadfully patriarchal one. And if you have both Mauled and Sedef as men there will be no women left in the story. The horror!