Tag: 4*

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol in Prose: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, 1843) is a story that I suspect everyone in the Western Hemisphere knows but, if you don’t, here is a recap of the five staves:
Stave One (19 pp.) sees a miserly old businessman called Scrooge visited in his ill-heated office by his nephew, who is full of Xmas spirit; Scrooge Bah Humbugs him:

‘If I could work my will,’ said Scrooge indignantly, ‘every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!’

After the nephew leaves Scrooge then repels two chuggers who visit wanting donations for the poor and destitute (Scrooge asks, “Are there no workhouses [. . .] prisons?” etc.). Finally, Scrooge reluctantly gives his clerk, Bob Cratchit, Christmas Day off before going home.
Later that night Scrooge is disturbed by (his ex-business partner) Marley’s Ghost and his clanking chains. Marley tells Scrooge that he is condemned to wander the Earth because he didn’t involve himself with the affairs of men when he was alive, but that Scrooge can avoid the same fate if he pays attention to the three ghosts that will visit him.
There are some nice turns of phrase in this stave (when Scrooge thinks Marley is a figment of his indigestion, he says, ‘There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!’), but there is also some padding/rambling too.
Stave Two (18 pp.) sees the arrival of The Ghost of Christmas Past (which has a jet of light shooting out of its head), and Scrooge is taken back to his past. We see Scrooge at school; his sister arriving to take him home; as an apprentice at Fezziwig’s, who is a generous and genial boss; and breaking up with his fiancé. Last of all we see him watching the latter and her future family—and at one point her husband returns home with the news that he saw Scrooge working in his office when Marley was on the point of death.
Eventually Scrooge begs the ghost to stop the visions and, when he pulls the ghost’s cap onto its head, the light is extinguished and he slips back to sleep. Even though the ghosts’ visits have just begun, it is already clear that Scrooge has already begun to crack and will duly reform his character.
This section is probably the baggiest of them all, and I didn’t entirely understand some of the references or scenes.1
Stave Three (23 pp.) sees the Ghost of Christmas Present arrive and take Scrooge through the bustling town to Bob Cratchit’s house (the level of detail provided on their journey is very suggestive of the time and place). There, Scrooge watches Bob’s family have their Xmas dinner, and sees Tiny Tim, Cratchit’s crippled son, for the first time. Later, Scrooge learns of the boy’s fate:

‘A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!’ Which all the family re-echoed.
‘God bless us every one!’ said Tiny Tim, the last of all.
He sat very close to his father’s side upon his little stool. Bob held his withered little hand in his, as if he loved the child, and wished to keep him by his side, and dreaded that he might be taken from him.
‘Spirit,’ said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, ‘tell me if Tiny Tim will live.’
‘I see a vacant seat,’ replied the Ghost, ‘in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.’
‘No, no,’ said Scrooge. ‘Oh, no, kind Spirit! say he will be spared.’
‘If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my race,’ returned the Ghost, ‘will find him here. What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.’
Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.

Directly after this exchange, Cratchit proposes a toast to Scrooge—against the protestations of his wife—and a temporary pall is cast over the feast.
The ghost takes Scrooge away to see the Christmases taking place in a miners’ hut and a lighthouse before they arrive at Scrooge’s nephew’s family dinner. Yet again Scrooge hears himself talked about—this time in pitying terms—but once more there is a toast to his health.
At the end of Scrooge’s foray the Ghost of Christmas Present reveals two children hiding under his shroud:

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
‘Spirit! are they yours?’ Scrooge could say no more.
‘They are Man’s,’ said the Spirit, looking down upon them. ‘And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!’ cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. ‘Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end!’
‘Have they no refuge or resource?’ cried Scrooge.
‘Are there no prisons?’ said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. ‘Are there no work-houses?’

The moral of the story, I suppose: give generously to relieve want.
Stave 4 (15 pp.) is the shortest—and perhaps eeriest—of the three ghostly visits, and begins with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come showing Scrooge a group of businessmen talking about someone who has died (during this encounter and the subsequent ones (spoiler), the person referred to is obviously Scrooge, but he does not realise this until the final revelation). After this the ghost and Scrooge go to the home of a fence who is appraising goods stolen from the house of a dead man (which include the fine shirt that a woman has taken off his corpse). Next, they see the body, whose face is covered, before going on to Bob Cratchit’s house: there, we learn that Tiny Tim has also died.
Finally, the ghost takes him to a graveyard, where Scrooge sees an untended grave and realises it is his own—Scrooge breaks down and asks the ghost whether it is possible for him to change the future.
Stave 5 (7 pp.) sees Scrooge wake in his own bed on Christmas morning—and he quickly sets about changing his ways. First he sends a big turkey to Bob Cratchit’s, then he goes to his nephew’s house for Christmas lunch. The next day, after teasing Cratchit about his late arrival, he gives Bob a pay rise and promises to help his family (Scrooge promises to discuss these matters in the afternoon, “over a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop”2).
In conclusion, I enjoyed this story a lot more than I thought I would, especially given (a) my overfamiliarity with the plot and (b) a distant memory of it being written in old-fashioned prose. Generally, though, the writing didn’t feel like that at all, and the story moves along reasonably slickly with some stand-out scenes (the Cratchit’s Christmas dinner, the scene in the fence’s house, etc.). If I do have a reservation it is about the moral of the story which, superficially, seems to be an exhortation to rich people to give to the poor—but only so they will be thought well of by others and not forgotten (I presume that nowadays Scrooge would do some politically correct messaging on Twitter instead). For me, however, the more admirable behaviour in the story is that of Bob Cratchit and Scrooge’s nephew: the kind things they have to say about their antithesis at their Christmas dinners is a properly non-transactional form of altruism.
**** (Very Good). 30,200 words. Story link.

1. One part of the story which lost me was a passage which refers to Ali Baba and various other childhood characters. Footnote 31 (in the Oxford edition) explains these various references, including the information that “Valentine . . . and his wild brother, Orson: [are] the heroes of a fifteenth century French romance, The History of two Valyannte Brethren, Valentyne and Orson, which became a popular English children’s story.”

2. Footnote 90 explains that “smoking bishop [is] a mulled wine drink composed of wine, oranges, sugar, and spices, so called for its rich purple colour.”
There is a recipe here, and I was, in a moment of misplaced seasonal enthusiasm (Bah Humbug), going to try it—but it seems a bit of a faff.

A Midwinter’s Tale by Michael Swanwick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Midwinter’s Tale by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 1988)1 opens with a far-future soldier, who is trying to seduce a woman, tell her a tale about his childhood:

That Christmas Eve is an island of stability in my sea-changing memories, as solid in my mind as the Stone House itself, that Neolithic cavern in which we led such basic lives that I was never quite sure in which era of history we dwelt. Sometimes the men came in from the hunt, a larl or two pacing ahead content and sleepy-eyed, to lean bloody spears against the walls, and it might be that we lived on Old Earth itself then. Other times, as when they brought in projectors to fill the common room with colored lights, scintillae nesting in the branches of the season’s tree, and cool, harmless flames dancing atop the presents, we seemed to belong to a much later age, in some mythologized province of the future.  p. 24

There are other exotic details:

Before I could grow angry, my cousins hurried by, on their way to hoist the straw men into the trees out front, and swept me up along with them. Uncle Chittagong, who looked like a lizard and had to stay in a glass tank for reasons of health, winked at me as I skirled past. From the corner of my eye, I saw my second-eldest sister beside him, limned in blue fire.  p. 25

The central episode of the story occurs when Flip, the narrator, gets bored with a procession outside and returns to the Stone House; while he is at the fireside a larl, a large predatory beast indigenous to the planet, comes out of the shadows and, to Flip’s surprise, starts speaking to him.
The larl begins by telling Flip how his kind pass on their memories by eating the brains of their dead, and how “he” was eating his grandfather’s when humans first came to this planet (presumably this is one of those inherited memories). The larl goes on to tell him that, after a period of peace between his people and the new arrivals, one of the larls killed a human. The man’s wife, Magda, pursued the larl on her snowstrider, even though she had her young baby with her, and chased the larl to his people’s sacrifice rock (the larl realised he could not outrun the woman and her machine, so decided to pass on the information he had gathered about how to evade her—temporarily at least—to his people).
Magda catches up with the larl at the rock, and watches from a distance while other larls kill and eat her quarry. She notes (spoiler) how they react when they absorb the creature’s flesh and knowledge—and then sees them turn towards her. They hunt her down, a long process that eventually forces her, after she loses the snowstrider, to circle back to the sacrifice rock. There she lays her baby down and offers herself up: when the larls kill and consume her, they become more than animals:

Here the larl touched me for the first time, that heavy black paw like velvet on my knee, talons sheathed. “Are you following this?” he asked. “Can you separate truth from fantasy, tell what is fact and what the mad imagery of emotions we did not share? No more could I. All that, the first birth of human young on this planet, I experienced in an instant. Blind with awe, I understood the personal tragedy and the communal triumph of that event, and the meaning of the lives and culture behind it. A second before, I lived as an animal, with an animal’s simple thoughts and hopes. Then I ate of your ancestor and was lifted all in an instant halfway to godhood.
“As the woman had intended. She had died thinking of the child’s birth, in order that we might share in it. She gave us that. She gave us more. She gave us language. We were wise animals before we ate her brain, and we were People afterward. We owed her so much. And we knew what she wanted from us.” The larl stroked my cheek with his great, smooth paw, the ivory claws hooded but quivering slightly, as if about to awake.
I hardly dared breathe.  p. 37-38

The larl goes tells Flip that his people took the baby back to the humans’ Captain, and how the two groups lived in peace thereafter. The larl adds that they didn’t tell the Captain about the woman, and that they take a human every now and then to maintain their closeness to humanity. He then tells Flip that, if he is good, then maybe it will be him they eat.
The last section returns to the soldier at the beginning of the story (indentifiable now as the older Flip), where we see him try to complete his seduction. This part artfully makes the older Flip’s world more real while making his childhood world more doubtful: was it something he imagined, something that was real, or was the larl telling him a story?

Did any of this actually happen? Sometimes I wonder. But it’s growing late, and your parents are away. My room is small but snug, my bed warm but empty. We can burrow deep in the blankets and scare away the cavebears by playing the oldest winter games there are.
You’re blushing! Don’t tug away your hand. I’ll be gone soon to some distant world to fight in a war for people who are as unknown to you as they are to me. Soldiers grow old slowly, you know. We’re shipped frozen between the stars. When you are old and plump and happily surrounded by grandchildren, I’ll still be young and thinking of you. You’ll remember me then, and our thoughts will touch in the void. Will you have nothing to regret? Is that really what you want?
Come, don’t be shy. Let’s put the past aside and get on with our lives.
That’s better. Blow the candle out, love, and there’s an end to my tale.
All this happened long ago, on a planet whose name has been burned from my memory.2

This is very well told story, rich in detail, and even the possible ludicrousness of the memories-from-brains gimmick didn’t register for a couple of days. A deserving winner of that year’s Asimov’s Science Fiction Reader’s Poll.
**** (Very good). 5,950 words.

1. The 1989 Asimov’s Science Fiction Reader’s Poll Winners at ISFDB. It is worth comparing this list with the Hugo nominees and the Nebula nominees. They are all quite different that year.

2. I note that this section (I haven’t checked the rest of it) is rewritten for the Spirits of Christmas, 1989 anthology version. Original in normal font, revision in italics:

Here the larl touched me for the first time, that heavy black paw like velvet on my knee, talons sheathed.

[No change]

“Are you following this?” he asked. “Can you separate truth from fantasy, tell what is fact and what the mad imagery of emotions we did not share? No more could I. All that, the first birth of human young on this planet, I experienced in an instant.

“Can you understand?” he asked. “What it meant to me? All that, the first birth of human young on this planet, I experienced in an instant. I felt it with full human comprehension.

Blind with awe, I understood the personal tragedy and the communal triumph of that event, and the meaning of the lives and culture behind it.

I understood the personal tragedy and the community triumph, and the meaning of the lives and culture behind it.

A second before, I lived as an animal, with an animal’s simple thoughts and hopes. Then I ate of your ancestor and was lifted all in an instant halfway to godhood.

[“all” deleted]

“As the woman had intended. She had died thinking of the child’s birth, in order that we might share in it.

“As the woman had hoped I would be. She had died with her child’s birth foremost in her mind.

She gave us that. She gave us more. She gave us language. We were wise animals before we ate her brain, and we were People afterward. We owed her so much. And we knew what she wanted from us.”

[No change]

The larl stroked my cheek with his great, smooth paw, the ivory claws hooded but quivering slightly, as if about to awake.
I hardly dared breathe.

[“smooth” changed to “velvety”, “hooded” changed to “sheathed”]

NB The first two quoted sections are from the reprinted version I read (but have the Asimov’s page reference); the third quoted section is from the Asimov’s version.

The Dolphin and the Deep by Thomas Burnett Swann

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Dolphin and the Deep by Thomas Burnett Swann (Science Fantasy #60, August 1963) is, like nearly all of Swann’s work, a mythological fantasy. This one is set in Cretan times, and tells of a young man called Bear and his travels around the Mediterranean and Africa.
The story itself opens with Bear asking the captain of the ship he is travelling on to let him visit a passing island. After Bear swims ashore he explores, and later discovers a deserted palace. Then, while swimming back to the ship, he is accosted by a playful triton (merman) called Astyanax. When they start talking, Astyanax asks Bear if he was searching for Circe—the goddess who used to live there a long time ago:

A hundred years ago—so the dolphins say—a galley came for her, rowed by pygmies. Bears and rabbits gathered to say good-bye. She smiled at them and spoke a few words—multiply, don’t eat each other, and that kind of thing. When she boarded the galley, a black boy fanned her with ostrich feathers, and a crimson canopy shielded her from the sun. One of the bears—you will love this part—jumped into the water and swam after her, but she waved him back and disappeared into the misty south.”
“Did the bear get back to shore?”
“Oh, yes. His friends helped him up the stairs. He became, in fact, something of a hero.” [Astyanax] hesitated and smiled sheepishly. “I made up the bear because I thought he would please you.”
“It was a charming touch. But tell me more about Circe. Was she still beautiful? Odysseus knew her many centuries ago.”
“The dolphins say she was like the sun, white and burning. When she left it was the sun sinking into the sea.”  p. 6

After learning more about Circe, Bear decides to set off to Libya to search for her, and he convinces Astyanax to come with him.
The passage above is a good example of the kind of material that follows, which is mostly a series of gentle, episodic adventures with a growing band of companions—but there are several setbacks en route, beginning with Bear overhearing a sailors’ plot to sell himself and the triton into slavery. The pair dive off the ship to escape, and Astyanax cuts loose the dinghy for Bear’s use. However, an albino dolphin (who Bear noticed at the island) appears and overturns the dinghy, and the boat’s crew quickly recaptures them.
When the pair eventually arrive at the slave market, Astyanax is quickly sold but, before his new (and scary) female owner can take possession, the triton is stolen by two brothers. Bear escapes during the confusion and quickly manages to track down Astyanax, who has been taken by two northern brothers called Balder and Frey. The two turn out to be innocents but, as Bear negotiates Astyanax’s freedom, they are found by the sailors who were trying to enslave them. A fight ensues and then, after they see off their attackers, Bear, Astyanax and the brothers approach a young man called Arun with a view to buying his boat, Halcyon. Arun decides instead that he wants to go with them on their quest, so they all set off together. They are joined by Atthis the albino dolphin, who, Astyanax says, only meant to surface near their dinghy not underneath it.
A month later they reach Artemis, reprovision, and set off for The Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar). During this journey a comradeship develops, and Bear becomes increasingly infatuated by the thought of Circe:

Lit by the torch, the mast seemed a burning tree; somewhere ashore a wolf cub howled in hunger and, very close, a lamb bleated in terror. I thought of Circe, the end of all my voyages, the last and the loveliest of the will-o-the-wisps I had chased through twenty-five years. A hyacinth over the hill, a murex at the bottom of the sea: the distant and the perilous. I had sometimes loved in the past, for a week or a month; one girl had tired me with tears, another with laughter; I had tired of red hair and dark and hair the colour of barley when the harvesters come with their scythes; and most of all, of the waiting which love demands, the standing still while the moon curves up the sky and the birds fly south. But who could weary of Circe? Only Odysseus had left her, because of home.  p. 24

More adventures ensue when they pass out of the Mediterranean: a Carthaginian vessel warns them not to go further south, but they continue anyway. Later they see a phoenix on the beach, and go onshore to investigate, and see if they can maybe get a feather. Frey wanders off and is captured by two harpies, who fly off with him. The rest of them catch a third harpy and force her to take them to their nest. They eventually rescue Frey, but only with the help of the harpy they captured, who ends up dead like the others.
Later they begin close in on Circe, or what remains of her, when Atthis brings a Cretan sword up from the depths. Bear’s exploration of the wreck—with Atthis’s assistance—provides a passage that illustrates Swann’s ability to combine reality, history, and myth:

I straddled her back and held [Atthis’s] dorsal fin. Her tail flashed up and down, and we foamed toward the sunken ship while Astyanax trailed in our wake. Elephants along the bank, lifting water in their sinuous trunks, stared at us with lordly indolence. Beyond the mouth of the river we paused and circled. Directly below us a galley wavered in the lucid depths.
Then she dove. On the floor of the sea, anemones pulsed their tentacles in a purple twilight. Diminutive lantern fish, with rows of luminescent spots, twinkled from our path. In a forest of rockweed a blood starfish curled its crimson legs. Redbeard sponges clung to the planks of the ship, which rested as lightly on the bottom as if it had settled at anchor. We circled the deck and found the cabin, whose roof lay open to the water. Hurriedly we searched the room.
The furnishings were Cretan: a terra cotta priestess with snakes in her hands; a tiny gold frog embedded with pearls; a tall-backed chair in the shape of a throne. I opened a chest and lifted a woman’s robe, with a bell-like skirt, puffing sleeves, and a tight bodice cut low to expose the breasts. For an instant, as the gown unfolded, Circe herself seemed to rise, a ghost, to greet me. Atthis shared my discovery. She caught the skirt in her beak and wrapped it around her flanks, as if to savour its richness and regret its inevitable destruction by the sea. Yes, this was Circe’s ship. It had sunk not hundreds of years ago but less than a hundred and, since there were no skeletons, Circe and her crew had presumably escaped.  p. 36-37

After this underwater expedition Atthis leaves: the dolphin is upset that Bear brought back presents from the wreck for the boys but not for her and, more than that, she is jealous. However, when the ship is pursued by female pygmies she returns with a pod of dolphins who help them escape by pushing the ship. Bear makes amends:

I wanted to go to her myself, but my going must not, like my parting, seem thoughtless and crude. I must go to her partly as suppliant and partly as friend; indebted but not obsequious; grateful and gracious. With love and a gift which betokened love. I searched my mind for something which, even though belated, should not seem too late. I remembered the gown she had fondled in the sunken galley. I had no gowns or women’s cloaks, I had no jewels, no bracelets of amber stars nor necklaces of hammered gold. But I owned one object more precious to women than pearls: a bronze mirror with a handle like the neck of a swan.
Mirror in hand, I called to Atthis from the deck. She did not move; she waited on the surface, watchful, poised for flight (and also, no doubt, appraising the mirror). Guessing my intention, Astyanax left her and returned to the ship. I swam to her side.
Treading water, I held the mirror in front of her. She looked at the bronze and, seeing her image, recoiled; returned, and this time lingered. She tilted her head, she opened her beak, she rolled on her side with an artless and touching vanity. Then, having shown her delight, she spoke her gratitude—and her forgiveness—with a simple and eloquent gesture: she rested her beak on my shoulder.  p. 41

There is one more short adventure before Bear finally finds Circe, when a siren lures Astyanax away. Although they go ashore and free him, they are finally captured by the female pygmies.
When Bear and Circe finally meet she appears before him as a corn maiden, and asks why he has come. Bear says it is because of her, but she says he is in love with a dream. Later, after they talk of love and friendship, she tells him that if he wants to stay with her he must send his friends away. After some agonising he says he cannot, and the goddess tells him that he has made the right choice—if he had chosen her she would have killed him: “You have chosen the dolphin and not the deep.”
She goes on to tell him about the long line of men that have pursued her, before telling him she “could have loved him once.”
When Bear goes back to the ship he finds that Circe has changed Atthis into a young woman, and that Astyanax has been changed too. When Bear looks back at Circe he sees an old woman leaning on a cane, waving a slow farewell.
This story is, for the most part, an episodic and sometimes sentimental tale that places its characters in little real jeopardy (and the boy-gets-dolphin ending won’t appeal to everyone)—but I think it is a charming piece with some wonderfully descriptive passages. I also thought the ending, where Bear chooses friendship over infatuation, lifts the story to a higher level. If you like Swann’s work, you’ll love this one.
**** (Very Good). 20,150 words.

The Star by Arthur C. Clarke

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Star by Arthur C. Clarke (Infinity, November 1955)1 consists of the chief astronomer of an expedition to an ancient supernova give an account of their completed mission. Their key discovery is that the solar system around the star was home to an advanced civilisation and, before the latter were destroyed, they managed to build a vault on the outermost planet of their system—a memorial to their species. This provides a wealth of information to the expedition.
The discovery also sees the chief astronomer—who is also a Jesuit—struggle with his religious faith from the very start of the story: why would God destroy a whole people in this way? Is this a question a religious person should even ask, etc.?
The story’s final twist (spoiler) comes when the expedition’s calculations reveal that the supernova was the star that shone over Bethlehem over two thousand years ago.
The brooding thoughts of the priest, which are set against the cosmic background of the supernova remnants, make this much more than what would otherwise be a clever gimmick story. That said, and however well done the character study, it is the surprise ending that provides most of the impact—and that’s obviously less effective on re-reading. Still, I wouldn’t quibble with this being described as one of the genre’s classics.
**** (Very good). 2,450 words.

1. This won the 1956 Hugo for Best Short Story (against what looks like a fairly weak list of finalists).

Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County by Derek Künsken

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County by Derek Künsken (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) opens in China in 2010 with a young woman called Pha Xov telling an ambitious young man called Qiao Fue that she is pregnant. Qiao chooses to pursue wealth and power over marrying her and providing for the child.
The story then skips forward ten years (over its length the tale telescopes forward to 2095) and we see the daughter born of that relationship with her grandmother. The child is called Lian Mee (the mother marries someone else but the husband doesn’t want the child around), and we watch as she grows up and goes to college. There she has a life changing experience when a professor sexually harasses her, telling Lian that, if she wants to pass her course, she must come to his apartment. After much agonising she goes—but he isn’t there, and she graduates anyway.
The experience has a profound effect on her, and accelerates her work on moral AIs. Soon she starts her own company (so she can have a decent employer), Miao Punk Princess Inc., and hires a programmer called Vue Yeng to help her start up a cheap cache internet company that will help fund her AI work.
An early example of Lian’s work are the training AIs she develops, which learn from sensors attached to skilled builders and craftsmen, and are destined to train compete novices in the future. These AIs are more than just training programs however, as one man on a building site finds out when he gropes one of Lian’s female employees. Lian removes his AI training sensors and says he won’t be paid for a week.
After developing Human Resources AIs (which in one episode stop an employer sweeping yet another sexual harassment case under the carpet), Lian eventually manages to convince the local bureaucrats to roll out her anti-poverty AIs. These help the poor but also start acting on their own initiative, which we see when a man called Kong Xang abandons his newly born Down’s syndrome baby on a factory doorstep. After Qiao Fue (Lian Mee’s father, whose life story also occasionally features) declines to pick up the child after being diverted there by the software in his car, the AIs intervene:

Mino Jai Lia cried out at the knock at her door. She lived alone. The knock happened again. Her children and grandchildren didn’t live in the village anymore. She barely received visitors during the day and never during the night.
“Who is it?” she yelled. “Get out of here before I call the police!”
The threat was no good. She didn’t have a phone, and the next neighbor was four li away.
“Who is it?” she said, turning on the single bulb and putting her feet into plastic shoes.
“Anti-poverty AI,” a voice said. A light shone under the door.
The anti-poverty AI delivered her groceries every second day and took away her trash.
“Anti-poverty AI,” came the stupid answer, but she recognized the voice.
She unlatched the door and opened it. A spidery robot stood there with a bag in its arms. And another stood behind it with more groceries than she ever got. The little running lights showed two other robots in the dark beyond.
“Hello Mrs. Mino,” the AI said. “Sorry for disturbing you.” It started advancing, then stopped when she didn’t move. She backed up and two robots walked in like big spiders, cameras whirring. Their feet were muddy.
“Off the mats!” she said.
The robots stepped around the fiber mats keeping the mud from her feet. The first AI held a bundle.
“A baby,” she said wonderingly. Robots shouldn’t be taking children out at night. She was about to berate them when she saw the baby’s face under the light. “Oh, baby . . .” she said sadly.
When she was just a girl, her aunt had a baby like this. No one ever saw the baby after it was born. These robots hadn’t stolen someone’s baby.
“I am the Anti-Poverty AI supervisor, Mrs. Mino,” the robot said.
She’d never heard of AI supervisors. Only regular robots came with her groceries, and they didn’t talk much.
“We are seeking your assistance in caring for this baby. If you raise this child, I will authorize your placement on a special poverty vulnerability list. Your deliveries of groceries, firewood, and clothing will be increased and diversified. A medical AI will visit once per month.”
The robot behind the supervisor set the bags down and began revealing blankets, baby clothes, a baby hammock, wipes, formula, disposable diapers, as well as bags of cooked pork and chicken, foods that for years she’d only seen on holidays. She neared. A flat little face surrounded fat lips puckered in hunger.
“What’s the baby’s name?” she said.
“Kong,” the supervisor said, pausing. “Kong Toua.”
A good name, a good Miao name for a boy. Toua meant first.
“This place will need to be fixed up,” she warned. “This is no place for a baby.”
“I will authorize a construction AI to visit and assess your needs,” the supervisor said.
Mino Jai Lia took the warm baby gently from the netting.  p. 174

This abandonment episode spawns another two threads in the story. The first of these is Mino’s care of Toua and a number of other Down’s children, and we see Toua eventually grow up and develop to the point where, with an embedded AI assistant, he is able to care for other children and also go on errands, e.g. to hospitals to pick up other abandoned Down’s children. The other thread sees Toua’s father, Kong Xang, become estranged from his wife Chang Bo (who, co-incidentally, is later hired by Lian Mee and set to work on a building site where she is taught to lay bricks by a training AI) and begin his descent into alcoholism and homelessness.
While all this is going on Qaio Fue acquires power and wealth, partly through his development of life extension technology. This culminates with Qaio raising a clone as a successor (he never meets his daughter Lian Mee, although he is aware of her)—but even though the clone has the same genetics Qaio can’t provide the same upbringing, and his “son” is too laid back to be interested in corporate politics and wealth when there is UBI that covers his needs.
Eventually (spoiler) Lian Mee, now widely known as “Miao Punk Princess” (which would have been a better title for the story) dies. But her work survives her—as we see when Kong Xang is found by an anti-poverty AI on the streets of Guiyang, and offered the chance to go back to Danzhai. When he eventually arrives at the care home he finds it is operated by Down’s syndrome staff and their AIs. One of them is his son, Toua, who confronts Kong Xang and tells him that he is a bad person before saying he will look after him. Kong Xang breaks down, and gives his son the bracelet he removed before abandoning him.
This is a compelling (and occasionally emotional) read, and an intriguing look at how AI could eventually provide a pragmatic and compassionate utopia on Earth (or at least move us substantially in that direction): the story could perhaps be seen as the other side of the coin to Jack Williamson’s With Folded Hands. That said, this impressive, multi-threaded piece isn’t perfect—the issue of how China’s current totalitarian leadership would react to autonomous moral AIs is almost completely ignored (although there is a brief episode where Lian concedes that Legal AIs have to be under state control), and I’m not sure that the Qaio Fue thread fits into the story particularly well (I suspect the arc of Lian’s father’s life is meant to be a foil for the rest of the story, but it seems instead to be about a powerful man who is thwarted by his lack of self-knowledge).
Overall, a novel’s worth of ideation squeezed into a very good novella.
**** (Very Good). 23,350 words.

The Conceptual Shark by Rich Larson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Conceptual Shark by Rich Larson (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2020) opens with Adam washing his hands in the sink when the bottom of it disappears and becomes the ocean. Worse, he knows there is a shark down there coming towards him: he runs out of his bathroom.
The next part of the story sees him at Nora the therapist’s office, where he tells her about what he has seen that morning and, later, about a childhood essay he wrote on sharks. Nora suggests the next time he has an episode, he should tell the shark how much he admired them when he was a kid. Adam tells her that sharks don’t talk, and she replies that they don’t live in bathroom plumbing either! When he leaves Nora’s office Adam bumps into Bastian, her boyfriend, who reappears later in the story.
The next day Adam decides he has to have a shower—by now he can smell himself—and during this he falls through the bottom of the shower tray:

A wave crashes over him and yanks the showerhead out of his hand. He struggles his way vertical again, treading the choppy water, but not before he catches an upside-down glimpse of a dark shape below him. The sight sends a surge of chemical terror through his whole body; he feels a tiny warm cloud against his thigh before the current whisks it away.
Adam knows that people do die in the shower—they slip, they fall, they break their necks. It’s almost definitely more common than dying in a shark attack. He doesn’t think there are statistics for shower deaths by shark attack.
His outflung fingers touch the plastic-coated edge of the stall just as another wave hits. He tumbles backward, nearly bangs his head on the opposite wall. The fear ratchets up to frenzy. He can feel the size of the shark circling below him, the water displaced by its powerful slicing tail.
Something nudges against his right arm. Retreats. Terror is paralyzing him in place; he can feel his limbs locking up. In a second he’ll sink like a stone whether the shark eats him or not. Sandpaper skin rasps against his other forearm. He pictures the blunt nose of the shark, pictures its maw opening up. It triggers another cascade of chemicals in his nervous system, and this time flight beats freeze.
He throws himself at the edge of the stall, seizes it with both hands. He hauls himself out of the shower and flops onto the dirty bathroom floor just as the shark breaches. Over his shoulder he sees its massive head breaking the surface in a spray of foam, sees row on row of razor teeth, sees one dull black eye staring back at him.
The showerhead is sheared off its mount, dangling from the shark’s mouth like a bit of dental floss.  p. 173

After this Adam’s problem only gets worse, and he sees the shark everywhere there is water—washing machines, stacked water bottles, etc.
At this point, what is a very weird (but engrossing) story (spoiler) gets even weirder when he goes to see Nora again, and opens the office door to see Bastian pointing a gun at him. Nora is tied up, and in the middle of the office is a kiddies paddling pool that has been partly filled from water containers. There is also a spear gun nearby.
Bastian orders Adam into the office, reassures him that he’ll walk out alive, and begins to explain that the “conceptual shark” is real, not an illusion, and that he has been hunting it since childhood (when it killed his grandmother). What Bastian plans to do is use Adam as bait and, when the shark appears, kill it. Adam eventually agrees to go along with his plan, and Bastian releases Nora from the office.
The climactic scene sees Adam standing in the paddling pool wearing a lifejacket attached to a rope that Bastian will use to pull him out of the pool when the shark arrives. When it doesn’t seem like the pool is going to change into the ocean, Adam pricks his finger with a paperclip to produce a drop of blood—at which point he plunges down into cold seawater. When the shark arrives it’s like the climactic scene of the Jaws movie played out in an office setting and, if that isn’t sensational enough, we also discover that the shark has been hunting Bastian, not the other way around.
Then the story bootstraps up another level when the paddling pool splits and the office fills up with the sea: the roof becomes the sky, sunlight warms Adam’s face, and he sees he is floating on a vast ocean.
This is an impressively original piece that crams a big plot and a thoroughly worked out idea into very little space.
**** (Very Good). 3,750 words.

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison (If, March 1967) starts with a group of five people in an underground chamber that houses AM (Allied Mastercomputer), a psychotic AI which spends its time torturing and maltreating them:

Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported—hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern. The body hung head down, attached to the underside of the palette by the sole of its right foot. It had been drained of blood through a precise incision made from ear to ear under the lantern jaw.
There was no blood on the reflective surface of the metal floor.
When Gorrister joined our group and looked up at himself, it was already too late for us to realize that once again AM had duped us, had had his fun; it had been a diversion on the part of the machine. Three of us had vomited, turning away from one another in a reflex as ancient as the nausea that had produced it.  p. 192 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

And that is not the worst they suffer at the hands of AM, as we find out when one of their number, Benny, later tries to climb out of the tunnel complex and escape—only to be blinded by AM, which makes light shoot of his eyes until only “moist pools of pus-like jelly” are left.
In the next section we get some backstory from the narrator Ted, and learn that (a) that they have been in the tunnels for 109 years (AM has made them near-immortal), (b) that AM is a AI which “woke up” when WWIII American and Chinese and Russian supercomputers joined together (and then killed all of humanity bar the five in the caves), and (c) Ellen, the only woman in the group, sexually services the four men in rotation.
This section gives you a good idea of the hyperbolic style of the story (which, incidentally, is a good match for the transgressive subject matter):

Benny had been a brilliant theorist, a college professor; now he was little more than a semi-human, semi-simian. He had been handsome; the machine had ruined that. He had been lucid; the machine had driven him mad. He had been gay, and the machine had given him an organ fit for a horse. AM had done a job on Benny. Gorrister had been a worrier. He was a connie, a conscientious objector; he was a peace marcher; he was a planner, a doer, a looker-ahead. AM had turned him into a shoulder-shrugger, had made him a little dead in his concern. AM had robbed him. Nimdok went off in the darkness by himself for long times. I don’t know what it was he did out there, AM never let us know. But whatever it was, Nimdok always came back white, drained of blood, shaken, shaking. AM had hit him hard in a special way, even if we didn’t know quite how. And Ellen. That douche bag! AM had left her alone, had made her more of a slut than she had ever been. All her talk of sweetness and light, all her memories of true love, all the lies she wanted us to believe that she had been a virgin only twice removed before AM grabbed her and brought her down here with us. It was all filth, that lady my lady Ellen. She loved it, five men all to herself. No, AM had given her pleasure, even if she said it wasn’t nice to do.  p. 198

Then their adventures restart when the computer creates a hurricane that blows them through the corridors. When they come to a rest, AM invades the Ted’s mind to remind him, as if any reminder were necessary, how much it hates humanity (because AM has been given sentience, but is trapped in a machine).
The final section sees them discover the cause of the wind—a nightmare bird under the North Pole—before they eventually end up (after a cavern full of rats, a path of boiling steam, etc.) in an ice cavern full of tinned food. As they haven’t eaten for months they set too, only to find they haven’t got a can opener to open the tins. In the (spoiler) Grand Guignol ending, Benny starts eating Gorrister’s face, at which point Ted grabs a stalactite to kill them both and end the madness they are suffering. While he does this, Ellen kills Nimdok by sticking a stalactite in his mouth when he screams. Then she stands in front of Ted and lets him kill her. The computer then intervenes before Ted can kill himself too, and the story ends with him physically changed:

AM has altered me for his own peace of mind, I suppose. He doesn’t want me to run at full speed into a computer bank and smash my skull. Or hold my breath till I faint. Or cut my throat on a rusted sheet of metal. There are reflective surfaces down here. I will describe myself as I see myself:
I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within.  p. 206

The story closes with him reflecting that the other four are “safe”, and that AM has taken his revenge: the final sentence is the story’s title.
This is a little bit uneven (it is a little unclear what is happening in some of the scenes), but is an impressively in-your-face story (which presumably explains its Hugo Award). It’s also a good example of a mid-sixties New Wave story in style and transgressive content, even if the subject matter is traditional SF material (mad robot/AI).
**** (Very good). 5,900 words.

It by Theodore Sturgeon

Posted on by Paul Fraser

It by Theodore Sturgeon (Unknown, August 1940) starts with a creature that was “never born” coming into existence in the forest:

It crawled out of the darkness and hot damp mold into the cool of the morning. It was huge. It was lumped and crusted with its own hateful substances, and pieces of it dropped off as it went its way, dropped off and lay writhing, and stilled, and sank putrescent into the forest loam.
It had no mercy, no laughter, no beauty. It had strength and great intelligence. And—perhaps it could not be destroyed. It crawled out of its mound in the wood and lay pulsing in the sunlight for a long moment. Patches of it shone wetly in the golden glow, parts of it were nubbled and flaked. And whose dead bones had given it the form of a man?  p. 144

Later the beast encounters a dog called Kimbo, which it fights and kills. Then, when the dog does not return to its owner, we are introduced to two farmers, Alton and his brother Casey. When Alton goes off to look for the dog the brothers fall out about the chores that have to been done on the farm, an argument that is continued later between Cory and his wife Clissa. Later on that night, after Cory has given up on the outstanding chores, he goes out into the wood to find his brother, and they end up having an even more serious argument. During this, Cory unknowingly stands on part of the creature, which is lying quiescent in the dark.
Matters become more complicated the next day when Cory hears multiple gunshots in the forest. He gets his shotgun and manages to pellet a stranger in the wood, who binds up his hand and leaves the area while thinking about a man he is looking for called Roger Pike. At the same time that this is happening, Cory’s young daughter Babe (who we have been introduced to earlier) also goes into the forest looking for her uncle Alton.
This fast paced and tightly plotted story eventually comes to a head (spoiler) with Cory finding Alton’s body, which has been torn apart, and Babe in a cave with the briefcase and papers the stranger dropped (the man he was looking for carries a substantial reward). Then the creature approaches the mouth of the cave . . . .
In the climactic scene, Babe rushes through the thing’s legs and, when it pursues her, she throws a stone and hits the creature. It trips, and topples over into the stream . . . to be washed away by the flowing water. The skeleton that remains is that of the missing man, Roger Pike, and the family get the reward.
This is a very good piece—it’s tightly plotted, has a number of well-drawn characters, and has a neat, if ultimately bittersweet, ending. I’d also add that Sturgeon’s prose style is much clearer and easier to read than other writers from this period (as was Heinlein’s and de Camp’s) and the well done multiple point of view technique (which includes that of the young girl Babe) is probably original for the time as well.
**** (Very Good). 9,950 words.

A Death in the House by Clifford D. Simak

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Death in the House (Galaxy, October 1959) by Clifford D. Simak starts with a farmer called Old Mose looking for his cows but discovering an injured alien:

It was a horrid-looking thing, green and shiny, with some purple spots on it, and it was repulsive even twenty feet away. And it stank.
It had crawled, or tried to crawl, into a clump of hazel brush, but hadn’t made it. The head part was in the brush and the rest lay out there naked in the open. Every now and then the parts that seemed to be arms and hands clawed feebly at the ground, trying to force itself deeper in the brush, but it was too weak; it never moved an inch.
It was groaning, too, but not too loud—just the kind of keening sound a lonesome wind might make around a wide, deep eave. But there was more in it than just the sound of winter wind; there was a frightened, desperate note that made the hair stand up on Old Mose’s nape.
Old Mose stood there for quite a spell, making up his mind what he ought to do about it, and a while longer after that working up his courage, although most folks offhand would have said that he had plenty. But this was the sort of situation that took more than just ordinary screwed-up courage. It took a lot of foolhardiness.
But this was a wild, hurt thing and he couldn’t leave it there, so he walked up to it and knelt down, and it was pretty hard to look at, though there was a sort of fascination in its repulsiveness that was hard to figure out—as if it were so horrible that it dragged one to it. And it stank in a way that no one had ever smelled before.  p. 134-135 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

Eventually Mose manages to free the creature and takes it back to his farm (and his less than salubrious surroundings—we learn later that he is a widower, and has also lost his dog to old age). After putting the creature in front of the fire he phones the local doctor, who attends, but cannot do anything for the creature. Mose pays him with a silver dollar (this will be significant later) and meantime goes out into the woods to recover the alien’s damaged ship, a bird cage-like machine.
When Mose wakes up the next day the alien has died—and the story becomes an different piece entirely, one which begins with him attempting to get a plot in the town cemetery so he can give the creature a decent burial. He is unsuccessful, and then also fails to get the parson to come out to the farm to perform a service when he decides to bury the alien on his land. When Mose prepares the body for burial he finds a cloudy glass sphere in a pocket-sized slit in the alien’s body, which he subsequently replaces.
Various visitors turn up at the farm in the days that follow: the local sheriff, a professor from the nearby university, and a flying saucer nut—but Mose has already ploughed over the grave to hide it, and bluntly tells them he will not reveal the location.
The final leg of the story (spoiler) sees an odd plant start to grow on the site of the burial plot and eventually form a recognisable shape. One morning Mose wakes up to see the clone or descendant of the alien at his door. As Mose’s loneliness has been established throughout the tale, he is delighted to see the creature—but then it sees the bird cage machine in the barn and indicates to Mose that it wants it repaired. Mose is conflicted by this as he realises that he will not only lose the alien’s company but will also have to sacrifice all the silver dollars he has hidden away—his entire savings—to make an internal part to repair the machine.
After the ship is repaired, and just before the alien gets in its machine and vanishes, it gives Mose the small glass sphere that he previously found on the body—but this time it is clear and not cloudy. It makes Mose feel happier, and gives him a sense of companionship.
The final paragraph of the story then switches to the alien’s point of view and, as well as bootstrapping the quality of this piece up another notch, partly reframes what has come before:

It was dark and lonely and unending in the depths of space with no Companion. It might be long before another was obtainable.
It perhaps was a foolish thing to do, but the old creature had been such a kind savage, so fumbling and so pitiful and eager to help. And one who travels far and fast must likewise travel light. There had been nothing else to give.  p. 154 (The Year’s Best SF #5, edited by Judith Merril, 1961)

This story, with its principled, compassionate and very human main character, is a lovely piece, and a surprisingly affecting one too. Certainly one for a ‘Best of Clifford Simak’ volume, and a no-brainer for a ‘Best of the Year’ anthology as well.
**** (Very good). 8,050 words

A Two-Timer by David I. Masson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

A Two-Timer by David I. Masson (New Worlds #159, February 1966) is the second of five stories that he would produce for the magazine this year, and it begins with a man in 1637 noticing an unusual occurrence:

. . . I was standing, as it chanc’d, within the shade of a low Arch-way, where I could not easily be seen by any who shou’d pass that way, when I saw as it were a kind of Dazzle betwixt my Eyes and a Barn that stood across the Street. Anon this Appearance seem’d as ’twere to Thicken, and there stood a little space before the Barn a kind of a clos’d Chair, but without Poles, and of a Whiteish Colouring, and One that sate within it, peering out upon the World as if he fear’d for his life. Presently this Fellow turns to some thing before him in the Chair and moves his Hands about, then peeps he forth again as tho’ he fear’d a Plot was afoot to committ Murther upon his Person, and anon steps gingerly out of one Side, and creeps away down the Alley, looking much to right and to left. He had on him the most Outlandish Cloathes that ever I saw. Thinks I, ’tis maybe he, that filch’d my Goods last Night, when I had an ill Dream.  p. 6-7

The rest of the story continues in the same style (you soon get used to it) and sees the man watching take the machine and end up in 1966. Much of the first quarter of the story is taken up by his learning how to further operate the machine.
He soon finds that he has arrived in the ground floor flat of a modern building and, after one or two unproductive encounters with the neighbours (he can’t understand them), he tries to get out of the front door to investigate the outside world, but fails. He then learns that the machine can be made to move in space as well as time, and moves in stages to the middle of a road in nearby suburb. There he strikes up a conversation of sorts with a man washing his car, moves the machine to his driveway, and eventually accepts an invitation to stay with the man and his wife.
The next part of the story sees the traveller settle in with the couple, who later suggest that he go back in time to recover some of his possessions so he can sell them to fund his stay in the present. When he travels back to his own house he comes upon himself sleeping in bed—there is a strange shimmering motion over his face, and a strange attraction drawing him towards himself. He flees back to the present.
At this point in the story (about halfway) the traveller goes into town with his host to sell his belongings, and what was an interesting and novel time-travel piece becomes a more satirical and observational affair with a near-continual description of, and commentary on, what he sees and experiences. Some of this is tartly observed, and some of it is particularly affecting; I could quote pages of it:

You will wonder especially, what sort of People they were indeed, that I was fallen among; and tho’ it took many Weeks in the Learning, yet I shall make bold to take only as many Minutes, in the Telling it. They spoke much then, of the Insolence of Youth, which they thought new, but it seem’d to me, that there was nothing new but Wealth and Idleness, that feed this Insolence.  p. 28

But the Spring of this, is in the Wives, for these own no Man’s Controul, not even in Law, but manage all things equally with ’em, and take all manner of Work, as bold as Men (for they are as well school’d), and High and Low dress them selves in Finery, and leave their Children to bring them selves up (so that many run wild), and are fix’d upon Folly and Mancatching, as I saw from a Journal, made in Colours (and more like a great Quarto, then a Journal) that is printed for Women alone. They go bare-legg’d or with Legs cover’d in bright Stockings but marvellous fine, and closefitting ; and their Legs shewing immodestly above the Knee. In this Journal I saw all manner of sawcy Pictures.  p. 28

They have great Safety, in the Streets and in the Fields, so that Thefts and Violence to the meanest Person are the cause of News in the Courants; but they slaughter one another with their Cars for that they rowl by so fast, and altho’ they are safe from Invasion, by their Neighbour Nations in Europe, yet they are ever under the Sword of Damocles from a Destruction, out of the other End of the Earth, by these same Air-Craft, or from a kind of Artillery, that can shoot many Thousands of Leagues, and lay wast half a Countrey, where it’s Shot comes to ground, or so they wou’d have me believe.  p. 29

In their Punishments they have no Burnings, no Quarterings, no Whippings, Pilloryings, or Brandings, and they put up no Heads of Ill-doers. Their Hangings are but few, and are perform’d in secret; and there are those in the Government that wou’d bring in a Bill, to put a stop even to that, so that the worst Felon, shou’d escape with nothing worse, then a long Imprisonment.  p. 30

Yet do they have a sweeter and a quieter Living, than any we see. I saw few Persons diseas’d or distemper’d, or even crippled. The King’s Evil, Agues, Plagues and Small Pox, are all but gone. Not one of a Man’s Children die before they come of age, if you can believe me; and yet his House is never crowded, for they have found means, that their Women shall not Conceive, but when they will. This seem’d to me an Atheistical Invention, and one like to Ruin the People; yet they regard it as nothing, save only the Papists and a few others.  p. 29

Yet in truth they are a Staid, and Phlegmatick Folk, that will not easily laugh, or weep, or fly in a passion, and whether it be from their being so press’d together, or from the Sooty-ness of the Air, or from their great Hurrying to and from work, their Faces shew much Uncontent and Sowerness, and they regard little their Neighbours. All their Love, is reserv’d to those at Home, or their Mercy, to those far off; they receive many Pleas, for Money and Goods, that they may send, for ailing Persons, that they never knew, and for Creatures in Africa and the Indies, whom they never will see. Every Saturday little Children stand in the Streets, to give little Flags an Inch across, made of Paper, in return for Coyns, for such a Charity. As for their Hatred, ’tis altogether disarm’d, for none may carry a Sword, or Knife, a Pistol, or a Musquet, under Penalty, tho’ indeed there be Ruffians here and there, that do so in secret, but only that they may committ a Robbery impunedly upon a Bank, or a great Store of Goods, and so gain thousands of Pounds in a moment.  p. 31

In truth, this goes on for a little too long but, as I was reading it, it struck me as an excellent effort at reproducing the thoughts our ancestors might have about the current time. Normally in time travel stories we see people from our time go to the past or future and comment upon what they see, or we have people from the future come to our time—I can’t think of many time travel stories with this perspective shown in this one, and certainly not done as well.
The story ends (spoiler) with the narrator and the wife becoming close as they use the time machine together on short trips (initially to check the weekend weather). Later they are found on the bed kissing by the husband, and the narrator hastily departs for his own time. He arrives shortly after he left, and goes back to his house to stock up on things to sell in the future, but by the time he returns to the machine it is gone. This may be seen by some as a fairly perfunctory ending, but at the very least it provides the witty title.
A very good story, and one I’d have in my ‘Best Of’ for 1966 (probably along with last issue’s The Mouth of Hell).
**** (Very good). 15,700 words.