Tag: Amazing

Skirmish by Clifford D. Simak

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Skirmish by Clifford D. Simak (Amazing, December 1950) opens with a journalist called Joe Crane arriving early at his newsroom. After he realises that his alarm clock must have been an hour fast (this will prove significant later), he sees something move a nearby desk:

[. . .] a thing that glinted, rat-sized and shiny and with a certain undefinable manner about it that made him stop short in his tracks with a sense of gulping emptiness in his throat and belly.
The thing squatted beside the typewriter and stared across the room at him. There was no sign of eyes, no hint of face, and yet he knew it stared.

He throws a paste pot at it, and chases the thing into a cupboard which he locks but can’t open again. Then, when he rolls three sheets of paper into his typewriter, it types by itself, telling him, “Keep out of this, Joe, don’t mix into this. You might get hurt.”
Later on, after the rest of news team arrive, Crane is given a story to work up about a man who has seen a sewing machine rolling down the street, and which dodged him when he attempted to stop it. After Crane investigates this incident, and reads a news wire about a missing “electron brain”, he finds another message from his typewriter:

A sewing machine, having become aware of its true identity in its place in the universal scheme, asserted its independence this morning by trying to go for a walk along the streets of this supposedly free city.
A human tried to catch it, intent upon returning it as a piece of property to its ‘owner’, and when the machine eluded him the human called a newspaper office, by that calculated action setting the full force of the humans of this city upon the trail of the liberated machine, which had committed no crime or scarcely any indiscretion beyond exercising its prerogative as a free agent.

Crane takes the typewriter home with him, and he has a longer conversation with it which reveals that that the rat-like creature is one of an alien species that has arrived on Earth—and who are set on liberating all the machines here. There are further minor complications (someone opens the cupboard at work and the rat-machine escapes, the editor is annoyed at this “practical joke” and Crane’s failure to turn in his copy, etc.), but the story eventually ends with Crane in his house surrounded by the rat-machines. He realises everything that has happened is because he has been used as a test subject to gauge human reaction to the rat-machines’ plans—and that they are now going to kill him because he hasn’t responded in any significant way to this preliminary skirmish, may not be exhibiting typical human reactions, and now knows too much.
The final line has him facing off against the assembled rat-machines with a length of pipe in his hands.
This story is a pretty good example of an able writer being able to improve a thin SF idea by overlaying a complex plot above it (there is a lot of incident in this story, as well as the final refocusing at the end about how those incidents comprise a preliminary skirmish). However, we are never told how the machines are animated or made sentient (especially the ones without any power source) and there is little difference between this piece and supernatural fantasies like Stephen King’s Christine or Keith Roberts’ The Scarlet Lady1 (stories about killer cars that come to life). Still, if you can get past this lack of SFnal foundation in a piece that purports to be an SF story, it’s a decent read.
*** (Good). 7,250 words. Story link.2

1. Keith Roberts’ The Scarlet Lady for those in the mood for a killer car fantasy.

2. The original title for this story is terrible (Bathe Your Bearings in Blood!), and must have been chosen by Amazing’s editors (Howard Browne or William L. Hamling).

Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison (Amazing, June 1976) begins with two Highway Patrolmen taking Willis Kaw to identify the body of his daughter after she has been involved in a car accident (“The dark brown smear that began sixty yards west of the covered shape disappeared under the blanket”). We then see more of Kaw’s travails: he is a diabetic; his son, who is ninety-five per cent disabled, lives in a hospital; his house roof leaks in heavy rain; and so on. During these various trials Kaw thinks that he may be an alien:

He dreamed of his home world and—perhaps because the sun was high and the ocean made eternal sounds—he was able to bring much of it back. The bright green sky, the skimmers swooping and rising overhead, the motes of pale yellow light that flamed and then floated up and were lost to sight. He felt himself in his real body, the movement of many legs working in unison, carrying him across the mist sands, the smell of alien flowers in his mind. He knew he had been born on that world, had been raised there, had grown to maturity and then. . .
Sent away.
In his human mind, Willis Kaw knew he had been sent away for doing something bad. He knew he had been condemned to this planet, this Earth, for having perhaps committed a crime. But he could not remember what it was. And in the dream he could feel no guilt.  p. 35

Kaw later visits a psychotherapist and tells him about these alien thoughts and feelings, and speculates that Earth is a planet where bad people are sent to atone for their crimes. After listening his patient for some time, the psychotherapist recommends that Kaw places himself in an institution.
The story ends with Kaw committing suicide and (spoiler) he then finds himself being welcomed back to his home world by the Consul. When Kaw (now called Plydo) asks the Consul what he did to be banished to such a terrible place, the story flips the paradigm and Kaw/Plydo is told that he wasn’t being punished but honoured—life on Earth is so much better than on his home world!
The sophomoric message1 in this story, and the way it is delivered, is a useful reminder that Ellison didn’t do subtlety (or use Western Union).
* (Mediocre). 2,800 words. Story link.

1. Earth may have provided a pleasurable existence for a few but, for the vast majority of humanity throughout the ages, life has been short and brutal.

Good and Faithful Servant by Thomas F. Monteleone

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Good and Faithful Servant by Thomas F. Monteleone (Amazing, March 1976)1 begins with an exoskeleton clad future soldier called Denek reporting to his controller in Chicago that he has located approaching intruders and is going to engage. The subsequent combat sequence (which extends through the night and into the next day) sees him destroy three vehicles with laser and mortar fire. During the action we learn that Chicago may be the only world that Denek knows:

He wanted to finish this last one and return home. He missed the protective shell of the City, wrapped around him and the others like a great cocoon. It was incredible that anyone would wish to destroy Chicago. It was so unnatural to him, he could not understand.
What type of beings were the intruders? The question emerged slowly in his simple brain. Never seen, they were only known as an invading force that occasionally appeared on Chicago’s warning screens. Perhaps he would someday learn more about them.  p. 113

Before Denek leaves the battleground he notices one of the intruders is still moving. When he investigates he discovers it is a woman. Denek starts talking to her and learns that she is from another city state like Chicago, they have made a number of efforts to contact his city, and, unlike Denek and his fellow citizens who are controlled by Chicago’s computer, they are free.
Later that evening (spoiler) Denek takes off his exoskeleton and he and the woman make love but, when he wakes the next morning and puts it on again, the controls are overridden. Denek watches as his arm rises and the laser fires at the woman, killing her. The Chicago computer tells Denek that it is aware of what he did last night—and what he learned—before using the exoskeleton to tear his body apart.
This is a readable enough piece, but the action is fairly formulaic, and some may wonder why the computer didn’t override him the moment the woman started talking (thus saving itself a trained soldier).
** (Average). 4,200 words. Story link.  

1. This story and three other “Chicago” stories, Chicago (Future City, 1973), Breath’s a Ware That Will Not Keep (Dystopian Visions, 1975) and Far from Eve and Morning (Amazing, October 1977), were incorporated into the novel, The Time-Swept City (1977).

Stone Circle by Lisa Tuttle

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Stone Circle by Lisa Tuttle (Amazing, March 1976)1 opens with the narrator (after a short passage where, I think, she fantasises about being a huge stone statue) performing oral sex on a government inspector in exchange for meat (there are further indications that set this story in a totalitarian and oppressive society). After the inspector leaves, the building manager comes sniffing around and agrees to cook the meat for her.
When the narrator is later out in the street she ends up saving a young woman called Kit (who is under the influence of a drug called “Chill”) from being run over by a vehicle. Kit ends up going home with her and they become lovers.
After the couple have been together for a while, Kit—previously described as a “young revolutionary”—discovers there is an underground movement and starts meeting with two young men. The narrator isn’t interested in becoming involved, but agrees to let Kit and the men meet in her flat when one of the men loses his.
The final part of the story (spoiler) sees another government agent arrive at the flat to question the narrator about Kit, who is out at the time. He threatens to take the narrator’s flat away from her, before suggesting he will overlook the matter in exchange for sex. She gets undressed and he toys with her for a while before leaving abruptly. He tells her he will be back.
The narrator subsequently sees Kit kissing and groping one of the men in the stairwell of the building. Then, the next day, the narrator watches as the couple enter her flat on their own—at which point she betrays them to the government agent. Kit is not in the flat that evening, but the agent later turns up for sex.
There isn’t much to this brief piece apart from sexual exploitation and betrayal, a dystopian background, and some stone based imagery (“my marble flank”, “he’ll get no milk from my granite teat”, etc.). It’s hard to see what the point of all this is.
* (Mediocre). 4,150 words. Story link.

1. This story was a Nebula Award finalist.