Tag: Asimov's SF

The Scalar Intercepts by Michael Cassutt

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Scalar Intercepts by Michael Cassutt (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2024) is a brief bit of ideation more than a story, and one which sees an AI report back to other AIs about the seven hundred or so humans left alive on Earth (there had been a past conflict between the two). The AI then reveals a discovery:

My research shows that, in addition to these kinetic processes, Objects possess a consciousness of their own. Yes, the Sun, other stars, the major planets including our own, and minor planets above a certain mass, are beings as self-aware and intelligent as any we know.
Organics and even Agents like us reside on the short or micro side ofthe lifespan scale. These space-based beings are on the macro side, living millions of years, and their communications take place at such a slow rate—one bit a year, for example—that I have chosen to call them Scalar Sentiences.
My apparently radical discovery, based on extensive analysis and translation of the Scalar intercepts, a process that has consumed energy for the last four hundred and thirty years, confirms that Scalars are hostile to our existence. p. 161

The piece ends with the news (spoiler) that the Scalars have sent asteroid hurtling towards Earth and the AIs will not survive.
* (Mediocre). 1050 words.

The Adherence by Jeffrey Ford

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Adherence by Jeffrey Ford (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2024)1 begins with an old man called Phil meeting a long lost female acquaintance called Dierdre in “The Crumble”. As they talk we learn that Phil lost his wife because of the effect of ubiquitous cheap products produced by a company called Adherent Corp.:

“She disintegrated.”
“Oh, my god, I’ve heard about that. Did you guys go in for all that cheap stuff?”
“I’m embarrassed to say it, but yeah. We had scads of it. It was just so fuckin cheap,” he said. “Couldn’t see spending top dollar on a bed frame or dresser when you could get either for a couple of bucks. Come on, a five-dollar television. You can’t beat it. We had everything.”
“I read that if you have a lot of the stuff from Adherent Corp., that it can set up a resonance field in your house,” said Dierdre.
“Not only that, but if there’s someone living there who’s suffering from depression, the particular atomic resonance of the victims of that disease can act as a catalyst, weakening the atomic bonds that hold together Adherent’s flimsy crap. The resonance of their merchandise disintegrating in turn affects the atomic bonds of the stricken, like Lily. One afternoon, in early autumn, when a cold breeze lifted the curtain and came through the screen of our bedroom window, I was walking down the hall, and the door was open. Lily was folding damp clothes from the half-assed dryer, and humming the song ‘Three Little Words.’ Just like that, she turned into mist, and that mist kept her form for a moment until the wind rolled through the room and dispersed her.”
“How long until you realized that having all that cheap stuff wasn’t worth it?”
“It took me a few days to wake up to the fact of what happened. I mean, back in the day, when we met, when we got married, who had any clue that someday, if you lived long enough, you might see your spouse vanish like the Easter Ghost. But eventually, yeah, it was clear we’d made our world from whatever tawdry substance went into making all of Adherent’s fine products. In the process it cost Lily her life.” p. 66

After this unlikely dollop of explanium/anti-materialism, the pair go to Deirdre’s house. There she tells him about Ronaldo, her ex, who is part of a religious cult called the Easterners. Apparently the “Easter Ghost” materialises at their services and has been known to reincarnate vanished people.
The last part of the story (spoiler) sees Deirdre arrange to have Ronaldo and the Easter Ghost come to her apartment. After they arrive (the Easter Ghost wears a three-piece suit of green and yellow, holds a stalk of yellow gladiolas, and floats a foot above the floor) Phil agrees to pay a thousand bucks to have his wife brought back. The Easter Ghost whizzes around the kitchen while Phil thinks of her, and then he wakes at a cash machine with Deirdre and Ronaldo. After they shake him down for the money he goes home to find his wife in his apartment. They make love but, after they finish, Phil discovers she is an Adherent Corp. copy.
This is a strange, dream-like story that doesn’t amount to much. Presumably it is making some sort of point about materialism, but what that might be is unclear (other than the obvious observation everyone makes about materialism).
* (Mediocre). 3,600 words.

1. The last sentence doesn’t have a full stop: “She put her arms out to him and tried to say his name, but in the jostling, her speakers had shorted”—I don’t know if this is intentional, poor proofing, or whether there is missing text.

Forty-Eight Minutes at the Trainview Café by M. Bennardo

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Forty-Eight Minutes at the Trainview Café by M. Bennardo (Asimov’s SF, November-December 2022) is set in a future where humanity has uploaded itself to a virtual reality where people spend their time experiencing a variety of simulations:

Closing his eyes, Felix took a sip of the tea, held it in his mouth, and felt its warmth diffuse through his sinuses. It was an incredible detail, just like every other detail in the place. The feeling of physical presence, of reality, of existential weight. He could not deny that the Trainview Café was utterly unlike any other simulation program he had experienced in the decades since he had left his own human body behind. But all the same, Felix couldn’t see what all of these finely turned details added up to. What was the point, except to remind him of what he no longer was?
Slowly, Felix inverted the paper cup over the edge of the platform. Steam rose hissing as the remaining tea splattered onto the gravel below, staining it dark gray. He squashed the paper cup and threw it down onto the tracks, wondering how much longer he had to wait before he would be disconnected. He vaguely recalled that the program had charged him for forty-eight minutes. It was an unusual increment of time, but it had been the only one available. And it had been expensive, too: more expensive than twelve hours in most other high-end simulations. Yet, here he was, only twenty minutes in and already bored.  p. 118

Felix eventually becomes so bored that he goes down to the tracks and lies there, waiting for the next train to come—but, before this can happen, he is asked by a woman to move. She adds that his behaviour is spoiling the simulation for everyone else and, if he doesn’t do as he is told, she will disconnect him.
Felix gets back on to the platform and ends up having a conversation with the woman, Nancy, who tries to explain to him that the simulation is not event driven but is dedicated to detail. She then takes him to see goldfinches at a birdfeeder, explaining that the birds are rendered at close to cellular level, never repeating themselves or looping as would be the case in other simulations (“Practically speaking, at every level above the size of a cell, they are real birds”). Felix doesn’t get it, but the challenge of trying to understand what other visitors are getting from the simulation breaks through the ennui he has recently been experiencing (something highlighted when he revisits the Blue Glacier climbing simulation, an experience that was thrilling the first time he made the ascent but has now lost its attraction).
Felix subsequently makes another visit to the Train Station simulation, and once again upsets the people there by banging on the window and frightening the goldfinches away. Then, on his next trip, he arranges to meet Nancy, and they have a long back and forth conversation about the simulation and the philosophy behind it. Nancy suggests that, if he wants to spend more time there, he could become an admin. Felix declines. Then Nancy offers to show him one of the hacks that she and the other admins have been working on—the ability to get on an outbound train and stay there all night until they return to the train station the next day (this enables the users to permanently stay in the simulation, which would otherwise be a very expensive proposition due to the processing power required).
There are shortcomings to this hack, however, as Felix finds out when they both set off on the “Night Train” and he is told to close his eyes and keep them closed. When he does, Felix experiences the motion and sound of the train, but (spoiler) he is unable to just lie there and enjoy the limited experience and, when he eventually opens his eyes, Felix finds himself in an unsettling low-resolution world of lines and unfilled spaces, an image that reveals the “endless nightmare” that he and (I think) all uploaded humans are trapped in.
This is a slickly told story—Bennardo has a concise and transparent style—and the concept is pretty neat. That said, I don’t think the ending is as good as the rest of it, possibly because it doesn’t clearly make its point. (Is this his personal nightmare or one for humanity? Do people really desire thrills or normal life?) Not bad at all, though, and I’ll be interested to see more work from this writer.
*** (Good). 6,950 words. Story link.

The Empty by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Empty by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s Science Fiction, November-December 2022) opens with Sal seeing a motionless red dot on her screen—one of her remotely supervised self-driving trucks has broken down.
The rest of the first half of the story describes Sal’s uncertain unemployment (she is continually assessed by Amazon-like metrics and there are lots of other people waiting to take her job), her location (she works in a portacabin complex in the car park of an abandoned Wallmart carpark in the middle of nowhere, presumably because of the tax breaks), and her possible future (when she goes to see her supervisor about the breakdown, she learns she is about to be promoted).
When Sal subsequently uses the truck’s remote bee- and monkey-like drones to remotely inspect the damage, she sees that the truck has hit a drone:

There really wasn’t much left of that thing. Her truck must have been the third or fourth one to hit it. Something that small, it would barely register on their sensors.
The trucks weren’t going to slam on the brakes for every jackrabbit that launched itself into their grills. Sal heard the stories from the drivers who had worked their way up from the service depots: You power-washed a lot of gore off these things. Blood, bits of bone, quills, hooves, and antlers. At two hundred kilometers an hour, at least it was over quickly for the animals.
The trucks were failsafed to spot humans near the road and brake—but she’d heard things. And they weren’t going to stop for anything, human or otherwise, out here on U.S. 50. This was the Empty. Population density below the safety threshold. The trucks automatically turned the failsafe off. Whoever lived out here (did anyone live out here?) knew you’d better look both ways when you cross these roads. And look again.
White paint, though. She’d never seen that.  p. 68

Then, while she waits for the repair truck to arrive, she walks the monkey over to a deserted diner—and sees “HELP” written on the one window that isn’t boarded up, with a handprint pointing into the desert.
The rest of the second half sees Sal go to investigate, all the while worrying about the cost that she is incurring (after she has used the allotted amount of time for inspecting the damage, Sal’s company starts charging her). Eventually (spoiler), Sal finds the remaining survivor of a nearby, unattended retirement settlement (we learn that the drone the truck crashed into is actually the settlement’s medical bot).
The story ends with Sal calling for a rescue drone, and later being let go by her employers. She subsequently gets a thank-you message from the woman she saved.
This story has a very convincing near-future setting—there is a wealth of throwaway, Heinleinesque detail about this increasingly automated society—but the capitalist excesses (paying for a SAR drone, being laid off for saving someone’s life) almost stretch credulity to breaking point, as does the rescued woman’s comment about never being able to repay Sal. Well, the woman could say she was going to leave her estate to Sal for saving her life—but, of course, that would ruin the tale’s miserablist finger-wagging about dystopian capitalism. This latter spoils the story somewhat.
(**+) Average to Good. 5,600 words. Story link.

What We Call Science, They Call Treason by Dominica Phetteplace

Posted on by Paul Fraser

What We Call Science, They Call Treason by Dominica Phetteplace (Asimov’s SF January–February 2023) opens with a billionaire called Rodrigo asking the female narrator of the story to wear a new invention (an “emotional fitness tracker”) to a lunch date with an old college acquaintance.
After a long lunch with Will, and surveillance drones photographing them outside the restaurant, he and the narrator are picked up by Rodrigo the billionaire. Rodrigo reveals that he is from a parallel world, and they drive to a building and go through a portal to Rome 2, where they speak Latin, have to wear the bracelets, and learn that the citizens are panicking because the planet is going to be hit by an asteroid in 19 hours. Rodrigo wants to transfer useful technology before the asteroid hits, but the narrator thinks they can save the planet—so she goes back for her world’s “Space Codex,” while Will gathers hard drives full of Rome 2’s knowledge. Then, after the narrator delivers the Codex and returns to her own world for the second time, the portal dies.
The narrator subsequently becomes a billionaire thanks to the cold fusion technology of Rome 2 (but there are still problems with climate change and the super-rich) and the story eventually ends years later with Rodrigo arriving out of a portal (a “white hole”). He tells her that they managed to save Rome 2 from the asteroid but now have a problem with a black hole in the upper atmosphere. He also adds that Will is sending more files through a white hole to the Burning Man festival, and he’ll meet them there.
This is all narrated in a vaguely satirical tone—but I’m not really sure what the point of this piece is other than to make a number of glib contemporary observations:

I also wanted to solve the prison problem. The police drones took all “unregistered” citizens to nasty offshore islands. It seemed unnecessarily cruel once you looked into the details.
I spent my fortune several times over trying to fund alternatives but never succeeded. It turns out that having money isn’t enough to effect change: you also have to get other people with money to agree with you. Otherwise, their billions act as anti-matter to your own, totally canceling each other out. The other billionaires were fine with me trying to fix the climate, but they thought having a large, incarcerated class of people was essential to their economy. How else would you motivate everyone else to work for you?

It certainly doesn’t work as any sort of believable story.
* (Mediocre). 5,050 words.

Tideline by Elizabeth Bear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tooniverse Telemarketer by Rudy Rucker

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Tooniverse Telemarketer by Rudy Rucker (Asimov’s SF, January–February 2022) opens with Dora Schreck, (who is married to Max) dealing with the most recent of a number of irritating telemarketing calls the house AI has let through. We then learn that (a) Max is suffering from Axle-8, a disease that apparently originated in sub-space, and (b) the house AI has budded a daughter who, while working for the neighbours, sent their dog to sub-space. The daughter AI later turns up in the form of a dog house after Dora trims her own house AI’s tendrils to reduce its consciousness.
Further wackiness follows, including the death of Max, during which he oozes ectoplasm (“smeel code”) that enters Dora. This brings Max’s consciousness back to life inside of Dora, and the daughter AI then takes them to sub-space where they find the dog. There they learn that the irritating telemarketer who features throughout the story is hiding inside the dog, and is an alien recruiting Earth folks for a Galactic Congress.
These events are so bizarre, and the story told in so larky a tone, it is hard to sustain any interest in what is going on.
– (Awful). 4,250 words.

The Metric by David Moles

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Metric by David Moles (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2021) opens on a far future Earth with a spaceship crashing near the city of Septentrion after the vessel is forced out of the metric (a universe wide system developed aeons ago which has its nexus on Earth). When a rescue party from the nearby city of Septentrion arrives, one of the members called Piper spots something in the wreckage, and he races his twin Petal to get to it.
When Petal arrives first and picks up a small sphere a stranger appears beside him and starts talking to the pair in an unknown language. One of the other group members gets their armour to translate what he is saying: they learn that the universe is ending.
Piper and Petal subsequently take the sphere and its intelligence, which calls itself Tirah, back to the city. Tirah applies for provisional citizenship and requests the fabrication of a body. While this happens, we learn about Tirah’s home world:

Hoddmimis Holt, the world that had sent Tirah, had been built perhaps two hundred million years ago, as Septentrion counted years; built when there were still stars in the sky, and when ships like Thus is the Heaven still plied the metric, knitting a web that spanned galaxies, even as the quintessence was drawing those galaxies apart, emptying the spaces between the stars to drown each galaxy alone in red darkness. It was a great city, as Petal understood it, built mostly of things more clever and more enduring than brute matter: nootic mass, dissociated fields, knots of space-time akin to the metric itself; and home only to purely computational intelligences, as far beyond the computationals of Septentrion as the Holt itself was beyond Septentrion’s towers of carbon and crystal.
The Holt was made in nearly full knowledge of the inevitability of the quintessence and the limitations of the metric, and made to last. Its makers poised it on the edge of a singularity with the mass of twenty billion stars, the core of a galaxy far from humanity’s birthplace, a black hole so enormous that even light would take days to girdle its vast event horizon; and there it spun, balanced at the equilibrium point between the singularity’s hungry mass and the even hungrier quintessence.  p. 26

The passage above gives you a good idea of the baroque and information-dense style of the story but, in the next few pages, the detail of Tirah’s warning becomes clearer and we learn that the quintessence is slowly destroying the universe. The metric, a system built to ameliorate the effects of the quintessence, needs to be shut down otherwise space-time will not come to an end—and this will prevent a new universe being born.
Tirah subsequently petitions the City Authority to shut down the metric but is unsuccessful (funnily enough, no-one wants the Earth and the Universe to come to an end before it has to). Tirah is then confined to the Archive grounds, but Petal, after discussing the matter with Gauge (a “motile” from the Archive), helps Tirah escape. When Piper realises that Petal and Tirah intend making the long overland journey to another city called Meridian, he and the rest of what remains of the rescue team are tasked to follow and retrieve them.
The second half of the story is devoted to the long overland trek that Petal and Tirah (and their pursuers) make in arctic conditions that prevail over most of this far-future Earth. Along the way there are deserted wastelands, buried cities, messages from their pursuers which make the pair detour, and periods when there is no light at all:

Petal and Tirah made more than twenty leagues that first day, the flat land of the lakeshore giving way to rolling hills, and there was just no reason to stop, not when Petal didn’t feel tired, not when the going was so easy, and Tirah so light in Petal’s arms. Petal could have kept on, continuing into the dark. But the scale of what they’d done, what Petal was committing to, was starting to sink in.
They’d outrun the storm, or it had passed over them, and they were under a clear black sky with only a faint dusting of silver sparks, very high up, that Tirah said was probably debris from colliding mirrors. The snow was smooth and very flat and seemed, through the armor’s eyes, to shine with its own light.
“What will it be like?” Petal asked—meaning the new cosmos. “Will there be stars?”
“Not to be known,” Tirah said. “It might be the same. It might be different. What’s most important is that it will be.”
Petal’s hand sought and found Tirah’s.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Petal said.
Tirah said nothing.
They couldn’t really touch, not through the armor, and in this cold the armor wouldn’t have opened if Petal had asked. But it was almost as though they could.
Three thousand leagues, Petal and Tirah, just the two of them.
And at the end of it, the end of the world.  p. 36

Eventually, after a hundred and seventy days on the ice, Petal and Tirah reach Meridian, only to see that parts of the city are on fire because of misaligned orbital mirrors. Then they realise that they are going to have to go through a restricted area (Petal’s armour and life support system tells him, “Under the terms of the 57th Diatagmatic Symbasis and its implementing regulations and orders, entry to the peripheral conservation area is permitted only to authorized persons”). They nearly make it, but are caught by the city cohorts.
Petal is taken to a cell and (spoiler) is surprised to see it is already occupied by Piper—he and his team arrived earlier as they used a crawler to travel overland. Petal also learns that several members of his old team died on the way.
Petal and Piper are then taken to the city, where they meet another old colleague, Hare, and then learn that Tirah will be allowed to see the sacella to make his case for shutting down the metric. Petal wants to go with him, and tells Piper to come along.
The final scene sees Tirah attempt to approach the sacella, but he is a machine and is disintegrated before he can speak with them. The twins, after some existential agonising, take his place—and the story ends with the implication that they are successful (the chapter headings form a temporal countdown throughout the story, with the last one being TΩ-2×103—thirty three minutes before TΩ).
This story struck me as the kind of piece that a more cerebral and current day Planet Stories might use—a enjoyably high density (there is as much detail here as some novels) super-science tale set on an exotic, far-future Earth, and one which ends with the death and rebirth of the universe!
***+ (Good to Very Good).1 16,300 words. Story link.

1. I liked this story (a Theodore Sturgeon Award finalist, by the way) better than all the other novelette finalists in the Asimov’s Readers’ Poll for 2021. I don’t know how this one didn’t make the cut—too complex, too hard a read?

The Extraterrestrials Are Coming! The Extraterrestrials Are Coming! by Peter Wood

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The Extraterrestrials Are Coming! The Extraterrestrials Are Coming! by Peter Wood (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2022) opens with the narrator, Savannah Myles, on a Western Alliance space station when the alarm goes off. She goes to the flight deck and we learn that (a) the female captain is her ex-girlfriend as of three weeks ago, (b) an alien spaceship moving at 60 times the speed of light is heading towards them (the aliens have somehow managed to message the station to let them know they are coming), and (c) Savannah is now attracted to Ingrid, another crewmember (even in the midst of the this momentous occasion we are told, “Ingrid was 100 percent the opposite of my hard-drinking, up-for-anything-anytime, blowing-off-work ex-husband”).
The rest of the first half of the story seems to be as concerned with Savannah’s interpersonal concerns as it is with the impending First Contact, and one of the other things we get throughout the story is a lot of literary name-dropping:1

I read the recreation activities wipe board. Canasta tournament Saturday. Book
Club tonight. Catcher in the Rye. Good God. We had just finished The Bell Jar. Somebody should write a book where the two depressed 1950s NYC protagonists find each other. Of course, I was a fine one to criticize depression.
I wanted to tell Ingrid a few things. Again. But I couldn’t go down that road. I shared the blame for our problems anyway. I signed up for station duty to escape a nasty divorce and then jumped right back in the water.  p. 143

Also mixed in with all of the above are a quirky robot called Yossarian (named after the Catch 22 character, presumably), and various messages from two feuding political parties on Earth, one of which looks likely to be replaced by the other around the time of the alien ship’s arrival (elections are currently taking place).
This all comes to a head when (spoiler) the two political parties’ spaceships arrive at the station at the same time as the aliens do. Then, when the opposition party ship subsequently attempts to dock with the station after being refused permission by the ruling party, it rips a hole in the superstructure. The crew have to abandon the station, and the aliens are not impressed with the squabbling politicians, so much so they make to leave. Only Savannah’s impassioned plea to the aliens that all humans are not the same (they just elect the politicians) stops them leaving.
There is the seed of a decent story here, and some amusing dialogue with Yossarian the robot, but the story can’t seem to decide if it is a First Contact story, a domestic soap opera, a literary salon, or a political satire. Consequently, it is a bloated mess (and one with an odd title).
* (Mediocre). 7,450 words.
 
1. As well as the two titles above, we also see mention of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Ulysses, Things Fall Apart, Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, and Bartleby the Scribner (I think this latter is meant to be Bartleby, the Scrivener, unless I have missed some joke). There are also references to Pablo Picasso, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ursula K. Le Guin (this latter is followed by an unconvincing, “Greatest writer of the twentieth century”.)


Sparrows by Susan Palwick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Sparrows by Susan Palwick (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2022) is set in an apocalyptic near future (storms and floods) and sees Lacey, a college student, finishing her paper on Shakespeare on a manual typewriter in her abandoned and damaged dormitory:

The paper was a comparison of Richard II and King Lear, contrasting close readings of Richard’s “For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground” speech and Lear’s speech to Cordelia: “Come, let’s away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage.”
The sonorous language filled Lacey’s head, as if the characters were here, talking to her. Both of these beaten kings: Richard railing against mortality and Lear—unaware that he was about to lose his only loyal daughter—vowing to find every grace he could in her company, to “wear out in a wall’d prison packs and sects of great ones that ebb and flow by the moon.” Both of them were doomed. But Lear’s sufferings had brought him acceptance and humility, while Richard just felt sorry for himself.  p. 51

Lacey later goes to drop off the completed paper in Professor Ablethwaite’s mailbox and, as she walks through the campus, sees bodies that have been crushed by trees or washed onto campus by the floods. When she gets to the English building (“one of the oldest on campus”) she is amazed to find it is still standing. Then, when she gets to Ablethwaite’s office, she sees the door is ajar and he is inside sitting at his desk.
After some initial introductions, Albethwaite asks Lacey why she bothered to finish her essay, and then, when she goes to leave, he asks her to stay. Albethwaite offers her something to eat and drink, and they (spoiler) start talking about her paper. This discussion references the earlier passage above, and the situation they are in:

A booming sounded in the distance, and they both looked out the window. The storm was much closer, the few remaining trees dancing and crashing. “This may be it,” Ablethwaite said.
“Yes. It may be.”
He turned back to face her. “All right. So what’s this paper about?”
She’d loved writing the paper, but now she felt tongue-tied. “It’s about Richard the Second and Lear. It’s a comparison of how they face their ends. Richard’s all bitter and everything, but Lear’s okay with being in a prison cell if he can be with Cordelia.”
“Which he’ll never get to be.”
“No. But he doesn’t know that.”
Ablethwaite scowled. “Mercy not to know sometimes, isn’t it? No currently relevant subtext, oh no. What is it Lear tells Cordelia? ‘So we’ll live’?”
“Yes. That’s what he says.”
Lear and Cordelia wouldn’t live. No one would. Lacey wouldn’t and her aunt wouldn’t and none of the departed students would. Even without the storms, even without social collapse and all the catastrophes besetting every corner of the globe Lacey had heard about, everyone would die, because everyone always did. The trick was to find what good you could while you were still alive. Lear had finally learned that, and all these hundreds of years after Shakespeare had written Lear’s speech, he had taught Lacey, too.
She swallowed and said, “For just a minute, you know, he’s happy. For just a little while. It’s the only time he’s happy in the whole play.”
“The sparrow flying through the mead hall, warm and dry, before it has to fly back outside, into rain and darkness.” Ablethwaite glanced through the window again.
Nothing was visible. The wind was a howling roar.
“Is that Shakespeare?”
“Bede.”  pp. 53-54 

The description of the unfolding apocalypse and the story arc outlined above work well together. Succinctly done, too.
*** (Good). 2,500 words.