Tag: Clarkesworld

Sensations and Sensibility by Parker Ragland

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Sensations and Sensibility by Parker Ragland (Clarkesworld #200, May-June 2023) opens with two droids entering a café called The Queen of Tarts, a period café from before the time of cybernetics and augmented reality. After they seat themselves, Mairead asks Cian what they should order—and the latter’s response about the cold reveals that Mairead, who was not aware of the low temperatures outside, has no sense of touch or sensation. Then, after they order a tomato tart from the human server, and discuss what “hot” feels like, we learn that Cian has no sense of smell.
The rest of the story mostly consists of the two droids’ conversations about these deficiencies, during which they attempt to mimic human behaviour (something seen when their tomato tart arrives):

“Do you want to cut it?” Mairead asked.
“Is that what we’re supposed to do?”
“It’s what the humans are doing.” Mairead nodded toward a couple sitting at a nearby table. On their plates, the two had neat wedges.
Cian shrugged and picked up their knife. They worked the blade through the pastry. Hot juices bubbled out of the gashes.
“Perfect,” Mairead said.
Cian carefully transferred the triangular slices onto plates using the flat of the blade. Then the droid swapped the knife for a spoon.
“I believe we’re supposed to use the other one, the one with the points.” Mairead picked up a fork and showed it to Cian. “That’s what those people over there are doing.”
Cian switched the items of cutlery.
“And don’t forget to put your napkin in your lap,” Mairead said.
Cian ignored Mairead’s second suggestion.
Mairead scraped off a bit of the tart and brought it close to their mouth. They acted out taking a bite by chomping on thin air. “Delicious.”
“Should I actually put a bit in my mouth?” Cian asked.
“What would happen if you accidentally swallowed?”
“I don’t know. I’m not even sure I can swallow.” Cian skewered the tart, tore a piece free from the slice, and then inspected the potential bite. “I could spit it out.”
“I don’t think that’s polite.

Their conversation subsequently devolves into a mild quarrel.
If there is a point to this inconsequential story, it eluded me.
* (Mediocre). 2,160 words. Story link.

LOL, Said the Scorpion by Rich Larson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

LOL, Said the Scorpion by Rich Larson (Clarkesworld #200, May-June 2023) opens with Maeve, one half of a couple, getting fitted for a “holiday suit”:

“Does it come in any other colors?” Maeve asks, eyeing herself in the smart glass.
“No,” the salesperson admits. “You look quite elegant in eggshell, though.”
She’s undecided. The holiday suit is a cooperative swarm of microorganisms, a pale paramecium shroud that coats her entire body, wetly glistening.
“Full-spectrum UV protection, internal temperature regulation, virus filtration, water desalination, emergency starch synthesis.” The salesperson has a comforting sort of murmur. “Ideal for any sort of live tourism. Where will you be off to?”
“Faro,” Maeve says, and saying the name conjures immaculate white buildings and deep blue waters onto the smart glass behind her, displaying the paradise she’s dreamed of for entire weeks now.

The rest of the story sees Maeve and Charlie on holiday, where we see Maeve’s suit filtering out a range of unpleasant stimuli, beginning with the aeroplane peanuts (allergen hazard) and the smell of a (unbeknown to them) dead gecko in the autocab’s undercarriage. (Charlie is less keen on the suits, “The whole point of live tourism is authenticity.”)
Later on Maeve’s suit edits a drunken tourist from her view, and the suit’s more advanced protection functions are revealed when the couple go on a boat trip for a personal dining experience—when the chef brushes past Maeve, the suit bites him. This latter occurrence (spoiler) foreshadows the climactic scene where Maeve becomes aware of a presence when she goes walking on the beach one night when she cannot sleep. She rolls down the hood of the suit to see what is there and becomes aware of the stench of Faro’s unfiltered air—and then sees that a man who shouted at the couple days earlier is in front of her. He speaks to her in Portugese1 and grabs hold of her, whereupon the suit bites off his fingers and leaves him with bleeding stumps.
When Maeve returns to her room, Charlie notes the attractive pink hue of her suit, a call back to colour discussion at the beginning of the story, and a comment that reinforces the horror of the recent event.
This is all executed well enough (there are a number of neat little touches), and it makes a point about the irony of travelling to new places but insulating yourself from that reality. However, it didn’t really engage me, probably due to the slightly dream-like logic and setting of the story (why would people be allowed to wear suits that are capable of wounding others? You might get away with that in some US states, but I doubt you would in Europe). Awful title.
** (Average). 2,670 words. Story link.

1. The man who accosts Maeve on the beach says three things, “Ajude-me.”; “Acho que sou o Homem Invisível”; “O do filme antigo. Ajude-me.” This Google translates to “Help me”; “I think I’m the Invisible Man”; “The one in the old movie. Help me.”

Songs of Activation by Andy Dudak

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Songs of Activation by Andy Dudak (Clarkesworld, December 2020) is set in a Galactic Empire future, and opens with Pinander at college reciting one of his set texts. After this, he meets his friends for lunch:

Pinander’s mind expands with activated Lore. He sits with Jain and Philo.
“Alright?”
A penitent Jain hunches over her steaming bowl.
Philo studies a scroll. “I’m not going to make it,” he says.
“Where are you?” Pinander says.
“The Temple Odes.”
Pinander explains the Temple Odes were songs. “Some verse lends itself to silent reading, but not the Odes. You should be reciting or singing.”
Jain giggles in her soup steam.
Pinander reckons Philo is doomed. Intelligence goes a long way in the imperial service exam, but shyness can hobble you. There are soundproofed study rooms for students like Philo, but to pass the exams you must study constantly: at meals, in showers, in the loo, to and from study groups, as you drift off to sleep. There’s a lot of verse like the Odes. If you don’t recite or sing, Lore will go un-activated, remaining useless noise in your skull.

We learn that the students spend several years in an aestivation facility dubbed “The Crypt” before they come to college, during which time a huge body of knowledge called the Lore is downloaded into them. Afterwards they have to activate it by reading or reciting or singing various texts.
The rest of the story sees Philo commit suicide, and Jain drop out, but only after she passes on the revolutionary idea that there was another context written for the Lore by a poet called Sinecure. Further academic and counter-revolutionary intrigue follows (a Professor makes a cryptic remark that takes root in Pinandar’s “activated mind”) and the story eventually proceeds to an ending (spoiler) where Pinander manages to track down a scroll written by Sinecure and uses it to gain a dual view of his Lore and the Empire.
The core idea of this story is a bit unlikely, and much that follows is either a hand-wavey development of that idea or a rather over-elaborate description of college students and parental pressure and revolutionary intrigue in a far-future Imperial Empire (i.e. too much description and not enough story). It also has an ending that seems a bit unfocused. Ultimately, I guess I liked this, but it takes some getting into, and I’d understand if people bounced off it.1
*** (Good). 5,850 words. Story link.

1. This story got a mixed response in one of my Facebook groups.

Sarcophagus by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Sarcophagus by Ray Nayler (Clarkesworld #175, April 2021)1 opens with the narrator, who has had a copy of his mind beamed into a “blank body” on a far-flung alien planet, recording in his log that he is the only one who has made it—all his colleagues’ downloads were scrambled and their blanks recycled. Worse still, he finds the planet is a polar wasteland that appears inimical to human life.
He subsequently decides to try and make it to a depot that is thirty clicks away, even though he is hampered by problems with his suit’s battery draining faster than he can recharge it (the surface of his suit doubles as a solar panel). During his journey he sees thermal vents (a sign of heat sources under the ice) and feels the vibrations of glaciers moving beneath him. Then he finds signs of alien life, the brittle chitinous exoskeletons of tiny animals which he scans and photographs. During this process he realises he may be the first human to discover alien life, but that he has no-one to share it with.
Then, shortly afterwards, he makes an even more profound discovery:

It wasn’t until midday that I hit the maze.
There must have been a massive steam collapse, years ago, under this part of the glacier. Or perhaps the pressure from its motion was pushing up against an obstacle, some ice-drowned reef of stone. The surface of the glacier had deformed and cracked, breaking up into blocks and slabs. Many of the slabs were ten or more meters high.
Canted towers of ice, sapphire in their cores, stretching as far as I could see with the binoculars. A city of ice. No way around.
That was when I saw it. It was just for a moment. A second, perhaps? Two?
Enough time to send a lacework trident of terror through me, up every vein and artery to the base of my brain, where the old, old fears live. Tooth and claw in the dark. Death by drowning. It must have been five kilometers away. It was visible so briefly; I could almost convince myself I had hallucinated it. How to describe it? The surface of it was pale. Smooth, fish belly pearl. It must have been three meters tall, at least—and nearly that wide. What Earth metaphor could encompass it? It was nothing like a bear, an ape, a wolf. If it had a face, I did not see it—but then, its outline, that awful plasticine, oily white against the white behind it, did not allow me to read its shape well.
Did it even have a head? It had four limbs and was standing on two of them. Or crouched over two of them. But were they feet? Legs? Its vague body undulated with malevolent power, writhing beneath its sickening skin.
And in the moment I fixed the binoculars on it, I knew it had seen me. It turned the upper part of itself in my direction. It seemed to fold deeper into itself, the way an animal will tense, growing smaller like a spring tightening, shrinking into its own core. It shuddered. Squirmed in its sallow sheath of skin.
Then it was gone, sliding down into the maze that I, too, would have to enter.

The rest of the story (spoiler) sees him working his way through the maze while he appears to be stalked by the alien—which, at one point, when he partially falls into a crevasse, he throws an axe at to scare away. Then, when he reaches the depot and finds an alien burial cairn nearby, he examines the body and sees that it appears to have the kind of impact damage caused by a crash.
The last pages see the narrator’s tent blown over in a storm, a concussion, and him waking to find that he is being dragged through the snow by the alien. He ends up in a warm cave with the creature observing him. Then, when he attempts to communicate with the creature, he discovers it is actually the sentient EVA suit of the buried alien—and it finally opens up so he can climb inside.
The strengths of this story are its cracking beginning and The Thing-like polar setting and suspense. Unfortunately it drags a little in the middle (the story is probably a little longer than it needs to be) and the ending verges on the far-fetched (i.e. the idea that the alien/suit would be able to provide life support to the narrator—although it must be said that the dead alien may have a similar biochemistry to humans or it probably wouldn’t have been sent to that planet). Overall, a good piece.
*** (Good). 7,650 words. Story Link.

1. This was joint seventh place in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for 2021 stories. Another of Nayler’s stories, Yesterday’s Wolf, was the winner.

Yesterday’s Wolf by Ray Nayler

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Yesterday’s Wolf by Ray Nayler (Clarkesworld #180, September 2021)1 opens in what later appears to be a remote tribal area of a near-future post-war Central Asian country. There, a father and his daughter Elmira find one of their lambs has been savaged by wolves on their summer pasture. The brother of the family says to Elmira (who we later discover is tech wizard) that it is a pity that she can’t reprogram their old and partially blind sheepdog.
In the days following this comment Elmira gets a chance to do something similar to her brother’s suggestion when her father brings back an inactive robodog found on his neighbour’s pasture. She starts working on this abandoned weapon, and eventually manages to get it reprogrammed and working again—in a way that will help her family:

These things had been designed to run independently for years, patrolling areas where regular soldiers couldn’t go. And of course that was the problem—after the war, no one had been able to come back to the summer pastures for a decade. Those who tried found themselves dragged from their yurts and torn to pieces. But eventually the karaitter—the black dogs—stopped moving, one by one. The summer pastures were safe again—except for the occasional mine or bomb.
The streambeds were the worst: unexploded cluster bomblets and mines washed into them in the storms and lay among the stones and torn branches, waiting indifferently to do what they had been designed to do.
She watched the sleek kara it pacing back and forth beside the herd. She had named it Batyr—Warrior.
Last night she had woken up, along with the rest of her family, to the sound of wolves. They came in close to the yurt camp, to where the sheep were penned. Her father reached for the old shotgun in the dark, but Elmira stopped him.
“No, just wait. Batyr will take care of it.”

After this set-up, which sees Batyr successfully scare away but not kill the wolves, a couple of other sub-plots begin. One concerns Elmira meeting a friend called Jyrgal in town and discovering that she has been kidnapped, raped, and forced into an arranged marriage—a common custom in Elmira’s society. Elmira then learns from her father, in an extended conversation on their way home, that her mother was also kidnapped and raped when she was young but was rescued by him before she could be married.
The other sub-plot sees another kara discovered by Jyrgal’s family but (spoiler), when they power the robodog up, it attacks them. After Elmira is told by her father about this, she reprograms Batyr before they go to help the family. When they arrive at the other family’s settlement Batyr tracks down and fights the other robodog, putting it out of action. During these events Elmira and her father find that Jyrgal is still alive but that her husband, father- and mother-in-law (i.e. the ones involved in the kidnapping) are conveniently dead.
The story closes with Elmira and her father returning home to see off a government official, his son, and a marriage proposal/demand.
This is a well done piece but it struck me as rather glib, at least in its treatment of the forced marriage aspects. First, the main character is atypical in that she is both young and highly capable,2 which makes the story more of a wishful feminist fable than a convincing SF story. Second, although many readers will be tutting in disapproval at what happens to Jyrgal, I doubt many will have a reaction beyond that as the true horror of her terrible experience is never explored (it is all related second hand, and is very safe-space). Finally, just as in the superhero movies, there are no real world solutions or suggestions as to how to curb this terrible practice. Although this looks like a story about forced marriage (at least in part), I don’t think it is.
*** (Good). 5,850 words. Story link.

1. This was the winner of the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for 2021 stories.
2. This is the third Nayler story I’ve read in recent months that has an uber-capable young female protagonist—the other two are Eyes of the Forest (F&SF, May-June 2020) and Muallim, Asimov’s SF, November-December 2021). The latter story also has a remote Central Asian setting and young cyber-whiz daughter.
I find these characters unconvincing and uninteresting, and I wish that male writers using female leads would default to more complex protagonists, like the mother in Rich Larson’s You Are Born Exploding (Clarkesworld #183, December 2021)—or even the ageing woman in Nayler’s own Rain of Days (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022).

Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld #177, June 2021) is a sequel to the author’s amusing (and Hugo Award) winning The Secret Life of Bots (Clarkesworld #132, September 2017). The story opens with the hero of that latter piece, a miniature robot called Bot 9, being woken by the Ship AI sixty-eight years later to be told that they have a problem—and it isn’t ratbugs like the last time, but something else:

“What task do you have for me?” [Bot 9] asked. “I await this new opportunity to serve you with my utmost diligence and within my established parameters, as I always do.”
“Ha! You do no such thing, and if I had a better option, I would have left you in storage,” Ship said. “However, I require your assistance with some malfunctioning bots.”
“Oh?” Bot 9 asked. “Which ones?”
“All of them,” Ship said.

Bot 9 soon discovers that nearly all the ship’s bots have gone rogue and have started forming “gloms” (conglomerations of robots) who think they are the ship’s (currently hibernating) human crew members. This poses an immediate problem for Ship as they will shortly be arriving in Ysmi space, and the Ysmi are extremely hostile to nonorganic intelligences not under the control of biological species.
The rest of the story sees Bot 9 attempt to work his way to the Engineering section, where Ship hopes 9 can revive the Chief Engineer before they reach Ysmi space. As 9 makes its way there it is attacked by a ratbug (creatures who eat wiring, hull insulation . . . and bots)—but is surprised when he sees a former colleague, 4340, sitting astride the creature. They catch up, and 9 learns that all the remaining ratbugs are now under 4340’s control. Meanwhile, the Ysmi contact the ship, the gloms attempt to get control of communications (when they are not engaged in internecine battles to accumulate more bots), and Ship infects one of their number with a virus—which soon starts spreading.
Eventually (spoiler), Bot 9 gets to Engineering and revives the Chief Engineer (who was badly injured in an earlier incident and put in a med-pod there). When he wakes, Bot 9 brings Chief Engineer Frank up to date with amusing exchanges like this one:

“I must warn you, however, that PACKARDs are on the other side [of the door],” 9 added.
“Packard? My second engineer? That’s great!” Frank said. “I thought—”
“It is not the human Packard,” 9 said. “They are in stasis with the other crew. There are four bot glom PACKARDs, currently trying to reduce themselves to only one. Unlike the other gloms, rather than trying to claim sole ownership of an identity via the expediency of violent physical contest, these three appear to be attempting to argue each other into yielding.”
“That sounds a lot like the real Packard, actually,” Frank said.

And then there is this when the Ysmi ship approaches:

“Where are you?” Ship’s voice was faint, but there.
Bot 9 found the knowledge that it was back in Ship’s communication range a matter of some relief. “I have woken Engineer Frank, and we are now in his living quarters, looking for some human item called ‘goddamned underwear,’” it replied.
“There is a synthetic-fabric fab unit in the cryo facility,” Ship said. “Please tell Frank he can visit it after we have reclaimed the facility from the gloms, but that right now there is not time. I need him at the docking facility.”
9, who had reconnected to the voice unit after the human had set it down inside the door, relayed that information.
“I’m not meeting the Ysmi naked,” Frank said.
“You are wearing a flag,” 9 said. A few moments later it added, “Ship asks if you would prefer to meet the Ysmi naked or as a bunch of newly free-floating, disassociated particles in empty space.”
“How much time do we have?” Frank asked. Before he’d even finished speaking, there was a vibration throughout the hull.

After Frank satisfies the suspicious Ysmi (who instruct him to go directly to the jump portal that Ship wants to use) the virus continues to spread through the gloms, and there is a climactic scene where 4340 and his ratbug army come to 9’s rescue.
This is an amusing and well done sequel to the original, with many entertaining exchanges between the various characters. That said, the ending is something of deus ex machina (and one you can see coming), so it is probably not quite as strong as the earlier piece.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 11,050 words. Story link.

Philia, Eros, Storge, Agápe, Pragma by R. S. A. Garcia

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Philia, Eros, Storge, Agápe, Pragma by R. S. A. Garcia (Clarkesworld #172, January 2021)1 is set in the same series as the recently reviewed Sun from Both Sides (Clarkesworld #152, May 2019), features the same two characters, Eva and Dee, and takes place before, during, and after that story.
This one starts with a rather confusing prologue where Brother-Adita, Sister-Marcus and an Admiral track down a “shell” (a robot cum AI, I presume) and—when they unexpectedly find it is still active—the Admiral throws the other two out of the cave and brings the roof down on himself and the shell.
The rest of the story consists of three interwoven narrative threads titled “Now”, “Then”, and “Before”. The “Now” thread opens with Eva and Dee at home talking—or rather signing (again, for some reason, they mostly communicate this way even though they can speak and hear)—about a goat they have bought before it is suddenly turned into gore. Dee realises that one of Sister’s drones has tried to kill Eva (Sister is Eva’s AI twin), and the rest of this passage turns into a combat chase with Eva ending up partially injured and hiding on a riverbank. Dee eventually manages to save her, while Sister—who realises she has been hacked—shuts herself down.
After the couple get back to their house, Eva gets a message from her daughter on Kairi and find outs (after they travel to make a secure call now that Sister is disabled) that there has been a Consortium attack on Eva’s people, the Kairi Protectorate, and seven people have been killed. They also learn that this was accomplished by hacking into Sister and using her “kinnec”, a communication system.
The rest of this thread sees Eva travel home to learn that the Consortium has discovered that she destroyed one of their ship AIs (this event is described in the Sun from Both Sides) and that their attack was retaliation. Eva also ends up in a political fight with the rulers of the Protectorate about what should happen to Sister (Eva opposes their plans to reboot her as it is apparently equivalent to death, and something that has already happened to Sister before).
The second thread, “Then”, begins (confusingly as this opens immediately after Sister’s attack in the previous thread) with Eva in a crashed, partially submerged ship (Sister) with someone cutting her out. We later discover that person is Dee, and that this is how the pair met. The rest of this thread mostly focuses on her recovery and their developing relationship. Eva eventually learns (during a long heart-to-heart) that Dee is an exiled Grand Master of Valencia, while Dee learns she is a Primarch of the Kairi Protectorate.
The third “Before” thread is chronologically the earliest of them all, and recounts a previous battle with the Consortium at the Cuffie Protectorate which ended with Sister damaged and Eva executing a (spoiler) “Nightfall Protocol” that wipes Sister and kills a lot of the Consortium AIs.
These three threads eventually merge together as we see, among other things: Eva getting a dispensation to marry Dee; Eva mind-merging with Sister to sort out the virus problem; Eva vetoing war at the Kairi Parliament and opening negotiations with the Consortium; and the repatriation by the Consortium of the minds of the children they kidnapped. One these minds, Xandar, joins Sister in her ship at the end of the story after the AI has been cleared of the virus. Eva and Dee now have a kid.
I didn’t enjoy this story as much as Sun from Both Sides for several reasons: first, there is far too much plot here (see above), which makes it hard to keep up with what is going on—something compounded by having three stories running in different time periods; second, some of the description is unclear (e.g. the opening passage); third, there is no real climax to the story, but what feels like a series of negotiations instead; fourth, some parts of the story feel padded (the family get-togethers and the Eva getting to know Dee scenes dragged on and, while I’m talking about family matters, I’d suggest you don’t have far-future children call their mothers “Mom”, as that colloquialism catapulted this non-American reader right out of the story—as did a later “asshole”); fifth, the sign language is presented as italic text, which makes for a lot of tiring reading (and can also cause difficulties for those with dyslexia); sixth, and following on from the latter, if you are using masses of italics for speech why wouldn’t you use a bold typeface for the Now/Then/Before chapter headings and perhaps number and/or date them? Readers would then have a better idea of where they are in the chronology of events. I’d also add, with respect to chapter headings, that the “Philia”, “Eros”, “Storge”, “Agápe”, and “Pragma” ones seemed completely irrelevant to the story. I still don’t know how they fit in.
So, in conclusion, too (unnecessarily) complicated, too unclear (in places), and probably too long as well. This wasn’t bad but it was a bit of headscratcher and/or slog at times.
** (Average). 21,000 words. Story link.

1. This is a finalist for the 2022 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.

The Cold Calculations by Aimee Ogden

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Cold Calculations by Aimee Ogden (Clarkesworld #183, December 2021) is yet another “response” to Tom Godwin’s classic, The Cold Equations (I use the word “response” lightly as this piece, like many, misses the point). Godwin’s story involves a spaceship pilot discovering a stowaway on a ship taking vital medicines to a colony planet. If the (female) stowaway remains on board the pilot won’t have enough fuel to decelerate and land, etc., so the pilot’s choice is apparently (a) she goes out the airlock or (b) they both die in space, and the colonists die too. The story (spoiler) goes on to confound reader expectation of the time by having the pilot put the stowaway out the airlock rather than finding an engineering solution.1
Reader reaction to the story often misses the Trolley Problem2 at its heart (which of these two awful solutions do you choose?) and criticism generally falls into one of two categories: (a) engineering or security or physical problems that can or should have been addressed, and/or (b) observations that the piece is intentionally misogynist because a woman is brutally killed (this latter ignores her sympathetic treatment earlier in the story, the likely feelings of the story’s contemporary readers—mostly from a “woman and children first” generation, and the fact that, if the stowaway was a man and he was put out the airlock, no-one would care, and the story would have no effect on its readership).
Ogden’s story doesn’t acknowledge the philosophical issue at the heart of Godwin’s story (it falls largely into the first nit-picking category above, with an anti-capitalist slant) and, instead, we mostly get inchoate rage about bad things happening to good people, with the finger of responsibility repeatedly pointed at “them”. We also get a lot of finger wagging at people who write stories like Godwin’s. These two lines of attack are limned in the opening passage:

Once upon a time, a little girl had to die. It’s just math. Wrong place, wrong time. Bad luck; too bad, so sad.
We’ve all heard such stories, told them, shared them, collected them. Not in the way that we collect trinkets; more like how a sock collects holes. We’re submerged in such stories, we breathe them in like carbon dioxide—poisonous, in the long term, but a fact of life, nonetheless.
But stories have authors, from the gauziest fantasy to grim autobiography. And when once upon a time becomes so many, many times, surely someone must think to ask: had to die? On whose authority?
It’s simple physics, of course. Natural law.
Unless, of course, someone’s been fudging the numbers.

After this the story jumps straight into the action with Alvarez just about to put a stowaway, Shaara, out the airlock. At the last moment Alvarez baulks, and the story then cuts away to a scene where a woman’s twenty-four year old daughter is dying from the continual chemical poisoning she has been exposed to at her factory job. The point made is that the owners were putting profit before safety.
The rest of the story yo-yos between the action on the ship (Alvarez and Shaara are ripping out everything they can to try and jettison the extra mass) and other passages that are similar to the above, with the second about the sacrifice of Komarov, who piloted the obviously unserviceable Soyuz-1 instead of Gagarin because “they” had made up their minds it would be launched regardless, and the third about a sick Cantonese worker who is badly treated on a railroad project.
Meanwhile, Alvarez and Shaara bitch about accountants and their penny pinching:

“It’s not physics that’s killing us. [. . .] It’s some accountant in Winnipeg who fucked us over to save the company some cash.” Whose cold calculation was it? How much did it save? Twenty, thirty thousand bucks. A single externality: one small human life. Cheap as hell, all things considered. “Money’s all that counts. Who cares what happens to the likes of—”

The author also chips in:

There should have been fail-safes and backups, extra reserves. There should have been possibilities—possibilities other than the company literally nickel-and-diming two people to their deaths. There should have been a world where this story has a happy ending.

We’ll come back to happy endings later.
All this comes to a climax when Alvarez is about to put himself out of the airlock instead of Shaara but, before he can, the story cuts away to another external scene where a factory has collapsed (due to more penny pinching) but where the workers start rescuing those buried, pulling rocks out of the rubble one at a time. Then the writer injects herself even more forcibly into the story and directly addresses the reader, stating that they are coming to the “hands on part of the story”, and telling them to “find their anger” as “they are going to need it”. Finally, after a long and muddled passage about what the “men at desks” insist on, and “if one man can kill a girl with the stroke of a pen, what can the rest of us do”, etc., etc., the reader is exhorted to “push already”. We see the mother of the poisoned woman determining that this won’t happen to anyone else; Gagarin realising that he should have tried to prevent the launch of Soyuz-1; the Cantonese worker trying to tip a boxcar off the tracks; and the factory workers finding the hand of a survivor in the rubble. There is one final authorial push, and then we discover that (spoiler) readers’ wishes have changed reality on the ship: Alvarez and Shaara now have enough fuel to make landfall.
I thought this was an awful piece of work for a number of reasons. First, exhorting readers to wish for a happy ending for your doomed characters, and then providing it, is dramatically unsatisfying (profoundly so); second, the story suggests that difficult problems do not have to be faced head-on but can be wished away; third, it is a political rant that profoundly misunderstands economics (if you build endless safety margins into every device they would be unaffordable); fourth, the story presents different situations in the story as if they are morally equivalent, i.e. the malfeasance in the chemical factory vs. the design decisions for the spaceship; fifth, the constant mention of “them”, “the men behind desks”, “the people with blood on their hands and fingers on the scale”, “some accountant in Winnipeg who fucked us over to save the company some cash”, sounds paranoid; sixth, if you are going to reference a story that is known to everyone, make sure you understand what it is about—if you don’t, write your own. Seventh, and finally, it is a bad idea for one writer to suggest what other writers should and should not write:

But stories have authors, from the gauziest fantasy to grim autobiography. And when once upon a time becomes so many, many times, surely someone must think to ask: had to die? On whose authority?

If one man can kill a girl with the stroke of a pen, what can the rest of us do?
It’s easy to decry his callousness, to raise our voices and shout over him. But this girl is not Tinkerbell, and a show of hands and a little noise will not be enough to bring her back. It’s not enough, it never was, just to point at the evil and name it for what it is (though that is the starting place).

If a man at a desk can kill a girl with a little bit of ink, then we can save her in exactly the same way. There are more of us than there are of him. Break his pen, throw it out the window, and send the desk after it.

– (Awful).3 5,500 words. Story link.

1. For a longer review of Tom Godwin’s story, and background information about the story’s genesis, see The Cold Equations at sfmagazines.com.

2. The Wikipedia page on The Trolley Problem, or the more entertaining The Good Life take on the matter.

3. Needless to say, this piece of rabble rousing finished joint second in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for 2021 stories.

Sun from Both Sides by R. S. A. Garcia

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Sun from Both Sides by R. S. A. Garcia (Clarkesworld #152, May 2019) opens with (for the first few pages anyway) a fairy tale-like beginning where “a woman loved a man, and a man loved a woman”. We see that Eva and Dee live in a forest, and watch their lovey-dovey domestic routine until husband Dee goes missing. Then Eva travels into the nearby town (which has a church belfry) to make enquiries, and sees that it has been largely laid to waste. Eva then learns that Dee has been taken by interplanetary slavers.
At this point the story becomes something else entirely, and we see Eva tap a command on her wrist and summon Sister (her AI “sister” spaceship) and its drones to search for Dee. The rest of the first part sees Eva track down the slavers and then fight a high tech battle with the AI captain of the Consortium ship, which she eventually wins (we learn during this that Eva is a fearsome Kairi Primarch). She retrieves her husband, and they fly home in Sister. Meanwhile, the evidence of the destroyed slaver ship is sent to another solar system.
This first quarter of the story eventually turns out to be a set-up for the remainder of the piece and, while this section is okay action/combat SF, it turns out to be a longer setup than is required for the next part of the story; I’d also add that the first four or so pages (the fairy tale/domestic part) are a little dull, and tonally dissonant when compared with the rest.
The final three-quarters of the story (which takes place some time later) is a different, and much superior, kettle of fish, and begins with a robot, a Valencian Knight, arriving with a summons for Dee. In the conversation that follows there is a lot of information imparted, but the gist of it is that Dee used to be Grandmaster Lucochin on the planet of Valencia, and the new Queen is demanding his presence at the Greatwood there. Although Dee tries to refuse the summons, he and Eva soon have a speck of Corewood implanted in them and fly up to Knight’s ship to travel home via the onboard Vineyard. (Sister covertly follows the pair after dropping them off there, but has to make her own way):

His wife squeezed his fingers to get his attention before signing, “Smells wonderful.”
“It’s the Vineyard,” he explained. “The ship is grown around it to infuse it with the vine’s atoms. It gets into every part of the vessel and flowers. Even when they’re not flowering, the mirror Vineyard on Valencia, or other ships, might be, so ships end up smelling like this all the time.”
They were in the corridors now. Petrified carbon curved under and around them, the same color as his wife’s startlingly light brown eyes, the whorls and rings rippling through the surface a testament to the ship’s advanced age.
This Vineyard was one of the massive fleet his people maintained to trade and lay seedlings in space to create Arbors, so that ships could travel ever further by navigating from one Arbor or Vineyard to another. No matter how far they explored, all other ships, seedlings, and Arbors, remained permanently entangled with Valencia and each other, allowing Valencians to travel vast distances in an instant and trade reliably with many other colonies.

The pair soon pass through the Vineyard portal and arrive on Valencia—almost immediately, Dee discovers that his Lucochin estate and all the people on it have been liquidated rather than taken over by one of the other houses (Dee served the former King, and his attempts to encourage democratic reform saw his lands confiscated and him exiled). The intrigue continues that night when the pair are gassed as they sleep, and Dee awakens to find that Eva has been taken hostage. Then, when Dee is taken to see the Queen, he discovers that she is his ex-wife. The Queen tells him there is a blight causing the Greatwoods and the Vineyards to die and, if he does not cure them, he and Eva will both be handed over to the Consortium slavers from the first section (who have subsequently discovered who destroyed their ship).
The description of the chess-based Valencian society in this part of the story is pretty well done (the ranks appear to go from Grandmaster down to Pawn, with the oppressed masses below the latter; the various characters often wear masks to hide their facial expressions; they complete “moves”, etc., etc.). Also well done is the Game of Thrones-like intrigue that takes place between the various houses. Another strength of the story is the Greatwood/Vineyard handwavium, and the hint that Valencia was originally settled by a generation spaceship full of “First Gardeners”.
Indeed, one of the best parts of the story involves Dee entering the Greatwood to discover why it is dying:

The Greatwood’s iridescence dimmed to a shifting, multicolored glow as he exited the transport and four Knights surrounded him. He was marched alongside the Queen into the low-hanging needle-leaves that spun and glinted in the wind, until they reached the Barrier, which kept all but the Grandmasters from entering. A cylindrical drone swept over to verify his seedling, then retreated to its charging station somewhere beyond the Barrier. He walked into the heart of the Greatwood, sensing the Queen’s unwavering gaze on his back. At the transport hub a short distance from the Barrier, he got into one of the small carts and let it take him on its pre-programmed route to the Coretrees. The sweet, musky perfume of the flowering vines draped on the trees surrounded him like a blanket, but for the first time, he caught the dank scent of rot underneath it all. Purple, red, golden, and green seedpods peeped between the branches, but many were shriveled and blackened, and heaps of spoiled pods had burst open on the ground. He heard the rustling of small animals in the undergrowth, but sobered by what he’d seen, he focused on clearing his mind for the task ahead.
The enormous stand of Coretrees rose out of the deep forest like a monolith, entwined trunks and quantum vines woven together into one massive, flowering, windblown, pulsing glare that forced his mask to its maximum setting. But there were also large dark areas within the Coretrees, where saplings had faded and died. More than ever before.
As the cart halted, a vibration prickled his skin, and heat blasted him. He made his way to the nearest annex in the group of hollowed-out beds at the roots of the Coretrees. He lay down, heart hammering in his chest at the thought of what he was about to do, adrenaline making his fingers shake as he wrapped a Corevine around the hand implanted with the seedling. The needle-leaves sank into his arm, tiny stinging points.
Instantly, he was weightless, his body free of pain and filled with the euphoria of the joining. His mind squeezed with energy and impressions, even as it grew to include every scrabbling life in the Greatwood, every vine curtain on every Vineyard ship, every needleleaf that draped over his paralyzed body, every quark in every Arbor floating in the silent dark.

The climax of the story (spoiler) later takes place at a meeting of Grandmasters where Dee manages to instigate a coup by telling the various Houses that he is the only one who can repair the Greatwood and maintain their space-wide Empire. He also tells them the masses must be enfranchised.
(If I recall correctly, the problem with the Greatwood has something to do with exchanges that he and the previous King had with the sentient trees that comprise it—something about feeding them emotion rather than logic and puzzles, although there is also a reference to problems that Dee left unfixed before his exile. Whatever the explanation was, it wasn’t particularly convincing.)
The story ends with Dee meeting Sister, who has been quietly subverting various AI systems and ships to get to the planet and rescue Eva. They collect her and go home.
This is a bit of a mixed bag to be honest, but the best of it, which is very good in parts, outweighs its flaws. It also struck me that this writer has more in common with previous generations of SF writers than current ones—there are flashes of C. L. Moore here, the sensory stuff about the Vineyards; Jack Vance, the odd and complex Valencian society; and Iain M. Banks—the AI/robot superbeings, and Dee’s “free the masses” politics. The story is also quite heavily plotted, and Garcia’s storytelling is largely brisk and clear (clearer than I’ve been above, I fear, but there is a lot going on in the story and I read it a couple of weeks ago).
A writer to watch, I think.
*** (Good). 16,450 words. Story link.

You Are Born Exploding by Rich Larson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

You Are Born Exploding by Rich Larson (Clarkesworld #183, December 2021) is set in a near-future world where an artificial asteroid has infected humanity with a xenovirus that causes people to mutate into shamblers (later described by the narrator as “monstrous eldritch crayfish things”). After humans change into shamblers they migrate to the oceans and disappear into the deeps.
All this SFnal content is, however, largely in the background at the beginning of the story, as we can see in the opening scene where Elisabeth the narrator and her son Jack go to the beach. Although biocontainment staff are disposing of a shambler there (“remove him efficiently and with good technicality”, according to the guard), the focus is on Elisabeth’s prickly interaction with a neighbour:

[Jack] points a fat finger down the beach. “Shambla, mumma? Is it? Shambla?”
Alea coos and chirps. “They’re speaking now! Such fun.”
“He’s speaking,” Elisabeth says, bristling. “Jack’s a boy unless he eventually decides otherwise.” She adjusts Jack’s hat. “He’s two now. Yes, Jack, it’s a shambler.”
Alea settles back on her towel, with a curve to her lips that looks more amused than chastened.
[. . .]
A ways down the beach, a small knot of spectators has gathered about ten meters back from a distinctive shape. It’s crawling for the surf, red-and-blue flukes rippling from its bent back. A guard is busy zipping into a hazard suit, white with what looks like a gasoline stain across one knee. The shambler seems to sense its time is limited; it scoots a bit faster now, dragging a wet furrow behind itself. The whole thing is quite macabre.
“Is hubby back from his little trip?” Alea asks.
“What?”
The ejection is more forceful than she intended it. She was distracted by the shambler, and by the sputter and whine of the buzzsaw the guard will use to dismember it.
“Benjamin,” Alea clarifies. “Is he back from Australia?”
“Not yet.” Elisabeth shifts her gaze to Jack, who is meticulously pouring fistfuls of sand onto his tiny knees. “My brother is coming to visit, though. He’s an artist.”
Alea smiles dryly. “Here to freeload while he seeks inspiration, I suppose? Every family has one.”
“He’s quite successful, actually.”
“Oh.” Alea gives a pensive moue. “I think we’re all artists, in our own way.”
Elisabeth imagines gouging out her eyes and filling the holes with sand. “What a lovely thought,” she says.

The rest of the story is a slow burn that is largely a study of the tough but tetchy Elisabeth and her relationship with Jack (who we later learn has a genetic condition) as (spoiler) her personal and the wider world fall to pieces. During this slow disintegration her artist brother Will turns up, and we find he has become interested in the shamblers and has started painting them. Later on, he finds a ledge on a cliff that they use to drop into the ocean but doesn’t report it.
Meanwhile, there is background detail about the rest of the world—the increasing chaos, the haves who get immunomods to stave off infection, and the have-nots who do not. We also learn that some people have started joining anthrocide cults, and are voluntarily infecting themselves with the xenovirus. This division in how people are responding to the crisis becomes obvious when her brother brings a new acquaintance round for a drink (“Will is always fucking meeting people”, thinks Elisabeth):

The air is fresh and electric, and it seems impossible that the world is ending, but that is where the conversation invariably leads.
“You see, this is not like the other plagues and pandemics,” says the ex-sommelier, in a faint Romanian accent. “This is their photo negative. Their chiral opposite.”
“Well, it came by artificial meteor,” Will says, with a buttery smile. “That’s quite unique.”
“It came with purpose,” their guest says. “In my opinion, it’s a gift.”
“How do you figure?” Elisabeth asks, more bluntly than usual.
“In my opinion,” the man repeats, “humanity has been offered a way to save itself.” This prompts her to verify, again, that the front gate’s biofilter reported him clean. “To save itself from itself,” he continues, stroking the small bones of his dog’s head, “and this time, the downtrodden lead the way.”
Will gives an alarmed smile. “That’s quite the idea.”
“First shall be last, last shall be first, et cetera.” Their guest places the dog in his lap. “We left the poor behind, over and over, but now they finally get to leave us behind.”
“By becoming monstrous eldritch crayfish things,” Elisabeth says. “Such luck.”
“By growing iridescent armor and returning to our primeval birthplace,” the ex-sommelier says. “They are safe in the ocean while the old world burns. Or they would be, if we stopped senselessly hunting them down.”

Shortly after this Elisabeth asks the visitor to leave, and later on her brother is ejected too (Jack later falls ill and, when Elisabeth checks the house’s video feeds, she sees that Will has smuggled some shambler carcass into the house to get one of the colours he needs for a painting of one of the creatures).
The final arc of the story sees Jack’s health continue to decline, but this is due to his genetic condition and not the xenovirus. Then, while Elisabeth has a bath, she starts thinking the impossible:

“Wash you knees,” Jack suggests.
He is sitting on the heated tile beside the tub. She can’t deny him, not so close to the end, not when his little limbs might give out at any moment. He’s playing with a bright red fire truck that used to be his favorite. The fact feels disproportionately important now. She feels the need to recall everything about Jack, every habit and preference. He has only been briefly alive, so it shouldn’t be difficult.
“Wash you knees, mumma,” Jack says again.
Elisabeth rubs at her kneecap, feeling the gooseflesh around the bone.
“Wash, wash, wash,” she sings. “Wash, wash, wash.”
“Good washing,” Jack decrees, in an uncanny imitation of the nanny’s synthetic lilt. “Good job.”
“Thank you, Jack. I thought so, too.”
Jack returns to his toy. Elisabeth reaches forward and drains the bath a bit, listening to the gasp and gurgle of exorbitant water waste, then adds a shot of hot water. She stirs with her hand until it’s tepid throughout. Climbs out dripping.
“Jack,” she says. “Do you want to come inna bath, bubba? With your fire truck?”
He is momentarily suspicious, but the novelty wins out. He lets her peel off his clothes, hold him fruitlessly over the toilet, carry him back to the tub. He gives a squealing giggle when she skims his feet through the water, holding him under the armpits. She sets him down carefully and clambers in after him.
“Lots of animals live in the water, Jack,” she says. “Should we play pretend?”

Elisabeth then researches ways of disabling their immunomods. Then she gets back in touch with Will. When she tells him what is happening with Jack, he agrees to help.
The final scene sees her meeting Will at the shambler ledge on the cliff. He gives her the injectors that will disable the immunomods and infect her and Jack with the xenovirus. After Elisabeth and Jack change, they shuffle off the ledge and fall into the sea. There is a great payoff line:

But when they are far from any shore, the smaller hooks itself to the larger. They dive together, toward a city that might exist.

Although this is a quite a slow burn to start with (I had to take a break in the middle as I was beginning to lose focus) it comes to an ending that is both emotional (all those interactions between Elisabeth and Jack come to a moving culmination) and transcendent (the final hint that they will have another kind of life beneath the waves). It is also at this point that you realise that this wonderful story is about Elisabeth and her son as much, if not more, than anything else.
****+ (Very Good to Excellent). 14,150 words. Story link.

1. This story was joint second in the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for their 2021 stories. It is the best of them by a country mile.