Ocean by Steven Utley (Fantastic, August 1976) opens with the female narrator, who has “flippers and gills now”, poisoned by the spines of a sea urchin—but she escapes its effects by surfacing and becoming a flying creature.
The next section describes an ongoing struggle she is having with a man who is either (a) interfering with her (possibly prosthetic) body, or (b) operating her controls (she may be a spaceship), or (c) she is a personality living in a ship’s computer. Later we learn (spoiler) that it is the latter, and that she is on a generation ship where everyone died apart from her. When she got old she uploaded into the ship’s circuits/memory, and at that point sensed a malevolent entity.
The story ends with some sort of reckoning.
Trying to work out what was going on while reading this story was like wading through mud.
– (Awful). 2,700 words. Story link.
The Human Operators by Harlan Ellison & A. E. Van Vogt
The Human Operators by Harlan Ellison & A. E. Van Vogt (F&SF, January 1971) opens1 with the narrator completing a task in space outside what we later find is a generation spaceship. He is the only inhabitant, essentially the slave of the controlling AI, which keeps him in line by the use of electric shocks.
The story later sees the narrator repair one of the modules in the ship’s intermind (where he hears voices—I can’t remember if this is ever adequately explained) so the ship can lower its “defractor shield” (shades of Star Trek) and dock with one of the other ships in the fleet (there is some backstory about a Starfighter revolt before the AIs took over the various ships in the fleet).
After the narrator completes his task, a female from one of the other ships comes on board to mate with him (the humans on the ship only live until their thirties—his father dies when he was fourteen, and his father’s father likewise).
Eventually, (spoiler) the telegraphed revolt occurs when the narrator goes to the control room and fights the AI (which fights back by accelerating and decelerating the ship). He wins—then the woman reveals that she is free too, and they should free the others in the fleet. However, after further discussions, they decide to go and settle on an alien planet instead.
Interesting start but, even though the individual scenes are competently enough done, the rest of the story never really convinces or coheres, especially the intermind/talking voices part. And the final section, where they land on the alien planet and meet the natives, seems like it belongs to a different story.
** (Average). 7,850 words. Story link.
1. There is a short note before the story:
[To be read while listening to Chronophagie, “The Time Eaters’’: Music of Jacques Lasry, played on Structures Sonores Lasry-Baschet (Columbia Masterworks Stereo MS 7314).]
Pretentious twaddle like this doesn’t improve your clunky space opera.