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 Lake of Gone Forever by Leigh Brackett
The Lake of Gone Forever by Leigh Brackett (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1949) opens with Rand Conway dreaming that he is on Iskar, and his dead father is telling him, “I can never go back to Iskar, to the Lake of Gone Forever.” Conway then wakes, realises he is on his way there in a spaceship, and he thinks about the great wealth that he may find at the lake. Shortly afterwards, Rohan (a rich man who is connected to Esmond, the ethnologist fiancé of Conway’s daughter Marcia) comes to tell him that they are about to arrive.
After they land, the crew get the sledges out and they head for the nearest village: Conway, Rohan and Esmond travel, but Marcia is left behind with the ship. Several hours later, and after they continue on foot, they eventually come to the city:
It spread across the valley floor and up the slopes as though it grew from the frozen earth, a part of it, as enduring as the mountains. At Conway’s first glance, it seemed to be built all of ice, its turrets and crenellations glowing with a subtle luminescence in the dusky twilight, fantastically shaped, dusted here and there with snow. From the window openings came a glow of pearly light.
Beyond the city the twin ranges drew in and in until their flanks were parted only by a thin line of shadow, a narrow valley with walls of ice reaching up to the sky.
Conway’s heart contracted with a fiery pang.
A narrow valley—The valley.
For a moment everything vanished in a roaring darkness. Dream and reality rushed together—his father’s notes, his father’s dying cry, his own waking visions and fearful wanderings beyond the wall of sleep.
It lies beyond the city, in a narrow place between the mountains—The Lake of the Gone Forever. And I can never go back!
Conway said aloud to the wind and the snow and the crying horns, “But I have come back. I have come!” p. 69
When they arrive at the city an armed group meet them before an old man arrives and identifies them as Earthmen. The old man, Krah, mentions someone called “Conna”, which Conway presumes is his father. Krah tells him and the other Earthmen to leave but, when Conway threatens war, Krah reluctantly orders the gates opened. Esmond and Rohan are not happy at Conway’s conduct, but he is determined to get to the lake.
The rest of the story unravels the reasons for Krah’s dislike and suspicion of the visitors—which are mostly connected with Conway’s father it seems—among the complications introduced by a native girl called Ciel, who causes trouble by trying to visit Conway, and Krah’s production of Conway’s daughter Marcia, who followed the group after they left and ran into trouble with the native women.
Ciel later shows Conway a way out of the city that leads to The Lake of Gone Forever and (spoiler), after Krah and his men pursue the pair there, the climactic scene sees Conway arrive at the lake, which is “semi-liquid” and contains valuable “transuranic elements”. He is told by Krah (who, like his men, has left his weapons outside the entrance to the lake) that their dead are put in the lake, and that it acts as a repository of the Ishtar people’s memories. Conway then sees a vision of his younger father together with his native wife and then, over the course of several visions, Conway sees his father consumed with greed at the thought of the wealth in the lake. Later there is an altercation when he tries to take a sample of the liquid, and he is stopped by his wife in the presence of Conway as a baby. During the struggle between Conway’s father and mother she falls into the lake and perishes. Conway’s father subsequently flees the planet.
Conway realises, after seeing the visions, that his mother was Krah’s daughter and so he must be Krah’s grandson. He gives up his dreams of wealth and asks Krah if he can stay on the planet. Krah agrees, and Ciel becomes Conway’s wife.
There is quite a lot going on at the end of this story after quite a protracted and unnecessary build-up (the story could probably start with Conway arriving at the city, and you could lose most of the other characters). Also, the idea of a radioactive (I presume) memory lake is poetic but doesn’t entirely convince. If you read this for the description and atmosphere it’s not bad, and I suppose it is a change, albeit a long-winded one, from the more prosaic delivery of the other stories of the period.
**+ (Average to Good). 13,400 words. Story link.
Commencement Address by Arthur Liu
Commencement Address by Arthur Liu,1 translated by Stella Jiayue Zhu (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) is a very hard to follow story that appears to be (a) partly an extended message from a father to his daughter, composed as he plummets to his death in an airplane accident (he uses the VR space in his head to stretch the time available to three days); (b) partly a series of their family’s stored memories; and (c) partly an account of the technology that allows the latter (and the rise of “Dream Architects” who invented it). The accounts of the memory storage technology are mostly detailed in italicised data dumps.
I almost gave up on this piece two pages in, when I hit this passage:
On Tomb-Sweeping Day, conciliation commenced in the rain. Two girls shook hands in forgiveness by a headstone. Four months ago, one had rallied a crowd against the other and called her a “bastard.”
At your classmate’s mother’s funeral, I saw two versions of you. She who represented you from the past was in anguish. When she saw you, panic colored her tear-stricken face.
Your teacher was the one to extend the invitation. During one of her home visits to us, she learned of my role in the research and development of Erstwhile. I said yes, so the girl’s mother might appear once again with the vivacity of her lifetime. I brought a beta test augmented reality device and gave the girl a chance to bid farewell to her mother.
The spirit of the dead shall eventually rise. Now that they had finally parted ways, the father clasped his daughter, while she burst into tears.
Then, she saw you. Standing face-to-face, your eyes alighted on each other.
At that moment, you stepped forward and pulled her into an embrace.
What on Earth is going on in that passage?
– (Awful). 3,500 words. Story link.
1. According to a note at the end of the story, this was “originally published in Chinese in the 2017 Science Writers Hunting Project (Ranked as Outstanding)”. Lost in translation.