Jody After the War by Edward Bryant (Orbit #10, 1972) opens with the narrator and Jody walking on a mountainside trail until they get to a picnic site overlooking Denver (one of the cities that survived a nuclear war). During this we get some backstory about the conflict, learn how the couple met, and see them discuss her PTSD and unwillingness to have children because of what she saw at one of the target cities.
Eventually, after munching through more related angst and the picnic, the narrator tells her he knows what he is letting himself in for and that he still wants marry her and move to Seattle.
A short slice-of-life/relationship fragment. Early-ish Bryant; he would do better work than this.
* (Mediocre). 2,200 words. Story link.
The Monogamy Hormone by Annalee Newitz
The Monogamy Hormone by Annalee Newitz (Entanglements, 2020) opens with the narrator, Edwina, smearing bacterial slime on the wall of a preschool lunchroom: this introduces one of the two pieces of SF decoration in this essentially mainstream story (“twenty years ago, nobody would have believed that smearing germs on the walls of schools could save a whole generation from asthma and irritable bowel syndrome”). The other piece of decoration appears when Edwina discusses her love-life problems with two of her friends at lunch1 (Edwina has two lovers), and they suggest that she take a magic pill (sorry, a “Eternalove” hormone pill) to help her work out which one she truly wants.
Edwina then spends the weekend with her girlfriend Augie and decides she is the one. However, after subsequently spending time with Chester, Edwina realises she is equally in love with him.
Edwina calls her friends for more help, and Alyx puts her right:
Edwina could feel tears in her eyes, and her contacts started to drift off her irises with an annoying string of error messages. She blinked them back into place and used one finger to draw circles on the bar with a blob of water. “I want to have kids. Nobody will let you marry two people and have kids with them.”
Alyx looked more serious than she had ever seen them. “You know that’s bullshit, right? I can’t think of a better place to raise kids than with grownups who love each other.” They drummed their fingers on the bar and seemed lost in thought for a moment. “Marriage is like every other brand that has staying power. Think about YouTube. It used to be part of a private company, and it was full of really bad stuff, like Nazis and crazies talking about rounding up gay people. But then YouTube spun off and became part of the public broadcasting network, and now it’s all educational programs and people gardening and stuff. That was a major rebrand, but it worked. Most people don’t even know that it used to be dangerous for kids to go there.”
“And this is related to my situation how?” Edwina drained her glass.
“Marriage is another changing brand. It used to be only for cis heterosexuals, but now gay people can get married—at least, in a lot of places. People don’t think of marriage the same way anymore. Even in North Carolina, where they have those Family First laws, people are protesting. Here in California, you can create an indie brand marriage. And you know what happens to indie brands, right?” Alyx winked. “They get appropriated by giant megabrands. Pretty soon, ProTox will be marketing a placebo for people who want to fall in love with more than one person. I guarantee it.”2
Fortunately, when Edwina later discusses the matter with Augie and Chester (each of who know about the other), they are both super fine with the arrangement because Edwina can do things with the other person that they don’t want to. And they all lived happily ever after.
This is a modern day relationship story pretending to be an SF one, and the fact that it is also inane and naïve (its view of human relationships reads like something written by a bright 14-year-old that has never had one) makes it even less attractive. It is also, ultimately, dramatically flaccid as it turns out there is no problem to solve here other than the one in Edwina’s head. At least it is breezily written.
* (Mediocre). 5,200 words.
1. A fellow Facebook group member remarked that, in this type of story, none of the characters ever seem to have a particularly demanding job and spend most of their time hanging out.
2. Mmm, I’m not sure YouTube is “full” of Nazis, etc.—I only ever see a lot of very useful clips that help people accomplish all sorts of different things. I also doubt there is a huge pent-up demand for polyamorous relationships.
Spirit Level by John Kessel
Spirit Level by John Kessel (F&SF, July-August 2020) opens with Michael, the story’s middle-aged and maritally separated narrator, waking in his parents’ house in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. On his way he sees the ghost of his wife Lauren—who asks why he left her after twenty-eight years, and demands the truth. She then walks into the living room and disappears:
He touched his hand to his head. He took a deep breath.
Yes, he was awake. He went to the bathroom, relieved himself, then returned to the bedroom.
He told himself it was some vivid fantasy, but lying on the air mattress, hearing the furnace turn on and then off, he felt a bone-deep uneasiness. Lauren was not dead. She was alive and living in the house they had lived in for the last twenty years. p. 53
The rest of the story sees Michael haunted by the ghosts of other failed or troubled relationships: the first is his (dead) father, who ends up striking Michael with a spirit level; then his (live) teenage son Trevor, whose ghost visits just after Michael has sex with his current girlfriend, says, “I smell her on you . . . You stink of her” before fleeing.
Alongside these encounters we get more backstory about the failure of Michael’s marriage and his unhappy relationship with his father, and we also come to see that most of Michael’s relationships are unsuccessful (we see this at his work, with his current girlfriend, and with the care staff where his senile mother lives—and whom he hardly ever sees). We begin to realise that Michael is part of the problem, something put in sharp focus when he dumps on his girlfriend Donna about a troubling visit to his mother:
Donna sighed. “I think you need to ask yourself a few questions, Michael. Is this about your mother or is it about you? If you can’t stop beating yourself about the head and shoulders, you shouldn’t expect someone else to stop you. You certainly shouldn’t expect them to give you sympathy for something you’re doing to yourself. Your mother’s situation is tragic, but it’s what happens. If you wanted to visit her more, you would, though I doubt it would make much difference.”
“That’s cold.”
“I don’t mean to be cold. You know I like you. You’re not a bad guy. But I can’t solve your problems for you. I’m sorry about your mother. At least you can be with her at the end, if you want to be.”
He looked her in the eyes; she took a sip of coffee.
“I don’t think we ought to keep seeing each other,” Donna said. p. 72
Eventually, Michael’s late-life crisis worsens (as well as the previous events, he starts taking drugs he has found in his parent’s home), and (spoiler) the climactic scene sees him entering his parents’ house to find himself in his childhood home, his mother still in her mid-thirties, and his father’s spirit-level lying beside an unfinished doorway (the spirit level is obviously some sort of symbol, as it appears on a number of occasions throughout the story).
This is fundamentally a literary short story about late life problems and angst (the spirit level, the references to Moby Dick, etc.) with a few fantasy tropes thrown in. For the most part this works pretty well—there is a lot of good observational writing—but the problem the story has is that the genre features are not used consistently, i.e. we go from ghostly apparitions to an ending where the protagonist is apparently transported back in time to his childhood home. This (perhaps dying fantasy) makes for a dissonant and inconsistent ending (I can see why he may want to return to when he was younger and start over, but why to his parents? And how does this ending flow from ghostly apparitions?)
I think this piece will mostly appeal to males in later life, who may recognise some of the situations and appreciate the story’s insights1—but, even if the ending doesn’t throw them, they may tire of a disgruntled protagonist who seems to be unable to get out of his own way.
**+ (Average to Good). 9,700 words.
1. Re the story’s observations, a couple of passages that struck me:
Nobody had a soul, Michael knew. All you had was the face you prepared to show to other people. Your character was a performance, a persona you put on; by the time you were a teenager, under the pressure of other people’s expectations, you worked out who you were supposed to be. You lived your invented self to the point where you imagined that was who you were. Everybody thought they knew you—you thought you knew yourself. Until something happened, like Michael walking out on Lauren, to reveal that there was nothing inside you but a few desires and an echo chamber. p. 71
He couldn’t blame anybody, and he realized that the sadness overwhelming him was not a result of things he had done or failed to do. It was the result of the simple passage of time. Things changed. When you were young, you thought the past could be recovered, or if not, corrected by the future. When you were old, the silent, inexorable slide of now into then, and its associated accumulation of losses, small and large, crushed any future. p. 76
Your Boyfriend Experience by James Patrick Kelly
Your Boyfriend Experience by James Patrick Kelly (Entanglements, 2020) opens with the narrator Daktari playing a “therapy adventure” with his partner Jin. As they play, Jin asks Dak to go on a simulated date with a new generation “playbot” called Tate which Jin has developed for the company he works for. Dak is not particularly happy with this suggestion:
Why was I so upset? Because I couldn’t remember the last time Jin and I had been on a date. How was I supposed to get through to this screen-blind wally who had the charisma of a potato and the imagination of a hammer, and who hadn’t said word one about the Shanghai soup dumplings with a tabiche pepper infusion that I’d spent the afternoon making?
“Just because we call them partners doesn’t mean you have sex with them,” he said, missing the point. “If you don’t want to have sex with Tate, it will never come up. He doesn’t care.”
I wanted to knock the popcorn out of his hand. Instead I said, “Okay.” I flicked the game back on. “Fine.” I huddled on the far side of the couch. “You win.”
This passage illustrates two of the things I didn’t much like about this piece: Dak’s continual grievances about his relationship (later on he replies to a heartfelt marriage proposal with a grudging and conditional acceptance), and the endless mentions of food (Dak is a chef at his own “forum”, so we have mini-recipes pervading the story).
Eventually, about half a dozen pages in—after a scene where he meets the boss of Jin’s company, and sits with lawyers to sign legal papers (riveting stuff)—Dak finally meets the very lifelike Tate, and is surprised to find that the playbot looks like him.
After this encounter Dak and Jin go to dinner, where Jin reveals the huge bonus he has received for finishing his project before proposing to Dak (see above).
The story kicks up a gear when Dak finally goes out on his date with Tate. The pair go to a very exclusive restaurant and matters proceed smoothly—Dak likes Tate because, obviously, the playbot is programmed to adapt himself to his human user—but Tate eventually causes a scene when his simulated intoxication causes him to loudly blurt out his love for Jin. After that the restaurant staff want both of them to leave, but the newly arrived owner smooths matters over.
Dak and Tate decide to leave anyway, and Tate suggests they go to a bowling alley he went to with Jin on a previous simulated date. There they eat (there is paragraph long review of the skinnyburger, “dried”, the tofu, “soggy”, and the firedog, “nice umani finish”, “heat was more at the piripiri level than cayenne”, etc. ) before later meeting Jin’s mother who, as Tate knows from his previous visit, goes bowling there regularly. Dak subsequently learns that she doesn’t appear to know he is living with her son (more grievance).
The final reveal (spoiler) occurs on the way home: Tate reveals he is imprinted on Jin and is now imprinted on Dak, and that he has been designed for couples so they can “fill any holes in the relationship.” Dak then realises that, if he rejects Tate, the persona the playbot has developed so far will be wiped—so he invites it inside when they arrive at the flat.
This story has some interesting and lively parts (mostly when Tate is onstage) but it is essentially a flabby relationship story with a premise that is not convincing (the idea that most couples would invite a robotic third party into their relationship isn’t convincing, and the more you think about this the more ridiculous it seems). It’s also hard to like a story whose narrator is endlessly moaning about his relationship and other First World problems.
** (Average). 11,500 words.