Tag: Spaceships

Beyond the Dragon’s Gate by Yoon Ha Lee

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Beyond the Dragon’s Gate by Yoon Ha Lee (Tor.com, 20th May 2020) opens with Anna, an ex-academic who used to work in AI research, arriving at an orbital fortress after being abducted by the military. After seeing the wreckage of several spaceships she learns from the Marshal commanding the military that the AIs that control these vessels have been committing suicide. He then tells her that he wants her to communicate with them mind to mind to find out why (even though her academic partner Rabia died from this process during their research).
When the Marshall takes her to see one of the surviving ships, Proteus Three, Anna sees how radical the previously discussed modifications have been:

They’d emerged above what Anna presumed was a ship’s berth, except for its contents. Far below them, separated from them by a transparent wall, the deck revealed nothing more threatening—if you didn’t know better—than an enormous lake of syrupy substance with a subdued rainbow sheen. Anna gripped the railing and pressed her face against the wall, fascinated, thinking of black water and waves and fish swarming in the abyssal deep.
[. . .]
“You’re going to have to give me an access port,” Anna said after she’d taken two deep breaths. She stared at the beautiful dark lake as though it could anesthetize her misgivings. “Does it—does it have some kind of standard connection protocol?”
The Marshal pulled out a miniature slate and handed it over.
Whatever senses the ship/lake had, it reacted. A shape dripped upwards from the liquid, like a nereid coalescing out of waves and foam, shed scales and driftwood dreams. Anna was agape in wonder as the ship took on a shape of jagged angles and ragged curves. It coalesced, melted, reconstituted itself, ever-changing.
“Talk to it,” the Marshal said. “Talk to it before it, too, destroys itself.”

The story ends (spoiler) with Anna communicating with the ship until she starts having convulsions. The Marshal breaks the link and then, after Anna recovers, she tells him the modifications that they have made to the spaceships have left the AIs with suicidal levels of dysphoria.
This story has a colourful setting and some interesting detail (the background war, the fish-dragon pets, the orbital fortresses, etc.), and the amorphous, water-like spaceships are intriguingly strange—but the resolution is too abrupt, and leaves the story feeling like an extract from a longer work. I’d also add that the reason for the AIs’ suicides reduces what is here to a simplistic trans message.
** (Average). 3,900 words. Story link.

The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury (The Golden Apples of the Sun, 19531) is one of his prose poem stories, I suppose you would call them—tales where there is no particular story, but where a vivid, poetic image is developed. Here, that image is fire and ice:

“Temperature?”
“One thousand degrees Fahrenheit!”
The captain stared from the huge, dark-lensed port, and there indeed was the sun, and to go to that sun and touch it and steal part of it for ever away was his quiet and single idea. In this ship were combined the coolly delicate and the coldly practical.
Through corridors of ice and milk-frost, ammoniated winter and storming snowflakes blew. Any spark from that vast hearth burning out there beyond the callous hull of this ship—any small fire-breath that might seep through—would find winter slumbering here, like all the coldest hours of February.

As the temperature rapidly increases, a crewman falls to the floor dead (a faulty space-suit). There is more drama:

Their icicle was melting.
The captain jerked his head to look at the ceiling. As if a motion-picture projector had jammed a single clear memory-frame in his head, he found his mind focused ridiculously on a scene whipped out of childhood.
On spring mornings as a boy, he had leaned from his bedroom window into the snow-smelling air to see the sun sparkle on the last icicle of winter. A dripping of white wine, the blood of cool but warming April, fell from that clear crystal blade. Minute by minute, December’s weapon grew less dangerous. And then at last the icicle fell with the sound of a single chime to the gravelled walk below.
“Auxiliary pump’s broken, sir. Refrigeration. We’re losing our ice!”

After they resolve this problem they eventually begin their mission, which is to extend a cup out of the spaceship to gather a sample of the Sun:

And here is our cup of energy, fire, vibration, call it what you will, that may well power our cities and sail our ships and light our libraries and tan our children and bake our daily breads and simmer the knowledge of our universe for us for a thousand years until it is well done. Here, from this cup, all good men of science and religion, drink! Warm yourselves against the night of ignorance, the long snows of superstition, the cold winds of disbelief, and from the great fear of darkness in each man. So we stretch out our hand with the beggar’s cup . . .

Insert smart comment about the relative ease of solar panels here.
One of Bradbury’s better efforts at this kind of thing.
*** (Good). 2,350 words.

1. The The Golden Apples of the Sun collection was first published in March 1953. The first magazine appearances were in Planet Stories, November 1953, and Argosy, July 1955 (the UK pocketbook magazine, not the US pulp).