Tag: Thoraiya Dyer

Lucie Loves Neutrons and the Good Samarium by Thoraiya Dyer

Lucie Loves Neutrons and the Good Samarium by Thoraiya Dyer (Clarkesworld #219, December 2024)1 opens with Izzy (the main character) with her wife Lucie at their house in France:

Izzy simultaneously adores the French farming village, because stepping into her stone-lined cellar feels like stepping back four hundred years, and loathes the village, because her neighbors’ social attitudes feel like stepping back four hundred years.

This chippiness (first seen in an encounter with the estate agent) is most often manifested in the comments about their neighbour Gaston, an old man who runs a nearby vineyard, but Izzy’s concern about this recidivism is dwarfed by other events that are ongoing in Europe:

Both women’s phones had pinged, and they’d pulled out their devices, to see that the yellow nuclear strike threat warning level had been raised to amber alert. Amber was the second highest level. It meant there was credible information to suggest an imminent attack within a certain radius of their location.
Red alert would have meant duck and cover. Dropping face down, putting her hands under her body, and closing her eyes, until the blast wave passed and debris stopped falling. Izzy had waited, as she always did, heart pounding, to see if missiles had actually been launched.

We learn that both of the women work in the field of nuclear science: Izzy works at a new research reactor nearby, making medical radioisotopes, and Lucie works at ESA with neutron tomagraphs. These nuclear occupations will eventually drive the events at the end of the story but, before then, it is mostly a family soap opera where they settle into their new lives in France and an engineer friend called Miron become a sperm donor for the couple’s first child. While this all this is happening a number of other things occur: a colleague struggles to launch thousands of tiny telescopes to create an orbital array; Izzy finds out that most of Lucie’s extended family died of nuclear test radiation poisoning in Tahiti; Lucie discovers an new mineral that may be able to absorb neutrons to form stable superheavy elements; they receive an allocation of Finnish and Polish war refugees as the war worsens; and Lucie’s baby is later born during an amber alert—a traumatising event for both of the women. Their relationship then deteriorates under the stress of having a young baby to look after and another two tactical nukes being dropped five hundred miles away.
The final section sees Miron arrive unexpectedly. He sees the child for the first time (prompting some defensiveness from Lucie), solves Lucie’s colleague’s launch problem by using the cyclotron in an MRI machine, and then, while talking to Lucie about her work, prompts her to reveal her plan to make anti-nuclear bombs using the new mineral she has been researching and superheavy elements she intends to manufacture in Izzy’s reactor.
Subsequently (spoiler), they launch a test vehicle (based on a drone stolen from Gaston); Lucie manufacturers the neutron absorbing element 124; and, finally, they then decide they need someone else to test the device, handing it over to a secretive third party (while making plans to publicise the discovery). This third party turns out to be the Chinese, who televise a demonstration missile launch which is neutralised by the new weapon. The war winds down, at least on a nuclear level, and the refugees leave. The couple’s lives return, more or less, to normal, and Luc goes to school.
As you can probably tell from the synopsis, there are a lot of moving parts in this story, but, for all that, it unfurls in a relatively organic way—if anything, too organically at the beginning: at times it drags and threatens to devolve into a rustic family soap opera. The other weaknesses I thought it had were the hand-wavium science explanations, the unlikely gadgets that are cobbled together, and the Chinese being the ones who receive the device (under the noses of wartime allied intelligence agencies?) Overall though, it works, and it was a pleasant change to read something that develops organically, has an interesting theme (the anti-nuclear weapon), and sounds like it was written in a British voice rather than an American one (I realise the author is Australian, but still). Awful title.
*** (Good). 10,050 words. Story link.

1. This is one of the 2025 Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll novelette/novella finalists.

Victory Citrus is Sweet by Thoraiya Dyer

Victory Citrus is Sweet by Thoraiya Dyer (Tor.com, 7th September 2022) has an intriguing opening where the narrator of the piece, Victory Citrus, details one of the hazards of space travel:

Cosmic rays buggered up my right arm just after we took the mission.
That is, some stupid high-energy proton started up an osteosarc in my ulna, which is a new one for me. Last cancer I got was lympho, in my lung. Which was annoying, because you can’t isolate and freeze a lung and keep working.
Lung isolation means a stupid induced coma while the new cells grow and Printer Two compiles a clean, connective tissue scaffold. It means sitting still for six weeks after the graft, somewhere with one-third G or more, waiting for it to take.
It means someone else gets the good jobs. Steals your promotion. I’m not bitter. Who can blame protons? They do what they do. Planet-bounds call us bobble-heads, because of the thick shielding on our helmets. One thing we can’t replace are our brains. But high-mass, high-density helmets don’t weigh anything up here. We take them off when we land, and the smart suits hold our spongy skeletons upright until the dirt jobs are done.

That’s a data-dump beginning, but it works, and we soon find out that Citrus has had to freeze her arm in nitrogen (which is in short supply) to stop the cancer growth so she can do a job on Mercury (her ship Whaleshark is headed to Gog’s Gorge to investigate a mass driver that is slinging refined uranium to the wrong hemisphere on Mars). Further information follows about (a) the nitrogen availability problem; (b) her childhood upbringing in a crèche run by bots; and (c) her apprentice Naamla (who at the end of the story we learn is the daughter of the spacer that Citrus was apprenticed to and who she now views as a rival). This is all reminiscent of the level of novel detail that you get in the early short work of John Varley, as is the chirpy conversational style of the piece:

I won an astronaut’s apprenticeship in a lottery my parents entered me in before I was born.
Don’t really remember them. Bots raised me in a creche. The bots came cheap, secondhand, from an Earth retirement village, and asked questions like, Are your bowel movements within normal parameters? Does the fleeting beauty of the blossoms make you ache with bittersweet memories? Your cortisol levels are high, do you feel you have failed your family members?
One of those was semi-appropriate for toddlers, I guess?
My personal bot had previously cared for someone with very specific music tastes, which is how I got acquainted with Earth sounds of the 1960s.
According to my EleAlloc service record, my worst hangover from being raised by bots is that I get squicked out by the sight of human eyeballs moving in their sockets.
I mean, anyone could get squicked out by that, right?
When I have to do my self-health-checks, and see my own reflected eyeballs moving, it makes me shout, “NO!”
Without fail. Every time. And I’m twenty-three years old, so I shouldn’t be shouting at myself in the mirror. I can’t help it. Eyeballs are so gross.

The main action occurs when the pair arrive on Mars and discover, in short succession, a gas vent near the drilling site, electron bursts that are transmitting the Fibonacci Sequence, and then (spoiler) animal/fish/lobster-like beings exiting crevasses in the ground—to their death—seventy clicks south of the first vent.
The rest of the story sees Citrus and Naamla investigate the body fragments of the dead aliens (they have a sulphur chemistry instead of a carbon one) and then attempt to communicate with them—they succeed, whereupon the Mercurians provide the nitrogen that Citrus needs. Then Citrus and Naamla realise that the mining operation has caused catastrophic damage to the underground Mercurian civilization, so they attempt to convince the Martian authorities to start slinging bismuth back from Mars to fill in the holes (and they enlist Naamla’s father to help them do this). Finally, having been over-exposed to radiation and developed multiple cancers, the pair enter comas to regrow their affected body parts.
The last section sees Naamla’s father wake them up—their limbs have been regrown, the Mercurians have been saved, and we learn Citrus’s apprentice name: Hogwash Perjury.
This is a fast paced, inventive, and colourful First Contact story. That said, the scene where Citrus almost effortlessly communicates with the Mercurians stretches credulity to breaking point.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 7,450 words. Story link.