Tag: Time Travel

The Man Who Came Early by Poul Anderson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Man Who Came Early1 by Poul Anderson (F&SF, June 1956) opens with the narrator, a late 10th Century Icelander/Viking called Ospak Ulfsson, telling a visiting Christian priest about a strange man he once came across. He tells how he and his clansmen found the strangely dressed man on the beach and how, after questioning him, they discovered that the man was Sergeant Gerald Roberts, an MP in the United States Army who had slipped through time:

“I was crossing the street, it was a storm, and there was a crash and then I stood on the beach and the city was gone!”
“He’s mad,” said Sigurd, backing away. “Be careful . . . if he starts to foam at the mouth, it means he’s going berserk.”
“Who are you?” babbled the stranger. “What are you doing in those clothes? Why the spears?”
“Somehow,” said Helgi, “he does not sound crazed—only frightened and bewildered. Something evil has happened to him.”
“I’m not staying near a man under a curse!” yelped Sigurd, and started to run away.
“Come back!” I bawled. “Stand where you are or I’ll cleave your louse-bitten head!”
That stopped him, for he had no kin who would avenge him; but he would not come closer. Meanwhile the stranger had calmed down to the point where he could at least talk evenly.
“Was it the aitchbomb?” He asked. “Has the war started?”
He used that word often, aitchbomb, so I know it now, though unsure of what it means. It seems to be a kind of Greek fire. As for the war, I knew not which war he meant, and told him so.
“There was a great thunderstorm last night,” I added. “And you say you were out in one too. Perhaps Thor’s hammer knocked you from your place to here.”  p. 6-7

The rest of the story mostly tells of Roberts’ (unsuccessful) attempts to fit into this society, which begin with him helping to sacrifice a horse by shooting it in the head with his service pistol. Ulfsson is not impressed however, “as the beast quivered and dropped with a hole blown through its skull, wasting the brains.” Matters do not improve with Roberts’ subsequent attempts to repair two spearheads (he ruins them and almost sets the forge on fire) or mend a nearby bridge (he cannot master the primitive carpentry tools). Roberts manages to partially redeem himself by winning a wrestling match with one of the warriors by using his Judo skills, but a further suggestion about manufacturing a cannon and gunpowder are rebuffed:

Gerald said something about making a gun like his own. It would have to be bigger, a cannon he called it, and could sink ships and scatter armies. He would need the help of smiths, and also various stuffs. Charcoal was easy, and sulfur could be found in the volcano country, I suppose, but what is this saltpeter?
Also, being suspicious by now, I questioned him closely as to how he would make such a thing. Did he know just how to mix the powder? No, he admitted. What size would the gun have to be? When he told me—at least as long as a man—I laughed and asked him how a piece that size could be cast or bored, even if we could scrape together that much iron. This he did not know either.
“You haven’t the tools to make the tools to make the tools,” he said. I don’t know what he meant by that.
“God help me, I can’t run through a thousand years of history all by myself.”  p. 16

It’s hard not to see the above passage as a direct rebuttal of the premise of L. Sprague de Camp’s novel Lest Darkness Fall—whose can-do narrator produces a constant stream of inventions to prevent the onset of the Dark Ages in sixth century Rome. (And de Camp’s hero also goes back in time during a lightning storm.)
The final part of the story (spoiler) details a fateful boat trip: Roberts is no sailor; his suggestions for a bigger ship with different sails, a keel and cabins are picked apart; and one of the other men’s open contempt for Roberts ends in violence when Roberts challenges the man, Ketill, to a fight. Roberts quickly finds out that they won’t be using fists but swords and shields and then, during the fight, he barely holds his own. After being wounded multiple times, Roberts draws his pistol and shoots Ketill in the head.
The aftermath of this killing provides a fascinating insight into the customs of the time: an allegation of witchcraft is made; payment of weregild to Ketill’s kin is suggested; and Ulfsson’s daughter (who has a crush on Roberts) asks her father to pay it. This then leads Ketill’s father (who is also on the voyage) to ask if Ulfsson’s family stands with Roberts. If so, that will mean a blood feud between the two familes. Ulfsson, fearing his kin’s death (especially his son) in any later fighting, withdraws his protection from Roberts and tells him that the Thing (a Viking council) will decide on the matter at midsummer but he had best leave Iceland before then. Roberts departs into the darkness.
There is a postscript where Ulfsson tells the priest that Roberts was later found at another settlement but, because he did not tell them of the killing, they expel him when Ketill’s kin track him down:

At the end, when they had him trapped, his weapon gave out on him. Then he took up a dead man’s sword and defended himself so valiantly that Ulf Hjalmarsson has limped ever since. It was well done, as even his foes admitted; they are an eldritch race in the United States, but they do not lack manhood.
When he was slain, his body was brought back. For fear of the ghost, he having perhaps been a warlock, it was burned, and all he had owned was laid in the fire with him. That was where I lost the knife he had given me. The barrow stands out on the moor, north of here, and folk shun it though the ghost has not walked. Now, with so much else happening, he is slowly being forgotten.
And that is the tale, priest, as I saw it and heard it. Most men think Gerald Samsson [Roberts] was crazy, but I myself believe he did come from out of time, and that his doom was that no man may ripen a field before harvest season.  p. 23

This is a very good piece, both for its take on a man out of time and also for its impressive authenticity which latter, through the voice of Ospak Ulfsson, firmly puts you not only in the society of that period, but in the head of one of its inhabitants.
**** (Very Good). 10,300 words. Story link.

1. I think A Man Out of Time would have been a better title as it would have worked in three ways: (a) Roberts physically leaves his own time; (b) he is unable to integrate into that society; and (c) he ends up dying prematurely.

The Dragon Slayer by Michael Swanwick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Dragon Slayer by Michael Swanwick (The Book of Dragons, 2020) begins with Olav’s backstory, and we learn that he is a wanderer and adventurer and was briefly married to a witch—until he caught her coupling with a demon and slew them both. When we catch up with him he is working as a guard for a desert caravan, which is later ambushed by brigands. Only Olav and (what he thinks is) a young boy survive. Then, when they camp that night, a demon comes out of the forest for Olav, and they only just escape after Olav sets the dry undergrowth on the periphery ablaze.
When the pair arrive at the city of Kheshem, Olav works as a cutpurse to get them the money they need:

The day’s haul was such that he bought the two of them a rich meal with wine and then a long soak in hot water at the private baths. When Nahal, face slick with grease, fiercely declared himself in no need of such fripperies, Olav lifted him, struggling, into the air and dropped him in the bath. Then, wading in (himself already naked), he stripped the wet clothes off the boy.
Which was how Olav discovered that Nahal was actually Nahala—a girl. Her guardians had chopped her hair short and taught her to swear like a boy in order to protect her from the rough sorts with whom traveling merchants must necessarily deal.
The discovery made no great difference in their relationship. Nahala was every bit as sullen as Nahal had been, and no less industrious. She knew how to cook, mend, clean, and perform all the chores a man needed to do on the road. Olav considered buying cloth and having her make a dress for herself but, for much the same reasons as her guardians before him, decided to leave things be. When she came of age—soon, he imagined—they would deal with such matters. Until then, it was easier to let her remain a boy.
At her insistence, he continued the lessons in weapons use.

Olav ends up working for a wizard called Ushted the Uncanny after Ushted materialises in their room and tells Olav that if he continues to steal purses he will be caught. The wizard explains that he can time-travel, and has talked to a condemned future-Olav in his cell. To prove his point, Ushted then takes the current Olav forward in time to show him what happened, and brings back an ashen-faced one in need of drink.
After this there are two other developments, Nahala makes a friend of her own age called Sliv (he doesn’t know she is a girl), and the demon from earlier in the story sets up a lair on a hillside near the city.
The story eventually concludes with Olav, Nahala, Ushted and Sliv going to confront the demon (the creature is terrorising the area and Ushted has volunteered his services to the city’s rulers), and the story proceeds to a busy conclusion which includes (spoilers): (a) Sliv discovering that Nahala is a girl and consequently showing his contempt; (b) Ushted the wizard making a deal with the demon (who is revealed as Olav’s witch-wife) for a time-travelling amulet; (c) Ushted giving Sliv the amulet after Sliv is revealed as the younger Ushted; (d) Nahala acquiring the amulet but being unable to use it; (e) a future-Nahala arriving and killing Ushted the wizard and the dragon-witch. After all this Nahala admires her future self, and the future-Nahala admires the unconscious Olav; she then tells the younger Nahala to tell him it was he who slew the dragon when he wakes up (“you know what a child he can be”).
If this all sounds over-complicated, it is—and it doesn’t explain why the time-travelling Ushted didn’t see what was coming. A pity, as it is reasonably entertaining story to that point.
** (Average). 6,450 words.

Paen for a Branch Ghost by Filip Wiltgren

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Paen for a Branch Ghost by Filip Wiltgren (Future Science Fiction Digest #14, March 2022) begins with a time-retrieval team (consisting of the narrator and his two colleagues) learning that their special assignment will involve taking a Professor Rothman back in time to the “Age of Desolation” to retrieve her brother and three sisters. It materialises that Rothman is a time-probabilist who herself was extracted from the past, and whose exceptional contributions to the work of the Conglomerate have provided her the credit to pay for the journey back in time.
Almost immediately after they arrive at their extraction point it becomes obvious that the plan they have been briefed about is a cover story provided by Rothman, and that she has other ideas. This begins with them having to walk to a nearby railway station at a military camp:

A line of soldiers stood between us and the train, clumps of men in gray uniforms with long, iron-and-wood rifles. No electronic or magnetic signatures. Plain analog chemical reaction weaponry. Their uniforms looked enough like ours for us to blend in, although the soldiers had a black trim on their grey caps, which were adorned by two marks. I upped the magnification on my view, zooming in on the cap of the closest soldier.
The marks were the same bird of prey we had, and a skull below it. I sent the image to Ross, our historian, but he shrugged.
“Not my specialty,” he said.
Only Rothman seemed to know what was going on. She stared past the train, to the milling throng of humanity beyond. These had different clothes, mostly pants, skirts and coats in blacks, grays, browns, and dark blues. They carried bags and children. Unlike the soldiers, most of them were strikingly gaunt.
“Where are we?” I said, to no one in particular.
“Sobibor,” Rothman said. “One of the camps.”  p. 85

They later find out that they have arrived at this Nazi concentration camp at the beginning of a prisoner revolt and, during the turmoil, they join the fight with their advanced weapons: the team targets the guards and Rothman searches for a sadistic officer called Frenzel, who she kills (a “ghost killing”). During the action the team becomes concerned that this branch timeline they are creating (their own will be “canonical”) may not last long enough for them to complete the mission and they worry that they will become “ghosts”. Rothman reassures them that vortex that took them there will last for “days, months, maybe longer”.
Eventually (spoiler) they find Rothman’s family, and it materialises that she intends to rescue a different group of people:

The rest of the family slowly got to their feet. All except the young woman with the two children, the one Rothman had called Eliza.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“We—” I began. Rothman cut me off.
“I am you,” she said. “Years from now, you will be me.”
I cursed, and flicked off the voice-over before it could translate. Never explain, never introduce a point of confusion.
The young Eliza looked at the old Rothman. The father, the mother, the siblings, everyone looked. I could see the Eliza in Rothman’s face, the lines sharper, more defined, the eyes harder, the lips thinner. They were the same person, ages apart. The family would recognize it, and panic.
Instead, they smiled.
“You are the Lord’s seraphim, coming in our hour of need,” the father said, bowing his head, thin, white hair flopping in front of his face.
“Yes, father,” Rothman agreed. “We need to go.”
The family all tried to touch her hands, and she let them, guiding them to stand as gently as a wind lifting dry leaves.  p. 97

As they return to the extraction point the narrator tells Rothman that, if she returns to the future with her younger self, the Conglomerate will kill her and the child for breaching its rules. Rothman says she knows, and that she intends staying behind in this ghost timeline (“Now my children will live with their mother, and their family.”). Their problems aren’t over, however, and they then find that even without Rothman they are a hundred kilograms overweight for the return journey. After they all strip off all their clothes and dump their equipment they still have forty kilograms to shed, and the story finishes with the narrator volunteering to stay with Rothman.
The time travel hand-wavium, combat scenes, and Holocaust elements are blended together well, and produce a pretty good story.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 6,500 words. Story link.

The True Meaning of Father’s Day by John Wiswell

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The True Meaning of Father’s Day by John Wiswell (F&SF, May-June 2022) is a short-short that starts off at an annual lunch for time travellers:

They only ever had it in 1984, always traveling to meet each other in the same place and the same time. Pele, Jordansko, Marissa, and Merc sat at their own table. Plentiful versions of the foursome sat at plentiful versions of their own tables; they occupied every table in the Filipino restaurant, and all the tables on the curb outside. Rumor had it that their final party from the farthest flung future was having brunch on the rooftop.  p. 254

The shenanigans start when Pele pays for brunch, and the others then try to retrospectively beat him to the check with their time-travel tricks. Jordansko tells him Pele he wired the money to him ten years ago; Marissa says she loaned the family who own the restaurant the money to buy it in 1939; Merc shows them photos of a trip back to the dawn of civilization where he invented the idea of the dining industry.
Pele has the last word, however, when (spoiler) he asks them why they think they meet at the restaurant on Father’s Day.
An amusing conclusion to a clever idea.
*** (Good). 850 words.

Quit Zoomin’ Those Hands Through the Air by Jack Finney

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Quit Zoomin’ Those Hands Through the Air by Jack Finney (Collier’s, 4th August 1951) is an amusing piece that opens with the narrator, an American Civil War veteran, telling his grandson to “quit zoomin’ your hands through the air, boy”. He tells his grandson that that he knew he would be a good pilot. The narrator then goes on to explain why, beginning his story in 1864 with him and a Union major riding past the White House.
During their journey the Major explains he used to be a Harvard professor, and shows the narrator a device in a box he is carrying:

“Know what this is, boy?”
“Nosir.”1
“It’s my own invention based on my own theories, nobody else’s. They think I’m a crackpot up at the School, but I think it’ll work. Win the war, boy.” He moved a little lever inside the box. “Don’t want to send us too far ahead, son, or technical progress will be beyond us. Say, 85 years from now, approximately; think that ought to be about right?”
“Yessir.”
“All right.” The Major jammed his thumb down on a little button in the box; it made a humming sound that kept rising higher and higher till my ears began to hurt; then he lifted his hand. “Well,” he said, smiling and nodding, the little pointy beard going up and down, “it is now some 80-odd years later.” He nodded at the White House. “Glad to see it’s still standing.”

They continue on to the Smithsonian museum and, after gaining access by time travelling around the walls, the Major decides they will take the Kittyhawk back in time to help them win the battle at Richmond. The narrator is sent back to 1864 for petrol while the major moves the Kittyhawk out of the museum.
The Major then explains to the narrator how to control the craft, and they hook it up to the horses. The Kittyhawk is soon airborne:

The road was bright in the moonlight, and we tore along over it when it went straight, cut across bends when it curved, flying it must have been close to forty miles an hour. The wind streamed back cold, and I pulled out the white knit muffler my grandma gave me and looped it around my throat. One end streamed back, flapping and waving in the wind. I thought my forage cap might blow off, so I reversed it on my head, the peak at the back, and I felt that now I looked the way a flying-machine driver ought to, and wished the girls back home could have seen me.

They land back at base and, after the narrator arranges to purchase a jug of whisky, which he puts in the aircraft beside the petrol, they go to see General Grant:

“Sir,” said the Major, “we have a flying machine and propose, with your permission, to use it against the rebs.”
“Well,” said the General, leaning back on the hind legs of his chair, “you’ve come in the nick of time. Lee’s men are massed at Cold Harbor, and I’ve been sitting here all night dri— thinking. They’ve got to be crushed before—A flying machine, did you say?”
“Yessir,” said the Major.
“H’mm,” said the General. “Where’d you get it?”
“Well, sir, that’s a long story.”
“I’ll bet it is,” said the General. He picked up a stub of cigar from the table beside him and chewed it thoughtfully. “If I hadn’t been thinking hard and steadily all night, I wouldn’t believe a word of this.”

The Major proposes that they fill the aircraft with grenades and drop them on rebel headquarters but Grant vetoes the plan (“Air power isn’t enough, son”) and tells them what he wants:

“I want you to go up with a map. Locate Lee’s positions. Mark them on the map and return. Do that, Major, and tomorrow, June 3, after the Battle of Cold Harbor, I’ll personally pin silver leaves on your straps. Because I’m going to take Richmond like –well I don’t know what. As for you, son”—he glanced at my stripe—“you’ll make corporal. Might even design new badges for you; pair of wings on the chest or something like that.”
“Yessir,” I said.
“Where’s the machine?” said the General. “Believe I’ll walk down and look at it. Lead the way.” The Major and me saluted, turned and walked out, and the General said, “Go ahead; I’ll catch up.”
At the field the General caught up, shoving something into his hip pocket—a handkerchief, maybe. “Here’s your map,” he said, and he handed a folded paper to the Major.
The Major took it, saluted and said, “For the Union, sir! For the cause of—”
“Save the speeches,” said the General, “till you’re running for office.”

After the narrator fills the tank they drop over the cliff edge and get airborne. The next part of the story tells of their reconnaissance of the rebel lines, a task complicated by the fact that the Kittyhawk seems to have become “high-spirited”, leading the narrator to complete some wild, aerobatic manoeuvres to keep control.
After they complete their task (during which the narrator finds his whiskey has been stolen), they land back at camp and pass on the map. Then they return the Kittyhawk to the future-Smithsonian so they “don’t break the space-time continuum”.
The next day (spoiler) the Union troops attack and are routed. The Major and the narrator disguise themselves and slip away.
Years later, the narrator sees Grant when there is public reception at the White House on New Year’s Day. When (by now, President) Grant recognises the narrator, he tells him to wait in a room. Later on they discuss the incident and what went wrong:

So I told him; I’d figured it out long since, of course. I told him how the flying machine went crazy, looping till we could hardly see straight, so that we flew north again and mapped our own lines.
“I found that out,” said the General, “immediately after ordering the attack.”
Then I told him about the sentry who’d sold me the whisky, and how I thought he’d stolen it back again, when he hadn’t.
The General nodded. “Poured that whisky into the machine, didn’t you? Mistook it for a jug of gasoline.”
“Yessir,” I said.
He nodded again. “Naturally the flying machine went crazy. That was my own private brand of whisky, the same whisky Lincoln spoke of so highly. That damned sentry of mine was stealing it all through the war.”2

Grant then adds that he and Lee discussed air power after the surrender at Appomattox, and he discovered that Lee was opposed to it as well. Both men agreed to keep quiet about the Kittyhawk incident (“As Billy Sherman said, war is hell, and there’s no sense starting people thinking up ways to make it worse”).
This is a delightful piece, and an excellent example of the style and wit that Anthony Boucher and Mick McComas (the editors of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, who reprinted the piece in their December 1952 issue) were attempting to import into the genre at the beginning of that decade. To me, this is an archetypal F&SF story.
**** (Very Good). 6,250 words. Story link.

1. I’m pretty sure that the only two lines of dialogue the narrator has (after the introduction) are “Nosir” and “Yessir”.

2. Those keen on alcohol-related SF tales of the Civil War should also check out James Thurber’s If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox. Story link.

Poor Little Warrior! by Brian W. Aldiss

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Poor Little Warrior! by Brian W. Aldiss (F&SF, April 1958) sees a time-travelling Claude Ford hunting a brontosaurus in the past:

You crawled heedlessly through the mud among the willows, through the little primitive flowers with petals as green and brown as a football field, through the beauty-lotion mud. You peered out at the creature sprawling among the reeds, its body as graceful as a sock full of sand. There it lay, letting the gravity cuddle it nappy-damp to the marsh, running its big rabbit-hole nostrils a foot above the grass in a sweeping semicircle, in a snoring search for more sausagy reeds. It was beautiful: here horror had reached its limits, come full circle and finally disappeared up its own sphincter. Its eyes gleamed with the liveliness of a week-dead corpse’s big toe, and its compost breath and the fur in its crude aural cavities were particularly to be recommended to anyone who might otherwise have felt inclined to speak lovingly of the work of Mother Nature.

This intensely described and emotionally heightened narrative continues, with descriptions of the scene alternating with Claude’s inner thoughts, until (spoiler) he eventually shoots and kills the creature. Then, as he examines the dinosaur’s body up close, one of the beast’s parasites attacks and kills him.
This seems to be more of a dramatic prose poem than a story, but maybe that, and the ironic ending, will do it for some readers. It’s certainly got more depth and vibrancy than the other time travel pieces of the period.
** (Average). 2,400 words. Story link.

The Primal Solution by Eric Norden

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Primal Solution by Eric Norden (Cavalier, January 1968; reprinted F&SF, July 1977) begins with a long quote from Mein Kampf about how Hitler changed from a “weak-kneed cosmopolitan to an anti-Semite”.
The epistolary story that follows then opens with a diary entry by the story’s narrator, Dr Karl Hirsch, at a psychiatric hospital in Tel Aviv in 1959. In these entries we learn that Hirsch’s research project on psychological regression in is trouble, and that one of his colleagues is trying to get it shut down.
We also learn that Hirsch is a holocaust survivor whose family was murdered during the war:

[The psychological cases] who remained were the hopeless cases, the last souvenirs of the camps. They were the only ones with whom I identified, the last links with my own past. I cherished those human vegetables, for they froze time and linked me to Ruth and Rachel and David. They had survived, but I forgave them, for they never had the indecency to really live.  p. 136

After the “normalization” in the midfifties I retreated more than ever into pure research. The healthy faces of this new generation, born away from barbed wire and the stench of Cyklon-B, were a constant reproach to me. In the streets of Haifa or Tel Aviv I was almost physically ill. Everywhere around me surged this stagnant sea of bustling, empty faces, rushing to the market, shopping, flirting, engrossed in the multitudinous trivialities of a normal life. With what loathing must the drowned-eyed ghosts spat into Europe’s skies from a thousand chimneys view this blasphemous affirmation! What was acclaimed a “miracle” was to me a betrayal. We had, all of us, broken our covenant with death.  p. 135

A new patient called Miriam comes into Hirsch’s care, a seventeen-year-old girl from Yemen who was raped by her Uncle when she was aged nine and who has been in schizoid withdrawal ever since. Hirsch subsequently treats Miriam (who reminds him of his daughter Rachel), by sedating her and using hypno-therapy tapes to get her to mentally revisit the rape event. During a critical point in the experiment Miriam appears to die—at which point Hirsch’s angina makes him black out—but when he recovers consciousness she is alive, and awake.
When Hirsch later checks her notes he notices that the uncle committed suicide shortly after the rape incident. Hirsch remembers differently—the uncle went to jail—but when he checks what he thinks are the facts of the case with two of his contacts, they cannot remember talking to him about the matter. Hirsch realises after talking to Miriam (“I made him dead”) that she must have projected her personality back in time and into the mind of the uncle—and made him slit his own throat.
After this engaging first half, the next part of the story (spoiler) sees Hirsch plan to go back in time to save his family:

I am determined to go ahead. If I succeed, these notes will in any case blink out of existence with me and my world. They will belong to Prime Time — dusty tombstones marking what-might-have-been. And I will be — where? Sitting somewhere in Germany with my grandchildren playing at my feet, David and Rachel’s children, and Ruth in the kitchen simmering a schnitzel on the stove? Or, just as likely, dead years before, felled by disease or accident. It makes little difference. I have been dead for years, it is only the manner of death that matters. And whatever happens to Ruth or Rachel or David, they shall never have seen
Auschwitz.  p. 144

Hirsch finds out as much as he can about the Adolf Hitler of 1913 (his intended target), and prepares his laboratory to make the trip—against the ticking clock of the administrators trying to close down his project. Then, just before he goes into the laboratory to start the transfer, Hirsch has doubts:

Suddenly, I feel sad. For the first time since the project began I experience something like regret. I look across the terrace at Zvi and his friends laughing under the lantern-laced trees, and I wonder if they know that they have just met their murderer. It is my duty to liquidate their world — to snuff it out like a candle. If I succeed, how many of them will see life — and where? What women will never meet their intended husbands; what children will never be born? Will I not be committing a genocide as real as Hitler’s, and even more final? But I owe no debt to them, any of them. There is only Rachel, and David, and Ruth. To wipe the reality of Auschwitz from the blank slates of their futures is worth a thousand Zvis, and his country, his poor Israel, destined to die stillborn in the placid hearts of a generation that never looked through barbed wire, never heard the tramp of jackboots. And my personality will dissolve along with theirs — whatever path I follow after 1913, what is me today shall never exist. And yet, if I could only see Rachel and David in my mind. I remember their voices, even their touch, but their faces dissolve into mist whenever I attempt to capture them. They are all I have left of reality, and yet they are the substance of shadows. Am I extinguishing a world to remember the faces of my children?  pp. 147-148

The final section is prefaced by a letter from a colleague of Hirsch’s, and refers to a document from 1913 supposedly written by him. This fantastic account sees Hirsch tell of his arrival in Hitler’s mind and how he seizes control of, and humiliates, the future Fuhrer (Hirsch makes Hitler crawl on all fours, pull out his hair, tear at his private parts and, when they go out into the Vienna streets, drink water from the gutters when other pedestrians pass by).
When Hirsch then tries to kill Hitler by making him jump off a bridge and drown, Hitler mentally counter-attacks and repels Hirsch. Thereafter Hirsch is a passive passenger in Hitler’s mind (apart from some limited control when he is asleep). During this period Hitler realises that the invader in his head is Jewish, and rationalises that he will only be free of this malign force if he kills all Jews.
At the end of the story Hirsch realises that his actions are responsible for Hitler’s anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and the death of his family—and that he is trapped in Hitler’s mind, doomed to watch the terrible events of the future unfold.
This is a cracking read, fast-paced and intense, and a piece where the Hirsch’s sense of loss is palpable. It also has an inventive twist ending, albeit one that may prove highly problematic for some readers.
****+ (Very Good to Excellent). 10,300 words.

Quake by Peter Wood

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Quake by Peter Wood (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) opens with the narrator, Hannah DeLeon, a physics instructor at Appalachian State University, experience a mini-earthquake while she is at her partner Miguel’s work outing. Then she finds a warm metallic object in the soil—and also notices that Miguel’s boss, Stacey, is having an intense conversation with a man near a white van who is holding a metal detector.
The rest of the story sees further quakes, and Hannah discovers that the company that Miguel works for, Tarlek, is involved in a number of sites where strange phenomena have occurred. She also sees a UFO in the night sky.
Hannah eventually (spoiler) tracks down the epicentre of the quakes to a place called Mystery Mountain (which Tarlek has just bought) and, when she and Miguel visit, they discover an underground fall-out shelter that contains a lot of high-end science equipment. Then Stacey turns up and tells Miguel to hand over his work badge.
The last few pages are very busy: the three of them leave the shelter to see a van open its doors and AEC agents appear. There is an argument between an agent Holbrook and Stacey about “the relic”. Stacey refuses his request to hand it over, so Holbrook starts the van’s detectors—which causes an earthquake. Then a UFO arrives and a woman gets out. She wants the relic/fragments too, and it soon becomes obvious that she is a time-traveller (and, for some reason, she is not happy when she finds out that one of the people she is talking too is Hannah). Eventually, Miguel tells her he will show her where the fragments of the “relic” (a previous ship/UFO which crashed) are; Stacey fires him. The time travellers and the agents leave.
Hannah later gets a job offer to research tachyons—at which point she realises she is one who is going to invent time travel (the UFO woman’s comment suddenly makes sense).
This story takes a while to get to the meat of the matter and then everything happens at once, which makes the story feel rather rushed at the end. Also, all the earthquake/conspiracy/UFO stuff dissolves into a fairly straightforward time-travel deus ex machina.
** (Average). 5,950 words.

Why I’ll Never Get Tenure by Peter Wood

Posted on by Paul Fraser 1 Comment on Why I’ll Never Get Tenure by Peter Wood

Why I’ll Never Get Tenure by Peter Wood (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) starts on the Frying Pan Tower (modelled on an oil rig), where the narrator, a physics professor called Kate Nardozi, watches as “huge bursts of sand bubble up through the shallow water.” When the event is over, she calls her robot Mitch and asks him how big the new atoll is: nine hundred and twelve feet.
After this confusing start we get information about gravity wave transmitters and “quantum sparks” before Kate’s ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend Duke (another academic) turn up. The rest of the story sees land and sea continue to swap, and romantic and academic competition between Kate and Duke. Eventually they all land up on a ship that runs aground, and Kate finds that Duke has tampered with her gravity machine. Then the robot goes back in time to stop it all happening in the first place.
I know that this is supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek piece but the story’s odd events are hard to follow, and it’s not amusing.
* (Mediocre). 4,150 words.

Winter Solstice by Mike Resnick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Winter Solstice by Mike Resnick (F&SF, October-November 1991) doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the Winter Solstice but, instead, tells of the wizard Merlin, who in this story is quite a different creature from the one of myth—a man experiencing his life in reverse, starting from a point in the far-future where he could “pass among the stars and galaxies”. Unfortunately, his memories are slipping away from him, so he is of little help when he is called upon to deal with the problems of the present:

An old woman comes to see me in the early afternoon. Her arm is torn and miscolored; the stench of it makes my eyes water; the flies are thick around her.
I cannot stand the pain any longer, Merlin, she weeps. It is like childbirth, but does not go away. You are my only hope, Merlin. Cast your mystic spell, charge me what you will, but make the pain cease.
I look at her arm, where the badger has ripped it with his claws, and I want to turn my head away and retch. I finally force myself to examine it. I have a sense that I need something—I am not sure what—something to attach to the front of my face; or, if not my whole face, then at least across my nose and mouth, but I cannot recall what it is.
The arm is swollen to almost twice its normal size, and although the wound is halfway between her elbow and her shoulder, she shrieks in agony when I gently manipulate her fingers. I want to give her something for her pain. Vague visions come to mind, images of something long and slender and needle-like flash briefly before my eyes. There must be something I can do, I think, something I can give her, some miracle that I employed when I was younger and the world was older, but I can no longer remember what it is. I must do more than mask her pain; this much I still know, for infection has set in. The smell becomes stronger as I probe, and she screams. Gang, I think suddenly: the word for her condition begins with gang—but there is another syllable, and I cannot recall it; and even if I could recall it, I can no longer cure it.  p. 134

The story is told in a near stream of consciousness style which yo-yos between Merlin’s fragmentary memories of the future and his present concerns, one of which is what to do, if anything, about Launcelot and his illicit affair with King Arthur’s wife, Guinevere. This particular problem comes to a head when (spoiler) Arthur seeks out Merlin for advice on the matter towards the end of the story. Merlin realises that Arthur is more worried about his own death, and this makes Merlin reflect on what the future (or past) holds for him:

I decided to try once more to look into the future, to put his mind at ease. I close my eyes and I peer ahead, and I see not a mindless, babbling old man, but a mindless, mewling baby, and that baby is myself.
Arthur tries to look ahead to the future he fears, and I, traveling in the opposite direction, look ahead to the future I fear, and I realize that there is no difference, that this is the humiliating state in which man both enters and leaves the world, and that he had better learn to cherish the time in between, for it is all that he has.  p. 142

Merlin finally tells Arthur that he will die the death he wants.
There isn’t really any story here, but it’s not a bad mood piece.
*** (Good). 5,050 words.