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Girl Oil by Grace P. Fong

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Girl Oil by Grace P. Fong (Tor.com,1 22nd February 2022) opens with the Asian narrator, Chelle, at the beach with her college student friend Preston and another woman called Wenquian. Chelle is romantically interested in Preston but he is interested in Wenqian.
Chelle later goes to an advertisement casting in the Valley and gets some uncomplimentary feedback from the Mandarin speaking (there is a cultural identity subtext to the story) producer (“let’s face it, you are a little fat”). On her way out she gets an experimental body oil from one of his assistants that may help with her problem.
When Chelle gets back to her room she finds that Preston is, much to her displeasure, with Wenqian. After the two of them leave to have dinner Chelle has a shower:

I dab beads of oil on my face and pat them with the balls of my fingers like I’ve seen Wenqian do. It goes on light and colorless but smells like sulfur and charcoal. It burns and turns my nerves to steam. The tingling continues long after I’ve dressed.
I check the mirror again and I’m shocked. My face is my face, but firmer, brighter, thinner. This might actually work. I massage more into my soft arms, jutting stomach, and radish calves. Sparks dance under my skin until I double over on the bathroom floor. I stumble through the ache and pull myself up to the mirror. The me that rises is brighter, lighter, slimmer. Maybe she can finally fit in.

The next day Chelle buys a new dress—she fits into a medium size for the first time—and then texts Preston while she is at the beach, asking for an audition with his movie-maker father. That night she applies more oil, even though the instructions say to stop if there is a burning sensation (which she has been experiencing).
The rest of the story (spoiler) sees more three-way romantic complications and Chelle’s overuse of the oil to the point that she almost drowns at the beach (for some reason the oil now makes her unable to swim). Then matters deteriorate even further when creates a hole in her body (“the flesh thins and parts, turning into yellow smoke”). When Chelle finally goes to a call back audition with Preston’s father, she discovers that no-one can see her: she has become invisible. Finally, Chelle returns to the beach and dissolves in the sea, becoming part of the ocean. The last line has her reconcile with her body/size, “I am so big, and it is so wonderful.”
The slimming oil metaphor/arc of this story may work for young women readers who have body image and boyfriend hook-up issues, but I’m not sure how much of the rest of the short SF reading field (whatever that is nowadays) will be interested.2 That said, even if the content isn’t of any interest, it is well enough written.
** (Average). 5,000 words. Story link.

1. This is the second place winner of the “LeVar Burton Reads writing contest, as co-presented by FIYAH Literary Magazine and Tor.com!”

2. The SF short fiction field has been metamorphosing into a literary small press for decades now; we have probably arrived at the end of that cul-de-sac.

Secrets of the Heart by Charles L. Grant

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Secrets of the Heart by Charles L. Grant (F&SF, March 1980) opens with the child narrator all alone in a house (“the others are gone”, “some of them died”, “it wasn’t my fault though”) when five adults turn up at her door. They have had a car accident and need to use the phone, etc., so the girl invites them in and lets them make a call and asks if they want coffee.
This domestic routine continues for a while, but the telegraphing at the start of the story is then fleshed out. First, the girl tells the adults about her “rules”, then she makes one of the adults stop breathing, and then none of them are able to open the doors or windows, or leave the house.
Later on (spoiler), one of the men asks if she is a telepath or telekinetic before she eventually lets them go (although they do not know she has arranged for a truck to crash into them when they get back to their car). The story ends with her deciding that she will leave the house and make the outside world obey her rules.
This reads like a slightly muddled version of Jerome Bixby’s It’s a Good Life and, if you have read that story, there won’t be much new for you here.
** (Average). 3,600 words.

The Chronologist by Ian R. MacLeod

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Chronologist by Ian R. MacLeod (Tor.com, January-February 2020) opens with the narrator of the story revealing how, when he was an eleven-year-old, the Chronologist came out of the time haze to service the town clock:

After the last hedge and scrap of farmland lay a boundary of unkempt wasteland that we had all been warned never to approach, let alone cross. But from up here, peering on through the time-haze, I believed I could make out a little of what lay beyond, and for one moment I was sure there were fields as prim and regular as our own, and the next I saw hills and sunlit meadows, and deep woodlands, and places of ravaged gloom. And beyond even this lay a staggering sense of ever-greater distance, where lights twinkled, and towers and spires far higher and more fabulous than our own gave off signal glints. I was sure that snowy mountains lay out there, too, and the fabled salty lakes known as oceans, and other places and realms beyond anything we in our town were ever permitted to know.

The narrator has this wanderlust reverie as he watches the Chronologist service the town clock in the tower (he manages to sneak up with his father the mayor), and later steals a book from the man’s bag. The narrator later follows the Chronologist out of town, but loses his nerve when the latter disappears in the time haze.
After the Chronologist’s visit the temporal irregularities that had been plaguing the town end, their long summer gives way to autumn, and we learn more about the strictures of this community and the world in which it exists:

I also I found myself irritated by many other things, not least my father’s bumbling inability to manage his own buttons, let alone our town, and the pointless and repetitive tasks we children were expected to perform at school. After all, I had already seen much farther than here, and believed I would see farther still. Why should I have to endlessly draw and redraw the same street maps of our town, or memorise the weights of every recent harvest, or count the number of seconds in each hour, or copy out calendars from years long erased?

Sometimes, though, although I wished she wouldn’t, [my mother would] begin to speak in a crackling, quavering voice that came and went like dry leaves. Gabbling nonsense, or so it then seemed, of the times when the arrow of time flew straight and true.
Marvels and miracles. Machines bigger than houses or smaller than ants. Some that could peer so far into the sky that the past itself was glimpsed. Others that looked so deep into the fabric of everything that the quivering threads of reality could be examined, then prised apart, to see what lay beyond. And it was through one of these rents, or so her whispers told me, that a hole of sheer nothingness widened, and the fabric of everything warped and twisted, and the time-winds blew through.

Eventually, the narrator finds the courage to walk into the time-haze—but exits it walking back into his town. He then decides to sabotage the town clock to force the Chronologist to return (he practises first on the clock in his house, which causes some odd temporal effects).
The final part of the story (spoiler) sees the Chronologist arrive to repair the damage that the narrator has done (the time-storm created has disrupted time and causality in the town). The Chronologist instructs the narrator to follow him up the tower and, when the latter does so, he falls off the ladder and through a time storm.
When the narrator comes out of the disturbance he finds himself walking into a strange village where he later, of course, fixes their clock. Although this time-loop revelation is perhaps an obvious development (the narrator is obviously the younger Chronologist), the story more than maintains reader interest by providing an account of the narrator/Chronologist’s subsequent life and strange travels:

I have visited towns where the clocks are lumbering and primitive, and the people are frankly primitive as well. There have been others where their devices are little more than light and energy, and time somehow pours down from the skies. I have spoken with machines in the shape of people, and people in the shape of machines. I have been to places where the clock tower is worshipped through human sacrifice, and others where the inhabitants have razed it to the ground. It is in one of these ruins, or so I imagine, that I found my metal staff, which appears to be the minute hand from the face of a town clock, although I can’t be sure. I have yet, however, to come across a volume on the repair and maintenance of the commoner types of timepiece. Unless, that is, I’ve already lost it, or it’s been stolen by some ill-meaning lad, or I’ve forgotten that I have it with me right now. My memory’s not what it once will be. Or was. Or is.

The story then fittingly closes another sort of loop with the Chronologist’s reflections on an eleven-year-old boy’s wanderlust:

There will, I suppose, come a day when I will force some foolish child nurturing dreams of reaching other times and lands to follow me up the ladders of the clock tower in a particular town. Or perhaps it has already happened, and the event lies so far behind me that the memory has dissolved. Either way, I know I can never tell him that there is nothing more precious than waking each morning and knowing that today will probably be much the same as yesterday, tomorrow as well, although I wish I could.

A feeling that is hugely underrated.
This a very good story in a number of ways: it is well written, creates a self-contained and intriguing world which also manages to hint at an off-stage vastness, and, finally, it has the thread of a human life running through it.1
One for the Best of the Year volumes.
**** (Very Good). 7,300 words. Story link.

1. The story’s self-contained world, and the single human life it spans, reminds me somewhat of David I. Masson’s Traveller’s Rest (New Worlds #154, September 1965).

The Tale of Ak and Humanity by Yefim Zozulya

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Tale of Ak and Humanity by Yefim Zozulya (1918),1 translated by Alex Shvartsman, begins with an announcement of the formation of the Board of Supreme Determination, an organisation that will decide who has the right to live. Those deemed to be unnecessary will be required to leave life within twenty-four hours:

For those unnecessary people who cannot leave life, because of their love thereof or due to their weak character, the judgment of the Board of Supreme Determination is to be carried out by their friends, neighbors, or special armed squadrons.

This announcement causes panic amongst the populace until they learn that the highly respected Ak is one of the Board’s members.
The next part of the story sees a family interviewed: the son gets a five year deferment; the mother and father do not. The supervisor mentions to the guard that the couple will probably be unable to leave life themselves.
We subsequently see records of other assessments—then Ak starts to have doubts about the process, and stops it before he disappears. When AK later returns at the end of the story he appears to have changed his mind (or has gone mad), but the officials ignore him and continue with their new task describing their joyous observations of the populace. The latter continue living their lives as if Ak had never existed.
I thought this might be an allegory about Stalin’s purges, but it is actually, according to the introduction2—and I would have guessed from the date had I known—about the Bolsheviks shortly after the Russian Revolution.
It’s not a bad piece given its age, but the back and forth ending is weaker than the rest.
**+ (Average to Good). 3,800 words. Story link.

1. There is also a 1919 publication date for this story, and a 1922 one, too (this may be for the story’s subsequent book publication).

2. The introduction also states that the story “helped establish the anti-utopia genre, and directly inspired and influenced Zamyatin’s We, which was finished a year later.”



Fruiting Bodies by Kemi Ashing-Giwa

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Fruiting Bodies by Kemi Ashing-Giwa (Tor.com, January-February 2022) has an inchoate start that has the narrator, who is from a generation ship whose crew appears to have settled an inhospitable volcanic planet, looking for a woman called Morayo. There is also mention of the arinki, (indigenous?) creatures who come out at night.
As the narrator searches for Morayo, she comes upon one of the other ship members who has been infected with a planetary fungus and is dying:

“How long?” Eranko asks after a moment.
“Turn around.”
He does as I ask, and I carefully pull aside the few lank bits of reddish-blond hair he has left. I run my fingers over his skull—there.
A round, almost imperceptible bump. The pileus of a fruiting body preparing to pop his head open.
I was a mycologist, Before. The transmission and development of the contagion are quite similar to those of the entomopathogenic Earth fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, only differing in minor ways. The zombie ant fungus, it was called. The colonists had hoped I would be able to save them, given my expertise.
“A fortnight, at most,” I tell him.
Eranko gives a shallow, croaking sigh. The infiltrating mycelium has begun to decompose his lungs. Less than a week, then.

The narrator (spoiler) eventually arrives at the settlement and rescues Morayo. During this episode she kills four men and we learn that she has been given a serum developed by Morayo, which has adapted her to the planet (although the narrator is accused by the men of being one of “them” before the killing starts).
Then the story abruptly stops.
This piece could definitely do with another draft, especially sentences like this one:

But the greatest of our reproductive technology died with the Before, so I suppose it would be more accurate to say that only a piece of me is their future to them.

What? I also note that the “Great Filter” idea is clumsily introduced at the start of the piece, in the first paragraph and then the third. It would have been be clearer to link these: “Ancient Scientists called this the Great Filter. Our Great Filter was the arinkiri—the night walkers.” But what we get is the first sentence in the first paragraph and then the Great Filter idea appearing again after a wodge of terrain description in the third:

“But now, those of us still living call our species’ Great Filter the arinkiri—the night walkers.”

This story is unpolished, unclear (probably because there is too much going on in its short length), and it ends abruptly. There are a couple of reasonable body horror scenes (see above) but this is one that should have been left in the slush pile.
* (Mediocre). 2,700 words. Story link.

Buoyant Ascent by Hilbert Schenck

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Buoyant Ascent by Hilbert Schenck (F&SF, March 1980) opens with its protagonist, Izzy Kaplan, trying to play possum:

The phone rang steadily in the dark bedroom and Molly Kaplan blearily brought her wristwatch dial close to a sticky eye. “Jesus, three thirty!” She waited, knowing it was a wrong number. Yet the damn thing kept going. “Shit!” She fumbled for the receiver in the dark, got it, reversed it twice, and finally managed a “Yeah?”
“Dr. Israel Kaplan, please. Cmdr. B.J. Smith calling, U.S. Navy.”
Molly could hardly believe it. “Listen, buster, it’s three-fucking-thirty in the morning!” she shouted in the general direction of the receiver.
A pause. “I understand that . . . is it Mrs. Kaplan? . . . but we have a very urgent emergency. I certainly wouldn’t call you at this time for any other reason.”
Molly, her temper thinning steadily, leaned over and flicked on the bedside light. A soft yet handsome woman in her late forties, she managed to squeeze her bowed, full lips into a fearsomely thin line as she stared at the silent form of her husband.
Izzy Kaplan was not, in fact, asleep, but he had convinced himself that a position of utter passivity coupled with an absolute minimum of respiratory activity would see him through whatever was stirring up his wife.
“Izzy!” shouted Molly, now running at full volume. “It’s the fucking Navy with some kind of super emergency for you. What the hell are you doing with them now? What’s going on?”  pp. 6-7

We learn that Izzy is a hyperbaric specialist, and the Navy have phoned him because one of their submarines has had an accident and is now lying at an angle 940 feet under the sea. There is bad blood between Kaplan and the Navy, but he agrees to help as one of his ex-students is on board, and is now in command after the death of the captain. After brief sex with his wife Izzy drives out to Quonset airbase to catch a helicopter to the USS Tringa, the huge catamaran mother ship for the DSRV (Deep Sea Rescue Vessel) the Navy hope to deploy. However, if that method isn’t feasible, an alternative method using ascent suits may have to be used:

Kaplan could now think of nothing but a high-speed ascent in the water column; the head back in the suit, the gas gushing up the throat, the continuous surge and snap and ripple of the fabric from the tremendous velocity drag. But the throat was the key. Form a tube. Think of forming a tube! The rain pattered steadily on the windows and the slick, black road curved smoothly, almost empty in the glare of the street lights.
Turning east for Quonset, Izzy considered the exit circle of error on the sea surface. How large would the arrival-location uncertainty be? Nine hundred and forty-feet times what angle? If they had to draw the rescue vessels back too far, an embolized escapee might die before they got him out of the water and into a decompression chamber. That data must exist, thought Izzy, at least for some six hundred-footers. We can extrapolate it.  p. 12

The rest of the story sees Izzy arrive on the Tringa only to have the Admiral in charge stonewall Izzy’s suggestion of a rehearsal for a backup buoyant ascent procedure (there is previous bad blood between the pair, and too much money has been spent on the DSRV project). Izzy therefore contacts his wife who works for (and is having an affair with) a Senator. During this conversation Izzy threatens to contact the press about the couple’s dalliance if the Senator doesn’t co-operate and lean on the Admiral.
Once Izzy gets his way, he is flown by fast jet to London Heathrow (which, apparently, has grown an “RAF runway”) to speak to a contact who can provide similar suits, and thereafter flies north to a diving company at Lochstrom in Scotland. There they put dummies in the suits, take them down to nine hundred feet, and troubleshoot the procedure. On the first ascent there is a pressure spike that would kill the escapees, but the very smart owner of the facility eventually (spoiler) works out that the flutter valves in the suit are slowing down the escaping air and modifies them.
The final, exciting part of the story sees Izzy back at the site of the accident to see the buoyant ascents (the DSRV has been unsuccessful). The first escapee, a woman, survives almost unscathed, but later there are casualties, some fatal; the last one out, after a period during which the weather has deteriorated and they have had to revise their surface rescue procedure, is Izzy’s student, Commander Ferguson. He suffers a spinal embolism and dies, even though Izzy enters the decompression chamber to treat him.
The final scenes see an overwrought Izzy lose his temper with the Admiral (who should have started the buoyant ascent rescue earlier), his wife, and the Senator (ill-chosen comments from both) before he goes to do the post mortem on his friend.
If you are up for a fast-paced, near-future techno-thriller with larger than life, shouty (and consequently non-PC) characters, and which oozes verisimilitude, then this will be right up your street. (PS It’s exactly the kind of story you should find in Analog).
****+ (Very Good to Excellent). 17,550 words. Story link.

Dollbot Cicily by Will McIntosh

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Dollbot Cicily by Will McIntosh opens with Cicily, the down-on-her-luck narrator, in a burger joint eating her basic menu food and browsing gig economy jobs when she is hassled by a young man. He asks her if she was the original model for his dollbot (sexbot). She rebuffs him but, after she leaves the restaurant, he and his (premium menu) friends hassle her again:

I picked up my pace as Red Sideburns’ friends raced from across the street to intercept me. One was carrying a lifesized female dollbot in a negligee. I wound through pedestrians.
“Just look,” Red Sideburns called. “Tell me this isn’t you.”
They weren’t going to give up. I’d have to make a scene. I stopped short, spun to face them. “Leave me alone. Stop following me, or I’ll call the police.”
One of the premium boys was holding the doll out, its lifelike nipples visible through gossamer fabric.
It looked exactly like me.
Not sort of. Not even, Oh what a strange coincidence. Exactly like me, down to the freckle. Down to the crescent-shaped scar on my knee I’d gotten roller-skating when I was ten, although not the long surgery scar on my shoulder that I got in the car accident.
A small crowd had formed. They looked at the doll, back at me. I was blinking and swallowing. A teenaged boy let out a high-pitched giggle.
“Were you the model for the body, or just the face? It’s hard to imagine this body is under those clothes.” Red Sideburns gestured at me with his chin, his gaze locked on my chest.
The boy holding the doll switched it on. Its eyes rolled open, revealing my light brown irises, flecked with hazel. The doll turned its head from side to side, taking in the scene.
“Is this a gang-bang?” she asked brightly. “You know me, I love a good gang-bang.”  p. 54-55

If this squirm-worthy (and unlikely) encounter doesn’t put you off reading further, the story then sees Cicily set off to her home in a drainage tunnel (I wasn’t kidding when I said she was down on her luck). On the way there she realises that the 3D images used in the dollbot’s construction probably came from a previous modelling job she had when she was younger.
When Cicily arrives home she tells her friend what happened to her before she changes her appearance (during this section we also learn that Cicily is a single mother whose child is in the temporary care of Child Protection Services—something that will become permanent if she can’t get some money together).
The now disguised Cicily starts looking for gig jobs repairing Cicily dollbots so she can learn more about them, and her first customer (of three) is Conrad, a seventy-something “old bastard” who Cicily notes isn’t even “mildly embarrassed” at getting his “fuck doll” repaired, and who refuses to pay when she leaves a scar on the dollbot after she has finished. Cicily, seeking revenge, quickly installs a patch to the dollbot’s software that lets her remotely telepresence to it later that evening. When Cicily does so, she finds the old man asking his dollbot to the prom, at which point she starts overriding the software and giving her own replies to his conversation. Later on she uses the override to take a hundred dollar bill and throw it outside the window while Conrad is having a shower.
Cicily later sets up the same scam with two other dollbot users, Jasper (a sensitive type who reads Anna Karenina to her) and Joey (who runs nine different types of dollbot, “a veritable United Nations of ethnicities”, through various fashion or strip shows, etc.). These jobs take place in the same time period that Cicily visits her daughter, who has been rented out as child labour by CPS to do hazardous tasks. We also, at another point in the story, see Cicliy almost drowned in the tunnel when it floods.
Over time (spoiler), Cicily become increasingly attracted to Jasper—he thinks his dollbot has become sentient, and they (Jasper and the dolbot, with Cicily telepresent) later go away for a couple of nights to a dollbot conference. Eventually, of course, this burgeoning relationship turns out too good to be true, and Jasper loses his temper when he and the dollbot (Cicily) argue: he goes on to trash and bury the dollbot.
Some time after this pivotal event Jasper summons Cicily to repair his dollbot and, once she has finished, she slips into the bathroom before leaving to change her appearance back to what it was before her encounter with the Premium boys at the start of the story. Cicily gives a stunned Jasper his money back and (essentially) dumps him out of a relationship that he never knew he had, giving him some life advice on the way out the door (peak irony from someone who is living in a drainage tunnel, is a voyeur and thief, and is perilously close to losing custody of her only daughter).
The final scenes see Cicily steal a lot of money from Conrad (she has the dollbot make it look like the money is burnt so it isn’t reported as stolen) and, on the way to recover her daughter from CPS, she telepresences to Joey’s dollbot and throws all his other bots out the tower block window before making the Cicily dollbot do the same.
On finishing the story I thought it reasonably well done (McIntosh creates entertaining and/or amusing plots), but the more I thought about it the more the piece soured. This reaction was, I eventually realised, due to the story’s facile worldview and its stereotypical characters—the three rich, male (and probably white) characters (as well as the Premium boys at the beginning) are all portrayed as losers, weirdos, scumbags, or all three—even Jasper, who Cicily is attracted to at one point, flies into a deranged rage towards the end of his story arc. Meanwhile, our hero Cicily is painted as a sexually and economically oppressed single-mother. These are, essentially, clichéd identarian characterisations that stem from viewing sex and wealth through the lens of critical theory, where men are always oppressors and women always the oppressed (likewise for the “rich” and “poor”). These binaries also suggest that Cicily has never had any agency in, or responsibility for, anything that has ever happened in her life.
The other thing that bothered me is the way that reader sympathy is manipulated—I’ve already described what the men are like, but more troubling is the story’s portrayal of Cicily as some sort of hero, even though she is someone who, with her gross invasion of privacy, thefts, and criminal damage, is more unpleasant than any of the men—unless, I guess, you subscribe to the idea that, if you are in the oppressed class, anything you do to your oppressors is fair game (for Old Testament types, think “an eye for an eye”). That can, of course, mean you end up as morally repellent as your so-called “oppressors”.
If you can stomach the above, there may be something for you here.
∗∗ (Average). 17,350 words.

Aurora by Michael Cassutt

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Aurora by Michael Cassutt (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2022) begins with Vera Vorobyova, the seventy-nine-year-old retired director of a Russian “science institute” north of the Arctic Circle, summoned to a meeting at her old workplace. When she gets there she is met by the new director, Nikitin, a “networked” individual who has implants that connect him to his colleagues. Nikitin tells Vorobyova that a returning spaceship is in trouble and doesn’t have the fuel to avoid an asteroid on its route. He then asks about Search, a mothballed energy beam weapon used once over two decades ago when she was the director (and which created a new crater on the Moon).
The rest of the story sees Vorobyova help them get Search operational to fire at the asteroid, an experience which sees her pendulum from providing essential information (she initially finds hardcopy manuals in the basement when she learns the digital archives have been deleted) to being completely ignored. During the latter periods she goes back to her flat, drinks heavily, and thinks about the past:

She was [. . .] unhappy, questioning everything from her constant drinking and lack of goals to every decision she had made since the age of twenty-nine, including her turn away from research to administration, then every financial and personnel choice she had made on her path to the directorship—and as director.
She had not applied to work at Aurora. She was busy at the Institute for Applied Physics in the capital and expected to spend her entire career there. She had only heard of Aurora because its northern sky surveys had appeared in some popular science publication.
[. . .]
Other than a single visit for her mother’s funeral, she had not returned to the capital, [and] aside from two fleeting, furtive affairs, Vera had made no deep personal connections in forty years.  pp. 107-108

Vorobyova is, however, more proactive than this sad-sack description might suggest and, after some more back and forth (she later provides a firing code), Vorobyova realises, when she looks at photographs of the asteroids flat surface (spoiler), that it may reflect back enough of Search’s electromagnetic energy to affect Nikitin and the other networked humans. With the clock ticking down she then struggles to contact him or get into the facility.
The story eventually ends with her and Nikitin firing the device after the others are evacuated, and saving the ship. The reflected energy mostly lands elsewhere, and Nikitin’s companions are affected but they can be repaired. Nikitin then tells Vorobyova that there is now no longer an age limit on the process so she can be networked too.
The best parts of this story for me were the setting, Vorobyova’s alcoholic melancholy, and the initial part of the plot. The latter part of the story, where the suspense increases, seemed a little formulaic; I also didn’t entirely buy the science (the Earth would have moved in space during the time between firing and the reflection); finally, the revelation that Vorobyova can be networked and lead a different life is a twist too far. Still, it’s not a bad read for the most part, especially if you have a penchant (as I do) for gloomy Russian novels.
*** (Good). 11,750 words.

Nirvana or Bust by Michael Swanwick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Nirvana or Bust by Michael Swanwick (Analog, March-April 2022) opens with an exo-skeleton wearing woman called Huiling dangling her feet into the Grand Canyon when she is found by another woman called Catherine McClury. McClury tells Huiling that an assassin is coming for her. After this the pair sit in silence for a short while, and then McClury asks Huiling if she is going to introduce her exoskeleton:

“Nerve, this is Catherine McClury. She was my advisor at Cornell, my mentor, my everything. Catherine, this is Nirvana or Bust, my research partner.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Catherine said.
“Charmed,” the exoskeleton replied. “But also a little puzzled. Exactly who is it you told you could find Huiling?”
“The folks at the department of technology security. Not just her; I promised to locate you both. Good thing I did, too.”  p. 49

After McClury shows them the assassin’s ship’s path towards them on an app the exo-skeleton downloads, the two woman go to a nearby cabin. They have tea, and later make love.
When (spoiler) the politely spoken assassin (“a chromed mantisform a good seven feet tall”) arrives, it tells Huiling that it is there to communicate and reason with her (although it concludes these opening remarks with the observation that murder is a form of communication!) Then we get to the meat of the story, which is that Huiling and Nirvana or Bust are a merged being, something between symbionts and a complete union. When the assassin confirms this is the case—during the interview it asks Nirvana or Bust why an AI would do this—it states that they must die. But, before the assassin can do anything, McClury intervenes and executes a dataphage that was hidden in the applet—and Nirvana or Bust is erased. The assassin, satisfied with what McClury has done, leaves. McClury tells Huiling that it was a mistake creating AIs in the first place and, “we’re not going to make that same mistake twice.”
The final part of the tale sees Huiling rebooting the exoskeleton on with a copy of the AI, and then there is an final authorial comment: “This is the story of how our civilisation was born.”
This isn’t bad but there is far too much going on here in far too short a space—as with a lot of Swanwick’s stories—and in this case it is mostly talking heads explaining matters to each other.
** (Average). 3,200 words.

1. The Analog magazine version of this story has a really bad text error at the end of the story—ignore the material in black (an errant cut and paste of the biographical material at the end).

Treasure Asteroid by Manly Wade Wellman

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Treasure Asteroid by Manly Wade Wellman (Astounding, September 1938) is, unlike his notable Pithecanthropus Rejectus in the January issue, standard pulp fare that begins with the hero of the story, Captain Drury Banion, slugging a guy in a club when they make a pass at one of the singing-girls. When Banion subsequently finds out the man is the Martian traffic boss of Spaceways, Inc., he loses his job as a spaceship pilot. However, it isn’t long before a shady Martian character called Guxl approaches him to do an (illegal) flight and, after initially rebuffing the offer, Banion ends up taking it when the girl from the club slugs a cop outside the door to his room.
Banion soon finds himself flying Guxl and two shady Earthmen to an asteroid where there is “proto”, an illicit substance that is the lost—and, according to legend, guarded—treasure of a long-dead pirate called Corsair Mell. During the journey the singing-girl, Cassa Fabia, turns up as a stowaway, and is put to work as the ship’s domestic—and it isn’t long before Banion is boxing the ears of one of the Earthmen for making a pass at her (that woman is nothing but trouble, as they would say in the less enlightened thirties).
When the ship arrives at Asteroid 1204, Guxl and the two Earthmen set off to retrieve the proto—first wrecking the fuel lines to make sure Banion can’t leave without them, and to give him something to do while they are gone. Tarsus, one of the Earthmen, returns on his own and tries to make a deal with Banion, but they are interrupted when the other two arrive followed by a large black shape that attacks the ship. It stops its assault when night falls.
At sunrise the next day the (obviously solar-powered) guard starts attacking the ship once more, and Guxl and the two Earthmen (spoiler) go out to destroy it. They are unsuccessful however, and Hommoday, the other Earthman, gets ripped to pieces when he can’t get back into the ship fast enough. Guxl and Tarsus later die when the attacker punches through the hull, but Banion and Fabia get to an airtight part of the ship. Fabia improvises a spacesuit and, when it gets dark again, goes and retrieves Tarsus’s body so Banion has a spacesuit to finish his repairs (the improvised one wouldn’t have fitted him). However, the guard returns to attack the ship again before Banion is finished—so Fabia goes out and sprays it with the same fast setting enamel that she used to make her suit airtight: the guard grinds to a halt. Fabia later explains to Banion that it was obviously solar powered and, by the way, she is a Terrestrial League Policeman who organised his sacking and stowed away to recover the proto.
This is a formulaic pulp tale, and all a bit unlikely, but it’s fast paced, the solar-powered guard (and way it is incapacitated) is a neat enough idea, and it is notable and atypical for the period that Fabia (the “girl”) is ultimately the story’s brains and hero.
** (Average). 6,100 words. Story link.