{"id":1334,"date":"2021-06-07T13:05:53","date_gmt":"2021-06-07T13:05:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1334"},"modified":"2021-06-10T18:49:08","modified_gmt":"2021-06-10T18:49:08","slug":"maelstrom-by-kristine-kathryn-rusch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1334","title":{"rendered":"Maelstrom by Kristine Kathryn Rusch"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Maelstrom <\/em><\/strong>by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em>, September\/October 2020) is an account written by the daughter of Captain Ferguson of the Gabriella<\/em>, a ship that sets out to explore the Najar Crater on Madreperla and is lost in one of the maelstroms that occur there. We are told about the experience of an earlier ship:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rumors floating around Ciudad Orilla promised vast stores of untold wealth inside that crater on Madreperla, from sea creatures with bones made of the finest glass to minerals needed for every single engine. The water that filled part of the crater, the stories went, contained healing properties, and had more nutrients than anything that humans had concocted thus far.
The Maria Segunda<\/em>, a ship that had land-to-sea-to-space capabilities, set out to learn which of those rumors had a basis in fact.
She arrived on the rim on a Thursday, set down on what her crew thought was an ice shelf, and by Friday morning, found herself in the midst of what the crew later described as an ice storm.
Only it was unlike any storm they had ever seen. A massive wind swirled around them, and they were caught in the center of it. But that didn\u2019t stop ice pellets, rock, and other materials that seemed harder than rock from hitting the outside of the ship. The Maria Segunda<\/em> had defensive shields, but they were rotating shields, built to stave off laser weapons. The normal heat and weather shields that any land-to-space ship had were not up to dealing with this particular anomaly, whatever the heck it was.
In the space of an hour, the damage to the ship\u2019s exterior was so severe that there was a good chance the ship might not make it out of the relatively weak atmosphere of Madreperla.  p. 15<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This passage, with its Star Trek<\/em> tech (\u201crotating shields\u201d, \u201cheat and weather shields\u201d), flabby prose (\u201cwhatever the heck it was\u201d), and tell-instead-of-show approach (all of it) illustrates the overall quality of the story.
And, after this section, matters do not improve when the daughter then interviews one of her father\u2019s one-time crewmates in an over-described space pub called the Elizabeta\u2014we get a page and a half about its skanky surroundings, and the owner, before the daughter asks about her father and the ship.
Then, later on, we are back at the pub\u2014again\u2014with other characters:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, on that final Sunday, she slides her whisky back to Beta, and walks out of the bar in search of Ferguson. Imelda finds him sitting in an \u201coutside\u201d table along the so-called promenade.
Most commercial districts of star ports have several promenades. On the exclusive levels, the promenades are designed to make patrons think they\u2019re outside in some exotic natural environment, complete with expensive water features and fake sunlight.
On most levels, the promenades resemble city centers of faraway famous places, with some replicas of the cultural icons hovering nearby. Or, if the displays aren\u2019t permanent, there\u2019s a rotating spectacle of VR images that show the tourist highlights of the planet below.
But the promenade outside of the Elizabeta is nothing more than chairs and tables and some gambling booths. The ceiling is as brown as the walls that are as brown as the floors. There\u2019s nothing special or even \u201coutside\u201d here, just a place to be away from the bar\u2019s noise, while still receiving the bar\u2019s service.
Captain Giles Ferguson is sitting out there alone, his fingers wrapped around a stein of a particularly skunky local beer called Ragtop. He drinks nothing but Ragtop at the Elizabeta, but unlike some of his shipmates, he never had the beverage delivered in quantity to the ship.  p. 21<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I can see the point of the first and fifth paragraphs, but do we really need a lot of vague blather about what would normally be seen on the promenade outside of the pub? This is a writer thinking out loud about background details rather than reducing them to a pithy line or image.
These interviews are followed by accounts of (a) the corporate shenanigans behind the trip (it seems that tech triggers the storms but the insurers were content to underwrite the trip); (b) her father\u2019s marital backstory; (c) the recruitment of another captain to act as a rescue ship should the need arise; (d) what might have happened to the Gabriella<\/em> when it arrived over the crater (three scenarios where the second-hand speculation about what may have occurred is about as riveting as you would expect); and, finally, (e) the findings of the inquiry.
It is bad enough that this is all told in mind numbing detail, is set in the thinnest of space opera realities, and that there is no plot progression whatsoever (at the end of the piece we are in exactly the same place as we were when we began), but throughout the story it is blindingly obvious that that the maelstroms are caused either by aliens, or by some current or leftover defence tech (the narrative grudgingly has one of the crew of the Maria Segunda <\/em>state late on in the story that it felt like they were fighting a \u201clive thing\u201d). This idea, however, is almost completely unexamined: whether this is because the writer couldn\u2019t come up with an intriguing explanation or whether it\u2019s because there is another twenty thousand words to be milked out of this idea remains to be seen.
– (Awful). 21,450 words.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maelstrom by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Asimov\u2019s SF, September\/October 2020) is an account written by the daughter of Captain Ferguson of the Gabriella, a ship that sets out to explore the Najar Crater on Madreperla and is lost in one of the maelstroms that occur there. We are told about the experience of an earlier ship: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[145],"tags":[79,296,4,146,29],"class_list":["post-1334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kristine-kathryn-rusch","tag-296","tag-asimovs-sf","tag-kristine-kathryn-rusch","tag-novella"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1334"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1371,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1334\/revisions\/1371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}