{"id":136,"date":"2020-12-24T19:33:50","date_gmt":"2020-12-24T19:33:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=136"},"modified":"2021-05-13T17:48:48","modified_gmt":"2021-05-13T17:48:48","slug":"hot-times-in-magma-city-by-robert-silverberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=136","title":{"rendered":"Hot Times in Magma City by Robert Silverberg"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hot Times in Magma City<\/em><\/strong> by Robert Silverberg (Omni Online<\/em>, May 1995) starts in a Los Angeles recovery house where an ex-addict, Mattison, is monitoring a screen for volcanoes and lava outbreaks in the local area:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The whole idea of the Citizens Service House is that they are occupied by troubled citizens who have \u201cvolunteered\u201d to do community service\u2014any sort of service that may be required of them. A Citizens Service House is not quite a jail and not quite a recovery center, but it partakes of certain qualities of both institutions, and its inhabitants are people who have fucked up in one way or another and done injury not only to themselves but to their fellow citizens, injury for which they can make restitution by performing community service even while they are getting their screwed-up heads gradually screwed on the right way.
What had started out to involve a lot of trash-collecting along freeways, tree-pruning in the public parks, and similar necessary but essentially simple and non-life-threatening chores, has become a lot trickier ever since this volcano thing happened to Los Angeles. The volcano thing has accelerated all sorts of legal and social changes in the area, because flowing lava simply will not wait for the usual bullshit California legal processes to take their course.  p. 51 (Year\u2019s Best SF<\/em>, edited by David Hartwell)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

When there is a particularly serious eruption, Mattison\u2019s team is sent by Volcano Central to support the local lava control teams in Pasadena. En route we get a description of this near-future LA:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rains have made everything green, though. The hills are pure emerald, except where some humongous bougainvillea vine is setting off a gigantic blast of purple or orange. Because the prevailing winds this time of year blow from west to east, there\u2019s no coating of volcanic ash or other pyroclastic crap to be seen in this part of town, nor can you smell any of the noxious gases that the million fumaroles of the Zone are putting forth; all such garbage gets carried the other way, turning the world black and nauseating from San Gabriel out to San Berdoo and Riverside.
What you can see, though, is the distant plume of smoke that rises from the summit of Mount Pomona, which is what the main cone seems to have been named. The mountain itself, which straddles two freeways, obliterating both and a good deal more besides, in a little place called City of Industry just southwest of Pomona proper, isn\u2019t visible, not from here\u2014it\u2019s only a couple of thousand feet high, after six months of building itself up out of its own accumulation of ejected debris. But the column of steam and fine ash that emerges from it is maybe five times higher than that, and can be seen far and wide all over the Basin, except perhaps in West L.A. and Santa Monica, where none of this can be seen or smelled and all they know of the whole volcano thing, probably, is what they read in the Times or see on the television news.  p. 58<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

After the team successfully complete their task (which, basically, involves hosing down the lava flow so it forms a crust that dams what is behind it) they get sent to another job\u2014but not until they demand, and get, a break:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lunch is sandwiches and soft drinks, half a block back from the event site. They get out of their suits, leaving them standing open in the street like discarded skins, and eat sitting down at the edge of the curb. \u201cI sure wouldn\u2019t mind a beer right now,\u201d Evans says, and Hawks says, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you wish up a bottle of fucking champagne, while you\u2019re wishing things up? Don\u2019t cost no more than beer, if it\u2019s just wishes.\u201d
\u201cI never liked champagne,\u201d Paul Foust says. \u201cFor me it was always cognac. Cour-voy-zee-ay, that was for me.\u201d He smacks his lips. \u201cI can practically taste it now. That terrific grapey taste hitting your tongue that smooth flow, right down your gullet to your gut\u2014\u201d
\u201cKnock it off,\u201d says Mattison. This nitwit chatter is stirring things inside him that he would prefer not to have stirred.
\u201cYou never stop wanting it,\u201d Foust tells him.
\u201cYes. Yes, I know that, you dumb fucker. Don\u2019t you think I know that? Knock it off.\u201d
\u201cCan we talk about smoking stuff, then?\u201d Marty Cobos asks.
\u201cAnd how about needles, too?\u201d says Mary Maude Gulliver, who used to sell herself on Hollywood Boulevard to keep herself in nose candy. \u201cLet\u2019s talk about needles too.\u201d
\u201cShut your fucking mouth, you goddamn whore,\u201d Lenny Prochaska says. He pronounces it hooer<\/em>. \u201cWhat do you need to play around with my head for?\u201d
\u201cWhy, did you have some kind of habit?\u201d Mary Maude asks him sweetly.  p. 71<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

En route to the second job we see more scenes of volcanic Armageddon and, at one point, the crew pass something that looks like an Aztec sacrifice taking place at an intersection. Finally, at the second job (spoiler), there is a climactic scene that involves a moment of peril for one of this dysfunctional crew, and a chance of redemption for another.
This is a very readable and entertaining story (as you can see from the extensive quotes above), with a neat idea (albeit not an especially SFnal one) as well as characters that are both colourful and snarky. It\u2019s a pretty good piece, and one I\u2019d have for my \u201cYear\u2019s Best\u201d. That said, the story feels like it is a bit longer than it needs to be (perhaps because of the vulcanology material, some of which feels like it comes straight from a very interesting holiday in Iceland), and the characters of the addicts are a bit too similar.
I note in passing that this doesn\u2019t read like a Silverberg\u2019s work at all, and felt more like one of those Marc Laidlaw & Rudy Rucker stories I\u2019ve read recently.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 20,100 words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hot Times in Magma City by Robert Silverberg (Omni Online, May 1995) starts in a Los Angeles recovery house where an ex-addict, Mattison, is monitoring a screen for volcanoes and lava outbreaks in the local area: The whole idea of the Citizens Service House is that they are occupied by troubled citizens who have \u201cvolunteered\u201d […]<\/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_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":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[31],"tags":[5,54,29,30,28],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robert-silverberg","tag-5","tag-3-4","tag-novella","tag-omni-online","tag-robert-silverberg"],"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\/136","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=136"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1150,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136\/revisions\/1150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}