{"id":2818,"date":"2022-02-16T12:37:43","date_gmt":"2022-02-16T12:37:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=2818"},"modified":"2022-03-29T18:13:24","modified_gmt":"2022-03-29T18:13:24","slug":"venus-exegesis-by-christopher-mark-rose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=2818","title":{"rendered":"Venus Exegesis by Christopher Mark Rose"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Venus Exegesis<\/em><\/strong> by Christopher Mark Rose (Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em>, March-April 2022) opens with a brief prologue that introduces the narrator Ling Chen\u2014an obedient ex-US Navy pilot sent on a mission to the atmosphere of Venus. The story itself starts in the gondola that she (although the narrator\u2019s sex isn\u2019t clear till later in the story) shares with a scientist, Gabriel, and an AI, Zheng-123783b (there is brief reference to AI civil rights and the fact that \u201cyou couldn\u2019t send humans on a great voyage of discovery and leave out the inorganics\u201d).
In fairly short order Ling becomes sexually involved with Zheng, and soon after that she is outside the floating gondola hacking one of the native \u201cflying pancakes\u201d to death with a machete, a First Contact situation gone badly wrong. When they are almost overwhelmed by pancakes responding to the killing, Gabriel fires the rocket motors. This saves them but they lose a lot of their attached life support equipment.
At this point (spoiler) the story then morphs from a sex-with-AIs\/First Contact tale into a Climate Change one, where Gabriel theorises that Venus was once like Earth but suffered from a huge runaway greenhouse effect. Then, when the crew are ordered home (they cannot survive for very long in their diminished state), Ling suggests that Zheng is sent back digitally to Earth, she take the one-man emergency pod, and Gabriel remains to do vital work on his theory. This solution is not accepted by mission control, and Ling gets a message from her Navy handlers on a secret backchannel\u2014then, when Ling and Gabriel subsequently go outside on a routine EVA to remove the pancakes from the gondola, Ling stabs Gabriel with the machete and throws his body into the Venusian atmosphere, while making radio calls that suggest that AI Zheng has jumped.
Ling later goes home in the pod, while Zheng stays on the gondola impersonating Gabriel and doing his work (apparently Zheng couldn\u2019t have been left behind on its own for political reasons).
Things slowly improve on Earth, although the similarity between the global warming effects on the two planets are never made public.
This story didn\u2019t work for me for a number of reasons: first, I didn\u2019t buy the Navy pilot as assassin malarkey (being able to drop a bomb on someone doesn\u2019t qualify you as a close-quarters killer); second, this kitchen sink story can\u2019t seem to decide whether it is about AI, planetary exploration, first contact, or climate change; third, the internal logic of the story does not convince (the political background is sketchy to say the least and, at one point, Zheng cryptically states it won\u2019t be able to help Ling as it is \u201cAsimov\u2019ed\u201d and \u201ccan\u2019t kill Gabriel\u201d. Obviously not that Asimov\u2019ed, because colluding in Ling\u2019s killing of Gabriel is an obvious First Law violation.
This is a bit of a mess.
* (Mediocre). 7,500 words.

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Venus Exegesis by Christopher Mark Rose (Asimov\u2019s SF, March-April 2022) opens with a brief prologue that introduces the narrator Ling Chen\u2014an obedient ex-US Navy pilot sent on a mission to the atmosphere of Venus. The story itself starts in the gondola that she (although the narrator\u2019s sex isn\u2019t clear till later in the story) shares […]<\/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":[705],"tags":[21,539,487,4,706,548,7,707],"class_list":["post-2818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christopher-mark-rose","tag-21","tag-539","tag-ai","tag-asimovs-sf","tag-christopher-mark-rose","tag-climate-change","tag-novelette","tag-venus"],"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\/2818","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=2818"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3315,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2818\/revisions\/3315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}