{"id":3243,"date":"2022-03-22T19:28:13","date_gmt":"2022-03-22T19:28:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=3243"},"modified":"2023-03-24T12:30:38","modified_gmt":"2023-03-24T12:30:38","slug":"blimpies-by-rick-wilber","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=3243","title":{"rendered":"Blimpies by Rick Wilber"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Blimpies<\/em><\/strong> by Rick Wilber (Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em>, March-April 2022) is part of the writer\u2019s \u201cS\u2019Hudoni Empire\u201d series, and opens with Kait Holman dreaming about a \u201cblimpie\u201d\u2014a floating airbag alien with tentacles which is found on the planet S\u2019hudon (think of the balloons in Harlan Ellison\u2019s Medea<\/em> anthology). When Kait then wakes up she remembers that she is a prisoner on the planet, before observing in some detail the replica room and bathroom the S\u2019hudonni have provided for her captivity (her captors aren\u2019t the blimpies, by the way, but another walking, talking, porpoise-like alien species).
During this\u2014already rambling\u2014beginning, we get a massive data-dump about how she got here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

She takes a breath, says, \u201cThis is what happened. I was jogging for exercise along Demeter Road. I\u2019d been doing it for more than a month. It was the new me, and I liked the new me, healthy and happy. I\u2019d had some rough years in there, Smiles, awful stuff with my father is what started it all; but then I got involved with some really bad people. I was doing bad things, destroying myself, really. I almost died a couple of times. If it wasn\u2019t for my brother Peter, I\u2019d be dead.
\u201cThen I found myself. I met a woman, Sarah, who was lovely\u2014so lovely!\u2014inside and out, and we fell in love. I was so lucky! I\u2019d work all day at the vet\u2019s office, helping take care of dogs and cats and ferrets and all sorts of Earthie animal pets. Then I\u2019d come home to Sarah, who taught finance at a local college. She loved to cook, so she\u2019d make dinner while I went jogging, and then I\u2019d finish, shower, and we\u2019d eat and just be together.
\u201cIt was a new me, a better me. I had two whole years when I was happy! Happy! The nightly run under the streetlights was part of that, where the shadows seem to chase you as you run toward the lights and then catch up with you when you\u2019re under them and then they rush ahead again as you move on before the next streetlight approaches and it all starts over again. I always thought it was just like life, those nighttime shadows.
\u201cSo it was a warm night. I was thinking of Sarah, and how wonderful it was to love someone and be loved in return; and then thinking of Peter and how he\u2019d saved my life twice during those horrible years. He was always there for me and now he was off and gone with Twoclicks.
\u201cBut he was famous! Twoclicks, for some reason, plucked Peter from obscurity and raised him to fame as Twoclicks\u2019s Earthie spokesperson. Fame! Fortune! So when Twoclicks announced he was taking Peter along to document the negotiations between Twoclicks and Whistle, and while he was there tell all of us on Earth about the wonders of space travel and wormhole panes and life on S\u2019hudon itself; well, that was amazing! We were all so excited for him. There was an audience of two billion of us Earthies watching as he stood on the ramp of Twoclicks\u2019s ship, waved goodbye to Earth, and walked up into the dark interior. It was so sad and stirring and emotional and I was so proud of him. My brother!\u201d  p. 166<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Too many exclamation marks.
The rest of the story alternates between Kait and Peter (and their translators\/sidekicks, Smiles and Treble) and sees the conflict between Prince and Twoclicks, two brothers who are in the line of succession to Mother (the Queen porpoise, essentially), play out.
Peter eventually sets off on the Old Road (there are hints about \u201cOld Ones\u201d and leftover advanced technology) in an attempt to visit Kait (it is a good time to attempt this as Prince has been temporarily detained after trying to kill his brother and acting out at an audience with the Queen). Around the same time Kait, with Smiles\u2019 help, escapes, and also sets off along the Old Road.
After some colourful travelogue, snippets about Kait\u2019s backstory (Daddy and drug problems), and (spoiler) the interventions of the blimpies (who rescue Peter from a storm and drop him off near his sister\u2019s likely path), the two are eventually reunited.
The final section sees a perilous journey to Peter\u2019s compound, with Kait pulling an anti-grav sled containing her injured brother. Prince, however, catches up with them, and there is a climactic airborne encounter which sees the blimpies drop the drugged troublemaker\u2014their tentacles have sedatives that apparently work on both the alien S\u2019hudonni and<\/em> humans\u2014to his death.
If you read this with your brain switched off then you may be able to enjoy it as a YA adventure (my rating below is probably on the generous side), but critical readers may baulk at the following aspects of the story. First, the imperial empire idea is dated and feels like something from the George Scither\u2019s Isaac Asimov\u2019s Science Fiction Magazine<\/em> of the late 1970s, not the Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em> of the 2020s; second, the S\u2019hudonni\u2014with the exception of Prince\u2014are portrayed as cutesy individuals but, apparently, when they are not behaving like Flipper1<\/sup> on legs, they are annihilating their enemies with ray firing screamships (\u201cweapons that had pacified Earth in one terrible day\u201d); third, the story mostly works by having the blimpies (who in future stories will no doubt turn out to be connected to the Old Ones) move the chess pieces around the board; fourth, it is woefully padded (see the passage above); and, fifth and finally, the story has, in common with much recent SF, a young woman character with major personal problems (which read like boilerplate reader-identification fodder).
A decidedly mixed piece.
** (Average). 29,200 words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Flipper was the dolphin character in a 1960s show<\/a> of the same name. The series was the aquatic equivalent of Lassie<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blimpies by Rick Wilber (Asimov\u2019s SF, March-April 2022) is part of the writer\u2019s \u201cS\u2019Hudoni Empire\u201d series, and opens with Kait Holman dreaming about a \u201cblimpie\u201d\u2014a floating airbag alien with tentacles which is found on the planet S\u2019hudon (think of the balloons in Harlan Ellison\u2019s Medea anthology). When Kait then wakes up she remembers that she […]<\/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":[327],"tags":[17,539,797,4,29,329],"class_list":["post-3243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rick-wilber","tag-17","tag-539","tag-alien-empires","tag-asimovs-sf","tag-novella","tag-rick-wilber"],"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\/3243","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=3243"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6519,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3243\/revisions\/6519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}