{"id":487,"date":"2021-02-03T16:06:59","date_gmt":"2021-02-03T16:06:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=487"},"modified":"2021-02-19T11:59:19","modified_gmt":"2021-02-19T11:59:19","slug":"hunches-by-kristine-kathryn-rusch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=487","title":{"rendered":"Hunches by Kristine Kathryn Rusch"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hunches<\/em><\/strong> by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Asimov’s SF<\/em>, January\/February 2021) is one of her \u2018Diving\u2019 series, although a peripheral piece I think, and it starts in the wreckage of a spaceship bridge, with Lieutenant Jicha as the only survivor:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He watched it happen in real time, gloved hands gripping the console, the small fiery thing still glowing, as if it was waiting for the oxygen to return. The small fiery thing seemed to be gloating, its redness pulsing, taunting him.
He had watched it zoom inside, then burrow into the floor, not too far from his boots. The boots that had their gravity turned on, so he wouldn\u2019t get pulled out of the bridge with the atmosphere, like so many others had.
But he had risked getting hit by that small and fiery thing, and somehow, it had missed him.  p. 102-103<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

There is then a long flashback (almost two pages of italics, so good luck to the dyslexics among you) where we learn about a group of alien \u201cfireflies\u201d surrounding the ship, and of Jicha\u2019s hunches. These latter mean that most of the story development is driven by him intuiting matters (which also means the author does massive amounts of telling rather than showing).
Jicha\u2019s hunches include the realisation that the \u201csmall and fiery\u201d thing is causing multiple system failures, and that he needs to get it out of the ship. By the end of the story he (spoiler) has managed to put it into a box and throw it out of the hole it made on the way in.
If this sounds a uselessly reductive description of the story, I can assure you it is not, and that most of the piece is spent in Jicha\u2019s head watching him make guesses about what is going on. This produces a grossly padded sub-Star Trek<\/em> story and one which, by the way, is partly written in a highly irritating telegraphic style:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He wasn\u2019t on his own.
He opened a communications link to engineering. He identified himself, and then\u2014the link cut out.
He re-established it, saw that they were trying to respond but seemingly were unable to.
Which meant they knew the problems existed; they just didn\u2019t know what the problems were.
Communicating with them, though, wasn\u2019t going to be dangerous. Not to them, not to him.
He just had to figure out how.
He glanced at that hole again, space glinting out there\u2014or maybe the fireflies, the light. Surely engineering would notice that the nanobits weren\u2019t functioning right.
But no one had come to the bridge yet. No one had come to see if anyone was alive here, or injured or in need of rescue.
Did they think everyone was dead?
He opened yet another screen on his console, saw the environmental system still trying to reboot and nothing else. He couldn\u2019t see any locations of crew personnel.
That system was never supposed to fail and it had.
Or maybe the Izlovchi<\/em> was going through cascading failures.  p. 107<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

– (Awful). 7,650 words.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hunches by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Asimov’s SF, January\/February 2021) is one of her \u2018Diving\u2019 series, although a peripheral piece I think, and it starts in the wreckage of a spaceship bridge, with Lieutenant Jicha as the only survivor: He watched it happen in real time, gloved hands gripping the console, the small fiery thing still […]<\/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":[145],"tags":[79,50,4,146,7],"class_list":["post-487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kristine-kathryn-rusch","tag-50","tag-asimovs-sf","tag-kristine-kathryn-rusch","tag-novelette"],"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\/487","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=487"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":627,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions\/627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}