{"id":4926,"date":"2022-07-21T11:27:04","date_gmt":"2022-07-21T11:27:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=4926"},"modified":"2022-07-21T11:27:07","modified_gmt":"2022-07-21T11:27:07","slug":"my-hypothetical-friend-by-harry-turtledove","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=4926","title":{"rendered":"My Hypothetical Friend by Harry Turtledove"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My Hypothetical Friend<\/em><\/strong> by Harry Turtledove (Analog<\/em>, January-February 2021)1<\/sup> gets off to a plodding start with Dave Markarian, President and CEO of Interstellar Master Traders Inc., preparing for a visit from one of the alien Brot. This involves three pages of scene setting and backstory about the alien visitors (although, given that miscommunications have previously caused them to level a city, the relationship is more complicated than that) before the alien, who Dave calls Old Salty, arrives (this is the point where the story should have started):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At 2:00:00.00, the paranymphic glider touched down on the roof. Had Dave\u2019s phone shown the time to be a hundredth of a second earlier or later, he would have assumed it was wrong, and never mind that it took the time straight from Earth\u2019s master atomic clock. A Brot who said two o\u2019clock sharp meant two o\u2019clock sharp.
Old Salty got down from the glider and walked\/moved\/flowed toward Dave. He\/she\/it looked something like a prune, something like a sea sponge, something like a slug. Several eyestalks stuck up from his\/her\/its front end; they looked every which way at once. The alien\u2019s underside had lots and lots of little tiny legs.
He\/she\/it said something in his\/her\/its own language. Inside his head, Dave heard (he supposed he heard; that came closer to describing it than anything else), \u201cI hail to you say, my hypothetical friend.\u201d People who were able to work in Brot establishments and make Brot widgets picked up on the meaning in Brot noises. To the rest of mankind, those remained alien gibberish.
\u201cGood to see you, Old Salty,\u201d Dave answered. The Brot didn\u2019t mind the nickname. He\/she\/it could understand the same smallish set of humans who could follow the speech and subspeech of his\/her\/its kind. Communication had been dicey when the aliens first landed: lots of pointing and pictures. Little by little, things got better. Not good, not yet, but better.\u00a0 p. 33<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The rest of the story has the same clunky delivery.
Dave quickly learns that this will be the Old Salty\u2019s last visit (it is returning to its home world), and he then takes the alien on the scheduled tour of the premises. We see that the business makes gadgets with an unknown function for the Brot.
Throughout the story Dave walks on eggshells but, before Old Salty leaves, they have a drink together (the aliens can drink both methyl and isopropyl alcohol) and Dave presents the alien with a going away present of four plastic figures (these are California Raisin toys given away with American fast food meals in the 1980s and 90s). They have \u201cMade in China\u201d on the base, and Dave comments that the \u201cpeasants\u201d who painted the toys would have had little or no comprehension of what they were. Old Salty leaves soon afterwards.
The story ends (spoiler) with the alien back on its home world. Old Salty arrives at his swarmsister\u2019s house and gives her kids presents\u2014the gadgets that were made by Dave\u2019s company (\u201cMade on Earth\u201d). We see that these aren\u2019t alien miracle devices like the paranymphic glider which Old Salty used to arrive at Dave\u2019s business, but are actually cheap disposable toys. The story then makes the leaden point that humanity is to the aliens as the Chinese workers were to Western consumers in the last century, i.e. \u201cpeasants\u201d.
The story closes with Old Salty wondering if humanity will ever spread out into space and find races that we can view and\/or treat in the same way as the Brot treats humanity\u2014but the alien doesn\u2019t expect that will happen any time soon.
This is a dull and old-fashioned piece, and the idea of this kind of economic imperialism rolling through the galaxy is just dispiriting. I note in passing that (a) the repeated use of \u201che\/she it\u201d for the aliens rather than \u201cthey\u201d or \u201cit\u201d is clumsy and (b) there seems to be no piece of American cultural ephemera so obscure that US writers will not shoehorn it into a story.
* (Mediocre). 7,050 words. Story link<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. This story placed 4th<\/sup> in the 2021\u00a0Analog\u00a0<\/em>Analytical Laboratory Awards short story category.

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

My Hypothetical Friend by Harry Turtledove (Analog, January-February 2021)1 gets off to a plodding start with Dave Markarian, President and CEO of Interstellar Master Traders Inc., preparing for a visit from one of the alien Brot. This involves three pages of scene setting and backstory about the alien visitors (although, given that miscommunications have previously […]<\/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":[1170],"tags":[21,50,427,33,1173,1171,12],"class_list":["post-4926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-harry-turtledove","tag-21","tag-50","tag-aliens","tag-analog","tag-economics","tag-harry-turtledove","tag-short-story"],"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\/4926","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=4926"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4936,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4926\/revisions\/4936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}