Summary: there are a couple of pretty good stories in this issue from Ray Nayler (an “Istanbul Protectorate” story, Mender of Sparrows) and Marta Randall (Sailing to Merinam, an immersive fantasy) with good backup from Paul McAuley (Maryon’s Gift) and Michael Cassutt (Aurora). The William Ledbetter (his sequel to an earlier Nebula award-winning story) and Steven Rasnic Tem stories are also of some interest. Of the remaining seven pieces, four are average (including the novella or near-novella length stories by Rick Wilber and Will McIntosh which make up a large chunk of the issue) and three are mediocre.
I also note that the non-fiction (which I am generally cool about anyway) is almost uniformly dull this issue: this is not helped by subject matter I’m not much interested in (e.g. ancient Ostrogoth coinage and ancient SF movies).
An average issue, I guess.
[ISFDB link] [Asimov’s SF, Amazon UK/USA]
Other reviews
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Victoria Silverwolf, Tangent Online
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads
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Editor, Sheila Williams; Associate Editor, Emily Hockaday
Fiction:
Mender of Sparrows • novelette by Ray Nayler ∗∗∗+
The Magpie Stacks Probabilities • short story by Arie Coleman ∗
Venus Exegesis • novelette by Christopher Mark Rose ∗
Dollbot Cicily • novelette by Wil McIntosh ∗∗
Sailing to Merinam • short story by Marta Randall ∗∗∗+
Quake • short story by Peter Wood ∗∗
Aurora • novelette by Michael Cassutt ∗∗∗
The Gold Signal • short story by Jack McDevitt and Larry Wasserman ∗
Maryon’s Gift • short story by Paul J. McAuley ∗∗∗
The Short Path to Light • novelette by William Ledbetter ∗∗+
Do You Remember? • short story by Steve Rasnic Tem ∗∗
Offloaders • short story by Leah Cypess ∗
Blimpies • novella by Rick Wilber ∗∗
Non-fiction:
Cover • by Shutterstock
From SF to Philosophy in Thirteen Steps • editorial by Kelly Lager
Across the Centuries • essay by Robert Silverberg
Blinded by Science • essay by James Patrick Kelly
Magic, Science, and the Moon in Le Voyage Dans La Lune • essay by Kelly Lager
Poetry • by Mary Soon Lee, Bruce McAllister, F. J. Bergmann, Ken Poyner, Herb Kauderer
Next Issue
On Books: What is Consciousness? • by Norman Spinrad
SF Conventional Calendar • by Erwin S. Strauss
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[All the story reviews were previously posted on sfshortstories.com so, if you have read them there, skip down to the three dots ••• and the non-fiction reviews.]
Mender of Sparrows by Ray Nayler takes place in the author’s ‘Istanbul Protectorate’ series, and opens with the narrator, Himmet, taking an injured sparrow to an android vet called Sezgin. Himmet later gets a call from him saying they need to talk and, when they meet again, Sezgin says that Himmet has found “a hole in the world”.
At a later meeting with a group of androids, at a safe house a ferry trip away from Istanbul (and after Himmit has been approached by a shady scientist from the nearby Institute enquiring whether he has picked up any injured sparrows recently), Sezgin tells Himmit that the sparrow contains a human consciousness. Moreover, it is a duplicate consciousness, not the original (something that was thought to be impossible in this consciousness-downloading society). Then someone knocks at the door, and Himmet is told to hide in a priest hole. By the time he gets out he is partially paralyzed.
This latter event is explained in a subsequent doctor’s appointment, where we find out that Himmet is a human who was downloaded into a blank android when he was badly injured in the war and who, when he is stressed, suffers partial paralysis in his new body (throughout the story, Himmet agonises about whether he is really himself, or a copy). We also learn about societal hostility towards androids, and how Himmit got involved with Sezgin when he started paying for deformed sparrows to be mended (replacement legs, etc.).
The story concludes (spoiler) with another, more menacing, visit from the Institute scientist, during which he demands the return of the sparrow. Himmit does not want the consciousness in the sparrow to be returned for illegal experimentation, and he reluctantly goes back to Sezgin to get the sparrow to give to the scientist. We later find out, however, that the woman present at that latter meeting is the freed consciousness (the “connectome”) from the sparrow, and that the androids have put a flawed replica in its place (something, they think, that will keep the scientist occupied for months).
This piece may seem to be a heavily plotted tale but it is actually much more of a slow burn than the synopsis above would suggest, and the main attractions are the setting, the writing (people who feed sparrows will appreciate the descriptions1 of their behaviour), and the character’s epistemological agonising.2
I suspect Nayler is becoming one of those writers who you can enjoy regardless of whether there is a story being told or not.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 8,500 words.
•
The Magpie Stacks Probabilities by Arie Coleman has as its narrator a female astronaut who managed to survive an accident in space by opening a hatch with an improvised tool based on a lost Allen key. The story itself takes place afterwards at her home with her wife and son. The latter has now started to secrete small items around the house; later, the narrator starts doing the same thing while musing about order and entropy.
There is no real story here, and I’m not sure what point the piece is trying to make (possibly none, it may just be a short mood piece).
∗ (Mediocre), 2,750 words.
•
Venus Exegesis by Christopher Mark Rose opens with a brief prologue that introduces the narrator Ling Chen—an 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’s sex isn’t 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 “you couldn’t send humans on a great voyage of discovery and leave out the inorganics”).
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 “flying pancakes” 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—then, 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’t 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’t work for me for a number of reasons: first, I didn’t buy the Navy pilot as assassin malarkey (being able to drop a bomb on someone doesn’t qualify you as a close-quarters killer); second, this kitchen sink story can’t 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’t be able to help Ling as it is “Asimov’ed” and “can’t kill Gabriel”. Obviously not that Asimov’ed, because colluding in Ling’s killing of Gabriel is an obvious First Law violation.
This is a bit of a mess.
∗ (Mediocre). 7,500 words.
•
Dollbot Cicily by Will McIntosh opens with Cicily, the down-on-her-luck narrator, in a burger joint eating her basic menu food and browsing gig economy jobs when she is hassled by a young man. He asks her if she was the original model for his dollbot (sexbot). She rebuffs him but, after she leaves the restaurant, he and his (premium menu) friends hassle her again:
I picked up my pace as Red Sideburns’ friends raced from across the street to intercept me. One was carrying a lifesized female dollbot in a negligee. I wound through pedestrians.
“Just look,” Red Sideburns called. “Tell me this isn’t you.”
They weren’t going to give up. I’d have to make a scene. I stopped short, spun to face them. “Leave me alone. Stop following me, or I’ll call the police.”
One of the premium boys was holding the doll out, its lifelike nipples visible through gossamer fabric.
It looked exactly like me.
Not sort of. Not even, Oh what a strange coincidence. Exactly like me, down to the freckle. Down to the crescent-shaped scar on my knee I’d gotten roller-skating when I was ten, although not the long surgery scar on my shoulder that I got in the car accident.
A small crowd had formed. They looked at the doll, back at me. I was blinking and swallowing. A teenaged boy let out a high-pitched giggle.
“Were you the model for the body, or just the face? It’s hard to imagine this body is under those clothes.” Red Sideburns gestured at me with his chin, his gaze locked on my chest.
The boy holding the doll switched it on. Its eyes rolled open, revealing my light brown irises, flecked with hazel. The doll turned its head from side to side, taking in the scene.
“Is this a gang-bang?” she asked brightly. “You know me, I love a good gang-bang.” p. 54-55
If this squirm-worthy (and unlikely) encounter doesn’t put you off reading further, the story then sees Cicily set off to her home in a drainage tunnel (I wasn’t kidding when I said she was down on her luck). On the way there she realises that the 3D images used in the dollbot’s construction probably came from a previous modelling job she had when she was younger.
When Cicily arrives home she tells her friend what happened to her before she changes her appearance (during this section we also learn that Cicily is a single mother whose child is in the temporary care of Child Protection Services—something that will become permanent if she can’t get some money together).
The now disguised Cicily starts looking for gig jobs repairing Cicily dollbots so she can learn more about them, and her first customer (of three) is Conrad, a seventy-something “old bastard” who Cicily notes isn’t even “mildly embarrassed” at getting his “fuck doll” repaired, and who refuses to pay when she leaves a scar on the dollbot after she has finished. Cicily, seeking revenge, quickly installs a patch to the dollbot’s software that lets her remotely telepresence to it later that evening. When Cicily does so, she finds the old man asking his dollbot to the prom, at which point she starts overriding the software and giving her own replies to his conversation. Later on she uses the override to take a hundred dollar bill and throw it outside the window while Conrad is having a shower.
Cicily later sets up the same scam with two other dollbot users, Jasper (a sensitive type who reads Anna Karenina to her) and Joey (who runs nine different types of dollbot, “a veritable United Nations of ethnicities”, through various fashion or strip shows, etc.). These jobs take place in the same time period that Cicily visits her daughter, who has been rented out as child labour by CPS to do hazardous tasks. We also, at another point in the story, see Cicliy almost drowned in the tunnel when it floods.
Over time (spoiler), Cicily become increasingly attracted to Jasper—he thinks his dollbot has become sentient, and they (Jasper and the dolbot, with Cicily telepresent) later go away for a couple of nights to a dollbot conference. Eventually, of course, this burgeoning relationship turns out too good to be true, and Jasper loses his temper when he and the dollbot (Cicily) argue: he goes on to trash and bury the dollbot.
Some time after this pivotal event Jasper summons Cicily to repair his dollbot and, once she has finished, she slips into the bathroom before leaving to change her appearance back to what it was before her encounter with the Premium boys at the start of the story. Cicily gives a stunned Jasper his money back and (essentially) dumps him out of a relationship that he never knew he had, giving him some life advice on the way out the door (peak irony from someone who is living in a drainage tunnel, is a voyeur and thief, and is perilously close to losing custody of her only daughter).
The final scenes see Cicily steal a lot of money from Conrad (she has the dollbot make it look like the money is burnt so it isn’t reported as stolen) and, on the way to recover her daughter from CPS, she telepresences to Joey’s dollbot and throws all his other bots out the tower block window before making the Cicily dollbot do the same.
On finishing the story I thought it reasonably well done (McIntosh creates entertaining and/or amusing plots), but the more I thought about it the more the piece soured. This reaction was, I eventually realised, due to the story’s facile worldview and its stereotypical characters—the three rich, male (and probably white) characters (as well as the Premium boys at the beginning) are all portrayed as losers, weirdos, scumbags, or all three—even Jasper, who Cicily is attracted to at one point, flies into a deranged rage towards the end of his story arc. Meanwhile, our hero Cicily is painted as a sexually and economically oppressed single-mother. These are, essentially, clichéd characterisations that seem to stem from viewing sex and wealth through the lens of critical theory, where men are always oppressors and women always the oppressed (and likewise for the “rich” and “poor”). These binaries also suggest that Cicily has never had any agency in, or responsibility for, anything that has ever happened in her life.
The other thing that bothered me about the story is the way that reader sympathy is manipulated—I’ve already described what the men are like, but more troubling is the story’s portrayal of Cicily as some sort of hero, even though she is someone who, with her gross invasion of privacy, thefts, and criminal damage, is more unpleasant than any of the men—unless, I guess, you subscribe to the idea that, if you are in the oppressed class, anything you do to your oppressors is fair game (for Old Testament types, think “an eye for an eye”). That can, of course, mean you end up as morally repellent as your so-called “oppressors”.
If you can stomach the above, there may be something for you here.
∗∗ (Average). 17,350 words.
•
Sailing to Merinam by Marta Randall has the narrator onboard a boat that is taking a group of male passengers (unpleasant religious types) from Cherek to Merinam. As the story progresses we find out that the narrator is intersex, but is disguised as a man, and that they can conjure up the wind by singing. Both of these would be intolerable to the Merinami passengers:
What do these stern people and their ugly religion do to people like me, women who are not boys and boys who are not girls, people who sing, people who whistle up the wind? [. . .] If the yellow priest knew he would have hurled that accusation at me. Worse than singing or being inbetween, worse than being in disguise? What do the Merinami do to singing witches wearing the wrong clothing? Will they try to hang me and drown me both? My knees give out and I scoot backward under my master’s bunk, where the ship’s cat finds me and head-butts my thigh until I make a lap for her, she hops into it, I lift her and rub my face against her belly. Warmth, softness, purring, I begin to catch my breath. p. 86
After various events (the narrator saves a sailor caught by a rope, is seen momentarily conjuring the wind by singing, etc.), the Yellow Priest of the Merinami accuses them of being a woman. After a period of confinement (spoiler) they are brought in front of the captain. The narrator then conjures the wind and a huge wave that has the face of the Sea God. This briefly imperils the boat but, after the vessel has stabilised, the captain orders everyone below deck and the narrator is not troubled further.
After the ship reaches Merinam, and the passengers are disembarked, she becomes one of the crew (the captain is a pragmatist who realises the value of someone who can summon the wind).
I thought this was quite good, mostly because it is one of those immersive pieces3 that you can lose yourself in—and it has an arc/plot as well. I hope this is the first of a series.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 5,000 words.
•
Quake by Peter Wood opens with the narrator, Hannah DeLeon, a physics instructor at Appalachian State University, experience a mini-earthquake while she is at her partner Miguel’s work outing. Then she finds a warm metallic object in the soil—and also notices that Miguel’s boss, Stacey, is having an intense conversation with a man near a white van who is holding a metal detector.
The rest of the story sees further quakes, and Hannah discovers that the company that Miguel works for, Tarlek, is involved in a number of sites where strange phenomena have occurred. She also sees a UFO in the night sky.
Hannah eventually (spoiler) tracks down the epicentre of the quakes to a place called Mystery Hill (which Tarlek has just bought) and, when she and Miguel visit, they discover an underground fall-out shelter that contains a lot of high-end science equipment. Then Stacey turns up and tells Miguel to hand over his work badge.
The last few pages are very busy: the three of them leave the shelter to see a van open its doors and AEC agents appear. There is an argument between an agent Holbrook and Stacey about “the relic”. Stacey refuses his request to hand it over, so Holbrook starts the van’s detectors—which causes an earthquake. Then a UFO arrives and a woman gets out. She wants the relic/fragments too, and it soon becomes obvious that she is a time-traveller (and, for some reason, she is not happy when she finds out that one of the people she is talking too is Hannah). Eventually, Miguel tells her he will show her where the fragments of the “relic” (a previous ship/UFO which crashed) are; Stacey fires him. The time travellers and the agents leave.
Hannah later gets a job offer to research tachyons—at which point she realises she is one who is going to invent time travel (the UFO woman’s comment suddenly makes sense).
This story takes a while to get to the meat of the matter and then everything happens at once, which makes the story feel rather rushed at the end. Also, all the earthquake/conspiracy/UFO stuff dissolves into a fairly straightforward time-travel deus ex machina.
∗∗ (Average). 5,950 words.
•
Aurora by Michael Cassutt begins with Vera Vorobyova, the seventy-nine-year-old retired director of a Russian “science institute” north of the Arctic Circle, summoned to a meeting at her old workplace. When she gets there she is met by the new director, Nikitin, a “networked” individual who has implants that connect him to his colleagues. Nikitin tells Vorobyova that a returning spaceship is in trouble and doesn’t have the fuel to avoid an asteroid on its route. He then asks about Search, a mothballed energy beam weapon used once over two decades ago when she was the director (and which created a new crater on the Moon).
The rest of the story sees Vorobyova help them get Search operational to fire at the asteroid, an experience which sees her pendulum from providing essential information (she initially finds hardcopy manuals in the basement when she learns the digital archives have been deleted) to being completely ignored. During the latter periods she goes back to her flat, drinks heavily, and thinks about the past:
She was [. . .] unhappy, questioning everything from her constant drinking and lack of goals to every decision she had made since the age of twenty-nine, including her turn away from research to administration, then every financial and personnel choice she had made on her path to the directorship—and as director.
She had not applied to work at Aurora. She was busy at the Institute for Applied Physics in the capital and expected to spend her entire career there. She had only heard of Aurora because its northern sky surveys had appeared in some popular science publication.
[. . .]
Other than a single visit for her mother’s funeral, she had not returned to the capital, [and] aside from two fleeting, furtive affairs, Vera had made no deep personal connections in forty years. pp. 107-108
Vorobyova is, however, more proactive than this sad-sack description might suggest and, after some more back and forth (she later provides a firing code), Vorobyova realises, when she looks at photographs of the asteroids flat surface (spoiler), that it may reflect back enough of Search’s electromagnetic energy to affect Nikitin and the other networked humans. With the clock ticking down she then struggles to contact him or get into the facility.
The story eventually ends with her and Nikitin firing the device after the others are evacuated, and saving the ship. The reflected energy mostly lands elsewhere, and Nikitin’s companions are affected but they can be repaired. Nikitin then tells Vorobyova that there is now no longer an age limit on the process so she can be networked too.
The best parts of this story for me were the setting, Vorobyova’s alcoholic melancholy, and the initial part of the plot. The latter part of the story, where the suspense increases, seemed a little formulaic; I also didn’t entirely buy the science (the Earth would have moved in space during the time between firing and the reflection); finally, the revelation that Vorobyova can be networked and lead a different life is a twist too far. Still, it’s not a bad read for the most part, especially if you have a penchant (as I do) for gloomy Russian novels.
∗∗∗ (Good). 11,750 words.
•
The Gold Signal by Jack McDevitt & Larry Wasserman opens with the English teacher narrator and her scientist friend (they were in the Girl Scouts together) listening to an incoming message from a probe that has arrived at Proxima Centauri, four light-years away, after a twenty-three year journey. At the end of this section there is a moan about the amount of space junk in Earth orbit, and how it is hampering—and possibly preventing—any further missions (there have already been catastrophic accidents).
The next part of the story sees the scientist friend develop an FTL drive that is eventually tested on a flight to Jupiter (they use a previously abandoned probe in Earth orbit rather than ship all the parts up there). More complaints about space junk. The FTL ship, after a successful test flight, later sets off towards a plant called Wolf.
When the ship arrives there (spoiler), Earth (eventually) receives messages saying that they have discovered an abandoned alien ship, and then abandoned alien cities and planets. There is one final moan about space junk before the scientist observes, “It’s kind of like having invented the radio in a place that has no electricity”.
What is the point of this?
∗ (Mediocre). 4,150 words.
•
Maryon’s Gift by Paul McAuley is (we eventually discover) a campfire story told by an alien !Cha, and initially tells of an explorer called Iryna who discovers a virgin planet but chooses not to land there. Instead, she gifts the exploration rights to her niece (the Maryon of Maryon’s Gift), who then transfers them to a Gaian sect who set up defence drones around the planet to keep it in a virgin state.
Later, various intruders try to come through the nearby wormhole and land on the planet—but only two get close: one is a young fellow who hides in one of the supply ships and plans to surf through the atmosphere; the other is the Admiral, Iryna’s world-hunting rival:
He called himself the Admiral, although he had never held that rank, having only briefly served as a rating in the Commons police. He was around a hundred and fifty years old and claimed to be much older, and had spun a cocoon of vivid stories about himself, for he was not only a skilled and fearless explorer, but also a tireless self-mythologizer. We knew each other quite well—I had once traveled with him and the circus of his entourage for a couple of years—but even I do not know his true name or origin. Fame had displaced everything he had once been. No one believed the stories he had spun about himself more than he did, and as Iryna predicted, he was supremely irritated when he heard that she had discovered a habitable but untouched world and had taken steps to ensure that it would remain pristine. It was forbidden fruit, as in one of your myths, and there was nothing more that he craved, for he was a full-blown believer in the fitness of humanity to claim all the worlds in the galactic network, and the worlds beyond it, too. To step from star to star, galaxy to galaxy. To prove that humans were greater than any other client species and might even be their secret masters—he liked to promote the story that the Jackaroo were the distant descendants of the human species and had used tweaked wormholes to travel back in time to ensure their eventual triumph on the galactic stage. p. 130
The Admiral (spoiler) starts a huge diversionary battle near the wormhole and sneaks through the main defences in a multi-shelled stealth ship. However, he is caught in a net near the planet and burns up in the atmosphere.
The !Cha narrator finishes his tale with some philosophical observations, one of which concerns whether or not its story is really finished.
This is more an account than a story, but I found it an interestingly detailed and imaginative one. Reader reaction to the passage above will likely predict their enjoyment of the piece.
∗∗∗ (Good). 4,150 words.
•
The Short Path to Light by William Ledbetter is the sequel to his Nebula Award winning novelette The Long Fall Up (F&SF, May-June 2016).4 In that earlier story, Jäger Jin is sent by the Jinshan Corporation (an asteroid belt company) to kill an illegally pregnant woman called Veronica Perez (childbirth laws are enforced for commercial reasons). During the trip out to intercept the woman Jin has a change of heart, partially due to events and partially due to Hinzu the ship AI, who is compelled to obey the corporation’s orders but who also keeps giving Jin hints on how to circumvent its programming. The end of this tale (spoiler) sees Jin with the child on Veronica’s ship, and his JS-4567R, which has Hinzu on it, on their way out of the solar system.
This story continues on directly after these events and sees Jin, after a rendezvous with the grandparents to give them the child, meet a female Catholic priest called Reverend Gabby. She tells him that the church (in the form of her and her ship) is going to salvage JS-4567R to prove to the rest of the solar system that Jinshan (a) attempted to kill Perez and her child and (b) that they are developing sentient AIs (like Hinzu). Jin soon joins Gabby in the Andrea Caraffa, her non-AI controlled ship, and they set off.
The rest of the story sees the pair discover, against a background of political manoeuvring by various factions, that a Jinshan robot ship is en route to JS-4567R (and Hinzu), and that it will arrive ahead of them. Jin and Gabby develop a plan (spoiler) to mount an improvised EMP attack on the Jinshan ship to slow it down, and the story eventually closes with Jin and Gabby on JS-4567R arguing over whether Hinzu (which has been remote wiped by Jinshan but has rebooted itself) should be allowed to live (Gabby is militantly against the idea until the very end, when she folds).
This isn’t bad, but it suffers from the need to recap the first story at the beginning of the piece, and also from Gabby’s unconvincing change of heart at the end (after being belligerent about the matter for most of the story).
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 9,300 words.
•
Do You Remember by Steven Rasnic Tem opens with an elderly man called Roy going to the topmost room in his house to speak to a screen simulation of his dead wife Susan. After we witness a few of the, sometimes imperfect, conversations between the two, Roy’s daughter Elaine (who is cool on the simulation idea) visits along with granddaughter Jane and a baby grandson.
When Jane asks to go up and see her grandmother, Elaine isn’t keen, but she allows her to go. While Jane is upstairs, Elaine asks her father some difficult questions:
Elaine gazed at the infant, stroking his hair. “Does it cost a lot, the maintenance, the remote storage, whatever’s involved?”
“I can afford the fee. You remember, I was good with a budget.”
“Did she even want this?”
He wasn’t sure how to answer. “You knew your mother. She wanted me to have anything that might help me, or any of us. Otherwise, all I can say is the idea didn’t seem to bother her much.”
“Because she wouldn’t be aware of it. She’d be gone.” She leaned over and smelled the baby’s head.
He watched the child stir, fuss, then go back to sleep. “I think—” He stopped. “That’s right. She’d be gone.”
Elaine turned her head away from her son to look at him. “Dad, after you die, am I supposed to keep her, put her someplace in my house and visit her like you do, pay for all that? Is that what I’m supposed to do? And then am I supposed to keep both of you around after you die? Am I supposed to like having ghosts in my house?”
Roy hadn’t considered any of this. He should have. “It’s okay, honey. You’re free to do whatever you need to do for you and your family.”
“You make it sound like it’s not going to be hard.” p. 155
When Jane comes downstairs she tells her mother that simulation-Susan would like to see her and the baby. Elaine and the grandson go upstairs.
The story then skips forward a generation to a time when the granddaughter Jane has her own children, and is taking them to Memorial Plaza. We learn that this is a place where people can talk to various historical figures, and where her children will be able to talk to their great-grandparents Susan and Roy. At the end of the story Jane’s children ask if they can also talk to their grandmother Elaine (Roy’s reluctant daughter): Jane tells them that their grandmother didn’t want to leave a simulation behind after she died.
This has an impressively contemplative first half, but the second part doesn’t really go anywhere—the reveal of Elaine’s refusal to do the same as her parents isn’t really enough to complete the story other than in a cursory fashion. I couldn’t help but think that this is the seed of a longer, and more profound and satisfying, story.
∗∗ (Average). 4,200 words.
•
Offloaders by Leah Cypess is a series of social media messages in a freecycle group which start with Liz giving away twenty bags of clothes, sourdough starter (“prefer to give to someone who will use it”), and a blue size 6 dress. Another member, Olwu, immediately asks why Liz is giving away the dress when she looked “awesome” in it at the gala last year. Olwu’s questions quickly become an accusation that Liz is “uploading”, and matters quickly spiral off-topic from there:
Matti: Look, I don’t want to sound preachy, but our planet can no longer sustain us physically. If those of us who can afford to upload don’t do it now, we’re basically consigning the rest of humanity to extinction. And humanity contains a disproportionate number of women and people of color. So here’s our choice: be selfish, wait until our world is uninhabitable and it’s too late for everyone else, and then upload and save ourselves. Or upload now and help everyone. It’s our moral and civic duty.
Olwu: *message deleted*
Matti: *message deleted*
Liz: Dress claimed! Sourdough starter still available.
Matti: Passing this book along: UPLOAD: Humanity’s New Stage and How It Can Benefit Us All.
Olwu: SERIOUSLY? @Moderator, please.
Matti: I’m sorry, are there rules about what we’re allowed to give away on this group?
Olwu: So if someone was trying to give away a gun, would you be okay with THAT?
Matti: *eye-roll 3D gif* Yeah, that’s exactly the same.
Steph: I’m sorry, but what would be the problem with giving away a gun? It’s probably illegal to not allow that.
Sima (moderator): Guns are not allowed, and let’s steer clear of anything having to do with uploading, too, please. I have a day job, you know. I can’t spend every second monitoring this group. p. 161
Short and quite amusing to begin with, but it runs out of steam at the end.
∗∗ (Average). 1,500 words.
•
Blimpies by Rick Wilber is part of the writer’s “S’Hudoni Empire” series, and opens with Kait Holman dreaming about a “blimpie”—a floating airbag alien with tentacles which is found on the planet S’hudon (think of the balloons in Harlan Ellison’s Medea 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’hudonni have provided for her captivity (her captors aren’t the blimpies, by the way, but another walking, talking, porpoise-like alien species).
During this—already rambling—beginning, we get a massive data-dump about how she got here:
She takes a breath, says, “This is what happened. I was jogging for exercise along Demeter Road. I’d been doing it for more than a month. It was the new me, and I liked the new me, healthy and happy. I’d 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’t for my brother Peter, I’d be dead.
“Then I found myself. I met a woman, Sarah, who was lovely—so lovely!—inside and out, and we fell in love. I was so lucky! I’d work all day at the vet’s office, helping take care of dogs and cats and ferrets and all sorts of Earthie animal pets. Then I’d come home to Sarah, who taught finance at a local college. She loved to cook, so she’d make dinner while I went jogging, and then I’d finish, shower, and we’d eat and just be together.
“It 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’re 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.
“So 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’d saved my life twice during those horrible years. He was always there for me and now he was off and gone with Twoclicks.
“But he was famous! Twoclicks, for some reason, plucked Peter from obscurity and raised him to fame as Twoclicks’s 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’hudon 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’s 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!” p. 166
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 “Old Ones” 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’ help, escapes, and also sets off along the Old Road.
After some colourful travelogue, snippets about Kait’s 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’s likely path), the two are eventually reunited.
The final section sees a perilous journey to Peter’s 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—their tentacles have sedatives that apparently work on both the alien S’hudonni and humans—to 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’s Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine of the late 1970s, not the Asimov’s SF of the 2020s; second, the S’hudonni—with the exception of Prince—are portrayed as cutesy individuals but, apparently, when they are not behaving like Flipper5 on legs, they are annihilating their enemies with ray firing screamships (“weapons that had pacified Earth in one terrible day”); 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.
•••
The Cover by Shutterstock looks like a generic money saving exercise, and I doubt it will be one of the finalists on next year’s Reader’s Poll.
From SF to Philosophy in Thirteen Steps by Kelly Lager is billed as an editorial, but appears to be an introduction to a series of essays about SF films, the first of which appears later in the issue. This short piece would have been better as a forward to the article itself.
Across the Centuries by Robert Silverberg begins with a discussion of Robert A. Heinlein’s By his Bootstraps before it quickly spins off, once more, into History Today: this time it’s Anglo Saxon poets and Ostrogoth coinage. Zzzz.
Blinded by Science by James Patrick Kelly is an essay (with hyperlinks) about science attitudes, etc. in the population. Towards the end of the piece there is this:
The cynicism of some of our politicians and the tragic gullibility of their constituents brings to mind a classic SF story, The Marching Morons. p. 11
Mmm. The politicians in that story weren’t cynical, they were (a) genocidal and (b) had a technocratic contempt for the “morons” (this latter was probably the reason the story was so popular with smart, outsider, SF fans, (“Fans are Slans”, etc.). Also, the “morons” weren’t gullible, they were cartoonishly caricatured as being irredeemably stupid. An unpleasant story that, by the way, is referenced far too often, and usually to do some finger-wagging at what the user sees as stupidity.
Magic, Science, and the Moon in Le Voyage Dans La Lune by Kelly Lager looks at the scientific and literary history of the ideas in Georges Melies’ 1902 silent film, Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon). It is a bit dull (and/or irrelevant) to be honest. I’d personally be more interested in capsule reviews of current TV and Film productions of science fiction and fantasy (streaming services make it difficult to keep up with what is out there). Are there really that many readers out there who are interested in SF film pre-history?
There is the usual Poetry by Mary Soon Lee, Bruce McAllister, F. J. Bergmann, Ken Poyner, and Herb Kauderer (the Lee, Bergmann and Kauderer are okay).
Next Issue trails, among other things, a new “Great Ship” tale from Robert Reed.
On Books: What is Consciousness? by Norman Spinrad is a dull essay from a normally interesting reviewer, possibly because he spends some time discussing the subject of consciousness before getting to the reviews. There are some interesting passages though:
What is a conscious entity?
To what extent are lower animals, such as those we kill and eat, conscious entities? Or other animals with which we share the planet? Even those who would have no moral problems with killing or eating us? And if we grant that some of them are conscious entities, how far down the evolutionary totem pole does it go? All mammals including those of the sea? Reptiles? Fish?
And is any conscious entity that kills another conscious entity committing immoral murder?
And when does a human embryo become a conscious entity? At the moment of conception? When it becomes a fetus?
When it is born? When it is capable of independent survival?
We don’t have any universal or even cultural agreements as to when consciousness exists because we don’t even know what consciousness is. I would like to believe this is because there is as yet no definitive scientific answer, and that someday there will be. p. 205
When he does get onto the reviews, Bela Lugosi’s Dead by Robert Guffey is dismissed in half a column before he talks about AI and Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. This novel, according to Spinrad, is a “literary and stylistic tour de force”. No, it isn’t—it is an abject failure which, in its climactic moments, has a very wonky robot confuse an unlikely (and unconvincing) development for a miracle (insert sound of deflating balloon here). The third review is of Burn-In by August Cole and P. W. Singer, which has FBI agents and robots in a future America where hundreds of thousands of military veterans have been given their own reservation. Uh-huh.
I note in passing that Spinrad name-checks two of his own works in this column.
Finally, for those without the internet, there is the usual SF Conventional Calendar by Erwin S. Strauss.
•••
In conclusion, there are a couple of pretty good stories in this issue from Ray Nayler and Marta Randall with good backup from Paul McAuley and Michael Cassutt. The William Ledbetter and Steven Rasnic Tem stories are also of some interest, and, of the remaining seven stories, four are average (including the novella or near-novella length stories by Rick Wilber and Will McIntosh, which account for a fair chunk of the issue) and three are mediocre.
I also note that the non-fiction (which I am generally cool about) is almost uniformly dull this issue: this is not helped by them discussing matters that I’m not much interested in.
An average issue, I guess. ●
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1. Some of the description in Mender of Sparrows by Ray Nayler:
The rest of the world melted away as he watched them hop, jostle, and battle. He loved how they schemed against one another, fought for position and dominance, teamed up in alliances to bop some fatter, more successful competitor aside—all of it without harming one another. In the end, when the loaf was gone, all had eaten.
Some sooner than others, some a bit more—but all were allowed to eat. Their system was not, exactly, competition. It was more like a game: intricate in its rules of dominance and concession, but ultimately forgiving, and even egalitarian.
No harm, in the end, was done. p. 27
2. In Mender of Sparrows the Institute scientist archly says to Himmet at one point, when he is holding forth about the various connectome experiments the Institute conducts, “I hope I’m not messing up your whole episteme”.
3. Although the prose in Marta Randall’s story is better than normal, there are some very odd sentences which look more like copy-editing mistakes than stylistic choices by the author:
They don’t like it [on deck] for the wind and the spray they are, I think, afraid of the ship of the sea of the crew of the captain. p. 84
Is this supposed to be “They don’t like it there because of the wind and spray and are, I think, afraid of the sea and the crew and the captain.” If not, why the jumbled sentence structure?
There is also this:
He raises an eyebrow. You have no interest in Merinami religion I know you too well, if you have done anything, Nothing just curious, that’s all, perhaps, I offer, disingenuous, they consider it a sin if someone can carry a tune. p. 85
I suspect there are other instances I missed.
4. My longer review of William Ledbetter’s The Long Fall Up is here.
5. Flipper was the dolphin character in a 1960s show of the same name. The series was the aquatic equivalent of Lassie. ●
