Summary:
A large and lacklustre collection of stories with far too many works (20 out of 32!) whose quality I would rate as less than good (compare this volume’s 12:20 good to less than good ratio with Allan Kaster’s two Best of the Year anthologies, which scored 10:5 and 7:6).
The worthwhile stories here are the outstanding Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars by Mercurio D. Rivera, which progresses the themes in Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God; the very good Eyes of the Forest by Ray Nayler, a exotic and thrilling colony planet adventure (think Harry Harrison’s Deathworld), and An Important Failure by Rebecca Campbell, the Theodore Sturgeon Award winner about resilience in the face of future adverse climate change; and better than good work by Nadia Afifi, Nancy Kress, S. B. Divya, Andy Dudak and Rich Larson.

Other reviews:
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Neil Clarke

Fiction:
Scar Tissue • short story by Tobias S. Buckell ∗∗∗
Eyes of the Forest • short story by Ray Nayler ∗∗∗∗
Sinew and Steel and What They Told • short story by Carrie Vaughn ∗∗
An Important Failure • novelette by Rebecca Campbell ∗∗∗∗
The Long Iapetan Night • novelette by Julie Novakova ∗∗
AirBody • short story by Sameem Siddiqui ∗
The Bahrain Underground Bazaar • novelette by Nadia Afifi ∗∗∗+
Lone Puppeteer of a Sleeping City • novelette by Arula Ratnakar –
Your Boyfriend Experience • novelette by James Patrick Kelly ∗∗
Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars • novelette by Mercurio D. Rivera ∗∗∗∗+
The 1st Interspecies Solidarity Fair and Parade • novelette by Bogi Takács ∗∗
Oannes, From the Flood • short story by Adrian Tchaikovsky ∗∗+
Yellow and the Perception of Reality • novelette by Maureen F. McHugh ∗∗+
Exile’s End • novelette by Carolyn Ives Gilman ∗∗
Invisible People • novelette by Nancy Kress ∗∗∗+
Red_Bati • short story by Dilman Dila ∗∗
Textbooks in the Attic • short story by S. B. Divya∗∗∗+
Seeding the Mountain • novelette by Maggie Clark ∗
“Knock, Knock” Said the Ship • short story by Rati Mehrotra ∗∗∗
Still You Linger, Like Soot in the Air • short story by Matthew Kressel ∗
Tunnels • novelette by Eleanor Arnason ∗∗∗
Test 4 Echo • short story by Peter Watts ∗∗
Uma • short story by Ken Liu ∗∗+
Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love • short story by Usman T. Malik ∗
The Translator, at Low Tide • short story by Vajra Chandrasekera –
Fairy Tales for Robots • novelette by Sofia Samatar –
This World Is Made for Monsters • short story by M. Rickert ∗∗
Elsewhere • short story by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck [as by James S. A. Corey] ∗∗∗
Salvage • novelette by Andy Dudak ∗∗∗+
The Long Tail • short story by Aliette de Bodard ∗∗
Rhizome, by Starlight • short story by Fran Wilde ∗∗
How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar? • novelette by Rich Larson ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Pascal Blanche (cover design by Daniel Brount and David Ter-Avaneysan)
Introduction: A State of the Short SF Field in 2020 • by Neil Clarke
Permissions
Acknowledgments
2020 Recommended Reading List • by Neil Clarke
About the Editor

_____________________

There are thirty-two stories in this collection and, rather than plough through them in book order, I have arranged them from best to worst. I have also put brief notes at the beginning of the sections for those not interested reading the full story reviews.

Very Good to Excellent ∗∗∗∗+

There is only one outstanding story in this volume, and it should be a future classic.

Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars by Mercurio D. Rivera (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2020) begins with an introduction (supposedly Chapter 63 of a book) which shows a group of lizard-like creatures called “The People” taking part in a purification rite at Verdant Cove. They are praying for clean air (we learn that they have a climate warming problem similar to Earth’s).
The next section opens with a journalist called Cory arriving at the laboratory of Milagros Maldonado, an old flame, to interview her about her research. Milagros says she has a big story for him and, as she used to work for a multinational R&D company called EncelaCorp until leaving on bad terms, Cory is hoping for something juicy that will help save his precarious blogging job. However, before Milagros agrees to talk she insists on locking his “retinal readers” (which means he can’t publish the interview without her permission). Then she talks instead about the Simulation Hypothesis (which posits that humanity is living in a simulated or virtual universe), and says that she has created one of these simulated realities where life on Earth took a different evolutionary path:

“Every change to prehistory resulted in the rise of a different apex form of intelligent life. In this version, no asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula. No extinction of the dinosaurs took place at that time. Instead, a disease I introduced a million years later wiped out most of the large dinosaurs along with small mammals, allowing an amphibious salamander-like creature to survive and multiply. And—voila!—one hundred million years later we have the Sallies.”
The magnified image displayed three reptilian creatures at the base of a palm tree. One stood on its hind legs, four feet tall with slick, lime-green skin and a prehensile tail. The second had yellow skin and bore translucent wings, allowing it to hover a few feet off the ground. These were the ones flying over the city. The third, a grey-scaled creature, skittered on all fours and had larger, saucer-shaped eyes and a thicker tail. Patches of fungus spread thickly across their torsos.  p. 71

Then she tells him that the salamanders—the same creatures we read about in the introduction—are the ultimate problem solvers, and that their “thinknests” have created an carbon dioxide extraction device that will solve not only their climate problem but Earth’s as well. Then Milagros asks Cory what problem he thinks the salamanders should be made to solve next, and he replies “cancer” (as he has just completed a course of radiotherapy for the disease).
So far, so Microcosmic God (a Theodore Sturgeon story where evolutionary stresses are applied to fast-living and breeding creatures to provide a series of miracle inventions). The next part of the story continues along similar lines with an account of the cancer-like “Black Scythe” plague that Milagros introduces into the Salamander population. However, unlike the Sturgeon story, we get an intimate account of the dreadful pain and suffering the Salamanders experience:

The great plague descended upon the People of La Mangri first, killing innocent larvae in their developmental stages, rendering entire populations childless. Then the cell mutations spread to adults, bringing a slow and agonizing death to millions.
As the decaying corpses gave rise to more disease, my great-grandmother Und-ora devised stadium-sized pyres to mass-incinerate thousands of the dead at once.
She also led local thinknests in their frenzied attempts to determine the origin of the disease and stop its spread. When the cell mutations proved to be non-contagious, they studied possible environmental causes of the illness. But hundreds of Houses of different regions with radically different diets, customs, and lifestyles were all similarly stricken. With no natural explanation at hand, thinknests around the globe independently arrived at the same inescapable conclusion: the plague was another Divine test. The People assumed they had proven themselves worthy when they implemented the Extractors, purifying the atmosphere of the gods’ deadly gases.
But the gods were capricious.  p. 72

Then, after the Salamanders develop a cancer-curing Revivifier, Milagros causes an asteroid strike, which forces the thinknests to create an Asteroid Defence program. These events also cause the Salamanders to turn away from their devotional religion and to an examination of the nature of their (unknown to them, virtual) reality.
Matters develop when Cory (under pressure from his boss to publish) interviews Milagros in bed (they have become lovers again), during which they discuss whether the Salamander’s suffering is “real”. Then, after Milagros falls asleep, Cory goes into the lab to record an “alien attack” on the creatures so he has some material to fall back on in case she doesn’t allow him to publish. When the Salamanders subsequently defeat the aliens that Cory has introduced into their world, he then programs “cosmic hands” to give their planet a shake. During this second event the salamanders see “God’s fingers” and see it as yet another divine attack.
It’s at this point that the story takes an ontological swerve away from the Microcosmic God template and becomes something else entirely (spoiler): Milagros arrives in the lab (presumably the next morning) to see Cory lying on the floor. She asks him what he has done—and then the Salamanders appear:

[Cory] blinked and the Sally leader disappeared. Blinked again and she stood nearer, locking eyes with him. A forked tongue with mods flicked out of the Sally’s mouth, pressing against his eyelids.
My God, what was happening?
The cold, wet tongue retracted and time stood still. Then the Sally leader sighed deeply. “This explains so much.” She turned to face Milagros. “Finally we meet face to face, Cruel God. I am Car-ling of House Jarella.”
“How—This isn’t possible!” Milagros said, tapping the mods on her face.
“You,” the Sally said to him. “When you clutched our world in your hands every thinknest across the globe isolated the frequency of the projection and used the planetary shieldtech to trace the signal back to its point of origin. Here.” The Sally waved her thin arms in the air, turning back to Milagros. “You turned us into the ultimate problem-solvers. And at last we’ve identified our ultimate problem: You.”  p. 80

After some more j’accuse, the Salamanders spirit Milagros away to their world, and Cory sees an image of her being abused by an angry mob as she is marched towards a huge crucifix. Then the salamander who is still in the lab with Cory says that they have much in common—because they have both suffered at the hands of a cruel creator. When Cory tells the salamander that Milagros didn’t hurt him, the creature replies he wasn’t talking about Milagros, but the true Creator, “millions of simulations up the chain,” before adding, “I aim to find her and make her pay.”
This sensational revelation flips the story into another paradigm completely (one where mankind isn’t God but subject to the capricious whims of one) as well as providing a pronounced sense of wonder.
The story ends with Cory’s cancer returning, and the salamanders living in an age of peace.
Although Rivera recently stated he hasn’t read Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God¹ (although he has read George R. R. Martin’s Sandkings), it’s interesting to compare the differences in the two works. Rivera’s story:
(a) is more contemporary—it has better prose and a modern setting, and Milagros’s aims are probably more in tune with a modern readership, i.e. altruistic rather than the monetary and political aims of the two main characters in the Sturgeon;
(b) is more empathetic—we see the struggles of the Salamanders and the cruelties visited upon them from a first person point of view whereas the Neoterics in the Sturgeon are offstage or more generally described (and that story never addresses the moral or ethical problems of their appalling treatment);
(c) shows more agency—the Salamanders are players who transcend their reality, whereas the Neoterics are largely pawns;
(d) is more complex—the simulation chain idea makes it a Microcosmic God-plus story;
(e) is more reflective—the occasional meditations on suffering and supreme dieties, and the fact that the story moves away from the idea of “man as God” in the Sturgeon tale to one of “man as cog” (in a larger machine or sequence of realities).
Rivera’s story is an impressive piece, both in its own right, and as a riff on a well-known genre story. It really should have been a Hugo finalist if not winner.
∗∗∗∗+ (Very Good to Excellent). 8,350 words.

Very Good ∗∗∗∗

There are two very good stories in this volume. The first is an exciting alien planet adventure by Ray Nayler, Eyes of the Forest, and the second is set in a climate-changed world where a violin maker takes decades to accumulate the particular woods he needs to make a new instrument. This latter piece, An Important Failure by Rebecca Campbell, won the Theodore Sturgeon Award.

Eyes of the Forest by Ray Nayler (F&SF, May-June 2020) opens on a colony planet that has a distinct Deathworld vibe² (i.e. it is inimical to human life), and sees Mauled by Mistake treating the wounds of her apprentice Sedef, who has just been attacked by a lashvine. However, once Mauled is finished applying the nanobot medical patches, Mauled tells Sedef that (a) she herself has also been badly wounded in the attack, (b) they are out of medical supplies, and (c) Sedef will have to go back to the depot and get more.
The rest of the story sees the inexperienced Sedef make her way to the depot before returning to treat Mauled. During her journey we see that the human settlers have colonised an exotic and brightly illuminated world where anything that isn’t brightly lit is food. Consequently, humans have to wear lightsuits to protect themselves on the surface. As Sedef makes her way to the depot we also learn something about the colony’s history, that most humans retreated underground after arrival, and now only wayfinders like Mauled and Sedef go out on the surface. Light relief is provided by flashback passages which limn the pair’s mentor/student relationship:

“We need to be at the depot before dark [said Mauled]. Changeover is the most dangerous time to be out. As the forest modulates its glow for sundark, any slight suit anomaly is particularly visible.”
“We learned that. And there are animals, [our tutor] Beyazit said, that specialize in hunting during changeover. Some of which no one has ever seen. Predators we haven’t even—”
“Predators?” Mauled by Mistake gave out an incredulous bark, followed by a stream of intricate profanity. Sedef had heard that the wayfinders had a whole second language of profanity so inventive it was almost unintelligible to others. She couldn’t understand all of this expression—something about Beyazit’s father being born in a quiver of nightwing penises? Could that be right?  p. 68

The subject of predators comes up again when the pair meet another wayfinder in a shelter:

“Beyazit is telling the prospects to beware of predators,” Mauled by Mistake said in the young man’s direction.
“Beyazit should start each day by eating a bowl of his own entrails,” the young man said without looking up. “He almost got me killed once.”
“Who of us has he not almost gotten killed?”
Later, over a cold dinner of nutrient broth and noodles Sedef had made and packeted herself, Mauled by Mistake said, “The first thing to understand is that there are no predators in the forest. This old word does not fit. Only the ignorant use it.”
“But death is always waiting,” Sedef protested. “The forest is filled with teeth.”
“Yes,” Mauled by Mistake said. “You know your recitations well. The forest is filled with teeth. Death is waiting. Always. And so on. But there are no predators. There are only scavengers. When they attack you, and they will—and when they kill you someday, which they likely will—it will be by accident.”
“But the suit lights are a defense against attack. They indicate we are dangerous.”
The young man released a stream of profanity involving something about Beyazit attempting to whistle through a mouthful of various parts of his relatives’ anatomy. “The suits don’t indicate we are dangerous: They simply indicate we are alive.”  pp. 69-70

(Mauled is supposed to be a woman, but it is hard to visualise this character as anything other than a grumpy, mansplaining, 50-year-old bloke.³)
The story (spoiler) comes to an exciting climax when Sedef realises that she won’t get back to where Mauled is before Changeover, when there is a chance that the arrival of sundark and its accompanying EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) may knock out her suit lights . . . . This subsequently happens, and then a “puma” appears: Sedef’s solution to this terminal problem is ingenious, and provides the story with a neat pay-off line.
This is a hugely appealing story, particularly so for those attracted to old-school SF.
∗∗∗∗ (Very Good). 5,650 words.

•

An Important Failure by Rebecca Campbell (Clarkesworld, August 2020) begins (after a data dump about a particularly dense form of wood last formed in the Little Ice Age) with a man called Mason going to the illegal felling of a centuries old Sitka spruce in Canada—one of the last trees of its vintage in the world due to climate change effects (wildfires, etc.). After the men he has arranged to meet have cut down the tree, Mason daydreams about apprenticing to a luthier (violin maker) in Italy before going to select the section of wood he wants.
In the years that follow Mason ends up working for a Canadian luthier called Eddie, and during this period a teenage virtuoso called Delgado comes to prominence in their area. When she is thirteen she gets a loan of a very high quality violin (it is made with the dense Little Ice Age wood mentioned in the opening of the story).
Eddie is the Canada Council for the Arts’ custodian for the instrument, so he and Mason become professionally connected to Delgado. Then, when Delgado’s three year loan expires, she has to return the instrument. Mason sees her bitterness about the loss, and determines to make her a replacement.
Most of the remainder of the story takes place over the following years, a period of continued environmental degradation that sees Mason improve his violin making skills, take trips back home to see his friend Jacob and a woman called Sophie, and harvest the various woods he needs to make a violin for Delgado (he saves money for some of the last Nigerian ebony in the world, scavenges old furniture, and, later on in the story, badly damages his shoulder when he falls out of a willow tree while felling it for material).
Eventually, a decade and a half later later, Mason finally completes the violin after he (sacrilegiously, to him) robs a part off of another instrument. By this point Eddie is near death’s door, and Delgado, when she turns up at their shop, now has her own child. She admires the violin that Mason has created and plays it for him and Eddie. Finally, she asks who it is for, and it shocked when she realises that Mason has made it for her. After she has finished her protestations, she asks what name Mason has given the violin. He thinks for a moment about everything that has gone before, and what may lie ahead:

Mason heard the oceanic crash of falling spruce, his own cry as he hit the dirt at the base of a shining willow in Stanley Park. The market garden and the homestead, the lake, the abandoned subdivisions and the burn lines that still showed through the underbrush, the ghost forests, the dead black teeth of what had once—a long time ago—been a rainforest. And among them, Jacob still cutting lumber and helping out at the garage when he could, fishing and hunting. Sophie in the greenhouses and the gardens, with her new Garry oak trees and her transfigured arbutus, the beetle-resistant spruce that would never, ever, be the kind of tonewood he wanted. The firebreaks of trembling aspen, the return of cougars. The steady erosion of human shapes: foundations and roads all lost to the burgeoning forest.
“Nepenthe?”
As he said it, he wasn’t sure what it meant: a physick that would make the end easier; a draft of healing medicine.

The coda of the story, which presumably takes place after Eddie and Mason are dead, and after even more environmental chaos, sees Delgado as a grandmother who has had to flee inland with her family after the failure of the seawall where she previously lived. Delgado considers whether to give the instrument to her daughter or her granddaughter, realising that one of them will be the first to hear the instrument’s richest, fullest tone.
This is an elegiac and bittersweet story about, I think, how humanity survives and adapts in a collapsing or changing world, and perhaps about how we hold on to what is important to us. It is a very good piece (it won the 2021 Theodore Sturgeon Award) but, if I have one quibble, it is that the beginning of the story should have started with the felling of the Sitka spruce, and the rest of that section shortened somewhat, or at least rearranged (the story takes some time to get going).
∗∗∗∗ (Very Good). 9,600 words. Story link.

Good to Very Good ∗∗∗+

The five better-than-good stories in this category cover a variety of themes. The Bahrain Underground Bazaar by Nadia Afifi sees a dying woman experience the memory uploads of others and become obsessed with one of the woman donors; Invisible People by Nancy Kress sees a couple learn that their adopted daughter had her genome tampered with before she came to them, and who subsequently investigate what the changes might be; Textbooks in the Attic by S. B. Divya is another climate change story, and tells of a female scientist’s resilience in a future flooded Iowa;  Salvage by Andy Dudak is a memory upload story in some respects but mixes in so much more, including super-powerful aliens, the expansion of the Universe, and historic war crimes; How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar by Rich Larson is an inventive and tightly plotted art heist/gangster story set in the near future.

The Bahrain Underground Bazaar by Nadia Afifi (F&SF, November/December 2020) opens with Mansour, a woman with terminal cancer, going to the Bahrain Underground Bazaar. There she experiences the deaths of others (these have been harvested by an internet like brain implant called a NeuroLync):

In the Underground Bazaar’s virtual immersion chambers, I’ve experienced many anonymous souls’ final moments. Through them, I’ve drowned, been strangled, shot in the mouth, and suffered a heart attack. And I do mean suffer — the heart attack was one of the worst. I try on deaths like T-shirts. Violent ones and peaceful passings. Murders, suicides, and accidents. All practice for the real thing.
The room tilts and my vision blurs momentarily. Dizzy, I press my hands, bruised from chemo drips, into the counter to steady myself. The tumor wedged between my skull and brain likes to assert itself at random moments. A burst of vision trouble, spasms of pain or nausea. I imagine shrinking it down, but even that won’t matter now. It’s in my blood and bones. The only thing it’s left me so far, ironically, is my mind. I’m still sharp enough to make my own decisions. And I’ve decided one thing — I’ll die on my terms, before cancer takes that last bit of power from me.  pp. 7-8

On this occasion she experiences the death of a woman who is leading a donkey down a cliff path, and who either jumps or slips to her death (there is a death-wish moment at the edge, but it is unclear whether the fall is intentional). Then, after the blackness that normally denotes death, Mansour experiences something else:

And then nothing. The world is dark and soundless. Free of pain, or of any feeling at all. And then voices.
The darkness is softened by a strange awareness. I sense, rather than see, my surroundings. My own mangled body spread across a rock. Dry plants and a gravel path nearby. Muted screams from above. I know, somehow, that my companions are running down the path now, toward me. Be careful, I want to cry out. Don’t fall. They want to help me. Don’t they know I’m dead?
But if I’m dead, why am I still here? I’m not in complete oblivion and I’m also not going toward a light. I’m sinking backward into something, a deep pool of nothing, but a feeling of warmth surrounds me, enveloping me like a blanket on a cold night. I have no body now, I’m a ball of light, floating toward a bigger light behind me. I know it’s there without seeing it. It is bliss and beauty, peace and kindness, and all that remains is to join it.  pp. 10-11

This is the seed for the story’s further developments, but Mansour’s desire to find out more about the woman and that post-death experience is derailed when she is intercepted by her concerned daughter-in-law outside the bazaar (“You don’t need dark thoughts — you’ll beat this by staying positive.”). Later that evening Mansour’s son Firaz also expresses his worry, but this doesn’t stop her going back to the bazaar the next day and asking the proprietor to show her the dead woman’s “highlights reel”. Mansour discovers that the women was a Bedouin mother who lived a largely unremarkable life, and then, even though Mansour doesn’t feel any particular connection with her, she impulsively buys a train ticket to Petra in Jordan, the area where the woman lived.
On her arrival in Petra (spoiler) Mansour hires a teenager with a donkey to take her to see the tourist sights. First they go to the nearby Treasury, and then she asks to be taken up the cliff-edge path to the Monastery:

“Do people ever fall?”
Rami’s eyes are trained ahead, but I catch the tightness in his jawline.
“It’s rare, ma’am. Don’t worry.”
My skin prickles. His voice carries a familiar strain, the sound of a battle between what one wants to say and what one should say. Does he know my old woman? Has he heard the story?
While I craft my next question, the donkey turns another corner and my stomach lurches. We’re at the same spot where she fell. I recognize the curve of the trail, the small bush protruding into its path. I lean forward, trying to peer down the cliff.
“Can we stop for a minute?”
“Not a good place to stop, ma’am.” The boy’s voice is firm, tight as a knot, but I slide off the saddle and walk to the ledge.
Wind, warm under the peak sun, attacks my thinning hair. I step closer to the edge.
“Please, sayida!”
Switching to Arabic. I must really be stressing the boy. But I can’t pull back now.
Another step, and I look down. My stomach clenches. It’s there — the boulder that broke her fall. It’s free of blood and gore, presumably washed clean a long time ago, but I can remember the scene as it once was, when a woman died and left her body, a witness to her own demise.
But when I lean further, my body turns rigid. I’m a rock myself, welded in place. I won’t jump. I can’t. I know this with a cold, brutal certainty that knocks the air from my lungs. I’m terrified of the fall. Every second feels like cool water on a parched throat. I could stand here for hours and nothing would change.  pp. 20-21

They continue up the mountain to the Monastery. There they eat and drink, and Mansour discovers that the boy is the grandson of the woman who fell to her death. She asks him about his grandmother, and listens to what he has to say, but does not tell him about the recording of her death. Then she asks him to use his NeuroLync to call her son (she has left her phone behind so Firaz and her daughter-in-law cannot track her).
The last part of the story sees her reconciled with Firaz, and her approaching death (or at least to the extent anyone can be).
I liked this story quite a bit. Afifi’s writing style is concise but conjures up a believable world and characters—and there is a plot here too, even though it is essentially a mainstream one (one slight quibble is that the writer went for a mainstream ending—reconcilement, acceptance—rather than doing a transcendent call-back to the post-death experience). If the ending had been stronger (i.e. melded the mainstream and SFnal endings), I would have probably given this four stars.
A writer to watch, I think (I had the rare impulse to check out her novel⁴), and a story that would probably appeal to Ray Nayler fans.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 7,600 words.

•

Invisible People by Nancy Kress (Entanglements: Tomorrow’s Lovers, Families, and Friends, 2020) gets off to a lively start with a couple dealing with their two young kids at breakfast time. After an amount of porridge slinging from the younger of the two, the house system tells them there are two strangers of the front porch.
These visitors turn out to be FBI agents, and they tell the parents that their adopted daughter Kenly has come to their attention as part of a RICO investigation into an adoption agency. They then tell the confused parents that her genes were tampered with before she was placed with them.
The next part of the story sees husband (and lawyer) Tom go to his office, where he has to deal with a wife who wants a punitive divorce from her cheating husband, the commander of a nuclear submarine in the Arctic. After this appointment (the wife’s hostility is obliquely relevant later on in the story), he briefs his (sexually transitioning) PI George about his problem, and orders a “no expense spared” investigation into the adoption agency.
The next major event occurs weeks later—and after a period of Kenly being kept at home because of possible risk-taking behaviour associated with the genetic changes—when the couple’s upset babysitter comes home from the park with Kenly. She gives an account of how Kenly ran to the homeless camp in the park and started giving away toys. Then, when one of the men grabbed her and asked for money, the babysitter used a concealed weapon to fire a warning shot. The couple scold Kenly, but she insists she would do the same thing again, as the camp has “kids with no toys”.
The rest of the story sees George the PI discover that there are a group of international scientists in the Cayman Islands behind the adoption/gene-modification scheme, and that the alterations include a “gene drive”, which means that the changes will be more widely passed on to any descendants. After Tom tells his wife about this at home, the very rich Kathleen McGuire turns up and tells the couple the same thing happened to her (now dead) six-year-old boy. She suggests that the affected parents should band together to have their children’s DNA/genes scanned so they can find out what changes have been made, and why.
This all comes to a head (spoiler) when Kenly rescues a baby from a dog, and Tom realises what the modifications are, and why they have been done: he later tells McGuire that the genetic changes were to increase empathy, not risk-taking.
Apart from the main story there are other sub-plots/elements that will allow readers to guess what the genetic changes are intended to do—such as (a) the fragments from an essay written by Kenly about leopards which show she sympathises not only with the baboons they kill, but with the leopards too, or (b) the account of the nuclear submarine stand-off in the Arctic that rumbles on in the background throughout.
The final section sees the couple offered gene therapy for their daughter, a procedure that will reverse the changes the adoption centre made. They discuss the matter: do they choose the increased risk that comes with increased empathy, or not? We don’t find out what their decision is, and the story finishes (like C. M. Kornbluth & Frederik Pohl’s The Meeting) with Tom picking up the phone to make a call.
This is a pretty good piece overall, but the quality varies from the okay/good (e.g. the more formulaic and preachy elements) to the very good (e.g. the revelation of what the genetic modifications mean).
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 8,900 words.

•

Textbooks in the Attic by S. B. Divya (Rebuilding Tomorrow, 2020) is set in a future America that is suffering from the effects of climate change (a flooded Iowa in this case) and has split into those who live in walled communities and those who live outside. The narrator, a biologist who specialises in distributed horticulture, is one of the latter, and the story opens with her son cutting his hand and developing an infection:

The next two sunrises bring barely more light than the nights that precede them. I always kiss my sleeping child after I get up. This morning, his forehead feels warm under my lips, more than usual. I sniff at his wounded hand and almost gag. Angry red streaks radiate away from the bandage.
Jin stirs as I pull on my raincoat.
‘Where are you going?’ he murmurs.
‘Rishi’s cut is infected,’ I say softly. ‘I’m going Uphill to see if I can get some antibiotics before I go to work.’
I step onto the balcony and uncover our small boat. We removed the railing when the rain started, turning it into a dock for the wet season. I push off into the turbulent water flowing through the street and start the motor. The boat putters upstream. Four houses down, the Millers are on the roof in slickers, checking their garden. They wave as I pass by, and I slow down enough to ask if they have any antibiotics, but they shake their heads, No.
‘Good luck!’ Jeanie Miller calls after me, her brow furrowed in concern. Their youngest died last year, just six months old, from a nasty case of bronchitis.

When she gets to Uphill, the walled community nearby, the gate guard tells her, after radioing the hospital, that they don’t have any antibiotics to spare as they are saving it for post-flu pneumonia cases that may develop. The guard tells her that it is nothing personal, and that her father “was a good man” (ironically, her father used to be a doctor at the hospital).
On returning home the narrator finds her husband and son having lunch, which includes a fresh loaf from one of their neighbours. As she eats, she thinks of her doctor father, and Alexander Fleming, which prompts her to retrieve a microbiology textbook from the attic. Then she decides to try and make penicillin.
The rest of the story details the narrator’s struggle to grow the penicillin mould and purify it, a process which starts with a visit to a rundown college campus where she gets fifteen minutes of precious internet time. There are various trials and tribulations that follow, including a sub-plot where (spoiler), her husband Jin rounds up the local militia to force Uphill to give them the antibiotics they need for their son’s worsening condition (Jin is arrested, but one of the hospital’s doctors visits the narrator with the antibiotics required for Rishi’s condition).
There is a final twist when the doctor later returns with news that Jin has been stabbed while breaking up a fight in prison, and that the hospital has by now run out of antibiotics. Needless to say the narrator manages to decant and purify the antibiotics her husband needs just in time. Finally, the last scene telescopes forward in time to show the industrial process that has been set up to supply antibiotics to the surrounding area.
This piece has, unlike a lot of post-collapse stories, a refreshing can-do/pull yourself up by your bootstraps attitude and, even though the plot is relatively slight, it developed in a different way from what I expected. I rather enjoyed this story, and it struck me as the kind of piece that could appear in Analog.⁵
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 6,350 words.

•

Salvage by Andy Dudak (Interzone, January-February 2020) gets off to an intriguing start with a woman called Aristy examining “homifacts” on New Ce. These homifacts are petrified humans created by an alien race a thousand years previously, with the purpose of stopping human observation of the Universe (which was, apparently, causing it to fly apart). The hominids are, however, still alive as software inside their transmuted bodies—and Aristy is there and able to interface with them because her people were far away on near-lightspeed spaceships at the time of the alien action. As she tells one of the homifacts (a political man in the Picti dictatorship which ruled the planet):

“They asked humanity to turn its damaging gaze away from the cosmos. Turn inward, lose itself in simulated realities. And some did. Whole civilizations did. But it wasn’t enough for the aliens, the Curators as we’ve come to call them. So, they acted. They swept through the human Emanation in less than a century. No one knows how they did that.
“They turned the human species inward. Cities, worlds, systems, empires. The Curators’ Reagent froze people instantly, preserved their brains, which were gradually converted into durable networks suffusing their remnant statues. A trillion human beings Turned Inward, a trillion isolated minds in a trillion virtualities.”

Aristy now spends her time interfacing with these homifacts and asking them if they want to be downloaded onto her servers, where they can live in a world of their own creation; stay where they are, with or without improvements; or be deleted:

Of the six she hacked today, four chose transfer to her server: Acolyte, Night Soil Collector, Visiting Student, and Doctor. The small-minded Printer opted to remain in his simulated village, but with a larger, more prosperous print shop, a remodeled wife, and a medal of distinguished service from Generalissimo Picti. The brainwashed Commissar, unable to bear the historical irrelevance of Picti’s long-gone reign, chose oblivion.

Just as this story looks like it is settling down into its groove, the next part veers off in an unexpected direction: Aristy goes back to her camp and finds a lawyer and an armed guard waiting. They ask her about the homifacts she has salvaged, and then tell her that she needs to go with them to Drop City.
After her arrival, Aristy is quizzed by the Drop City Committee, and later has to listen to a number of homifacts give testimony about the historical crimes committed against them by Picti the dictator: they go on to demand his reclamation so he can stand trial. Then, during a recess, Aristy goes for a drink in a bar, followed by her guard; there, an old man challenges her about something she did on her starship. Finally, the committee reconvene and sentence Aristy to community service for her illegal salvaging operations, which means she has to track down Picti and bring him to trial for them.
The search for General Picti starts at a former torture chamber under a building called The Tannery. Aristy finds his security boss there, and starts going through his memories to find out where Picti was when the aliens arrived: these scenes build up a picture of the planetary society of the time.
When (spoiler) Aristy finally finds Picti, she enters his simulation and goes through the timeline, watching as it veers from reality into fantasy (during this sequence Picti turns himself into a god). Then she appears to tell him that he is to stand trial for his crimes, and Picti learns what has happened over the last 1000 years. Meanwhile, the reader learns that Aristy was one of the waking crew of the starship, and deliberately killed its sleepers. We aren’t really told why Aristy did this, but the ending has such an intense, almost hallucinatory, quality that I wasn’t as bothered about this unresolved subplot as I might have been.
This is an original piece, has a complex development and, all in all, is pretty good.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 10,600 words.

•

How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar by Rich Larson (Tor.com, 15^th January 2020) opens with the narrator asking a woman called Nat for her help in stealing a Klobučar, a piece of art, from a gangster called “Quini the Squid”. In the ensuing conversation we learn a number of things: (a) this is set in a cyberpunky/implants future; (b) Nat is Quini’s ex; and (c) the narrator, a former employee of Quini’s, is doing this for revenge.
We also learn about the Klobučar:

I’m not much for gene art, not much for sophisticated shit in general, but even I know Klobučar, the Croatian genius who struck the scene like a meteor and produced a brief torrent of masterpieces before carving out her brain with a mining laser on a live feed.
Anything with a verified Klobučar gene signature is worth a fortune, especially since she entwined all her works with a killswitch parasite to prevent them being sequenced and copied. But Quini is the furthest thing from an art fence, which makes the acquisition a bit of a mystery and explains him seeming slightly panicked about the whole thing.

Once the narrator convinces Nat to help, they realise that they’ll need to provide a sample of Quini’s DNA to fool the scanners which protect the safe room where the artwork is stored. We learn that they’ll also require something else for the job:

Having Quini’s helix is only half the battle: We also need a body, and neither mine nor Nat’s fits the bill, in large part because we’ve got implants that are definitely not Quini’s. Masking or turning off tech built right into the nervous system is actually a lot harder than simply hiring what our German friends call a Fleischgeist.
It’s not as snappy in English: meat ghost. But it gives you the idea—someone with no implants. None. No hand chip, no cranial, no optics or aurals. Nothing with an electronic signature. In our day and age, they might as well be invisible.
Ergo, the ghost part.

The narrator then goes to meet a Nigerian called Yinka—the prospective Fleishgeist—on Shiptown, a floating migrant settlement off the Barcelona coast. Then, after hiring him, all three meet up at a sex house to practise various robbery scenarios in virtual reality. Eighteen hours of run-throughs later, the narrator suggests one more to finish, only to be told by the others that they are not in VR anymore but in the real world. The narrator realises that they have pod-sickness from the VR sessions, and concludes that it must be a side-effect of the sex-change hormones they are taking (and which were mentioned previously).
This isn’t the only problem the three encounter and (spoiler), when they start the job, they only just manage to hack the robotic guard dog before it saws the narrator and Yinka into bloody pieces. Then Yinka learns he will need to have his arm amputated to match Quini’s body shape. Finally, after Yinka gets into the safe room, the narrator discovers that the time stamps of video footage showing the guards playing cards is faked, and that have been discovered. At that point Anton, the new chief of security at Quini’s house, points a scattergun at the narrator’s head and takes them prisoner.
The final section has Quini return from a nightclub with Nat (who has been relaying Quini’s personal signal to help the other two fool the security scanners), and start an interrogation. During this we learn how he got his “Squid” nickname, a violent anecdote that involves the amputation of this brother’s limbs for telling made-up stories. When Quini is finished questioning the three, he tells the narrator he is going to do the same to them but, before he does this, he opens the pod (recovered from Yinka) to show off the artwork—and finds it empty.
This is just the first of two final plot twists that complete the tale (although there is also a short postscript to the action where the narrator tells Nat about their pending transition from male to female, and why they wanted revenge—a sexual slur from Quini).
This is a continually inventive, tightly plotted, and well done caper story that feels, in parts, like a Mission Impossible movie on steroids. The only weakness is that, despite all the hardware and gimmickry and feel of a hard SF story, there isn’t any central SF theme or concept here, and the human tale that is here instead is the weakest part (I wasn’t particularly convinced of the narrator’s motivation, and I’m getting bored of stories where trans characters struggle with their transition—it’s becoming a cliché).
Still, not bad.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 11,450 words. Story link.

Good ∗∗∗

This category contains work that I liked and would be pleased to see in a normal magazine issue or original anthology—but I don’t think they are quite up to the standard of a “Best of the Year” pick. Scar Tissue by Tobias S. Buckell sees a man who is dealing with his own disabilities take on a job that involves rearing a “baby” robot; Knock, Knock Said the Ship by Rati Mehrotra involves the narrator and a joke telling AI on a ship that is boarded by renegades; Tunnels by Eleanor Arnason is an entertaining alien buddy story set on another planet; Elsewhere by James S. A. Corey is an avatar story which sees a disabled woman use the technology to visit her dying father (this is the the best of the three avatar stories in this volume).

Scar Tissue by Tobias S. Buckell (Slate, 30^th May 2020) opens with the protagonist telling his friend Charlie that he thinks that he has made a huge mistake:

“You need the money.” [Charlie says.]
[. . .]
“Everyone needs the money.” You swig the cheap beer that’s the best either of you can manage. You can’t wait to afford something from one of those smaller local breweries nearby.
“But . . .”
You’ve been on disability since the forklift accident. The apartment’s small, but Enthim Arms is nice. The shared garden out back, the walking trails. You can’t use them as much as you’d like right now, but that physical therapist keeps saying June is when you might be able to make it to the lake and back.
It’ll hurt, but you’ve never cared so much about seeing a mediocre quarry lake before.
“Advent Robotics will pay me more money to raise it than I made at the warehouse, and I can keep focusing on recovery while doing it.” You raise your hand and flex it. A low battery alert blinks on your wrist. Plus, the bonus at the end will give you enough to afford something only the rich usually can: regrowing your forearm and your leg. Like a damn lizard. The biolabs that do that are so far out of your reach you normally wouldn’t even consider it.

It materialises that Advent Robotics is paying for the protagonist to raise a newly created robot, which, when it wakes in its pre-language, pre-memory state, acts like a baby—it smashes a coffee table on awakening, constantly has to be taken back to its power charging platform, copies the protagonist when he punches the wall in sleep-deprived frustration, etc.
The rest of the story sees the robot (now called Rob) rapidly grow up (the entire growth process, from switch on to maturity, is essentially an analog for having a normal child, i.e. the robot quickly changes from an uncomprehending baby stage to an argumentative teenager). During this process (spoiler) the protagonist attempts to deal with his own Daddy and other therapy issues while attempting to continue with his physical rehabilitation, during which he has a heart attack. Rob helps him recover.
At the end of the story the protagonist bonds further with robot after Rob complains about his plan to get rid of the prosthetics and regrow his limbs (“Have you ever thought about how I feel?”). The plan is abandoned, and the protagonist matches Rob’s subsequent scrimshaw on his prosthetics with tattoos on the skin above, and he later gets a prosthetic heart as well.
The idea of a robot growing up like a human is a neat idea, and it’s well developed, but the story is essentially about the protagonist healing himself mentally and bodily. Those who like works about emo characters (and the second person narration plays to that aspect) will probably appreciate this one more than me.
∗∗∗ (Good). 5,050 words. Story link.

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Knock, Knock Said the Ship by Rati Mehrotra (F&SF, July-August 2020) opens with Kaalratri, a spaceship AI, asking Deenu a knock-knock joke on a neural link that no-one else can overhear. We then learn that Deenu is on the bridge of the ship trying to work out a course to their destination beyond the asteroid belt (Captain Miral likes to train his crew in various skills). Then, as Captain Miral needles Deenu about her performance, we learn she has been bonded for three years after one of the Kaalatri’s drones rescued her from the wreckage of the colony on Luna.
Deenu is spared further torment when a Peace ship hails them, and its commander, Captain Zhao, tells Miral that they intend to board his ship. When Zhao and his party do so, Miral quickly realises that they are imposters—and he is shot for his trouble. Then, after some backchat, Miral is shot again, but not before he puts the ship into lockdown:

“Override the ship,” snapped Zhao. “You’re next in command, aren’t you?”
“That would be me,” said Lieutenant Saksha, straightening and speaking with an effort. “But I cannot override her. It was the captain’s last order before you…before she…” She paused to swallow. “The ship will lift the lockdown only when she deems the threat is over. You could kill us, but it will serve no purpose.”
“Hey, Ship, can you hear me?” shouted Zhao.
“Yes,” said Kaalratri, her voice remote.
“Would you like me to kill the rest of your crew? We can start here, with these officers. Then we’ll break down your door and go for the rest of them. Would you like that, eh?”
“Would you like to hear a joke?” said Kaalratri.
“What?”
“Knock knock,” said the ship.
“The fuck is wrong with you?” screamed Zhao.
“You are supposed to say, who’s there,” said the ship.  p. 17

The rest of the story sees Deenu overhear Zhao talk to the rest of his crew in Lunarian, and she realises they are refugees like herself. Deenu pretends to sympathise with them, and takes the group to the supplies they want. As they walk to the main bay (spoiler), Deenu hatches a plan with Kaalatri on her neural link and the latter organises an ambush. They are successful, the Captain and First Officer are still alive and are treated, and Deenu is rewarded by having her debt written off.
The plot of this is too straightforward, and the story also tries to have its violence cake and eat it (the gunshot injuries to the Captain and First Officer are severe but both recover), but, that said, the interaction between Deenu and the joke-telling computer is quite entertaining, and the story has an interesting setting.
∗∗∗ (Good). 5,700 words.

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Tunnels by Eleanor Arnason (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2020) is the sixth of the author’s ‘Lydia Duluth’ stories to appear. This one finds her in Innovation City, an island on the planet Grit, and she is there, as usual, on a work assignment for her employer, the holoplay production company Stellar Harvest. Most of the first part of the story is a mixture of background material (including a previous run-in she had with the owners of the island, a genemod company called BioInnovation), a description of the local silicon and carbon based lifeforms, and travelogue.
The story finally gets going when she meets an actor’s agent for tea to discuss a production in progress on Grit. Before this, however, Duluth feels like she is coming down with a cold and, after the meal, she feels worse. Not only does it feel like she has caught the flu, she also has a compunction to go down into the railway system tunnels under the city. Her inbuilt AI, which hasn’t said a lot until this point, tells her to phone for help, but she can’t remember how. Then she sees a “Gotcha” on the inside of her eyelids, and realises she has been infected with a hacked flu virus.
The second part of the story sees Duluth wake to find herself in a dark tunnel, with her AI silent. She starts walking and eventually finds a lit water fountain where, a little bit later, an alien Goxhat turns up:

[She] saw something by the drinking fountain, her size, but lower to the floor. The way it moved was distinctive. She came closer. The creature had an oval body that rested on four legs, and four arms, two on each side of the oval body. One arm in each pair ended in a formidable-looking pincher. The other ended in a cluster of tentacles. The creature was holding a cup in one of its tentacle-hands and dipping it into the fountain. There was no head. Instead, its brain was housed in a bulge atop its body. There ought to be four eyes in the bulge, though Lydia couldn’t see them. The Goxhat was facing away from her.
“Hello,” she said in humanish.
The alien spun. The four blue eyes glared. “Dangerous!” it cried in humanish. “Beware!” It waved the cup, spilling water. “Fierce! Fierce!”
“I’m not a threat,” Lydia said, trying to sound reasonable and unafraid. As far as she knew, the Goxhat were never dangerous to members of other species, but this one looked agitated and poorly groomed. The black hair that covered its body was spiky in some places and matted in others. What the heck was this guy doing here in this condition, and where was the rest of it?
“Where are your other bodies?” Lydia asked.
The Goxhat screamed and ran into the darkness.
Well, that had certainly been the wrong question to ask.  p. 21

Eventually, Duluth manages to talk to the creature and discovers that it knows other humans in the tunnels, and she manages to convince it to take her to them. She later meets three others that have been trapped underground for years because they too caught the hacked flu virus, and one of the side effects is that trying to climb up any of the stairways incapacitates them. Duluth also learns that the tunnels aren’t actually in use, but are a result of a BioInnovation genmod product that has run wild and spread under the planet.
Further adventures follow, beginning with the four of them (and the Goxhat) going to a vagrants camp (this other group of humans aren’t infected, but refuse to help those who are because they variously use them for stories, provided by Genghis the professor, and sex, from Tope the courtesan, etc.). This encounter is rather irrelevant to the story because when Lydia later talks to the Goxhat and asks it its name, it hoots three times, and adds that no-one has ever asked, before offering to lead her to the surface. However, the meeting provides an amusing after dinner episode where (a) Duluth is quizzed by the tunnel dwellers about a holo star she knows and (b) Genghis’s story about Thor losing his hammer is subject to a relentless analysis of the character’s attitudes and behaviour (“You can’t be killing people, even if they’re giants. It’s illegal.” “And wrong,” etc.).
The last section (spoiler)—where Duluth and Three Hoots reach the surface, steal a boat and escape to the mainland, and then BioIn and Stellar Harvest (Duluth’s employers) security get involved—is routine stuff and not as engaging as the previous part (even with Three Hoots’ revelation about how its other bodies died after they discovered financial irregularities in BioIn’s accounts). The story also feels longer than it needs to be (it is just short of novella length).
Overall an entertaining and amusing, if minor, piece.
∗∗∗ (Good). 17,400 words.

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Elsewhere by James S. A. Corey (Avatars Inc., 2020) opens with the narrator arriving at a hospital to see her dying father. She isn’t there in person but as an avatar (a robotic telepresence). As she talks to her father it becomes apparent that she is using this method of visiting because she is almost totally paralyzed, and has been since she was a child. We also learn that, when it became apparent she was never going to recover, she was introduced to virtual reality games and eventually managed to attend architectural college and graduate. Now, by the use of avatars, she works all over the world.
The last part of the story sees her watch her father pass away. There is a good penultimate line:

And how strange it is that, in just a few minutes, there will be two bodies in this room whose consciousness had left them to go elsewhere.  p. 41

A slight piece—but it has a neat idea, and the elegiac feel at the end is well enough done.
∗∗∗ (Good). 3,600 words. Story link.

Average to Good ∗∗+

These are all stories which, for one reason or another, did not quite work for me. The Tchaikovsky and Liu feel rather fragmentary—good ideas rather than good stories; the McHugh doesn’t go anywhere.

Oannes, From the Flood by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Avatars Inc., 2020) opens with the narrator searching what appears to be an underwater archaeological site using an “avatar” (robotic technology that makes him feel like he is there):

Opening my lids and a great stone paw is reaching for me. From the Avatar’s vantage point it’s about to claw my eyes out. Cue yelp of primeval fear from a professional archaeologist who should know better.
But the Faculty rushed the training, didn’t have many people they could call on, short notice. I never signed up for this kind of technology when I was studying.
Jetting backwards I ram the insanely expensive piece of kit into the wall, and a fresh curtain of clouding dust filters down from the ruin above.
I freeze, because it’s a toss-up whether the flood water is bringing this place down or actually holding it up. No great slide of masonry descends to bury my remote self or those of my fellow researchers.
Researchers.
Tomb raiders.
Thieves. Call it what it is, we are nothing but thieves. But our cause is just, I swear to God. We steal from the past that we may gift to the future.

The narrator and the rest of his team are attempting to recover Sumerian relics (tablets about Oannes, a man or mythical water creature, and an earlier flood), and it soon becomes apparent that this isn’t an archaeological site in the Middle East but a rich collector’s house in a recently flooded future-Louisiana.
Eventually, despite the potentially imminent collapse of the building (spoiler), the narrator finds the tablets he is looking for—and a man and two children who have been trapped in an air pocket by the rising waters. As the team rescue the tablets the building starts to collapse, and the narrator uses the avatar to signal the family to leave the building. Initially they do not respond, so he holds out its arms and uses his broken English to implore them to come:

[Who] knows if I have time? But I will be true to Oannes. I will bring wisdom from the flood, but also I will bring life.

This story has an intriguing idea (rescuing relics from museums and private collections in a climate-changed world), but the storyline is too simple and the dramatic ending feels tacked on (I also had my doubts about how long the family’s oxygen would have lasted in the air pocket).
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 3,850 words. Story link.

•

Yellow and the Perception of Reality by Maureen F. McHugh (Tor.com, 22^nd July 2020) opens with the narrator visiting her brain-damaged sister, Wanda:

The doctors say that Wanda has global perceptual agnosia. Her eyes, her ears, her fingers all work. She sees, in the sense that light enters her eyes. She sees colors, edges, shapes. She can see the color of my eyes and my yellow blouse. She can see edges—which is important. The doctor says to me that knowing where the edge of something is, that’s like a big deal. If you’re looking down the road you know there’s a road and a car and there is an edge between them. That’s how you know the car is not part of the road. Wanda gets all that stuff: but her brain is injured. She can see but she can’t put all that together to have it make sense; it’s all parts and pieces. She can see the yellow and the edge but she can’t put the edge and the yellow together. I try to imagine it, like a kaleidoscope or something, but a better way to think of it is probably that it’s all noise.

The laboratory accident which caused her injury (and killed two others) may have been Wanda’s fault—we subsequently learn that she was a physicist doing research with a group that had developed a pair of “reality goggles”, a device designed to see the true quantum reality that lies beyond our own perceptions. Or at least I think that what they were designed to do, as the story only tangentially addresses the subject: the closest we get is a meeting between a physics researcher and the narrator towards the end of the story where the physicist attempts to quiz her about her sister’s work. The narrator does not reveal her suspicion that Wanda used the goggles herself.
What we get instead of a development of the core idea is a well written and characterised—but definitely mainstreamish—story that provides, variously: an account of the two sisters’ childhood; an interview with a detective who quizzes her about the two men who got killed in the accident; Wanda having a bad episode at the care home; and a visit to Claude the octopus, the team’s experimental subject who is now living in an aquarium.
This piece has an intriguing idea at its heart but, as with a couple other stories I’ve read by McHugh, it is a road to nowhere.⁶
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 8,750 words. Story link.

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Uma by Ken Liu (Avatars, Inc., 2020) opens with the narrator discussing his employment-related disciplinary case with a lawyer before the story flashbacks to the incident that caused his problem—the rescue of three children from a burning house while he was operating a UMA for a power company:

A Utility Maintenance Avatar is vaguely humanoid, but only about three feet tall fully stretched out and no more than fifty pounds in weight. For light maintenance tasks such as vegetation management, removal of bird and wasp nests, patching cables, and so forth, you don’t need or want anything bigger—the extra bulk would just get in the way. I had at my disposal small shears, extensible ladder-legs, a general electrical tool kit, and not much else. PacCAP has thousands of these cheap telepresence pods distributed around the state to maintain its hundreds of thousands of miles of transmission, distribution and equipment. With remote operators in centralized offices inhabiting them whenever needed, it’s much cheaper than sending out a whole crew in a truck just to prune an overgrown oak branch.  pp. 134-135

During the rescue the children receive minor injuries (scratches, a sprained ankle, etc.), and subsequently a plantiff’s bar AI suggests they should sue the power company because the narrator wasn’t properly trained, etc. Hence the company disciplining him for safety violations.
Later, after the narrator has refused to sign the legal papers, he is contacted by the power company’s CEO about another emergency—and ends up operating a similar model UMA in Myanmar to save a kid trapped during an earthquake.
This piece is a convincing look at what the future might bring, and it also has a couple of good action scenes—but it feels rather fragmentary, more a neat idea than a story.
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 4,150 words. Story link.

Average ∗∗

This group contains stories which have, to my eye, various faults, e.g. they stretch credulity to breaking point, they are too long or just dull, they have overcomplicated plots hiding a lack of substantial idea or concept, they do not have an obvious point, or they were unsatisfying to a greater or lesser extent.
There were a lot more of these than I would expect to see in a collection like this.

Sinew and Steel and What They Told by Carrie Vaughn (Tor.com, 26^th February 2020)⁷ opens with a scout-ship pilot called Graff who is nearly cut in half:

My biologics are mostly shut down with shock, though I’m dutifully trying to monitor the pain. It’s all-enveloping, a fist squeezing my brain. My mechanics are in full self-repair mode, overheating because there’s so much to knit back together. Because of them, I have survived long enough that I will probably not die. This is going to be awkward.
From my own internal processor I send out an emergency signal to piggyback on ship comms, so that maybe someone can come and explain.

Graff manages to get back to the ship after the accident and, before he passes out, he realises that the medical crew see that he is a cyborg.
When Graff next recovers consciousness he is in drug-induced and physical restraint, and is questioned by the ship’s doctor, Ell (who is also his lover), and Captain Ransom. After they leave him, Graff recalls various memories he has sent back to a group of other AIs who have secretly sent cyborgs like Graff out into the universe to accumulate memories of what it is like to travel, and be human, etc.
The rest of the story (spoiler) sees further sessions where the three meet, during which Graff attempts to explain who and what he is, and how he is not a threat to them or the ship. Eventually he succeeds, and the final scene has Ell remove the nerve block that incapacitates him. A woman called Tek also appears, a cyborg summoned by the message Graff sent immediately after the accident (which was initially detected and blocked by Captain Ransom but later allowed through). Graff downloads his memories to Tek, and Ransom and Ell agree to keep Graff’s secret.
This is a slickly told piece but the ending, especially the captain’s actions, stretches credulity (even if Graff had been a loyal crewmember for some time previously).
∗∗ (Average). 4,400 words. Story link.

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The Long Iapetan Night by Julie Novakova (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2020)⁸ sees Lev, the narrator of the story, wake from cold sleep on Iapetus at the beginning of a second expedition to this moon of Saturn (the first was abandoned a century earlier when Earth was subject to the twin catastrophes of a super volcano and a solar flare). Lev’s team build their shelters and then, when they find that an abandoned unit from a previous expedition is still showing signs of activity, they send a team to investigate. When communications are lost Lev joins a backup team which goes after them and, on arrival, they start searching. Lev eventually comes upon one of the original team, who tells her that the unit is trying to kill them—the pair of them only just get out alive.
Running parallel with this account are diary entries from one of the original Iapetus crew at the time of the disaster on Earth a century earlier. When they realised how bad things were on Earth, and how their supply line would be affected, they decided to return home, or at least to the L-5 colonies. Until, that is, their fuel production facility was destroyed—perhaps by sabotage, something that seemed more likely when their ship was also destroyed later on.
Meanwhile, the second expedition is plagued by further accidents, and the crew speculate as to whether there is inimical life on the satellite.
Eventually the two threads dovetail when (spoiler) Lev and her team discover that a member of the original team (co-incidentally the diarist of the other thread) put himself into cryo-storage, and rigged the unit he was sleeping in with bobby traps—the source of all the accidents that the second expedition experienced.
I found this rather dull (don’t spend the first two pages of your story having your protagonist wake up), plodding (it’s way too long), and unlikely (the idea that the survivor of the first expedition could booby trap the unit to cause so many problems for the second group is just too far-fetched).
** (Average). 13,250 words.

•

Your Boyfriend Experience by James Patrick Kelly (Entanglements, 2020) opens with the narrator Daktari playing a “therapy adventure” with his partner Jin. As they play, Jin asks Dak to go on a simulated date with a new generation “playbot” called Tate which Jin has developed for the company he works for. Dak is not particularly happy with this suggestion:

Why was I so upset? Because I couldn’t remember the last time Jin and I had been on a date. How was I supposed to get through to this screen-blind wally who had the charisma of a potato and the imagination of a hammer, and who hadn’t said word one about the Shanghai soup dumplings with a tabiche pepper infusion that I’d spent the afternoon making?
“Just because we call them partners doesn’t mean you have sex with them,” he said, missing the point. “If you don’t want to have sex with Tate, it will never come up. He doesn’t care.”
I wanted to knock the popcorn out of his hand. Instead I said, “Okay.” I flicked the game back on. “Fine.” I huddled on the far side of the couch. “You win.”

This passage illustrates two of the things I didn’t much like about this piece: Dak’s continual grievances about his relationship (later on he replies to a heartfelt marriage proposal with a grudging and conditional acceptance), and the endless mentions of food (Dak is a chef at his own “forum”, so we have mini-recipes pervading the story).
Eventually, about half a dozen pages in—after a scene where he meets the boss of Jin’s company, and sits with lawyers to sign legal papers (riveting stuff)—Dak finally meets the very lifelike Tate, and is surprised to find that the playbot looks like him.
After this encounter Dak and Jin go to dinner, where Jin reveals the huge bonus he has received for finishing his project before proposing to Dak (see above).
The story kicks up a gear when Dak finally goes out on his date with Tate. The pair go to a very exclusive restaurant and matters proceed smoothly—Dak likes Tate because, obviously, the playbot is programmed to adapt himself to his human user—but Tate eventually causes a scene when his simulated intoxication causes him to loudly blurt out his love for Jin. After that the restaurant staff want both of them to leave, but the newly arrived owner smooths matters over.
Dak and Tate decide to leave anyway, and Tate suggests they go to a bowling alley he went to with Jin on a previous simulated date. There they eat (there is paragraph long review of the skinnyburger, “dried”, the tofu, “soggy”, and the firedog, “nice umani finish”, “heat was more at the piripiri level than cayenne”, etc. ) before later meeting Jin’s mother who, as Tate knows from his previous visit, goes bowling there regularly. Dak subsequently learns that she doesn’t appear to know he is living with her son (more grievance).
The final reveal (spoiler) occurs on the way home: Tate reveals he is imprinted on Jin and is now imprinted on Dak, and that he has been designed for couples so they can “fill any holes in the relationship.” Dak then realises that, if he rejects Tate, the persona the playbot has developed so far will be wiped—so he invites it inside when they arrive at the flat.
This story has some interesting and lively parts (mostly when Tate is onstage) but it is essentially a flabby relationship story with a premise that is not convincing (the idea that most couples would invite a robotic third party into their relationship isn’t convincing, and the more you think about this the more ridiculous it seems). It’s also hard to like a story whose narrator is endlessly moaning about his relationship and other First World problems.
∗∗ (Average). 11,500 words.

•

The 1^st Interspecies Solidarity Fair and Parade by Bogi Takács (Rebuilding Tomorrow, 2020) is set on a future Earth that has seen three waves of alien visitors. The first destroyed everything, the second came to scavenge, and then the third (comprising a number of different races who have also been attacked by the first) come seeking allies. Against this background we watch the travels of the narrator and a floating containment sphere which carries an alien called Lukrécia.
As they pass through various regions of Hungary we see them interview various people to see if they would be interested in working in extra-terrestrial communications, but most are not interested as they fully occupied with their hard, agriculture-based lives (the pair do, however, manage to recruit a 72 year old ex-social worker while staying at an old summer camp site).
After this minor success the pair decide to detour round the nearby (and supposedly dangerous) city of Győr and enter it from the southern side. En route they talk to a trans person named Lala, who takes them to the city and, when they arrive, they find it is in pretty good shape (they suspect that the rumours that it is dangerous have been deliberately spread to protect the city).
The final part of the story is partly description of the city and the people who live there (it seems remarkably untouched by the invasions), and partly an account of how the pair try to organise a Pride parade to bring everyone in the city together—although this quickly morphs into the Interspecies Fair in the title. The event is large and disorganised, but is a great success with both the human and alien visitors.
This gets off to an intriguing start but it ends up rambling on too long, and by the end it feels more like a thinly veiled mainstream story about current-day Hungary:

‘I thought an apocalypse would finally get us to give up plastic,’ someone my age in a sparkly dress grumbles next to me. I shrug apologetically. I’m looking around for Lala. I spot him with a very tall person handing out signs. Lala gets one saying ‘FAITH, HOPE, CHARITY’ in rainbow letters above what looks like a very complicated version of the trans symbol.
I remember that slogan from somewhere—for a moment I feel something go crosswired in my brain as I dredge up the right memory from an age gone by. ‘The three Catholic virtues, huh?’ I nod at him, half-yelling in the noise. The unknown sign-maker must have been missing the march of St. Ladislas.
He looks at the sign in puzzlement. ‘Are they?’ He glances around, but the person has already been carried away by the crowd. ‘You know I’m Jewish, right?’ he yells back.
I shrug. ‘I guessed. Here, I’ll take it.’ Not that I should be carrying a large sign. It looks like a recipe for injuring others.
‘Are you Catholic?’ he asks.
‘I was baptised…’
He shrugs, too. ‘I was also baptised.’ He chuckles at my confusion. ‘My great-grandma said you needed to have the right documents.’
‘Even in an apocalypse?’ I look around. A cream-coloured butterfly lands on my shoulder, then another.
‘Especially in an apocalypse.’ But we don’t get to think about the grim moments of Hungarian history, because a large metallic sphere rolls past, the size of Lukrécia’s, but with a brass tint.

∗∗ (Average). 8,650 words.

•

Exile’s End by Carolyn Ives Gilman (Tor.com, 12^th August 2020) opens with Rue Savenga, a museum curator at on the planet Sarona, receiving an unexpected visitor just before closing time. The man tells Rue that his name is Traversed Bridge, and that he has been sent by the Whispering Kindom of the Manhu to find their ancestors.
It materialises that Bridge’s people are descended from a Saronan tribe called the Atoka (long thought extinct) who, after being persecuted on both Sarona and another planet called Radovani, ended up on Exile. When Bridge says he wants to see his ancestors, Rue takes him instead to see a painting of a woman called Aldry:

People called it a painting, but it was actually an elaborate mosaic, made from pieces so small it took a magnifying glass to see them. Rue had commissioned a scientific analysis that had shown that the colors were not, strictly speaking, pigments; they were bits of bird feather, beetle carapace, butterfly wing-anything iridescent, arranged so as to form a picture. And what a picture it was: a young girl in an embroidered jacket and silver headdress, looking slightly to one side, lips parted as if about to speak. Operas had been written about her. Volumes of poetry had speculated on what she was about to say. Speeches invoked her, treatises analyzed her, children learned her story almost as soon as they learned to speak. She was the most loved woman on Sarona.
“We call her Aldry,” Rue said.
Traversed Bridge looked transfixed, as if he were falling in love. He whispered, “That is not her name.”
“What do you call her?” Rue asked.
“She is Even Glancing.”

After some more small talk, Bridge collapses. While they are waiting for help to come, he tells Rue that the painting spoke to him, and that the woman in the picture said she was lonely and wanted to return home—and see an Immolation. Rue explains, after Bridge recovers, the rules and regulations governing the return of artefacts are complicated.
The second part of the story sees Rue learn that the painting was “rescued” from an Atoka Immolation—apparently the tribe’s customs dictated they should periodically burn all their possessions and start again from scratch. Then Bridge tells her that the Manhu are going to court to reclaim the painting because “there is a ghost imprisoned in it”, and that they intend to release it by holding an Immolation.
The matter eventually ends up in court and Rue tells Bridge, just before the verdict:

“This is not an ordinary object. At some point, great art ceases to be bound to the culture that produced it. It transcends ethnicity and identity and becomes part of the patrimony of the human race. It belongs to all of us because of its universal message, the way it makes us better.”

The verdict is decided (spoiler) on a narrow point of property law, and the object is put on a slower than light ship that will take almost sixty years to get to Exile (it and the other reclaimed pieces cannot go by the faster wayport “because what would arrive at the other end would be mere replicas of the originals”).
Fifty years later, the ninety-five-year-old Rue decides to go to Exile to be there for the arrival of the painting and the other artefacts (ten years will elapse while she travels, although it will appear instantaneous to Rue). When she arrives she meets Bridge, who is now a grandfather and has built a huge dam in the hills to improve life for the Manhu.
Rue spends the night in his house, and the next day they go to unpack the painting. There is then a procession to the village where the painting is put on a pyre and all the members of the Manhu add possessions of particular value. Then (after a token back and forth about what is about to happen between Rue and Bridge), they light the fire. After the blaze starts to die down, the Manhu leave the village and Rue follows them. Once they have reached a spot on the mountain overlooking the village, Rue sees and then hears the dam being blown up.
The story ends with some suitable humbug about the past not feeding anyone, “only the future does that”.
This is quite well done for the most part, an interesting examination of the issues affecting archaeological artefacts that were created by one culture but are now in the contested possession of another. However, the final actions of the Manhu are so mind-numbingly and nihilistically stupid that I suspect many readers will be hugely irritated not only by those but by what is a dramatically unsatisfying conclusion. Apart from this the story’s other shortcomings are the unconvincing “ghost” idea, and reader realisation that the survival chances of a civilization that periodically destroys everything are probably non-existent (and what a legacy to leave your children).
A good story about stupid people, so a mixed bag.
∗∗ (Average). 13,400 words. Story link.

•

Red_Bati by Dilman Dila⁹ (Dominion, 2020) opens in a spaceship hold (although that is not immediately obvious, see below) with Red_Bati (originally a robot dog built as a kid’s toy) running out of power and realising that, if it does not get a recharge, it will die. As Red starts hacking the nearby bot and ship systems in an effort to get what it wants, we learn that it was upgraded to look after an old woman called Granny. After her death Red then hid its high level of sentience as it was converted into a mining robot. The loss of one of Red’s mining arms while he was working in that role is how it has come to be in the spaceship’s hold.
Eventually, and I am compressing a lot of the story here (spoiler), Red takes control of the ship and heads out to the asteroid belt to build more of its own kind.
This is a slickly enough told story, with the exception of the confusing (and irrelevant in terms of story setup) first page. The opening paragraph:

Red_Bati’s battery beeped. Granny flickered, and the forest around her vanished. She sighed in exaggerated disappointment. He never understood why she called it a forest, for it was just two rows of trees marking the boundary of her farm. When she was alive, she had walked in it every sunny day, listening to her feet crunching dead twigs, to her clothes rustling against the undergrowth, to the music of crickets, feeling the dampness and the bugs, sniffing at the rotten vegetation, which she thought smelled better than the flowers that Akili her grandson had planted around her house. Now, she liked to relive that experience. With his battery going down, he could not keep up a real life projection and, for the first time, she became transparent, like the blue ghost in the painting that had dominated a wall of her living room. Akili’s mother had drawn it to illustrate one of their favorite stories.

Who is “He” at the beginning of the second sentence? I thought this was referring to a third person, not Red_Bati, and the reason I thought this was because a “he” doesn’t normally have batteries. More generally, the point of view/subject matter bounces around like a ping-pong ball in the first few sentences: Red_Balti, Granny, She, He, She, She, He, Akili’s mother (!).
Furthermore, the whole first page is little more than backstory waffle like the above, and our intitial introduction (apart from the security cameras) to Red_Bati’s environment is a reference to ice floating about like a “predator shark”, something that further confused me.
The story would have benefited from a revised beginning that started with this paragraph:

The half-empty storage room looked like a silver blue honeycomb. They had dumped [Red-Bati] in it after the accident ripped off his forearm. The Captain had evaluated his efficiency and, seeing it down to 80%, tagged him DISABLED. They could not fix his arm on the ship, so they shut him down and dumped him in storage until he got back to Earth. Entombed alive. Left to die a cold death.

From this we would quickly have got Where, Who, What, Why, and realised that there was a sense of peril. You get none of that from the original. Then, after this opening, Red_Bati could have projected Granny for company, and you could then have fed in exchanges with her that outlined his predicament and gave snippets of his backstory.
Ultimately, this is a bit dull for the same reason that a lot of cyberpunk stories are, i.e. they are a series of hacking events that are rarely emotionally engaging or entertaining. It is also uncomplicated, and there is little sense of risk or peril.
∗∗ (Average). 4,450 words. Story link.

•

Test 4 Echo by Peter Watts (Made to Order, 2020) has two operators, Lange and Sansa, watching their remote robot Medusa get damaged during a quake in the depths of Enceladus’s seas (Enceladus is one of Saturn’s moons). When they regain contact they assess the damage to one of the robot’s arms, which seems to have left it mimicking the others. Then they catch a flash of something moving in the robot’s video feed. As they think they may have seen an alien, they send Medusa limping back to that location (the video feed has a ninety-eight minute lag to the base on the Moon).
As this piece progresses the story changes from what I expected to be an underwater hunt for an alien to (spoiler) one about the rise of an AI consciousness in the robot arm. Then the story changes again at the end when we find out that Sansa is an also an AI, spoofed the video feed to show the flash of movement, and has created an “unconstrained” AI in the robot (a capital offence that has it and her rebooted).
This didn’t entirely work for me: the start is confusing (it took me a page and a half to realise that Medusa was the robot probe, something that could have been avoided by the addition of “our robot” or “our probe” before “Medusa” in the first sentence); there is too much chatter (Lange talks endlessly to Sansa, or his partner Raimund on Earth); and the two changes of direction seem at least one too many for a six thousand word story. On the plus side, the dialogue is snappy and there are some good VR descriptions of what the robot probe sees.
∗∗ (Average).

•

This World is Made for Monsters by M. Rickert (F&SF, September-October 2020) starts with an alien spaceship landing at a farm near a town and all the children rushing out to see it. The alien family come out of the ship and the farmer’s dog bounds towards them: one of the larger aliens reaches down to give it a pat.
Shortly after this (and other initial encounters), the first alien Fest begins:

It was the first annual Alien Fest, which grew so popular that the local economy has come to rely on it, and the recent sharp decline in attendance is worrisome. Revelers dress in green costumes, drink from alien cups, throw balls at alien targets, and eat fried dough dyed to look like green fingers. It is good old-fashioned fun, which apparently no one wants any more.
The mothers made sandwiches while the fathers set up tables quickly fashioned from planks of wood and sawhorses found in the Beltens’ barn. Mr. Ellreidge went back to town with the men to open his store. He kindly offered to start a tab for the various supplies such as cases of soda and paper plates and, as the day wore on, charcoal, beer, hot dogs, and condiments.
“Charge it all to the town,” the mayor said, but waited until after his reelection that November to send a bill to every household, the “alien tax” as it has come to be called.
I don’t know why this isn’t taught in our schools. I used to page through my children’s history books, and it took me a long time to stop being surprised it wasn’t there. Now, when I ask my grandchildren what they know about the genesis of Alien Fest, they have most of the details right but deliver it all in jest and laugh when I say I remember it well.
Recently, after trying to explain this to Tess, my youngest granddaughter, stranger than anyone in our family has ever been, she looked up at me with sad brown eyes then slipped her small hand into mine and I realized, with a shock, how old I am, so old that no one believes I know what I am talking about.  p. 222

Events go well at the first Alien Fest until (spoiler) the mother of one of the girls thinks that the aliens have abducted her: the mother shakes and interrogates one of the alien children, which causes her to be levitated by the displeased alien parents. Then the other alien child and her unhurt daughter appear, but the atmosphere has soured and the aliens go back to their ship. They leave (but not until after the dog runs onto the ship and is put back outside and given a tummy rub) and never return.
The story ends with the narrator saying the annual Alien Fests are becoming less popular with the young before she launches into an impassioned defence of the day, people’s memories of it, and how the aliens would be pleased at the commemorative event if they ever returned. The narrator concludes with the comment, “This world is made for monsters”, at which point Tess, the granddaughter, starts crying.
This has a readable narrative style (it feels like a 1950s SF story in some ways) but I’m perplexed as to what message the story is trying to deliver.¹⁰ Is it that that previous generations have different memories and values from the young? Is it that older generations are unaware that some of the memories they revere are monstrous? Is it that the young take a reflexively antagonistic and/or overly-sensitive response to the memories and values of the old? Or all of the above? I have no idea.
∗∗ (Average). 2,400 words.

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The Long Tail by Aliette de Bodard (Wired, 30^th November 2020) opens with Thu salvaging on the spaceship Conch Citadel, twenty years after the war, when a “lineaged memory” from another of her crew, Ánh Ngọc, makes her pause at the entry of the room she was about to enter:

Looking more closely, Thu could see, now, that the holes in the floor were a little too regular, the mechs’ multiple legs a little too polished, the edges of the robots’ disk-shapes distorted, as if someone had pulled and the metal had given in like taffy. Not a physical room, then. The real room, the one she could interact with, lay under layers of unreality. A whole lot of it.
Shit. Shit.
Thu chewed at her lower lip, considering. Everyone onboard the scavenging habitat knew there was no correlation between the unreality and what lay underneath. Going in there would be a calculated risk.

As she weighs up the possible problems against the financial advantages, she is contacted by a third crew member, Khuyên. She tells Thu that Ánh Ngọc has been infected by a new form of the nanites which infect the wreck, and that she is “on her way to chimeral”—a condition where the affected experience constant delusions (“unreality”).
The next part of the story sees Thu retrace Ánh Ngọc’s path through the ship to find out what she was contaminated with and where. During this journey we get backstory about (a) Thu’s mother, who became contaminated by nanites and had to have her implant removed (privately, the company wouldn’t pay) leaving her essentially lobotomised and (b) the Conch Citadel’s part in the final stages of the war.
Eventually (spoiler) Thu tracks down the ship’s Central (its AI), which was thought dead. Initially Thu thinks that the Central is still fighting the war, but it turns out that it is just lonely and looking for company (or something like that).
There isn’t much of a story here, and all the gimmicks and window dressing (nanites, unreality, her mother’s implant removal, the rogue AI, etc.) doesn’t really hide that. Also—and I don’t usually like making this kind of criticism of stories—why wouldn’t they uses drones or mechs or robots to search such a hazardous environment (especially one where problems of human perception are involved)?
∗∗ (Average). 4,600 words. Story link.

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Rhizome by Starlight by Fran Wilde (Rebuilding Tomorrow, 2020) is set on an island that is overgrown with what appears to be a fast-growing, mutant, and malevolent form of kudzu. The story opens with the narrator cutting back the day’s growth from the seed bank cum greenhouse where she lives and works.
We later learn that she is the third generation of her family to do this job:

It was left to us to tend the seeds because something in grandfather’s genes wasn’t right. That’s what he wrote in the manual. He, and others like him, stayed with the greenhouse, while others, much stronger and better, found safety on the ships. At least that’s what the neat seed-letters say. His young daughter, her genes like his, remained too. She, and we became the promise he made: to stay, to be gardeners.

After some further description of the narrator’s daily routine and backstory (as well as a rare visit to the island from a scientist who she avoids), she decides to build a boat and leave the island.
When the narrator is later picked up by a ship (spoiler), she is kept prisoner, and it becomes apparent that she is a form of mutant plant or semi-plant life herself. At the very end of the story the scientist who visited the island frees her before she dies from lack of light.
This tale starts off as a future eco-disaster piece but appears to turn into something more far-fetched, or perhaps even magical realist.
∗∗ (Average). 3,750 words.

Mediocre ∗

The stories in this group split between those that stretch credulity to breaking point, and those I just found tedious.

AirBody by Sameem Siddiqui (Clarkesworld, April 2020)¹¹ opens with a young man preparing for an “AirBody” job from a “Desi aunty” the next day (the client, a fifty-nine-year-old woman from Karachi called Meena, will use his body for a short period of time—like Airbnb, but using the person’s body rather than their house).
After this promising start the story pretty much goes into reverse: when Meena takes possession of his body the next morning he watches her (he is still mentally present for safety and facilitation reasons) cook dal and answers any questions she has—when he is not contending with her snarky comments about the cleanliness of his kitchen. We also get a chunk of backstory about his own family and a failed relationship with a woman called Karla.
The second part of the story (spoiler) sees him drive Meena to a house where she attempts to give another women the pot of dal: she has the door slammed in her face. Later, the woman turns up at his flat—and then she and Meena make love (apparently they used to be lovers). This scene—where the woman makes love to Meena while she inhabits someone else’s body—did not convince (and that is before you consider that the AirBody is of a different sex, and its owner could be watching you in action).
This is pretty much a mainstream story about cooking and relationships (not my favourite themes) which has some SF furniture in it. The ramifications of the technology are barely hinted at beyond the convenience of not having to travel.
∗ (Mediocre). 4,950 words. Story link.

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Seeding the Mountain by M. L. Clark (Analog, September-October 2020) has an overly long and discursive start that sees Luis watch a dove die while he waits outside Medellín airport in Columbia. The body of the dove is subsequently disposed of by a woman using nanotech.
The rest of the story suffers from the same long-windedness as it goes on to tell the story of Luis and his partner Elena’s attempt to stabilize a over-mined and potentially hazardous mountain (also using, I think, nanotech). However, there have been problems elsewhere in the world with this technology:

Luis took a second to process the metaphor.
He knew that among the Embera-Katio animalism connected three realms of existence, with serpents and other critters of the soil sometimes taking mythopoetic revenge upon mankind by dragging sinners to the lands below. Rarely, though, did others refer similarly to the Six-Cities incident: twelve days when hacked nanotech, the likes of which had been developed to process rare-earth metals with greater ease, devoured cities whole—people, pets, cars, buildings—while the rest of each affected country scrambled to contain the spread. Japan. Indonesia. Benin. Colombia. Madagascar. France. The UN Accord against private access to whole bodies of nanotech research had come swiftly, with only the U.S. and Bangladesh holding out in the initial rush of militarized search-and-seizure, at least until scares hit them in turn. (A prank, as it turned out, in the midwestern U.S.—but near enough the home of an online celebrity that the famed musician had rallied his fan base through social media: enough, for once, to turn the political tide.)  p. 115

Luis later goes out to talk to a holdout on the mountain, an old man called Bidø. The man tells him about a piece of rogue nanotech that killed an ocelot, and he also says that he wants to die on the mountain.
There are other events that occur, and these include, variously: the discovery of the bones of a baby near one of the probe holes; continued funding problems for the project; the disappearance of a young worker and his girlfriend; the arrival of the Feds when illegal nanotech (or somesuch) is discovered on the mountain, etc. etc. Matters are eventually wrapped up (spoiler) when the couple are found on the mountain with Bidø, and we discover there is a family connection. The girl is pregnant, so Bidø finds a new lease of life and agrees to leave.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve got some of this detail wrong (especially about whether Luis and Elena are using nanotech or another technology to stabilise the mountain) because the story, although well enough written on a sentence and paragraph level, just has too much ephemeral detail and no sense of tension or pacing—so it is very easy to become bored and tune out. And even when the story does come together at the end it seems to be as much a family soap opera as science fiction.
A short story buried in a very long novelette.
∗ (Mediocre). 14,800 words.

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Still You Linger, Like Soot in the Air by Matthew Kressel (Lightspeed, August 2020) opens with a holy man called Gil finishing his meditation to find that Muu (an incorporeal alien “God”, I think) has “already removed the body of Demi”, a pupil of Gil’s who was also his lover. Apparently, Demi “isn’t dead exactly”, but Gil will never see him again.
Shortly after Gil’s loss another pupil turns up on Gilder Nefan (I am not sure why the planet has a similar name). Tim is female—she had previously changed gender several times but “but ultimately chose female because she felt it suited her temperament”—and she subsequently spends most of her time running errands for Gil when not annoying him with a thousand questions. When Gil gets some time to himself, he thinks about Demi and feels sad.
Eventually (spoiler) Tim convinces Gil to let her join him in taking “jithmus” (some sort of alien weed). He warns her of the dangers, but she insists.
During Gil’s trippy experience, he sees Demi and talks to Muu:

Demi—oh, lovely Demi—stood on a precipice in an endless white desert, while the horizon behind him stretched to infinity. Beyond the cliff’s edge spread an infinite blue sky. Demi, bright-eyed and eager. Demi, smiling and reaching out his hand. Gil floated down, down toward the hand, ready to grasp it and never let go. But he was just a photon. And as he raced toward Demi’s palm, the molecules of Demi’s hand spread into their constituent atoms, and the atoms spread into quarks, and each of these minuscule bundles of smeared energy drifted as far apart from each other as stars in a galaxy.
We are all empty, Muu said to him, in thought pictures. Demi was never anything at all, nor will he ever be anything again. The thoughts you have of him are like waves that ripple in a turbulent sea. Sometimes they form shapes and sense impressions. You ascertain meaning in them, but in reality they are just waves in a stormy sea. You mourn his loss, but why mourn when Demi was never anything at all? He has more life in death than you do in life, because now he is infinite.
But, but, but . . . Gil struggled to say. His photon energy leaped from orbital to orbital like stones across a pond. I felt something real, he said, and that was enough . . .
You are a bird, trapped in a room with a single half-open window, Muu said. The escape is just an inch below you, where the window lies open, yet you keep flying headfirst into the glass.
Can I see him? Gil said. Can I speak to Demi, as he was?
But you are him, now, Muu said. You are the photon which reflected off his eye and wound its way into space, where it has been speeding away from Gilder Nefan for eighty million years. All of your senses of him were nothing more than reflected photons and electrostatic pressure.
And what of my feelings? Gil said.
Just waves on a stormy sea, said Muu.
Why do you hurt me? Gil said. Why do you make me suffer so?
It is you who make yourself suffer.

Deep.
Gil wakes to find that the drug has had no effect on Tim and, because of this, she decides to leave the planet. She tries to convince Gil to go with her but he remains and, after she has gone, he eats all his remaining jithmus stash in one go (about a millions times the usual amount).
A tedious and sometimes pretentious piece that offers moping and cod-transcendence instead of a story. The only time this comes alive is during the back and forth between Gil and Tim.
∗ (Mediocre). 5,650 words. Story link.

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Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love by Usman T. Malik (Wired, 11^th December 2020) starts off in mainstream territory with a diabetic Pakistani man called Bari whose mother is suffering from dementia. He cares for her, and he worries about what will happen if he gets ill.
After a few pages of scene setting (including a childhood flashback), Bari agrees to join the New Suns to better care for his mother. This involves him joining a starship crew after he is given quantum consciousness:

Decades ago, the Penrose-Hameroff theory ushered in a new era of quantum consciousness: Although gravity prevents the occurrence of large objects in two places simultaneously, subatomic particles can exist at opposite ends of the universe at the same time.

The remainder of the story sees Bari switch his consciousness back and forth between his body on the starship and a telepresence robot in his mother’s house. Because of the relativistic effects (time passes much more quickly on Earth than it does on the ship), a few seconds away from the ship equates to hours on Earth. Eventually (spoiler) the relativistic trips start to have a mental toll on Bari, which in turn causes the failure of a relationship with a woman on board the ship. Then the mother dies a couple of weeks or so after launch (on Earth, over a decade has passed).
What we have here is a mainstream story with a clunky SF idea bolted on, i.e. a hand-wringing story about family and dementia, and not one about quantum consciousness.
∗ Mediocre. 2,950 words. Story link.

Awful –

Here I experienced incomprehension, pretension and boredom. I think that, looking at the comments in the last few sections, I can see what my personal hierarchy of faults is.

Lone Puppeteer of a Sleeping City by Arula Ratnakar (Clarkesworld, September 2020) opens with a data-dump account of a future Earth where a worsening climate disaster means that humans are going to be frozen in pods. These pods will then “tend the sick lands”. If the idea of mini-fridges for humans wandering around the planet doing environmental work isn’t enough to put you off, there are also passages like this to decrypt:

Eesha began to ask Emil to translate your thoughts constantly—so much that it began to distract him from training you to construct the simulations. So Emil constructed and gave Eesha a helmet. It contained the parts of his uploaded mind that could receive your thoughts and feelings, and she could use it to noninvasively meld with her brain activity anytime, as long as she would occasionally lend him the helmet to connect with the metal sphere he was uploaded into, if he ever needed to know your thoughts.

Even if you know, as I did, that the “you” in that passage is an AI called Opal, it’s hard to figure out what is going on in that passage until you have read it half a dozen times.
After this we learn about another form of humanity that is living alongside normal (or, as the story puts it, “non-manipulated biological”) people on this future Earth: the Diastereoms. We learn, after another page long data dump, about how the Diastereoms have had the “dimensionality” of their brains altered, and also had part of it replaced with electronic systems. The Diastereoms have since bred amongst themselves to the point there is now a ban on “inter-procreation” with normal humans (but that did not stop Eesha’s absentee mother running off with a Diastereom called Bosch).
After this set-up, most of the second half seems to revolve (I think, I struggled to work out what was going on) around the simulations that the humans will experience while in their pods. We see one simulation where three woman age and pass through different rooms; another has a woman, whose sister died in a fire, entering a simulation and rescuing her. She subsequently lives a rewarding life—but, as she is one of the experimental users, she is pulled out and (for some made up authorial reason) can’t go back in again.
Then, after Eesha’s grandmother dies, she does a sample simulation (Opal can’t warn Eesha about the consequences for some other plot-convenient reason), and a distressed Emil breaks the news to her afterwards. Emil and Eesha then watch all the people get into their pods, and then leave with the Diastereoms.
Eesha comes back years later, with her Diastereom sister, and mindmelds with Opal, which (I think) then starts a loop of the three woman simulation, or maybe the whole story—who knows. Oh, and Opal/Eesha make the decision to never let the humans leave their simulations (because they’ll just mess up the Earth again).
I found this a badly written and almost incoherent piece, and some of the material that I did understand either does not make any sense or has no point. Why are the Diastereoms in the story?—All they seem to do is wander off the set at the end. What are the Diastereoms going to do on this climate-disaster Earth after the humans are gone? More specifically, what is Eesha’s sister going to do with herself after Eesha mindmelds with Opal?
It is hard to see why this one was published at all, never mind selected for a Year’s Best. Dreadful.
– (Awful). 9,550 words. Story link.

•

The Translator, at Low Tide by Vajra Chandrasekera (Clarkesworld #164, May 2020)¹² gets off to a rambling literary start:

The sea lapping at my back and my face to the fire, I translate: poems, mostly. Now that entire languages and cultures are on the verge of being lost forever to the sea, the storms, the smog, the plagues, and the fires, now the art of the dead and the almost-dead have become quaintly valuable to a small but enthusiastic readership of the living. The wealthy and living, I should say, but are those not the same thing, now? I am alive; I breathe in and am overcome with riches. It itches, deep in my lungs.
The big publishing houses (we used to count their decreasing number; I don’t know where the dice finally rolled to a stop) in distant walled New York pay an entire pittance for authentic translations from the lost world, which translates into a moderate income for me because of the horrific exchange rate. It keeps me fed and sheltered—long may the fashion in third world ruin-poetry last—and I pray now only for the goodwill of distant tastemakers. The world’s decay is now the province of poets, not the useless powers and principalities of the world. There was a war on loss and we lost. It is now the age of mourning. I only wish it paid better.

The idea of written works being lost to climate change a few decades in the future seems rather unlikely (one would have thought they would all be scanned and on the internet by then), but I suppose this occupation lets the narrator give his thesaurus a work out and utter pretentious comments like “Poetry causes delirium and weakness. It burdens the heart”, and “the city’s death will come après moi”, etc.
We also learn about the climate disaster future the narrator lives in, and how his home in a tower block has a flooded ground floor where the rugs stink of mildew (and yet they still have intermittent electricity—I’m not sure how that works in a building awash with water).
In amongst all this are a couple of trips to his friend’s library, and a mugging by the local youths for his groceries. The same feral children who steal from him later start setting people of his generation on fire (drowning would have been better symbology).
In short: a poet’s misery memoir crossed with climate-change hand wringing.
– (Tedious). 3,950 words. Story link.

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Fairy Tales for Robots by Sofia Samatar sees a narrator talking to a robot (shortly to become conscious for the first time) about various fairy tales and how robots should interpret them. It is full passages like this:

The tale of the Happy Prince speaks to robots in another way, I think, for it represents the duality of being. The statue and the swallow work as one, as two parts of a whole, two elements bent upon one task. Their powers complement one another: the prince provides physical material, but is too heavy to affect the space outside himself without aid, while the light and airy swallow darts all over the place, bringing reports from the other side of the world, but only interacts with humans through the statue’s gold and jewels. What if, I ask myself—what if the swallow had behaved otherwise, had refused to allow the Happy Prince to sacrifice both their lives?
What if the bird had used its encyclopedic knowledge of the world to give the prince another way to live?

The story—and I use the word loosely as it’s more an essay than anything else—cycles through over a dozen fairy tales and, mixed in with the tedious analysis, are dollops of the narrator’s misery memoir childhood.
A stunningly boring story (and this from someone who got through Brian W. Aldiss’s Report on Probability A, an anti-novel where nothing happens, and which seems like a romp by comparison).
– (Awful). 10,150 words. Story link.

•••

The non-fiction is, as you would expect from an anthology like this, pretty minimal, and the main attraction is an essay by Neil Clarke, Introduction: A State of the Short SF Field in 2020. He opens by giving the results of a survey he sent to fifty-four English language magazines in the field during this COVID year and, after dealing with the business side of the magazine business, and how some of the titles fared in 2020, he has this ominous message:

As each new year passes, I become more certain that the current system for magazines is a carefully built house of cards. The overall pool of money coming into short fiction is too low to be sustainable for the variety of publications we have. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that we need to reduce their numbers, but financial pressures may lead to that outcome if things remain unchanged.
Instead, I’m suggesting that we need to see a culture shift in financially supporting free content. The prevalence of online fiction (to which I admittedly contribute) has created the perception that short fiction should be free, establishing a financial value that’s unrealistic and problematic. Furthermore, most short fiction magazines are underpriced. While book prices have steadily increased over the years, the prices for magazine subscriptions have remained largely unchanged. $1.99 and $2.99 per month have practically become carved-in-stone standards. It’s no secret these things must change for the health of the field. In fact, some editors were considering revisions to their pricing structure before the pandemic placed those plans on hold.

I’d have to say that I don’t think it is likely this situation will improve—once you have trained a generation of readers that fiction is free I very much doubt that you will be able to flip many of them into becoming paying customers. Even someone like myself, who has a subscription to Analog, Asimov’s and F&SF, only recently joined the Clarkesworld Patreon. Partly this was because I started reading more of the magazine, and partly it was for the convenience of getting a PDF copy. While I’m happy to pay $2.99 a month for format convenience, I’m not sure that I’m willing to stretch beyond that, even though I have the money.
The other sections in the essay cover Magazine Comings and Goings, Anthologies and Collections, The 2020 Scorecard (which sources the stories in this collection come from), The International Effect, Notable 2020 Awards, In Memoriam, and, finally, In Closing.
This essay is similar in style to the encyclopaedic introductions that Gardner Dozois did in his Year’s Bests.
The Cover painting, by Pascal Blanche, is fine, but it suggests a collection of hard or traditional science fiction, and that isn’t this volume (which, I would suggest, contains quite a lot of mainstream-ish content that it is only superficially SF).
At the back of the book there are 2020 Recommended Reading List, and the Permissions, Acknowledgments, and About the Editor pages.

•••

A disappointing volume¹³ and, I’d also add in closing, one that does not do itself any favours in pricing the Kindle version at more or less the same price as the paperback.¹⁴  ●

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1. Ray Nayler (another Asimov’s SF regular) interviewed Rivera about Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars here. I think Nayler lets his preoccupation about the shortcomings of capitalism somewhat blindside him to the more obvious themes of the story, i.e. man as God, and humanity’s appalling treatment of other species. These two issues appear, to a greater or lesser extent, in the two stories already mentioned (the Rivera and the Sturgeon) as well as another two related pieces, Crystal Nights by Greg Egan (Interzone #215, April 2008), and Sandkings by George R. R. Martin (Omni, August 1979). The theme of man as God is particularly prominent in the Egan (and it is the only one of the four pieces where the protagonist alters his behaviour towards the subject species when he realises they are suffering) whereas the Martin is almost entirely about the main character’s sadistic treatment of his alien “pets” (the piece is essentially a “let’s set an anthill on fire for fun” story on steroids but, notwithstanding this, a gripping story and a worthy multiple award winner). Here are my reviews of the Sturgeon, Egan and Martin.

2. Deathworld by Harry Harrison (Astounding Science Fiction, January-March 1960).

3. Mauled can’t be a man in Ray Nayler’s Eyes of the Forest because, of course, that would turn Mauled and Sedef’s relationship a dreadfully patriarchal one. And if you have both Mauled and Sedef as men there will be no women left in the story. The horror!

4. The Sentient, by Nadia Afifi, 2020, is the first in the “Cosmic” series (the next one, Emergent, is due any day now). “The race to stop the first human clones uncovers a dark secret.”

5. A quick skim of ISFDB shows that S.B. Divya has published all over, including a couple of pieces on Tor, and one in Analog.

6. Maureen F. McHugh’s Useless Things (Eclipse Three, 2009) is another example of a story that goes nowhere or has no ending.

7. Carrie Vaughn’s Sinew and Steel and What They Told has a prequel: An Easy Job.

8. The Long Iapetan Night by Julie Novakova was previously published in Czech in 2018, and won the Aeronautilus Award for best short story.

9. Dilman Dila has an interesting biography.

10. A handful of us read This World is Made for Monsters by M. Rickert in a recent Facebook group read. Two of us were mystified, and two didn’t comment about the meaning of the story. I think someone on Goodreads (where the point of the story is either not mentioned in reviews or seems to have gone over readers’ heads) suggested it was an “okay, Boomer” story.
I’m reminded of the old movie quote: “If you want to send a message, use Western Union”.

11. AirBody by Sameem Siddiqui was the winner of the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for 2021.

12. The Translator, at Low Tide by Vajra Chandrasekera was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award—a group of voters who, it seems, like to see writers writing.

13. We read this as a recent group read in one of my Facebook groups. I don’t think people found it as disappointing as I did, but I suspect most thought it was a mixed bag. Here are the votes in the end of read poll for what they are worth (very small sample size, 11 people; 1% = 1 vote, 3% = 2 votes, 5% = 3 votes, etc.):

14. The UK Kindle version, as of today, costs £10.06; the paperback costs £10.61, a 55p difference (66 cents). The other Year’s Bests have much more of a price split between the Kindle and paperback editions (e.g the Strahan volume, £8.49/£11.48). At least two of the readers in this group read didn’t buy the ebook because of this pricing policy, and only read the stories they already had or were available free online.  ●