ISFDB
Magazine

Other reviews:
Various, Goodreads
Various, Vector Short Story Club

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Editors, Neil Clarke & Sean Wallace

Fiction:
The Things • novelette by Peter Watts ∗∗∗+
All the King’s Monsters • short story by Megan Arkenberg ∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • Sergio Rebolledo
Lucius Shepard: An Expatriate Writer of Exotic Tales • interview by Jason S. Ridler
Video Game Sci-Fi Comes of Age • essay by Brian Trent
2009 Reader’s Poll and Contest • editorial by Neil Clarke

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When I researched the previous post (John W. Campbell’s Frozen Hell, the recently published longer version of Who Goes There?) I came across mention of The Things by Peter Watts, a story which retells the events of the original piece from the alien’s (rather than the human’s) viewpoint. (I note in passing that Watts references the John Carpenter movie version, The Thing, and not Campbell’s story.¹)
If you are unfamiliar with any of these, or haven’t read my original review, I’ve cut and pasted the latter into the footnotes below so you can catch up.²
Watts’ story gets off to an engrossing start with the thoughts of one of the alien Things:

I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front.
I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead.
I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance.
The names don’t matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. The world has burned everything else.
I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair.
MacReady has told me to burn Blair if he comes back alone, but MacReady still thinks I am one of him. I am not: I am being Blair, and I am at the door. I am being Childs, and I let myself in. I take brief communion, tendrils writhing forth from my faces, intertwining: I am BlairChilds, exchanging news of the world.
The world has found me out. It has discovered my burrow beneath the tool shed, the half-finished lifeboat cannibalized from the viscera of dead helicopters. The world is busy destroying my means of escape. Then it will come back for me.
There is only one option left. I disintegrate. Being Blair, I go to share the plan with Copper and to feed on the rotting biomass once called Clarke; so many changes in so short a time have dangerously depleted my reserves. Being Childs, I have already consumed what was left of Fuchs and am replenished for the next phase. I sling the flamethrower onto my back and head outside, into the long Antarctic night.
I will go into the storm, and never come back.

The rest of the story alternates between a retelling of events from the Thing’s point of view, and its various epiphanies. One of these is the realisation that its spaceship has been covered in ice for millions of years and that no rescue is coming; another, more important, discovery is that humans are unable to “commune”, to reach into each other like the aliens do. The Thing finds the inability of humans to do this horrific and later, after discovering the function of the human brain, concludes that is it is sharing its flesh “with thinking cancer”:

Those encysted souls. Those tumors. Hiding away in their bony caverns, folded in on themselves.
I knew they couldn’t hide forever; this monstrous anatomy had only slowed communion, not stopped it. Every moment I grew a little. I could feel myself twining around Palmer’s motor wiring, sniffing upstream along a million tiny currents. I could sense my infiltration of that dark thinking mass behind Blair’s eyes.
Imagination, of course. It’s all reflex that far down, unconscious and immune to micromanagement. And yet, a part of me wanted to stop while there was still time. I’m used to incorporating souls, not rooming with them. This, this compartmentalization was unprecedented. I’ve assimilated a thousand worlds stronger than this, but never one so strange. What would happen when I met the spark in the tumor? Who would assimilate who?

This is all pretty good stuff, and the story has an appropriately chilling ending (spoiler: the remaining Thing decides to end the isolation that humans experience by infiltrating them all). The story later appeared in at least four of the ‘Year’s Bests’, as well as winning the Shirley Jackson Award.
Nevertheless, I have a number of minor criticisms: first, it rambles at points and becomes a little unfocused (which also makes the story slightly overlong); second, the last line is jarring: “I will have to rape it into them.” “Rape” seems an odd word choice here for a couple of reasons—not only is it is a sexually charged one which produces a discordant note in a story that features only men at a remote Antarctic station, but it also seems like an inappropriate word for the Thing to use. Even if the Thing (which reproduces in an entirely different way) could comprehend what the word means to humans, it is unlikely that it would misdescribe its act of salvation in this way.
There is only one other story in this issue (Clarkesworld was a much slimmer magazine a decade ago), All the King’s Monsters by Megan Arkenberg. It opens with a woman who is a prisoner in some kind of fantasy tower:

Before Hunger came, I shared a cell with Grief. Her child was dead. She called his name at night, weeping into her ragged white hair. I could not comfort her. She flinched from my hands, from my voice, from my offers to comb her hair or share my half of the gritty gray bread the guards brought us.
I whispered to her sometimes, telling of Uri, but she did not listen—or else she did not hear. I learned long ago that Grief is a monster without ears.

There is a second woman who comes later for the other prisoners, and who talks of a king and his iron monsters, but I finished the story baffled. It all felt rather pretentious.

The Cover for this issue is by Sergio Rebolledo, and it is a striking, if dark and monochromatic one (there is a lot of black and grey there, and I found my eye initially drawn to the light, not the robot or the child).
I was looking forward to Lucius Shepard: An Expatriate Writer of Exotic Tales, the interview by Jason S. Ridler, but ended up finding it a dry and stilted affair (I got the impression that Shepard was responding to a posted or emailed set of questions). Nevertheless, I learned a few useful snippets about an author I really like but don’t read as much of as I should.³
Video Game Sci-Fi Comes of Age by Brian Trent is an article about a pastime I never managed to get into (my poor coordination limited my progress with the likes of Halo and Mass Effect (?), and I wasn’t prepared to put in the time to improve my hand-eye coordination). The article is probably quite dated by now, but there is the odd comment I found of interest:

Sci-fi is speculative fiction rooted in science. It puts society and the human condition through an imaginative filter. It builds structured worlds and histories. We can loosely group its contributions into the Verne and Wells camps; the former wrote optimistic odysseys of techno-exploration, while the latter probed a grimmer (and often dystopian) depth.
Interestingly, one of the most notable features of the gaming industry’s growth is the overwhelming adoption of the Wellsian perspective. Societal collapse, war, and the negative consequences of technology feature prominently in today’s story-based sci-fi games.

2009 Reader’s Poll and Contest by Neil Clarke is a short editorial/note about the 2009 Reader’s Poll, and lists the stories published by Clarkesworld in the previous year. There are also images of all the covers, some of which seem very dark and monochromatic (July, August, and October for a start):

This issue is worth getting a hold of for Watts’ story.  ●

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1. I’m curious as to the copyright implications, if any, of Watts using The Thing movie as the background for his story (or share-cropping, as I believe this is called).

2. My review of John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There? (Astounding Science-Fiction, August 1938):

“Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, Jr.⁵ opens at an Antarctic research station with the crew standing around the tarpaulined body of a frozen alien. One of the main characters, McReady, tells the men that they discovered it at a crashed spaceship near a magnetic anomaly they were investigating. During the process of digging the alien out of the ice they accidentally destroyed the ship.

After this atmospheric but data-dump start the men then discuss whether it is safe to defrost the creature and examine it. The camp physicist, Norris, is vehemently opposed, and his warning telegraphs the arc of the story:

“How the hell can these birds tell what they are voting on? They haven’t seen those three red eyes, and that blue hair like crawling worms. Crawling— damn, it’s crawling there in the ice right now!
“Nothing Earth ever spawned had the unutterable sublimation of devastating wrath that thing let loose in its face when it looked around his frozen desolation twenty million years ago. Mad? It was mad clear through—searing, blistering mad!
“Hell, I’ve had bad dreams ever since I looked at those three red eyes. Nightmares. Dreaming the thing thawed out and came to life—that it wasn’t dead, or even wholly unconscious all those twenty million years, but just slowed, waiting—waiting. You’ll dream, too, while that damned thing that Earth wouldn’t own is dripping, dripping in the Cosmos House tonight.
“And, Connant,” Norris whipped toward the cosmic ray specialist, “won’t you have fun sitting up all night in the quiet. Wind whining above—and that thing dripping—” He stopped for a moment, and looked round.
“I know. That’s not science. But this is, it’s psychology. You’ll have nightmares for a year to come. Every night since I looked at that thing I’ve had ’em. That’s why I hate it—sure I do—and don’t want it around. Put it back where it came from and let it freeze for another twenty million years. I had some swell nightmares—that it wasn’t made like we are—which is obvious—but of a different kind of flesh that it can really control. That it can change its shape, and look like a man— and wait to kill and eat—
“That’s not a logical argument. I know it isn’t. The thing isn’t Earthlogic anyway.”  p. 66-67

After some more discussion the men agree to have Connant babysit the alien’s body overnight, but it isn’t long before he falls asleep and the body goes missing. Then everything kicks off when the Thing is found in the huskies’ enclosure, and the men head there with ice-axes, .45s, and flamethrowers:

Connant stopped at the bend in the corridor. His breath hissed suddenly through his throat. “Great God—”
The revolver exploded thunderously; three numbing, palpable waves of sound crashed through the confined corridors. Two more. The revolver dropped to the hard-packed snow of the trail, and Barclay saw the ice-ax shift into defensive position. Connant’s powerful body blocked his vision, but beyond he heard something mewing, and, insanely, chuckling. The dogs were quieter; there was a deadly seriousness in their low snarls. Taloned feet scratched at hard-packed snow, broken chains were clinking and tangling.
Connant shifted abruptly, and Barclay could see what lay beyond. For a second he stood frozen, then his breath went out in a gusty curse. The Thing launched itself at Connant, the powerful arms of the man swung the ice-ax flatside first at what might have been a head. It scrunched horribly, and the tattered flesh, ripped by a half-dozen savage huskies, leapt to its feet again. The red eyes blazed with an unearthly hatred, an unearthly, unkillable vitality.  p. 73

I love that “mewing and insanely chucking” description.
Even though they finally manage to kill the Thing they note that it has changed shape during the fight to become part-dog. This ability of the alien to change itself down to the cellular level drives the rest of the narrative, as the men no longer know who is human and who is a Thing . . . .
There are a couple of later scenes that rise above the well done paranoia and claustrophobia: one of these is (spoiler) when the men have their blood tested (the theory is that a Thing’s blood will want to “live”); and the other is when McReady and Barclay go to see Blair, who has been isolated in another part of the camp. This last part provides an SFnal finish to the story (in contrast to the movie) when they discover the Thing has built a blue-light emitting atomic reactor to power an anti-gravity device it intends to use to escape.
The best parts of this story are very good but the story as a whole is rather uneven, with some parts that don’t really work (e.g., I didn’t understand the explanation for the failure of the serum samples before they attempted the blood test). A greater problem (and one that I wouldn’t have been able to articulate until I saw it discussed elsewhere) is that the characterisation and point of view is all over the place. If the men were more clearly drawn, and the story told from McReady’s point of view (rather than the semi-omniscient one used), it would have been a much smoother and more effective piece. Overall you get the feeling of a story that needs another draft—but, for all that, it is well worth reading.

The review of the expanded version of this story, Frozen Hell, is here.

3. I learned that, among other things, Shepard’s Over Yonder has a companion piece, and that Viator Plus is a rewritten version of Viator, the latter completed as the author suffered a breakdown (clinical depression). There is also mention of a long novel, Piercefields, which I presume is unfinished (it’s not listed on ISFDB, unless it is the 2013 Beautiful Blood).
There are only two comments after the Shepard interview on the Clarkesworld website, and one of those is someone who has never heard of Shepard (sigh), a great writer and multiple award winner. (Arkenberg’s story has nine comments and Trent’s article has four; Watts’ story has 153).  ●