Summary:
There are two strong novellas in this issue, A Rocket for Dimitrios by Ray Nayler (which is particularly good) and The Realms of Water by Robert Reed. Otherwise, this is a poor issue with all the remaining fiction average or worse, and the non-fiction columns quite boring (even Norman Spinrad’s On Books is duller than usual).
[ISFDB link] [Asimov’s SF, Amazon UK/USA]

Other reviews:
Rich Horton, Locus #721, February 2021
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Michelle Ristuccia, Tangent Online
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Sheila Williams; Associate Editor, Emily Hockaday

Fiction:
A Rocket for Dimitrios • novella by Ray Nayler ∗∗∗∗+
The Fear of Missing Out • short story by Robert H. Cloake ∗∗+
No Stone Unturned • novelette by Nick Wolven ∗
The Three-Day Hunt • short story by Robert R. Chase ∗∗
Table Etiquette for Diplomatic Personnel, in Seventeen Scenes • novelette by Suzanne Palmer ∗∗
Hunches • novelette by Kristine Kathryn Rusch –
Humans and Other People • short story by Sean William Swanwick ∗∗
Shy Sarah and the Draft Pick Lottery • novelette by Ted Kosmatka ∗
Mayor for Today • novelette by Fran Wilde ∗
I Didn’t Buy It • short story by Naomi Kanakia ∗
The Realms of Water • novella by Robert Reed ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Donato Giancola
A Magical Eire • editorial by Sheila Williams
One Hundred Years of Robots • essay by Robert Silverberg
Get It? • essay by James Patrick Kelly
Poetry • by Jane Yolen (2), Leslie J. Anderson, Robert Frazier, Avra Margariti
In Memoriam: Mike Resnick (1942-2020) • obituary by Sheila Williams
Next Issue
On Books: Out There • essay by Norman Spinrad
Thirty-Fifth Annual Readers’ Award
Index
SF Conventional Calendar • by Erwin S. Strauss

_____________________

[All the story reviews have been previously posted on sfshortstories.com so, if you have read them there, skip down to the thee dots ••• and the non-fiction reviews.]

A Rocket for Dimitrios by Ray Nayler is the second of his ‘Sylvia Aldstatt’ stories,¹ and takes place in an alternate world where America, after finding a crashed flying saucer in 1938, went on to develop superweapons that changed the course of WWII (and also allowed it to establish hegemony over the rest of the world: Russia was invaded after the war; Roosevelt is serving his seventh term as president).
The story starts with Aldstatt falling out of a “terraplane” and plummeting towards the surface before the story flashbacks to a point in time several days earlier. Here we see her at an American Embassy party in Istanbul, where the ambassador talks to her about the purpose of her visit:

“So, you’re the girl that talks to dead people,” the ambassador had said as I came into his office that morning.
I noticed he had one of those idiotic gold Roosevelt silhouette pins in his lapel. A badge of loyalty. They weren’t required, but I was beginning to see them crop up more and more among the sycophants of the diplomatic corps.
So, you’re a puffed-up, aging boy whose daddy was smart enough to grab up the saucer patents early, I wanted to say. But I didn’t. I wasn’t feeling combative. I was feeling fragile and tired, struggling to fight off a cold caught on the transatlantic rocket flight.
[. . .]
“Sir, I’m a combat veteran of the Second World War and the Afterwar. I was in General Hedy Lamarr’s Technical Corps. I pilot the loops, if that’s what you mean.”
Maybe that would help him sort the word “girl” out of his speech.
He didn’t even blink.  p. 16

Before this meeting Aldstatt talks briefly to a Chief Inspector Refik Bayar, a well-connected Turkish secret policeman better known as “The Fisherman”, who offers a briefing on Dimitrios Makropoulos, the dead man whose memories she is going to read. Makropoulos supposedly knows (or knew) the location of a second crashed saucer, and the Americans urgently want to find it before any other country does to avoid destabilising the world order.
When Aldstatt later goes to the building that houses Makropoulos’s body and the loop machinery, she meets the Chief Inspector once more, and gets a briefing on the dead man’s life as a professional middleman and criminal who operated in the shadows:

“There is a drug smuggling ring in the mountains north of Thessaloniki run by a Greek named Dimitrios who is never caught. This is in 1937. Was it him? We believe so—but we cannot be sure. We don’t pick up his trail again with certainty until he is sighted by one of our agents at the Athene Palace hotel in Bucharest. There, we know it is him. Our Dimitrios. Now he’s playing the role of a Greek freighter captain, but what he is really involved in is selling Black Sea naval intelligence to the Nazis via their emissaries in Rumania. This is 1940. We have our eyes on him until 1942, when our services are”—he paused, considering his words—“compromised. We catch a glimpse, perhaps, of him again. The port town of Varna, in fascist Bulgaria. First mate of a salvage vessel. He approaches one of our double agents embedded with the Axis Bulgarian government with information he says will alter the course of the war. This is 1943. The course of the war, by then, is largely unalterable. It took you Americans a few years to crack any of the technology you found on that saucer that crashed in your Western desert, but by 1943, things were much more certain.”
Ashes, ashes, you all fall down, I thought. And Turkey wakes up from its semi-Fascist dreams and joins the winning team to make sure it gets a slot in the U.N. But what was Turkey up to before that?
“And then?”
“And then our double agent in Bulgaria is compromised. And shot.”
There was a long beat of silence, with only the seagulls screaming over the Golden Horn to fill it.  p. 22

When Aldstatt eventually dons the loop helmet, and enters the dead man’s memories, she initially sees him trying to sell the location of the saucer to the Germans in the middle of WWII, before seeing his childhood as a goatherd in the Greek mountains; then she sees him float in the sea after his ship is torpedoed.
After the session she tells Alvin, her OSS handler, that Makropoulos spoke directly to her—something unprecedented in any of the dead people she has read—and that he appears to be aware of what has happened to him.
The rest of the story sees Sylvia reliving more of Makropoulos’s memories (which eventually start deteriorate and become distorted by her presence) against a backdrop of external developments that, among other things, include an apparent schism at the top of the American government over the desirability of recovering the second saucer—as revealed to Aldstatt by a night time visitor in a antigravity suit. This latter character is (spoiler), Eleanor Roosevelt, who reappears later on.
The conclusion of the story not only manages to satisfyingly tie up all the various plot strands but also, after revealing one of Makropoulos’s formative experiences as a child, produces an unexpectedly touching ending.
This is a very impressive piece (probably one of the best I’ve read recently in Asimov’s) and one that provides a huge amount of immersive detail. Nearly every paragraph throws off descriptions and information about the characters, their behaviour, their physical location, the geopolitics of this world, and the geopolitics of our world. You end up with the impression that Nayler has taken all his experience as a Peace Corps volunteer, Foreign Service officer, and Cultural Affairs officer—and his life time observations of the world and its inhabitants—and squeezed them into one story.
This should be on the Hugo finalist ballot, but it probably won’t be.²
∗∗∗∗+ (Very good to Excellent). 18,800 words.

•

The Fear of Missing Out by Robert H. Cloake³ starts off intriguingly with a man called Candid meeting an attractive man on the way to a book club meeting. Rather than fumble a conversation (he later self-identifies as the “office loser”), he turns on his implanted auto-personality:

Candid turned on the software, and immediately his vision faded into a whitish haze. Only his overlays were visible.
When he had first tried the auto-personality in private, the sensory fade-out scared him. But he realized that the software couldn’t work if you were watching and analyzing the situation for yourself. You could play back what happened later, or, of course, turn it off at any time.
With all his senses muted except touch, he became acutely conscious of the texture of his seat and the cool metal of his buckle where his arm rested against it. He felt his mouth move, but he couldn’t hear what he was saying, and then he felt his arm rise and do something, an unfamiliar gesture the auto-personality had chosen. He didn’t resist.  p. 43

Candid later discovers that his auto-personality has arranged a coffee date with the man, Barack, and he initially tries to deal with their next encounter on his own. However, after a fumble or two, he switches the auto-personality back on. Then, after leaving the coffee bar, they go somewhere else, and Candid briefly surfaces to find himself in a low-lit room. When Barack asks him if there is anything wrong he lets the auto-personality take over again, and after a while senses that they are having sex. This produces a good line:

And that was how Candid lost his virginity while unable to see, hear, smell, or taste anything.  p. 46

The rest of the piece sees Candid spend most of the following work day watching himself having sex (the software records what happens when it is active), and agonising about not being able to be himself in the relationship. When (spoiler) he finally manages to turn off the AP for a longer period he finds that the excitement of personal interaction with Barack is going to trigger his seizures. Ultimately, Candid decides that Barack deserves his AP and not him.
This is an interesting piece that, I guess, explores to what extent people suppress their real selves to be part of a couple, or to fit into society more generally. But I’m not sure that is writer’s intention: if it was he would probably have ended the story at the “it was the only adult, loving choice to make” line, and not continued on with a final two paragraphs where Candid experiences as much of the real world as he can before he once more visits Barack’s apartment. If I have got this broadly correct, then moving the “loving choice” sentiment to the very end of the piece would be the better option.
So, in conclusion, a thought-provoking piece but perhaps not an entirely successful one.
∗∗+ (Average to good, and probably a minor revision away from the latter). 3700 words.

•

No Stone Unturned by Nick Wolven jettisons his (more usual, in my experience) breezy, lightweight approach in a more serious piece that starts with Martin coming back to his automated “HappyHome” to find his partner has left his son to run wild, with toys and dishes and mess everywhere. After he finds his son in bed asleep, Martin goes outside to find his wife Anna, who is having some sort of breakdown or dissociative episode in the communal reflecting pond.
Martin is later contacted by a man called Daniel, who says he can explain what has happened to his wife. When they meet he suggests that Anna has become “decohesive”—a result of her being a “Leaper” one of the first astronauts to use a quantum matter transmission device to explore the Galaxy.
The rest of the story sees a physicist called Lina from the LEAP program turn up, and Anna have further episodes where she forgets to pick up the child from nursery, or leaves him in the car, etc. Then Martin and Daniel meet again, and we get more of Daniel’s outsider hand-wavium about the LEAP process. He finally explains that that it doesn’t account for the “chaos” of the human mind when scanning a subject for quantum transmission, causing personality changes in those transported.
The final scene (spoiler) has Martin return home to find Lina the physicist there again, and to be told that Anna has decided to go back out again because she wants to be among the stars.
I found this dull, unengaging stuff, partly because of the makey-up science (shoving “quantum” and “chaos” in there does not make the hand-wavium believable), and partly because I just didn’t care about Anna, who seems to spend most of her time pretentiously staring at the stars or reflections of them in water (I exaggerate, but that’s what it felt like).
∗ (Mediocre). 9,600 words.

•

The Three-Day Hunt by Robert R. Chase starts with an Afghanistan veteran called Hammond going to investigate a flying saucer that has crashed near to his cabin in the woods. When he and Tripod, his three-legged dog, get to the craft the pilot is missing, so they start tracking it.
The rest of the story has the pair following the alien through the wood for the next couple of days, during which we get Hammond’s military and domestic backstory as well as the dog’s (their paths crossed in Afghanistan, just before a bomb went off and injured them both). Later, the military contact him by phone to try to get him to stop his pursuit, but Hammond ignores them and carries on.
Then (spoiler), when Hammond stops to treat the dog’s bleeding paws, he finally sees the alien. As Hammond approaches it, the alien gestures towards the dog—at which point the story dissolves into a mini-lecture about how humanity’s domestication and/or symbiosis with dogs makes it more likely that we will be able to successfully establish a relationship with aliens.
More a notion than a story, but okay, I suppose.
∗∗ (Average). 4900 words.

•

Table Etiquette for Diplomatic Personnel, in Seventeen Scenes by Suzanne Palmer opens with Station Commander Ennie Niagara of Kenlon Station having dinner with the Ijt ambassador, an avian like alien. Niagara listens to the Ijt’s account of the previous commander’s fall from grace (a food related incident involving the serving of ghost peppers), and learns that his actions were designed to get rid of the Joxto, a troublesome race of aliens, from the station. The conversation closes with the ambassador’s news that the Joxto are on their way back.
Multiple plot elements and characters are then introduced into the story: two aliens, Qasi and Baxo, set off the fire alarms when they try the human custom of fondue (the latter creature is unknown to the rest of the station, and lurks in the air ducts); then a spaceship arrives with a Captain Vincente, who comes with official news of the Joxto’s imminent arrival; meanwhile, a body is found in engineering, which turns out to be the previous station commander . . . .
After this the stories trundles along while the investigation proceeds. More characters are introduced (two security officers, Mackie and Digby, as well as Dr Reed). There is an alien fruit ceremony that Ennie attends before later going to her office and finding a piece of fruit that Bako, the “ghost alien” has left there. Then Vincente gets news from Earth that there is an assassin on the station looking to kill the Joxto.
After the fruit left in the commander’s cabin is identified as a particularly delicious one from Tyfse, a planet destroyed previously by the warring Joxto and Okgono, this all eventually resolves (spoiler) in the station’s garden ring. There we find out that Fred the gardener is plotting with the remaining surviving Tyfsian to sell the fruit it has saved from its planet, in return for assisting it to kill both the Joxto and Okgono. The story closes with Ennie confronting both races about the genocide.
This is an okay story, I guess, but it’s plodding as its title, goes on too long, and generally felt like a dull ‘Sector General’⁴ story with trendy pronouns:

“That is because I have not yet added the [fondue] heat source,” Qasi said. “I wished to test my understanding of the processes and equipment, and also refine my selection of sauces, before I invite an entire party to participate in the experience. I will even invite the commander!”
“What is the heat source, though?” Bako asked. Ey rotated eir head upside down so ey could peer at the underside of the pot, long whiskers bent back. “Some sort of thermal pod?”
“No!” Qasi said, her long tail twitching behind her from the excitement. “This is the very best part.”
She pulled out a small metal can, took the lid off, and slipped it between the legs of the stand under the pot. Then she grasped the small pull-tab on the side between two claws and pulled.
Flame jetted out of the top of the can, engulfing the pot. Bako skittered away on all eir two dozen legs, screeching in alarm. “It’s supposed to be able to be modulated,” Qasi said, trying to get close enough to see without burning her own whiskers. “I probably should have read the instructions.”
“Fire!” Bako shouted. “You made a fire! On a space station! This was a terrible idea, Qasi!”  p. 79

I can see why you might use these pronouns for a human character, but why use them for a genderless alien instead of “they” or “their” or “its”? It’s an unnecessary distraction.
Another thing that irritated me by the end of the story was the continuous mention of food. There are numerous occasions where various characters are eating, and one of these, where a minor character is stuffing a burrito into his cakehole, just destroyed my suspension-of-disbelief. I thought, ‘They are still eating burritos on a distant space station hundreds of years from now?’
I also didn’t much care for the lazy contemporary dialogue and thoughts that the characters sometimes express. Apart from the likes of “Holy shit that’s good” and “crap ton of energy,” we also have twaddle like this:

The coffee machine was, in one of humanity’s oldest and most sacred covenants, fair game, with the caveat that if you finished the pot, you set it to make another.  p. 84

I usually look forward to Palmer’s work but this was disappointing.
∗∗ (Average, barely). 15,150 words.

•

Hunches by Kristine Kathryn Rusch is one of her ‘Diving’ series, although a peripheral piece I think, and it starts in the wreckage of a spaceship bridge, with Lieutenant Jicha as the only survivor:

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

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

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

– (Awful). 7,650 words.

•

Humans and Other People by Sean William Swanwick⁵ opens with Mitchell and a robot called Simone (“Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir”) in a boat, with Mitchell diving down to a drowned Atlantic City Municipal Court to retrieve various documents. When he surfaces, Simone gives him news of an apartment fire. The pair are soon back on land and at the site of the blaze, where they manage to finagle matters so they are the only ones permitted to enter the “unsafe” building. This is followed by a meeting where they shake down the residents to get the salvage contract for their possessions.
The main part of the story (spoiler) sees the pair at work in the building, in which, the guard warns them, there may be an “anthroform” lurking. They soon find out that it is a robot when it physically attacks Mitchell and then Simone. During this episode they realise that it is made from standard parts, speaks Chinese, and its power levels are low (the only thing the creature says during the scuffle is that it has 6% power remaining). This encounter leads to more robots in the attic, where Mitchell gives them batteries and then rigs a solar panel to give them a permanent power supply. Then he and Simone leave.
The plot is by far the weakest part of this piece: not only is it relatively uncomplicated, but the idea of giving experimental robots of an unknown origin (one of whom has previously attacked you) a power supply and leaving them to it seems rather foolhardy. However, the story is fluently told, and there is a lively relationship between Mitchell and Simone that results in some sparky and/or quirky conversation. This isn’t limited to the exchanges between the pair however, as the apartment owners discover:

“No, wait, hold on,” said one of the interchangeable three. “So, we’re paying, what, you? And, er, your—” they paused, confused. “F. . . friend? Employee? The robot?” Simone turned a featureless head toward the speaker and said nothing. “And they’re going to help you retrieve things?”
“She is going to help.”
“Excuse me?”
“She is going to help.” Simone’s tone had grown clipped. “Not they. There is only me.”
The marks practically fell over one another in a confused torrent of explanation. “I thought robots were theys instead of its—” “You’re definitely displaying a gender neutral—” “Wait, is robot wrong? I’ve heard people saying Mobile Anthroform—”
Simone played an audio file of a sharp handclap as two sets of metal fingers came together, silencing the table. “No offense is taken,” Simone said. “If you find yourself struggling with the nomenclature, please feel free to ignore me completely.”
Mitch cursed inwardly—Simone had been getting worse and worse at handling the clients. In Pittsburgh, a recent argument about the nature of identity had ended with the clients never calling again.  p. 117

It is a mixed bag of a story, but a very promising debut: I look forward to further stories from this writer.
∗∗ (Average). 5,300 words.

•

Shy Sarah and the Draft Pick Lottery by Ted Kosmatka starts off with a woman called Sarah arranging an encounter with a fan called Ames at a baseball match. She sits in the seat next to him after a supposed ticket mix-up (his girlfriend has been delayed by the rest of her team) and, after a certain amount of pretence and social chit-chat, she eventually introduces the idea of sabermetrics (statistical analysis of baseball results), and also that teams want particular fans—superfans—because they positively influence the outcome of their matches.
After this we see Sarah with her bosses, who quiz her about the suitability of Ames as a “candidate” and, later on, she arranges to bump into him. They go for a walk, and she tells him about her job:

“It works like this,” I say. “Most people are normal, but one out of a hundred is different. They have some kind of talent that’s hard to explain. For me it started in childhood—crippling shyness, the obligate side effect. I was sent to see specialists.
My parents thought it was therapy, but the specialists had their own ideas. In reality, they were conducting a search.”
“Search for what?”
“For children like me. Who could help them with people like you.” I glance at him.
“The real prospects.”
“So you’re saying I’m one of these prospects?”
“That you are. A certified, top-tier, can’t-miss prospect, and no going back now. But don’t blame me; it was the spreadsheet cowboys who found you. I just gave the final nod.”
The Walk sign flashes and we cross the intersection.
“Found me how?”  p. 130

She goes on to tell him more about the world of “shies,” “ply-mouths,” “daykeeps” and “latents.” And of “prospects,” fans like him whose luck rubs off on the teams.
The rest of the story shows us a draft meeting where Ames is discussed by various corporate types and sold to a team in Texas (all of this without his attendance or knowledge). We also see Sarah telling Ames of a much wider conspiracy that involves the drafting of people into various other jobs (valets, blackjack dealers, cashiers, Uber drivers, etc.), which may be in locations they do not want to live (there is also a crack about only untalented people being allowed to become bankers and lawyers). She finally advises him that when he gets an upcoming job offer he should accept it—or he will experience unpleasant consequences.
The story ends (spoiler) with Ames missing the flight to his new job, and Sarah tracking him down and telling him she wants him to help her fight the system.
This is a readable enough story but I wasn’t convinced by the Sabermetric conspiracy gimmick, and I’m not that interested in baseball stories (or the author’s infatuation with “knuckle ball throwers”). Finally, I’m getting a bit bored of stories with simplistic anti-capitalist subtexts, most of which never amount to much beyond conspiracies and/or smash the system endings.
∗ (Mediocre). 8,250 words.

•

Mayor for Today by Fran Wilde⁶ begins with its narrator, Victor, being offered the job of Mayor of Danzhai in China, but only for one day. His GigTime app tells him that the job is well paid and includes travel and accommodation so, as Victor needs the money, he accepts.
After half a dozen pages of setup (we learn a lot about the future gig economy and Victor’s financial and life circumstances) he finally arrives in Danzhai and joins a queue at the municipal office to sign on for the job, only to find a massive queue of mayors-for-a-day. It then materialises that one of the previous mayors has refused to quit and, as the other mayors subsequently can’t sign on and complete their jobs, the GigTime app won’t give them their tickets and visas to fly home. So they are all stranded in Danzhai. Then, after his second night there, Victor ends up in the same situation when he loses his room at the hotel and has to share with a group of the other mayors.
The remainder of the story shows us the economic and social ecosystem that has evolved around the hundreds of stranded mayors, and there are also a few set pieces as well: drone footage of their plight appears on the news, Victor meets the incumbent Mayor and discovers he is an alien, and so on. Eventually (spoiler) Victor and the others manage to trick the alien Mayor into planting a tree, which completes his job and also that of all the others.
There is the seed of a half-decent story here but this takes far too long to get going (Ron Goulart would have got to the queue of mayors in about 800 words, not six pages), and making the trouble-making mayor an alien is over-egging the pudding. It also has an overlong and weak ending. I struggled to finish this, which is not surprising given that it is a 6,000 word story crammed into 10,000.
I’d also add that this latter aspect of the story seems fairly typical of the current generation of writers, who seem incapable of writing concisely or pacing a story, and who think that endless prattle about the character’s job or personal concerns will be of obvious interest to readers. Personally, I’m not interested in thinly veiled descriptions of the writer or their friends’ problems with the gig time economy, student loans, housing or other family and domestic trivia. When did SF become about this?
∗ (Mediocre). 9,900 words.

•

I Didn’t Buy It by Naomi Kanakia starts with an android called Reznikov being abused by his female owner until a friend of hers calls the police and she is arrested. After this Reznikov rips out his transponder and lives wild until he meets another woman and starts living with her. The rest of the story details their relationship (and the woman’s reservations about him) until they eventually have children—at which point the “story” grinds to a halt.
This story is similar to the kind of work you find on Tor.com (I suspect Reznikov is a metaphor for a certain type of emotionally shutdown man) and it has MFA/writer’s workshop stamped all over it. Apart from the fact there is little in the way of structure or an arc, I could have done without the omniscient author comments, e.g. “This is a story about a creature that was incapable of telling stories about itself.”
∗ (Mediocre). 2,850 words.

•

The Realms of Water by Robert Reed is part of his “Great Ship” series and gets off to a picturesque start with a group of travellers crossing a desert in a slow and uncomfortable six-legged machine (the native Grand Many make travellers endure this to dissuade them from making the journey to their city). The story opens with one of the passengers, the male of a Janusian couple (who grows out of the back of his female partner) addressing the other seven humans in the cabin about the illusion of friendship produced while travelling in such straitened circumstances. After going on at some length, he eventually concludes with this:

A little laugh. Then, “Now imagine that we remain trapped inside this minuscule space for even longer. Oh, let’s say for the next three hundred cycles. I guarantee, it won’t matter how noble and decent each one of you believes yourself to be. You will come to hate everyone else. Indeed, after three hundred cycles inside this miserable cabin, you’ll find yourself wanting the strange old lady in back to please, please step outside and die. And why? Because you’ve grown so tired—all of us are so very tired—of that goddamn endless smile of hers.”
The janusian fell silent, and everyone else laughed.
Loudest of all was the old woman sitting in back.  p. 165

The woman at the back is eventually revealed to be Quee Lee, a very old and wealthy woman from the Great Ship who, when their machine is damaged after stumbling into a pothole, suggests they divert to a nearby house where one of the Grand Many lives in isolation.
When they arrive Lee pleads for help at the door of the home, but they are ignored until, eventually, two robots appear and begin repairing their machine. Then Lee wanders off into the desert night and stumbles upon one of the Grand Many (presumably the owner of the house). Lee and the huge creature start talking, and she provides, at its request, and after “ripping away thousands of years of existence,” a brief autobiography. Then she learns that the creature she is talking to is a male, and his name is The Great Surus:

“I took the name from human history.” Then he said it again, in a very specific way. “Surus.”
She repeated the word.
“Do you know the name?”
Quee Lee asked her bioceramic mind for advice, a thousand potential answers dislodged from a long life full of curiosity. Because of cues in the diction, one possibility felt a little more appropriate than the rest.
She began to answer, offering a first word.
And Surus repeated the word. “‘Elephant,’” he said. “Yes. To be specific, Surus was Hannibal Barca’s favorite war elephant.”
“And why take that name?” she asked.
“I was studying your species,” he said. “Long before I arrived on the Great Ship, I came across the elephant’s story. And somehow his life and his miseries found a home inside me.”
“Oh,” was the best reaction that she could manage.
Silence came, and then a distant voice crossed the ridge. A human male was calling to someone else. But whoever was shouting fell silent again. Just the two of them were sitting on that slope together, and looking at the golden dome, Quee Lee finally asked, “Did you also walk across the Alps?”
The giant’s hand moved, swift and gentle, one finger touching the human shoulder and then gone again. Leaving behind the heat of a giant electrically charged body, and stealing some of her perspiration, too.
“The Alps would be nothing,” said that quiet, sorrowful voice. “You cannot begin to guess the life that I have marched.”  p. 171

Most of the remainder of the story tells of The Great Surus’s life history, something that, in some respects, parallels the story of Hannibal and his elephants (this and the Roman Carthagian wars are mentioned in the introduction to the story). This account begins with the birth of the city of Samoon, and how their army one day marches to the Lithium Wash to dig up thirty-nine Grand Many orphans. The Great Surus is one of them, and we see how he and the others are raised by an old woman of their kind, and later trained for the defence of the city. We also learn of the Grand Many’s electrical physiology, and how they communicate by microwaves (one day, when Surus climbs a mountain, he can hear many others of his own kind in the distance).
Then the commander of the army dies and his son takes over, starting a war with the Mistrials. The next few chapters detail the long conflict (spoiler): how the Samoon army cross the mountains by using carriages and massive batteries to extend the range of the Grand Many; the use of the Many as fireships in a huge land battle; the siege of The City of Promises and the near mutiny among the Many, only prevented when they smell the “sweet electric” over the wall. Eventually, after a huge battle on a peninsula, the Samoons build a fleet of rafts to return home, but are ambushed at sea. Surus walks off the raft to avoid capture and descends into the depths.
The story then skips forward eight hundred thousand years, to a point in time where the seas of the planet have boiled off into the atmosphere. Surus’s body is found by scientists and recharged, and he comes back to consciousness. Eventually he decides he doesn’t like talking to the scientists and he leaves, travelling to the mountain that separates the lands of the Many and the water people.
At this point in the tale Lee’s machine is fixed, so The Great Surus brings his story to an end. She travels on to the City of Copper Salts, where the natives’ initial irritation at the modifications to their machine is quelled by the revelation that they were completed on the orders of The Great Surus.
I’m not sure this story forms a particularly coherent whole but the individual parts are fascinating and, if you are looking for a story that is part Roman history, part weird alien ecosystem, and part time-spanning epic—a story that is vast—then this will fit the bill. I almost rated it as very good, and probably would have if it hadn’t been for one or two parts that are not as clear as they could be (e.g. the initial meeting between Lee and Surus is a little confusing when it comes to what he looks like). Nevertheless, possibly one for the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 19,850 words.

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The non-fiction in this issue just adds to the general feel of mediocrity. The Cover by Donato Giancola is a dark piece, and the little light there is consists mostly of a blurry face—hardly the kind of thing that is going to grab you on the newsstand. That said, any artist would struggle to produce a decent cover for Asimov’s given their propensity for carpet-bombing the artwork with type—as, once again, they do here.
A Magical Eire by Sheila Williams provides an account of her pre-Wordcon tour of Ireland in 2019; Robert Silverberg contributes One Hundred Years of Robots, an essay cum dull Wikipedia article about the hundredth anniversary of the word ‘robot’; and Get It? by James Patrick Kelly sees him trail round the internet once again, this time looking at SF humour. Even On Books: Out There by Norman Spinrad is uncharacteristically dull this issue, and sees him vexed about the “rubber science” of faster-than-light travel (personally I could care less). After the introduction bemoaning the use of this in fiction he goes on to an examination of Transformation by James Gunn, Relic by Alan Dean Foster, and The Death of the Universe by Brandon Q. Morris (if I recall correctly—it was some time ago and I omitted to make notes—the  very long lived people/immortals of the latter novel and their travels around the universe impressed Spinrad the most).
There is also Poetry in this issue from Jane Yolen (two items), Leslie J. Anderson, Robert Frazier, and Avra Margariti (none of which, as per usual, particularly grabbed me); In Memoriam: Mike Resnick (1942-2020) is a short but heart-felt obituary by Sheila Williams; Next Issue plugs a new Greg Egan novella, as well as another few well-known names (Rudy Rucker, Michael Swanwick, James Patrick Kelly, etc.); and there is the annual Thirty-Fifth Annual Readers’ Award and Index, and the usual SF Conventional Calendar by Erwin S. Strauss.

•••

But for the two strong novellas, this would be a poor issue. In particular the columns seem very tired (Silverberg seems to be scraping the barrel for ideas, and Kelly’s column might have been useful in 1998, but I fail to see the point of it now). I suspect what we have here is an editor who is unwilling to knife those aspects of the magazine that have outlived their usefulness.  ●

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1. The first published story of Ray Nayler’s ‘Sylvia Aldstatt’ series is The Disintergration Loops (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2019). I suggest you read A Rocket for Dimitrios first.

2. The Nayler probably won’t be on the Hugo ballot because it appears in a print magazine and isn’t available free online. And because it is also up against the Tor novellas, which are published as books (and book voters outnumber short fiction voters). Among other things.

3. If I was editing the magazine I’m not sure I’d include this reading-desire killing sentence in the introduction to the Cloake story:

With a background in academic philosophy, he uses his fiction to explore the ethical and ontological problems of truth, human personhood, and aesthetic value. p. 43

4. The ‘Sector General’ series, by James White, were stories about a hospital in space which treated different types of aliens. There is a list on ISFDB—read those instead.

5. The introduction to the Swanwick story mentions Gardner Dozois (whose office manager the author was) shaking a baby toy at him when Swanwick was an infant, so I presume the author is the son of Michael Swanwick.

6. There is this under the title of Fran Wilde’s story: “The author acknowledges the support of the Future Affairs Administration, Danzhai SF Camp, and Wanda Group.” Do we really need mini-Oscar acceptance speeches at the start of stories?  ●