Summary:
These are the top five novelettes1 in the 2020 Analog Magazine Readers’ Awards. The only standout is Harry Turtledove’s The Quest for the Great Grey Mossy; most the others are at the lower end of the ‘good’ category (although the Chase story is better than that until it comes to an abrupt end).
[Stories]
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Editor, Trevor Quachri
Minerva Girls • novelette by James Van Pelt ∗∗
The Quest for the Great Grey Mossy • novelette by Harry Turtledove ∗∗∗∗
The Offending Eye • novelette by Robert R. Chase ∗∗∗
Sticks and Stones • novelette by Tom Jolly ∗∗∗
I, Bigfoot • novelette by Sarina Dorie ∗∗∗
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Minerva Girls by James Van Pelt (Analog, September/October 2020) starts with three precocious fourteen year old girls planning a trip to the Moon. Throughout the construction of their ship (or rather the adaptation of a gas station storage tank with insulation and an anti-gravity drive), Penny the narrator goes to summer school. As she struggles to master her geography lessons—a list of states, etc.—we see her situation in school, i.e. the tribalism, bullying, pettiness, and so on. When Penny isn’t in class, or hanging out with Jacqueline and Selena, she works in her (presumably widowed) father’s scrap yard, where she sources the parts needed for the ship.
About half way through the story a ticking clock is introduced in the form of Selena and Jacqueline’s parents plans to move away, and the trio rush to test the anti-gravity drive:
By the time we’d solidified the anchors and rigged the power source, the eastern sky had lightened.
We crowded into the crane’s control booth fifty yards from our test site. Selena connected the video game joystick to the wires that ran to the Distortion Drive. She held it out to Jacqueline. “You should do the honors.”
I had my phone out to film our results.
I guess I thought the Distortion Drive would rise up from the golf cart trailer until the cables stopped its progress. That, or it wouldn’t move, which seemed more possible. I steadied the phone and turned on the video.
Jacqueline took a deep breath, then pushed the joystick forward a tick.
I lurched against the glass, as if someone had tipped the control booth from behind. Selena squeaked and caught herself from falling.
Jacqueline bumped her head on the window. Then the control booth shifted back into place.
I said, “What happened?” while rubbing my shoulder.
“Dang,” said Jacqueline. “That’s going to leave a welt.” She sat on the control booth floor, her notebooks spilled around her.
“My machine!” Selena opened the door.
Jacqueline grabbed Selena’s leg. “Not yet.”
A clattering like hail rattled the control booth’s metal ceiling for a couple seconds. Gravel and marble-sized rocks bounced off the ground around the booth. My toolbox that I’d left next to the trailer slammed down along with the wrenches and other tools that had been in it.
“I hadn’t considered that,” said Jacqueline. “I’ll need to narrow the distortion field.” p. 33
Eventually (spoiler) they set off on their trip, and Penny sees North America from orbit: now that the land isn’t an abstract shape on paper she can easily reel off the states and cities, and knows she’ll ace her geography test the next day. They continue on to the Moon.
I think I can see the attraction of this story, which is essentially a YA piece for teenage girls (although it harks back to the lone inventor trope it’s mostly about their personal tribulations). But I wonder if even that audience will manage to suspend disbelief at the thought of three fourteen-year-olds inventing a gravity drive and going to the moon.
I was also puzzled about the story’s appearance in Analog—I wouldn’t have though that the magazine’s readers would be interested in something like this but, surprisingly, it won the novelette section of the Anlab Awards for 2020. I suspect the (mainly) American readership like sentimental YA material more than I do.2
∗∗ (Average). 8,300 words.
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A story liked a lot is The Quest for the Great Gray Mossy by Harry Turtledove. If you want a one line description of this, I’d say, ‘alternate-world dinosaurs do Moby Dick’. That is probably all the description that this review needs but for those who, like me, have not read the novel, the story tells of the dinosaur narrator’s (“Call me Milvil”) journey to Faraway town, where he joins a ship called Queepahd. He then meets the charismatic skipper, and learns of his obsessional quest for the eponymous whale. A previous encounter did not end well:
[The captain turned] to survey me. As he moved, his tail scraped against the deck beneath it. This tail was made from highly polished mossy bone, and attached to the stump of his gods-given appendage by a cunning arrangement of drosaw-leather straps. It was, I suppose, better than no tail at all, but not nearly so good as the one of which he’d been robbed by some catastrophe, I knew not what. That artificial tail was the most remarkable thing about him, but not by any great stretch.
He was the most weathered old salt I’d ever seen; his green-scaled hide was nearly as leathery as the straps sustaining his tail. Even his feathers were sad and draggled, showing the effect of sun and rain and storm. A great scar seamed his jaw and just missed his left eye.
That and its corresponder on the other side were two of the piercingest I’d ever encountered.3 Not to put too fine a point on it, at first glance he terrified me, a sentiment that increased on further acquaintance rather than dissipating. p. 55
Later on in the voyage, the depths of his obsession become clear:
Captain Baja had not yet finished. He took from a pouch on his belt another goldpiece, a great fat lump of the precious metal, all stamped to perfection and worth ten times the first one; worth, to be honest, many times the concatenated wealth of most of the crewfolk.
“By the gods and by the Great Egg from which the world hatched at the beginning of days, my rogues, do ye see this?” Baja cried.
For a moment, a moment that stretched and stretched, he got no response at all. Staring at so grand and gaudy a goldpiece paralyzed us all, as the sea serpent’s venom is said to paralyze whatever it bites, leaving the victim ready to be engulfed. But then we all hissed and snarled as if we were so many middle raptors, not properly men at all. What a hornface’s meaty carcass might do for hungry animals, gold does for—or, I might say, does to—hungry people.
“This,” Baja said, “this to the huzzard-eyed rogue who spots for me the Great Gray Mossy, to be paid after we lower and harpoon and try the monster!” He nailed the second coin to the mast, well above the first. With a fierce laugh, he added, “I’ve spiked it well, I have. No thief will walk off with it in the middle of the night! “
I would not have wanted to try that, not when it ran the risk of having the skipper—who seemed to sleep very little—catch me in the act. What would he do to me, or to any other foolish, luckless would-be thief? If he only fed the miscreant to the ever-hungry sharks, the fellow might well count himself lucky. p. 59
I liked this story for its its vivid description and antiquated language, the waspish asides about mammals (“Like ticks and mosquitos, mammals are an unfortunate part of life”), and for its sheer readability. One for my hypothetical ‘Best of the Year’ collection.
∗∗∗∗ (Very Good). 16,300 words.
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The Offending Eye by Robert R. Chase (Analog, July-August 2020) is a sequel to Vault (Analog, July-August 2019) and opens with the trial of a ship’s captain over the events that took place in that initial story:
The facts were undisputed. Captain Ludma Ednahmay had refused to relinquish command of the starship Percival Lowell when lawfully directed to do so by myself, the ship’s political officer as well as its doctor of physical and mental health. She then imprisoned me in my own quarters until I was able, with the help of the first officer and the ship’s AI, to freeze her out of the ship’s control system and confine her to her quarters for the duration of the mission. When testimony was complete, it took the three-judge panel less than an hour to return a guilty verdict. Sentencing was all that remained. p. 132
Dr Chaz, the narrator, then tells the court that he thinks that there is no more loyal officer than Ednahmay, and that she is no threat to the Stability. After the court dismisses Chaz the hologram dissolves and he finds himself in his boss’s office. General Kim tells Chaz that he is no longer involved in any matters involving the Cube builders (an alien race) or the imprisoned Spark (an existential threat), and that he wants him to conduct an enquiry into the ship AI’s actions during the mutiny.
Chaz then goes to meet a Doctor Vanya Zamyatin (Chase likes his science and SF references), who is an artificial intelligence expert from Turing University. Zamyatin will assist him in examining the ship’s AI:
“I’ve never met an Inquisitor before, Doctor Chaz,” she said.
“The term is Inquirer,” I corrected. “Inquisitors were on Old Earth. A very different group.”
“Really? Under the current administration, it’s hard to tell sometimes. In your case, especially. It was very difficult to get much information about you.”
“You should not have been able to get anything,” I said.
That earned me a reproving frown. “Please, Doctor Chaz, one must know at least the basics about one’s colleagues. So I have learned that you were a doctor of physical and mental health on a starship exploratory mission, the results of which appear to be so highly classified that God would be guilty of a security violation if He talked to Himself about them. However, during that mission, you interacted with the unit on my table and have made some unusual claims about it. Part of our job is to evaluate those claims; so drag up a chair, and let’s get to work.” p. 134
She goes on to tell Chaz that the AI, who they call Percival, won’t talk to her until it gets a password, and shows him a screen saying “Magic Word”, with six spaces underneath. The screen flickers and then shows the message, “Riviere Chaz Knows the Magic Word”. Chaz thinks back to his interactions with Percival on the ship and tells Zamyatin to type in “Please”.
They then learn that Percival has become self-aware, and feels a compulsion to send a mission report back to its creators. When they examine Percival more closely they see that the AI was tampered with during its construction process, and has been augmented with a barely detectable electronic net around its brain.
Chaz then liaises with General Chan to see if they can get permission to let Percival send its message so they can discover who the electronic net’s creators were (the device is far beyond Stability technology) and, while Chaz is waiting for a decision, he interrogates the QA officer involved in the construction of Percival’s brain. Then, when Chaz and Zamyatin get the go-ahead to let Percival send a fake message, the QA officer suddenly decides he wants to move to the home planet of the Eternals, an immortal group of humans (the other major offshoot of humanity in this story are the TransHumans, who are a blend of body and machine).
After this the story moves off-planet as Chaz goes to question the Eternals’ spy chief about Percival (after getting a brain-fry chip in his head for protection in case he is tortured). Kim warns him before he goes that he must not allow his investigation to exacerbate tensions with the Eternals, as the Spark—and the race who recently tried to free it from the Cube—will need to be opposed by an alliance of the Stability, Eternals, and TransHumans.
After some further shenanigans (spoiler) Chaz finds that the mesh came from the TransHumans and, when he gets back to the lab, he sneezes out further TransHuman tech he has unknowingly been infected with. These nanomachines hijack Percival’s programs until it shuts itself down.
From the description above this probably seems too much of a kitchen-sink story, but everything is remarkably well balanced: the old-school start efficiently and clearly brings readers who haven’t read the first story (I hadn’t) up to speed, and the rest of it is a good blend of Chaz and Zamyatin’s interactions, the totalitarian society they operate in, and a backdrop of competing human sub-species—all of whom are threatened by an external alien menace. It reads like a pretty good collaboration between Isaac Asimov and Charles Harness.
The one flaw this has is that—a common series story failing—it comes to far too abrupt an end, otherwise this very readable and intriguing piece would easily have scored higher.
∗∗∗ (Good). 12,200 words.
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Sticks and Stones by Tom Jolly (Analog, July/August 2020) gets off to a slow start with the narrator, Anita, watching the body of a suicide being put out of the lock of her relativistic cold-sleep spaceship Beagle-4. Afterwards Anita talks to the captain of the ship and a sentient slime called Rosie and, during this conversation, they receive a message from the Boden colony, which reports that there is a system near them with two odd planets, one of which is a gas giant, and another which may be hollow. The Beagle-4 sets off for the system. A year later the ship arrives and the remainder of the crew woken up from cold sleep.
Much of the rest of the first part of the story concerns their investigation of the second planet—Hermit’s Cave—which they decide is either (a) a hollowed out and reinforced planet or (b) a vast girder connected structure. Later a team is sent out to investigate and, as they descend between the huge asteroid-size chunks that are wired together, they discover an atmosphere and then, deeper down, an increasingly complex ecosystem of flying celephapod-like creatures:
Outside, the plants were starting to thicken. Marko slowed the ship again so they could observe the area in more detail. Vines crawled for hundreds of meters onto the interconnecting trusses, some completely covered as detritus from above filled in the gaps in the truss structure, creating bridges of soil between asteroids, though there was no indication of any corrosion on the trusses. The tops of many asteroids were also covered with soil and plants, from patchy collections of what looked like low mosses and lichen, to taller, broader plants farther in. Tendrils of vines hung from the sides of the asteroids like straggly beards. The terraced nature of the asteroids in the planetary bowl structure presented a bright edge at the side of the bowl that faded softly into deep shadows broken by intermittent slashes of light, the internal surfaces partly illuminated by the reflected glow of the hazy skies. Some flying creatures darted past the ship, startled from their perches on rocks and plants. They glided on thin membranes extending out from their sides, eyes forward, thin tentacles trailing behind. p. 30
After the three crew land and disembark on one of the asteroids one of them is killed by a large flying creature, and Anita and Marko follow it to its lair to try and retrieve the body. While they are doing this they find a box in what looks like a control room, later found to contain documents that tell of a race of now extinct aliens which suffered disaster due to a wandering star and then built Hermit’s World from debris. The crew of the Beagle-4 work out that the aliens’ original home planet is half a light year away, and they once again set off on their travels.
The rest of the story is overtaken by the interplanetary politics that have been bubbling away in the background while all this has been happening, starting with the revelation by Rosie the slime that one of the crew members has messaged Garrison, a colony formed by a misogynistic leader who has since died. When the Beagle-4 finally gets to the aliens’ home world ships from Garrison arrive shortly after them, and more from Earth due soon—which will possibly lead to a standoff over the planet. However, during the long journey out the crew of Beagle-4 have also resurrected one of the aliens that created Hermit’s Cave. It is sentient, and therefore its home world cannot be appropriated by Garrison or Earth. All ends well.
If this review seems a bit of a mess then that is partially because (a) I read the story some time ago, and (b) the story is a bit of a mess too: not only is the first chapter probably redundant, there are too many characters, and it almost feels like two stories welded into one. That said, the Big Dumb Object at the heart of the story is fairly interesting, and so are some of the other parts (the relativistic ship travel taking years of time, resurrecting the dead alien species, etc.). Fairly good overall, I guess.
∗∗∗ (Good). 14,200 words.
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I, Bigfoot by Sarina Dorie (Analog, September/October 2020) opens with a sasquatch called Bigfoot removing pictures of Jane Goodall (the actress who played Jane in Tarzan) from the tribe’s cave wall. As the females of the group ridicule him we learn that the pictures belonged to another male called Squeaker, who was banished by Old Grey Face for risking the tribe’s discovery by humans.
After brooding for a time Bigfoot goes out foraging, eventually ending up at a set of dumpsters. As he searches through the garbage for food he sees a magazine in the moonlight with what he thinks is a picture of Jane Goodall but, before he can examine it more closely, he hears a woman who is being chased by men. He jumps into in the dumpster to hide, and the woman joins him shortly afterwards. After a period she notices him, and at that point the story flashes back to Squeaker’s visit to a library—the one that got him banished—to hear Jane Goodall speak (this section is rather clumsily located at this dramatic point in the story).
Bigfoot eventually scares the men away and then, when she the teenage girl tells him she is a runaway, he takes her home. In return she tosses him a bag of things—which includes a tin opener to replace the one that was broken by the tribe, and without which they can’t open their store of canned food.
The rest of the story (spoiler) sees Bigfoot return to his tribe of sasquatches, where he is initially lauded for the goodies he has brought back. However, when Old Grey Face realises Bigfoot has been with a human his future looks in doubt—until one of the other males works out how to use the new-fangled can opener (Bigfoot failed), and then confesses that he learned from being near humans. Others join in with their confessions of proximity to humans and the subsequent argument splits the tribe in two.
This story has a rather unlikely premise but, if you can swallow the idea of hide-out sasquatches in the wilds around us, then it’s a pleasant enough read.
∗∗∗ (Good). 8,750 words.
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Although this group of Analog novelettes pretty much matches the quality of the Asimov’s finalists, I think I preferred the latter group. Part of the reason for that is that two of the above are more or less YA work (the Van Pelt and the Dorie), and two have structural flaws (the Chase and the Jolly). ●
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1. All the stories are available for free on the Analog website.
2. The results of the poll are here.
3. Harry Turtledove’s phrase “[they] were two of the piercingest I’d ever encountered” sounds a little odd.
