Other reviews:
Todd Mason, Socialistjazz. blogspot.com
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Ted White; Assistant Editors, Lou Stathis, Terry Hughes

Fiction:
Bloody Man • novella by Avram Davidson ∗∗∗∗
God of the Naked Unicorn • novelette by Richard A. Lupoff [as by Ova Hamlet] ∗
New-Way-Groovers Stew • short story by Grania Davis ∗∗
Algy • short story by L. Sprague de Camp ∗
The Stairs in the Crypt • short story by Lin Carter and Clark Ashton Smith ∗∗∗
The Atheling’s Wife • novelette by Keith Taylor [as by Dennis More] ∗∗∗
Ocean • short story by Steven Utley –

Non-fiction:
Editorial • by Ted White
Fantasy Books • book reviews by Fritz Leiber
According to You • letters

_____________________

Some time ago I mentioned, at the start of a review of the February 1976 issue of Fantastic, that I planned to read through all four issues for that year. Given that was written in 2016, I think I had better speed up . . . .

This issue contains one of the highlights of 1976, Bloody Man by Avram Davidson, one of his ‘Jack Limekiller’ series, which features Jack, a Canadian ex-pat who lives in British Hidalgo (previously the British Honduras). This one opens with him asking Archbishop Le Beau, who is the middle of scaling fish, for work:

“They tell me . . . ” Limekiller hesitated, briefly. Was it My Lord? Your Lordship? Or was it . . . it was, wasn’t it . . . Your Grace?
Some saints levitate. Some are telepathic. It was widely said and widely believed that William Constance Christian Le Beau was a saint.
“Just ‘Archbishop’ will do, Mr. Limekiller,” the old man said, without looking up. Scrip . . . scrop . . . scrip. . . Jack found himself looking covertly around. Perhaps for loaves.
“Ah . . . thank you, sir . . . Archbishop. . . . they tell me that I might be able to pick up a charter for my boat. Moving building supplies, I understand. Down to Curasow Cove? For a bungalow you want built?”
Flop went the fish into the basket.  p. 6

After receiving the Archbishop’s agreement and a letter of introduction, Limekiller sets about obtaining the materials he requires. He soon finds out, however, that there aren’t any supplies in sleepy Point Pleasaunce, so his travels take around the town and beyond, which provides the reader with a number of delightful picture-postcard descriptions of the places he visits and the people he meets:

Well, there was the Royal Telegraphy. Her Majesty’s Government did not exactly go to much effort to advertise the fact that there was, but Limekiller had somehow found the fact out. The service was located in two bare rooms upstairs off an alley near the old Rice Mill Wharf, where an elderly gentleman wrote down incoming messages in a truly beautiful Spencerian hand. . . . or maybe it was Copperplate. . . . or Chancery. . . . or Volapiik. What the Hell. It was beautiful. It was, in fact, so beautiful that it seemed cavalier to complain that the elderly gentleman was exceedingly deaf, and that, perhaps in consequence, his messages did not always make the most perfect sense.
Gambling that the same conditions did not obtain at the Royal Telegraphy Office in Port Caroline, Limekiller sent off several wires, advising the Carolinian entrepreneurs what he wanted to buy, and that he was coming in person to buy it.
“How soon will these go off?” he asked the aged telegrapher.
“Yes, that is what I heard myself, sir. They say the estate is settle, sir. After ahl these years.” And he shook his head and he smiled a gentle smile of wonder.  p. 11

Stepping out into the pre-dawn was like stepping into a clean, cool pool. Already, at that hour, people were about . . . grave, silent, polite. . . . the baker setting the fires, the fisherman already returning with their small catch. The sun climbed, very tentatively, to the edge of the horizon. For a moment, it hesitated. Then, all at once, two things happened. The national radio system, which had gone off the air at ten the night before, suddenly awoke into Sound. Radios were either dead silent or at full-shout. In one instant, every radio in Port Caroline, and in the greater Port Caroline Area, roared into life. And at the same moment, the sun, suddenly aware that there was nothing to oppose it, shot up from the sea and smote the land with a blast of heat.  p. 17

Most of the first part of the story is travelogue like the above, but Limekiller eventually starts hearing mentions and rumours of a ghostly mystery, the “Bloody Man” of the tale:

“An’ one day, me see some-teeng, mon, me see some-teeng hawreed. Me di see eet, mon. Me di see di bloody mon—”
“Hush up you mout’,” said Piggott. But the other, a much older fellow, did not hear, perhaps, or did not care, perhaps. “Me di see di blooddee mon. Me di see he, ah White-MON, ahl cot een pieces ahn ahl blood-dee. Wahn, two, t’ree, de pieces ahv heem dey ahl come togeddah. De mon stahn op befah me, mon. He stahn ahp befah me. Ahl bot wahn piece, mon. He no hahv wahn piece een he side, mon. He side gape, mon, gape open. Eet bleed, mon. Eet BLEED!”
And now other faces than the proprietor’s were turned to the narrator.
“Hush up you mout’, mon!” other voices said, gruff.
Brown man, glass of brown rum in his brown hand. Sweat on his face. Voice rising. “Ahn so me di know, mon. Me di know who eet ees, mon. Eet ees de blood-dee Cop-tain. Eet ees Cop-tain Blood!”  p. 15

This supernatural thread slowly develops through Limekiller’s subsequent trip down to Curasow Cove with his shipment—he witnesses a fishing grounds dispute between the locals and Arawak tribesmen from the south, displaced because of sightings of the apparition—and then Limekiller himself sees the Bloody Man when his boat enters a supernatural mist. Then (spoiler) after talking to Harlow, one of the locals who provides information about who the apparition might be (there is talk of Blackbeard and the Flying Dutchman, etc.), Limekiller asks the Archbishop for help in laying the ghost to rest.
In the climactic scene, and after fighting off the Fallen (who summon waterspouts and sharks), the Archbishop administers the sacrament to the Bloody Man and he disappears.
There is an interesting historical postscript where the ghost is revealed as Captain Cook (who met his death in Hawaii, thousand of miles away), and whose ghost has supposedly returned to the area because of a light-hearted oath made by Cook before his death.
I really enjoyed the wonderful description and colourful detail of this story (it is probably my favourite of the ‘Limekiller’ series¹) but I suspect the average genre reader’s enjoyment will depend on whether they take to the sprawling travelogue that occurs before the fantasy elements come to the fore.
**** (Very Good). 19,250 words. Story link. 

•

God of the Naked Unicorn by Richard Lupoff [as by Ova Hamlet²] (Fantastic, August 1976) is one of a series of author parodies—although this one doesn’t concentrate one writer but mashes up Dr Watson and various pulp action heroes.
The story begins with Watson, after another failed marriage, returning to Baker Street in search of accommodation only to find that Sherlock Holmes no longer lives there (he has apparently retired to keep bees). Watson rents a flat in a down-and-out area and is almost immediately visited by ‘The Woman.’ After learning of Holmes’ retirement she reveals the purpose of her visit:

“The God of the Naked Unicorn has been stolen.”
“The God of the Naked Unicorn!” I exclaimed.
“The God of the Naked Unicom!”
“No!” I blurted incredulously.
“Yes!” she replied coolly. “The God of the Naked Unicorn!”
“But—but how can that be? The greatest national art treasure of the nation of—”
“Shh!” She silenced me with a sound and a look and a renewed pressure of fingertips to wrist. “Please!
Even in more familiar and secure quarters than these it would be unwise to mention the name of my adoptive motherland.” p. 44

Watson and The Woman then take a train and an autogyro flight to a building in the Arctic called The Fortress. Here, The Woman introduces him to Doc Savage, and leaves after saying the theft is part of a greater plot. Savage takes Watson to meet a number of other men:

“Richard Benson—the Avenger,” said the man in gray.
“Kent Allard—the Shadow,” the hawk-nosed man chuckled grimly.
“Gordon, Yale ’34—my friends call me Flash.”
“Curtis Newton, sir, sometimes known as Captain Future.”
“John Carter, former captain, confederate cavalry.”
“David Innes of Connecticut and the Empire of Pellucidar.”
“Richard Wentworth,” said the second of the black-clad men, “known to some as the Spider.” Even as he shook my hand I detected a look of suspicion and jealousy pass between himself and the man who had identified himself as the Shadow.
And finally, the man in the green clergy suit. “Om,” he intoned making an Oriental sign with his hands before extending one to me in western fashion. “Jethro Dumont of Park Avenue, New York. Also known as Dr. Charles Pali and—the Green Lama. p. 53

We later learn that Holmes and Tarzan were kidnapped at the same time as the theft of the God of the Naked Unicorn. Savage explains:

“The fiend had apparently developed a superscientific device of some sort which reduced the stature of his victims to that of pygmies, and he strode away with poor Holmes under one arm and Greystoke under the other.”
“Yes,” I said encouragingly, “pray continue.”
“Well, Dr. Watson,” Savage resumed, “as the fiend left the Exposition of European Progress he seemed to be mumbling something to himself. I could barely make out what it was he was saying. But it seemed to be something like Angkor Wat, Angkor Wat. But what could that possibly mean, Watson?” p. 58

Savage and Watson then take another autogyro flight to search for the evil genius, first to Angor Wat then to a number of other locations before ending up back at Baker Street. There (spoiler), they find the man they seek—a writer sat in front of a typewriter apparently writing the tale of which they are part. Watson shoots the man: pulp flakes come out of the bullet wound.
If you like the pulp pastiche and superhero references then you’ll probably appreciate this more than I did, but it’s an overlong piece that is mostly description and motion. And the ending is on the same level as “and then I woke up and found it was all a dream.”
(Mediocre). 12,000 words. Story Link.

•

New-Way-Groovers Stew by Grania Davis opens with the lesbian narrator’s description of the 1960’s Haight-Ashbury scene—which includes, atypically for the time of publication, a frank description of her elderly gay friend:

He’s always so funny, and admittedly, more swishy when he has a new lover. Not that any of them appreciate his wit, his charm, his intelligence. The old fairy usually manages to dig up some tight-assed sailor from the Tenderloin, or a motorcycle freak from one of the leather bars. He buys them new clothes, prepares lavish and tender gourmet meals, and gazes at them with sad, baggy basset-hound eyes, waiting for some small sign that some of the feeling has been appreciated, perhaps even returned. That maybe (but this is really too much to hope for) something might develop. Something permanent, a real relationship with warmth, love. But it never does.
When Jule excused himself for a brief visit to the john, his latest Chuck (or Stud) started eyeballing the prettiest girl in the room, boasting loudly, “I hate faggots, and I hate this nancy food, and the only reason I’m hanging around with that old auntie, Jule, is cause I’m temporarily short of bread. Soon as I get me a bankroll, I’m getting a big red steak, and some pretty blonde pussy. And all you queers can shove it up your ass!”  p. 62

There is some more about the narrator’s and Jule’s friendship before the story turns to the Flower Children who are beginning to converge on Haight Ashbury. We learn about the latter’s communitarian lifestyle, and how they initially coalesce around the New-Way-Groovers Free Store, an establishment which freecycles goods and also provides a daily stew, made from various scavenged foodstuffs, to all-comers.
The narrator and Jules occasionally visit with the people at the store, and Jules later gets involved in a long argument with a man called Tony, during which, among other things, they discuss morality (Tony states at one point, “The highest morality is to take care of yourself”). This idea later manifests (spoiler) when the narrator gets a note from Jules saying he has gone away, and to send all his money to his sister in Detroit. When the narrator asks Tony where Jules has gone, she is given a bowl of stew that is much richer than normal and which has chunks of meat in it. Tony tells her that they stole some meat, got themselves a “fat old pig”.
This piece contains quite a good portrait of alternative life in 1960’s Haight-Ashbury but, even after the morality argument, the cannibalism ending is silly and a bit over the top. So this is a game of two halves as a horror story—but perhaps notable as an early example of one with lesbian/gay characters.
** (Average). 3,950 words. Story link.

•

Algy by L. Sprague de Camp is a ‘Willy Newbury’ story,³ and one which sees Willy and his new wife Denise arriving at his aunt’s vacation camp at Lake Algonquin to rumours of a sea monster. An old friend who works there fills them in:

Mike scratched his crisp gray curls. “They do be saying that, on dark nights, something comes up in the lake and shticks its head out to look around. But nobody’s after getting a good look at it. There’s newspaper fellies, and a whole gang of Scotchmen are watching for it, out on Indian Point.”
“You mean we have a home-grown version of the Loch Ness monster?”
“I do that.”
“How come the Scots came over here? I thought they had their own lake monster. Casing the competition, maybe?”
“It could be that, Mr, Newbury. They’re members of some society that tracks down the shtories of sea serpents and all them things.”  p. 72

The rest of the story revolves around the aunt’s daughter Linda and two men who are keen on her: one is George Vreeland, an unreliable local character, and the other is Ian Selkirk, one of the Scots who is there to investigate the sightings. Matters develop at a ball where Selkirk cuts in on Vreeland and Linda—to the displeasure of the former—and then, when Selkirk and Linda are later canoodling in a canoe, matters come to a climax when the monster surfaces besides them. Selkirk jumps out of the canoe and swims to shore, not because he is fleeing the monster but because he has spotted that it is a fake and that Vreeland has been operating it from the pump house on the edge of the lake. It later materialises that Vreeland’s boss (another camp site owner) hired him to set up the hoax to attract tourists to the area. Vreeland was only supposed to surface the fake monster at night but, jealous of Selkirk, he used it to try and scare him away.
Finally (spoiler), when Willy and Lord Kintyre (Selkirk’s boss) go out on the lake to examine the fake, something drags it under the water and rips it to shreds.
I suppose this is well enough executed, but the story mostly involves cardboard characters going through the motions of a mainstream plot—with a brief supernatural twist tacked on the end.
* (Mediocre). 4,750 words. Story link.

•

The Stairs in the Crypt by Clark Ashton Smith & Lin Carter opens with the death (“the inexorable termination of his earthly existence”) of the necromancer Avalzaunt, and his subsequent entombment:

If the pupils of Avalzaunt assumed that they had taken their last farewells of their master, however, it eventuated that in this assumption they were seriously mistaken. For, after some years of repose within the sepulchre, vigor seeped back again into the brittle limbs of the mummified enchanter and sentience gleamed anew in his jellied and sunken eyes. At first the partially-revived lich lay somnolent and unmoving in a numb and mindless stupor, with no conception of its present charnel abode. It knew, in fine, neither what nor where it was, nor aught of the peculiar circumstances of its untimely and unprecedented resurrection. On this question the philosophers remain divided. One school holds to the theorem that it was the unseemly brevity of the burial rites which prevented the release of the spirit of Avalzaunt from its clay, thus initiating the unnatural revitalization of the cadaver. Others postulate that it was the necromantic powers inherent in Avalzaunt himself which were the sole causative agent in his return to life.
After all, they argue, and with some cogence, one who is steeped in the power to effect the resurrection of another should certainly retain, even in death, a residue of that power sufficient to perform a comparable revivification upon oneself. These, however, are queries for a philosophical debate for which the present chronicler lacks both the leisure and the learning to pursue to an unequivocal conclusion.  p. 83

I guess you’ll either like this mannered, discursive, and droll stuff (as I did) or you won’t. If you are in the former group then the rest of the story will treat you of an account of how Avalzaunt waits for a ghoul pack to break into his tomb to release him, swears them into thraldom, and then seeks out the sustenance his post-life body now requires—human blood and gore. During these depredations Avalzaunt becomes more and more swollen as, apparently, the undead can neither digest nor excrete “the foul and loathly sustenance whereon they feed”.
Eventually, after working his way through several of his former apprentices, and preying on the fat monks of Cambora, he is (spoiler) finally stopped by the silver knife-wielding abbot in an Grand Guignol ending that sees everything Avalzaunt has consumed spew out of his body (think of a bloodier and messier version of Monty Python’s Mr Cresote sketch).
I suspect many will find this an overwritten and ridiculous story, but I thought it was an entertaining pastiche of Smith’s work.⁴
*** Good. 3,600 words. Story link.

•

The Atheling’s Wife by Keith Taylor⁵ [as by Dennis More] is the second story in the writer’s ‘Bard’ series, which is set in sixth century Celtic Britain, and begins with Felimid mac Fal arriving at the hall of King Cedric, looking for passage across the sea and away from the island:

The walls were gigantic timbers adzed and fitted together like the ribs of a ship. The corner-posts were carved like frowning gods, and it would have taken three men to stretch their arms around one. The roof was tiled with scales a foot across, from a sea-dragon the king had hunted down. They glittered like beaten metal, green shading into grey at the edges. Felimid could have ridden through the doors without ducking the lintel, and a comrade could have gone either side of him without scraping the posts. The doors themselves were sheathed in bronze, with silvered iron hinges marvellously wrought. Hinges long as he was tall, nearly.
The double portal, huge as it was, was framed in the naked white skull and jaws of the sea-dragon whose scales covered the roof. Teeth half as long as a man’s arm shone like white salt. Bereft sockets under blunt bone ridges were caves of deep shadow. They seemed to glare with menace yet. The notion of riding under them did not enchant Felimid even as an image.  p. 92

After the guard tells Felimid that the jaws will snap shut if he intends any misdeeds, Felimid passes through into the interior, and later finds himself sitting at a lowly place at the king’s table. At the top are King Cedric, his wife Vivayn, and the king’s brother Cynric.
Felimid realises that he will have to be careful as he is fleeing from Cedric’s father, King Oisc of Kent,⁶ but it does not stop him intervening when a number of the men start tormenting a dwarf called Glinthi, who they then try to throw into the hearth. Felimid intervenes, efficiently seeing off the other men and rescuing Glinthi, and bringing himself to the notice of King Cedric. Felimid briefly speaks to the king and then performs for him, flattering him shamelessly with the songs he sings. Then, after his performance is over, Felimid sleeps with Eldrid, one of Vivayn’s ladies in waiting.
Felimid’s smooth progress is subsequently interrupted when one of the reasons he wants to leave the island—Tosti, a shapeshifter/werewolf from King Oisc’s court—turns up at the camp. After a confrontation between the two they appear before the king, but Tosti unexpectedly refuses to fight Felimid (Felimid has a silver inlaid sword, and Tosti is more likely to lose any duel in his human form). Then, later that evening, Vivayn, wearing a glamour to make her look like Eldrid, comes to his bed. Felimid sees through the disguise but sleeps with her anyway.
The story comes to a climax (spoiler) when Tosti ambushes Vivayn/Eldrid when she leaves Felimid’s bed the next morning. He tells Felimid to lay down his silver sword, and the bard complies as he doesn’t want Vivayn killed, her glamour to disappear, and everyone to see that he has slept with the king’s wife. Fortunately, the bard is saved when Glinthi intervenes. Tosti initially fights but then flees, and we see one of his henchmen killed by the dragon’s jaws when he rushes to the hall to summon help, lying about what has actually happened.
Felimid subsequently tells Cedric that Tosti is a shapeshifter and, realising the complex situation he is in (the two women who share their lovers, Glinthi’s earlier treasonous comments), departs the camp to pursue Tosti.
This is a well enough plotted piece of Sword & Sorcery but it could have done with another draft as it is a little rough in places. Also, some of the point of view changes are also a little odd—the first story was told in the first-person and you can see the author is still getting to grips with the third-person transistion⁷. That said, the protagonist’s occupation and the story’s convincing setting are strengths.
*** (Good). 9,200 words. Story link.

•

Ocean by Steven Utley opens with the female narrator, who has “flippers and gills now”, poisoned by the spines of a sea urchin—but she escapes its effects by surfacing and becoming a flying creature.
The next section describes an ongoing struggle she is having with a man who is either (a) interfering with her (possibly prosthetic) body, or (b) operating her controls (she may be a spaceship), or (c) she is a personality living in a ship’s computer. Later we learn (spoiler) that it is the latter, and that she is on a generation ship where everyone died apart from her. When she got old she uploaded into the ship’s memory, and at that point sensed a malevolent entity. The story ends with some sort of reckoning.
Trying to work out what was going on while reading this story was like wading through mud.
– (Awful). 2,700 words. Story link.

•••

The atmospheric Cover for this issue is by Stephen Fabian for Bloody Man. He also contributes good black and white work for that story, and for Keith Taylor‘s The Atheling‘s Wife. The other Interior Art consists of good pieces by Richard Olsen and Joe Staton, and two by Dan Steffan and Tony Gleason. These latter two are, whatever one thinks of their technical qualities, dull images (the Steffan piece looks like a random pane from a comic book). The non-fiction in the issue leads off with a long Editorial by Ted White. This starts with the editor quoting two long letters about the John Norman Gor fantasy/S&M novels (which were the subject of a negative editorial a couple of issues ago) before he veers off into a long discussion  about what he actually said in his editorial, free speech, and the evolution of modern pornography to date (this was around the time of a so-called ’snuff‘ movie). The final result resembles one of those long internet threads where, by the time you get to the end of it, you can barely remember what was first said.
After this there is mention of the recent change of schedule to quarterly:⁸

You’ve probably noticed, if you’re a regular reader of this magazine, that we’ve been skipping issues recently. That is, the February issue was followed not by an April issue but rather by the May issue. And there was no July issue; this issue is dated August.
The sad fact is that sales fell dramatically with the introduction of our $1.00 cover price, and although it’s too soon to know whether that was just a one-time situation or not, we were forced to change from a bimonthly publication schedule to a quarterly schedule. For that reason the next issue will be dated November.
Frankly, I’m very unhappy about this turn of events, as is the Publisher. I feel that in the last year we’ve published an unusually wide variety of fantasy and that the actual quality of our fiction has been steadily improving. I feel that the issues of the last year have been issues any editor might justifiably take pride in. And I’m saddened that this has not been reflected by sales. p. 130

White concludes with the wish that the magazine soon returns to bimonthly, a hope that was not to be realised.

•

Fantasy Books by Fritz Leiber leads off with some of his personal history with Harlan Ellison before he tackles that writer‘s collection Deathbird Stories:

But he worked ten years on the cycle of stories in this book. They show it, being heavily ornamented, almost chryselephantine, gold and ivory now joined to the silver and marble—in twenty years he’s learned a lot about words and here he scatters them lavishly yet precisely, almost as if they were brilliantly plumed darts he were ceaselessly throwing at his story a-building, bright-ribboned banderillas for the plunging toro of his tale—each landscape vast but with a single focal point from which the lines of perspective radiate to infinity.
[. . .]
[But] basically the stories are fantasies, often of the wild Weird Tales variety (cf. Bloch’s science and the way Spinrad mixes cryogenics and blood-of-a-virgin witchcraft in Bug Jack Barron)—”Adrift” mixes werewolfry with the search for the locus of the soul with sub-particle physics in a reprise of Fantastic Voyage in which the pancreas becomes a vast, man-killing desert with skulls scattered about.
In short, each story is a whopping big picture, or rather three-dimensional (or maybe four or five) sculptured form. Now there are two consequences of this to be noted. One: Each story is surely “a construct built in a void, with every joint and seam and nail exposed” (one of Ursula Le Guin’s characterizations of fantasy in From Elfland to Poughkeepsie) and this construct may be, but is not always, a monstrous, maze-like, plastic futurian city or wasteland, like one of Silverberg’s, with one man wandering in it (Ellison’s man raves, suffers, and rages; Silverberg’s retrospects). One can get the impression from this that the author is egotistical to the point of solipsism and wish he would or could get interested in getting more quietly inside the skin and mind of one or preferably several other characters— none of whom are completely stripped of mystery—write that sort of novel. p. 112-113

There are further interesting comments about Ellison’s work before Leiber moves on to cover a handful of other books. There’s a Lord Dunsany collection (“perhaps the finest fantasy book bargain of all time”); an August Derleth SF collection (“clearly a product of Derleth’s afternoon mind”); a Carl Jacobi collection; and, finally, a booklet/essay by L. Sprague de Camp about Robert E. Howard, The Miscast Barbarian (first in his ‘Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerors’ series, several of which appeared in Fantastic).
Interesting column.

•

The long (and, like the editorial, sometimes rambling) letters column, . . . According to You, cover several subjects: the stories in the February issue, the role of women in S&S; fringe beliefs; and yet more on the Gor novels. One of the latter letters from E. K. Hardt (from Dallas) gives a description that, if I recall correctly, nods towards (my perhaps less enthusiastic) thoughts about the first few novels when I read them in the mid-seventies (I gave up after the fifth one):

Let’s get off Norman’s sex fantasy for the moment and onto the quality of his fiction, which on the whole is very good. The two best of the ten novels have been Nomads and the latest one, Maruders, with the Tarn-race sequence in Assassin probably the best cohesive passage in the series. In each case the sexual element, while present, has been softpedaled to tell a good rousing story and it has been done very well. p. 126

I wonder what I would think of them now.

Overall, a pretty good issue, and one worth getting for the Avram Davidson novella. ●

_____________________

Footnotes:

1. The ‘Jack Limekiller’ series of stories (which were later collected into a book) at ISFDB. Book purchase link UK/USA.

2. The Ova Hamlet stories were collected, first in The Ova Hamlet Papers (1979) and then in the expanded The Compleat Ova Hamlet (2009).

3. The ‘Willy Newbury’ series at ISFDB. The stories were collected in The Purple Pterodactyls (1980).

4. I suspect the whole (or most of the) Smith /Carter collaboration is probably Carter’s apart from the plot idea. Ted White’s introduction states:

Lin Carter, working from Clark Ashton Smith’s extensive legacy of notes, outlines, lists of titles and story-fragments, has collaborated posthumously with Smith (who died in 1961), creating new stories—two of which appeared in the briefly-revived Weird Tales, and the third, “The Scroll of Morloc”, here (October, 1975). Here is the fourth.

5. Keith Taylor first published these stories under the pseudonym Dennis More. ISFDB lists this series as two separate ones, Bard and Felimid, but they are the same sequence.

6. The events that cause Felimid’s problems with King Oisc are detailed in the first story of the series.

7. Ted White’s introduction to Taylor’s piece says this:

This story is a direct sequel to the author’s Fugitives in Winter (October, 1975), but unlike that story this one is told third-person. As More explains it, “To write in the first-person about a sixth-century Celtic bard, even a fantasized one, is something I just couldn’t keep up. And it’s easier to juggle a number of characters this way.”

8. One of the casualties of the frequency change was the serialisation of a Thomas Burnett novel (most likely Cry Silver Bells. I think). More on this in the review of the November 1976 issue (which will be appearing in 2036 at this rate). ●

Summary:
There are two better than good stories in this issue by Thoraiya Dyer and P. H. Lee and they are the complete antithesis of each other. The Dyer is a colourful tale of a spaceship on its way to Mercury, and its breezy style and inventiveness reminded me of John Varley (it would also fit easily into an issue of Analog); the Lee, on the other hand, starts with the Prince of Jupiter falling in love with the Princess of the Sun, but quickly becomes something more quirky and metafictional (in the second chapter Ursula the Witch tells the Prince’s sidekick that things seldom end well for minor characters, and in the third chapter Stanislaw wheels out his Demetaphoricator. . . .)
The Rich Larson story is another tightly plotted future gangster story, this time with a homunculus hit-man (if you liked his How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar, you’ll like this).
The remaining three—a horror/fantasy by Suyi Davies Okungbowa, a portal love story from Seanan McGuire, and a multiple worlds love story by Indrapramit Das—aren’t bad, just average.
A stronger issue of this newsletter than normal.
[ISFDB] [Magazine link, individual stories are available at Tor.com and Amazon]

Other reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank Sep/Oct
Victoria Silverwolf and Kevin P. Hallett, Tangent Online Sep/Oct

_____________________

Editors, Jonathan Strahan x2, Ellen Datlow, Ann VanderMeer, Jonathan Strahan, Lee Harris

Fiction:
Victory Citrus is Sweet • short story by Thoraiya Dyer ∗∗∗+
Choke • short story by Suyi Davies Okungbowa ∗∗
Quandry Aminu vs The Butterfly Man • novelette by Rich Larson ∗∗∗
Of All the New Yorks in All the Worlds • short story by Indrapramit Das ∗∗
How the Crown Prince of Jupiter Undid the Universe, or, The Full Fruit of Love’s Full Folly • short story by P. H. Lee ∗∗∗+
Skeleton Song • short story by Seanan McGuire ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Interior artwork • by Gregory Manchess, Xia Gordon, Sara Wong, Bill Mayer, Ashley Mackenzie, Rovina Cai
About the Author

_____________________

Gregory Manchess

Victory Citrus is Sweet by Thoraiya Dyer (Tor.com, 7^th September 2022) has an intriguing opening where the narrator of the piece, Victory Citrus, details one of the hazards of space travel:

Cosmic rays buggered up my right arm just after we took the mission.
That is, some stupid high-energy proton started up an osteosarc in my ulna, which is a new one for me. Last cancer I got was lympho, in my lung. Which was annoying, because you can’t isolate and freeze a lung and keep working.
Lung isolation means a stupid induced coma while the new cells grow and Printer Two compiles a clean, connective tissue scaffold. It means sitting still for six weeks after the graft, somewhere with one-third G or more, waiting for it to take.
It means someone else gets the good jobs. Steals your promotion. I’m not bitter. Who can blame protons? They do what they do. Planet-bounds call us bobble-heads, because of the thick shielding on our helmets. One thing we can’t replace are our brains. But high-mass, high-density helmets don’t weigh anything up here. We take them off when we land, and the smart suits hold our spongy skeletons upright until the dirt jobs are done.

That’s a data-dump beginning, but it works, and we soon find out that Citrus has had to freeze her arm in nitrogen (which is in short supply) to stop the cancer growth so she can do a job on Mercury (her ship Whaleshark is headed to Gog’s Gorge to investigate a mass driver that is slinging refined uranium to the wrong hemisphere on Mars). Further information follows about (a) the nitrogen availability problem; (b) her childhood upbringing in a crèche run by bots; and (c) her apprentice Naamla (who at the end of the story we learn is the daughter of the spacer that Citrus was apprenticed to and who she now views as a rival). This is all reminiscent of the level of novel detail that you get in the early short work of John Varley, as is the chirpy conversational style of the piece:

I won an astronaut’s apprenticeship in a lottery my parents entered me in before I was born.
Don’t really remember them. Bots raised me in a creche. The bots came cheap, secondhand, from an Earth retirement village, and asked questions like, Are your bowel movements within normal parameters? Does the fleeting beauty of the blossoms make you ache with bittersweet memories? Your cortisol levels are high, do you feel you have failed your family members?
One of those was semi-appropriate for toddlers, I guess?
My personal bot had previously cared for someone with very specific music tastes, which is how I got acquainted with Earth sounds of the 1960s.
According to my EleAlloc service record, my worst hangover from being raised by bots is that I get squicked out by the sight of human eyeballs moving in their sockets.
I mean, anyone could get squicked out by that, right?
When I have to do my self-health-checks, and see my own reflected eyeballs moving, it makes me shout, “NO!”
Without fail. Every time. And I’m twenty-three years old, so I shouldn’t be shouting at myself in the mirror. I can’t help it. Eyeballs are so gross.

The main action occurs when the pair arrive on Mars and discover, in short succession, a gas vent near the drilling site, electron bursts that are transmitting the Fibonacci Sequence, and then (spoiler) animal/fish/lobster-like beings exiting crevasses in the ground—to their death—seventy clicks south of the first vent.
The rest of the story sees Citrus and Naamla investigate the body fragments of the dead aliens (they have a sulphur chemistry instead of a carbon one) and then attempt to communicate with them—they succeed, whereupon the Mercurians provide the nitrogen that Citrus needs. Then Citrus and Naamla realise that the mining operation has caused catastrophic damage to the underground Mercurian civilization, so they attempt to convince the Martian authorities to start slinging bismuth back from Mars to fill in the holes (and they enlist Naamla’s father to help them do this). Finally, having been over-exposed to radiation and developed multiple cancers, the pair enter comas to regrow their affected body parts.
The last section sees Naamla’s father wake them up—their limbs have been regrown, the Mercurians have been saved, and we learn Citrus’s apprentice name: Hogwash Perjury.
This is a fast paced, inventive, and colourful First Contact story. That said, the scene where Citrus almost effortlessly communicates with the Mercurians stretches credulity to breaking point.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 7,450 words. Story link.

Xia Gordon

Choke by Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Tor.com, 14^th September 2022) sees the narrator, Kédiké, accompanying Afonso, a fellow academic and friend who “worships free food”, to a family assigned by the International Friends program:

The house, when you arrive, is more conspicuous than you had expected. Apparently, it used to be a church, back when this town was still a part of Mexico. The Spanish architecture and Infant of Prague statues, both of which you recognize from your Catholic upbringing, are huge tells. When you go past the motion-sensored outdoor lights, the statues come to life, casting slant shadows, like sentries over something poached.
The gate swings open into a large compound containing multiple buildings. The door at the top of the steps is open, ushering you in. From inside: the smell of good food, laughter, a cat meowing. Afonso beams. There is joy here.
You have forgotten your ancestors’ whisper that you will choke.

This passage pretty much presages the three narrative threads that are developed in the story. First, there are the whispered warnings and statements (of variable reliability) that Kédiké regularly receives from his dead ancestors in the “Great Across”—and they have already warned him that he will “choke” at this gathering; second, we learn about Kédiké’s abusive religious upbringing in Nigeria; and, third, it becomes obvious that the hosts of the meal, the Paxton family, are proselytizing Christians using the Friendship program to recruit new converts.
During the evening the ancestors continue to give Kédiké nudges and brief visions at the meal, and he also becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the religious observance that occurs (prayers and passages from the bible between courses, etc.). This discomfort increases when (spoiler) a final member of the family arrives, Elijah Paxton, who, after an aggravated assault on a woman with a baseball bat (he called on the “LGBT slut” to repent), was banned from all campuses in a fifty-mile radius.
The story climaxes with Kédiké experiencing an intense vision:

The world flickers, and the last light in the room is snuffed out. Your ancestors, tired of waiting, step forward.
Every guest at the table is a faceless two-dimensional darkness, bodies draped over furniture and cutlery, trapped in the plane of shadows. They speak but are unheard; scream but are stifled by a form too shallow to hold all their selves. The only bodily parts spared are their fingers, fleshy ends clinging to the flattened shadows at the table. With these they call for attention, scratching at the wood, pulling splinters, drawing blood.
But the sound of water drowns them out.
Each Paxton is a white robe wearing a stole, like the men from your exorcisms. Sticky gray tendrils, borne of each utterance, each interaction, connect the whites to every guest, bonding all in a closeknit web. Water so saline you can taste it pours from the depths of each Paxton to the dining room floor, enveloping the slant shadow-selves. Alessia’s ejections happen, like her words, in drips, slipping down the sides of her mouth. Charlotte and Donny, Hollywood smiles still intact, spout huge bucketfuls. But no one gushes into the fast-rising lake like Elijah, from whom water pours out of every orifice: eager, hungry, restless.
Young Joshua is the only Paxton left untouched. He is still stroking the cat. But rather than the vacant expression he has presented all evening, his face is warped by fear as he watches the water rise. His eyes turn, slowly, and find you, realizing you have joined him in this separate reality.
“Help,” he whispers, choking. “Help me.”
The flesh-fingered shadows scratch the table, echoing his words in wood. HELP. HELP ME.

The narrator quickly leaves, and realises that the ancestors were warning him that he might drown (in the host’s religion, presumably).
For the most part this is a readable piece (and economical, too—it does a lot with its four thousand words) that slowly and successfully builds unease in the reader—but it is somewhat anti-climactic (Kédiké runs away), and unsatisfyingly open-ended (what does he subsequently do to help Joshua, who appears to be in a similar situation to the younger Kédiké?) It also feels a bit like an anti-Christian hit job, and an unsubtle one at that.
All in all this reads like the beginning of a longer story, and I wonder if it is a novel in progress.
∗∗ (Average). 3,950 words. Story link.

Sara Wong

Quandry Aminu vs The Butterfly Man by Rich Larson (Tor.com, 21^st September 2022) opens with an unnamed woman arriving at a makeshift biolab run by a man called Jow. After some brief conversation she opens a pouch containing something that looks like the cross between a foetus and a homunculus, and they watch it grow in the bathtub of biomass that Jow has prepared:

There’s a rattling gurgle, like rainwater racing through pipes during a storm, and the tub starts to churn. A wet pink fleck strikes Jow’s boot. He steps back, heart humming, knees shaky. The biomass is sluicing away, but not down the drain. The thing from the pouch is greedy, growing, sucking with ravenous pores.
Jow watches the level fall, and fall, and a body emerge. It swells and thrashes. Limbs elongate. A cartilage skeleton stretches, twists. Muscles creep over each other, layer on bubbling layer; rubbery skin splits and reforms to accommodate. Jow can’t take his eyes off it.
When the gurgling noise finally stops, the fully formed butterfly man is lying in a shallow carbon puddle. It’s human-shaped, but strays in the details: joints distended, no finger or toenails, smooth uninterrupted flesh between the legs. Its face is the most perfect part of it, with planar cheekbones and soulful dark eyes.
“Thought it’d be bigger,” Jow says, to mask the crawling in his spine.

The woman compares it to a tupilak, something made out of animal carcass that you send after a person who has wronged you but, before she can expand on her comment, Jow gets a text saying, “For diagnostic purposes, run or hide.” The butterfly man then leaps out of the bathtub and stabs the woman to death with a plastic probe before pursuing Jow, who flees.
The next section switches to a bar where Timo finds a woman called Quandry and tells her that a gangster called Jokić is unhappy about “the harbour job going belly up,” and that he has sent a butterfly man after her. The story subsequently turns into a Terminator-style narrative (the butterfly man has extraordinary powers of regrowth) where Quandry is relentlessly pursued and has several close shaves. During this she learns about butterfly men from her father (Quandry keeps his oxygenated head in a case while she is acquiring funds to buy him a new body), and he tells her that they only survive for 24 hours, but no-one who is pursued lasts that long.
The pivotal part of the story comes when Quandry goes to a drug dealer’s house and discovers (spoiler), when the butterfly man arrives, that she is in its temporary lair. Quandry then fights with the butterfly man, manages to inject a cocktail of drugs into its jugular, and restrains it. She subsequently manages to convince the creature that, if it kills Jokić before her, it can get control of the rest of the shipment of butterfly men that is due to arrive and, because they have linked memories, gain control of its own destiny and do what it wants rather than being endlessly compelled to be a bioware assassin (we have learned along the way that it likes noodles and painting). The butterfly man agrees to kill Jokić first, then her.
The climax of the piece comes when Quandry and the butterfly man go to the top floor of Jokic’s building, where they kill his guards and then fight with him and his barber robot. During this Quandry watches a second butterfly man push the original off the roof (this second butterfly man has the same memories and essentially the same consciousness as the first but likes pushing things off of buildings). This latter act is fortuitous because the second butterfly man, unlike the first, has not been programmed to assassinate Quandry.
If you don’t think too much about what is going on here (the part where Quandry ends up in the butterfly man’s lair and manages to convince it to go along with her plan hugely stretches credulity) then this is an entertaining enough gangland assassination story with lots of grisly wetware action and a twisty plot. If you enjoyed Larson’s recent How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar (also on Tor.com) you will probably like this.¹
∗∗∗ (Good). 14,750 words. Story link.

Bill Mayer

Of All the New Yorks in All the Worlds by Indrapramit Das (Tor.com, 19^th October 2022) opens with the narrator, a multiple worlds traveller, meeting Aditi-0, the original iteration of his ex-girlfriend Aditi-1, who he met in New York City-5 while travelling across the timelines (NYCs 2-4 didn’t have an Aditi in them). We subsequently learn that he met Aditi-1 after he was tasked to take a message from Aditi-0 to the versions of herself on other Earths (her “altselves”).
The rest of the story is mostly an account of the time he spends with Aditi-0, during which they talk about his failed affair with Aditi-1 (which he is still moping about). The story ultimately (spoiler) subverts reader expectation by having the narrator and Aditi-1 become friends instead of lovers at the end of the story (or perhaps it just describes what happens when people break up but remain in touch). I am not sure what the point of this is.
The story essentially appears to be a piece about failed relationships even though it is decorated with SFnal furniture, e.g. the physical effects of timeline travel (nausea, etc.), futuristic jargon (“altselves,” “sticers”), and one scene that describes a trans-timeline node in operation:

Time appears to slow, and sound with it, flooding my ears with a low hum.
Everything. The people, the stars in the sky, the ruddy smear of sunlight still burning in the clouds behind Manhattan, the lights of New York City, the glowsticks now arcing through the air above us. Everything grows persistent trails that crawl across the dark blue evening air in shimmering banners and strings. Aditi0 is replicated a hundred times until she is surrounded in a glimmering tracery of herself. The entire world etches the expanding mark of its passage on to the surface of reality. We see the potentialities of past and present grow around us for what seems like infinity but is actually just a few moments. As this multi-hued, crystalline geometry of our movement and Earth’s movement through spacetime grows more and more complex it begins to ripple and fade like a wake, so the tearing meteoric lines of the city’s lights fracture into what looks like a thousand overlapping New Yorks and a thousand starscapes splayed out across the horizon, before vanishing into the singular skyline we know.
The dancing replications decorating reality stream away to nothing and time hits its normal pace again, letting sound rush in like an explosion. I stagger back at this effect, gasping as I take in the world, which now seems to be moving too fast. It takes a few seconds of staying still to keep from throwing up at the contrast. Aditi0 lets her shoulder sag against mine.

This is probably the only truly SFnal part of what is essentially a slow-moving mainstream story about relationships.²
∗∗ (Average). 6,350 words. Story link.

Ashley Mackenzie

How the Crown Prince of Jupiter Undid the Universe, or, The Full Fruit of Love’s Full Folly by P. H. Lee (Tor.com, 12^th October 2022) opens with the Crown Prince of Jupiter becoming infatuated with the Princess of the Sun:

He was in love, and his heart knew no persuasion. “Oh look at her,” he would say, admiring the tiny portrait, “what radiant beauty!”
“Her radiance,” commented his advisors, “is due entirely to her nuclear fusion. If your royal highness was in her presence, even a moment, then by those self-same processes you would find yourself instantly annihilated.”
“Are we not all slain by the self-same arrows of true love?” answered the Prince. Which, of course, was not any sort of answer, except to a young man in love.

The Prince subsequently stops eating and drinking, so his advisors implore his Aunt to intervene. She initially reiterates what he has already been told but, when she sees he is smitten, tells him that his only hope lies with Ursula, a witch who lives on Earth.³
In the second part of the story we see the Prince and Alisterisk (an advisor) journey to Earth suitably attired in pressure armour. There they meet Ursula and the story takes a meta-fictional turn:

Ursula’s eyes came at last on the Crown Prince and on Alisterisk beside him. In their pressurized armor, they looked to her as bluewhite gleams in a beam of sunlight. “Ah,” she said, relaxing. “I see now that this is a science fiction story. And I suppose you want me to write the end of it. All right then. What’s the matter?”

There is more of this kind of thing when (after the Prince tells his story and Ursula tells him that he should seek out the wizard Stanislaw) Alisterisk momentarily stays behind to thank her:

“Do not thank me yet,” said the Earth Witch. “For the matter is not done. I am afraid, Alisterisk, that you shall come to no good end in this affair. The side characters seldom do.”

The final section sees the Prince and Alisterisk meet Stanislaw³ who, after hearing their story (spoiler), tells them he can help, but that there may be consequences:

“I have in my possession,” said the wizard Stanislaw, “a Metaphoricator, left for me by the Constructor Trurl when he sojourned in my company these many years ago. A Metaphoricator is a most particular device. Operated properly, it can transform any real thing into a metaphor, merely a story meant to illustrate its point.”
“So you mean to transform us into metaphors?” asked Alisterisk hesitantly.
“Oh no!” said the wizard Stanislaw, “You are quite clearly metaphors already. Just think of it! How could there be such a thing as a real Crown Prince of Jupiter, a real Princess of the Sun? Your entire narrative is quite clearly a farce.”
“But then what do you intend to do?” asked Alisterisk
“By means of a few simple re-arrangements and jerry-rigs,” said the wizard Stanislaw, “my Metaphoricator can be transformed into a Demetaphoricator. And that is the machine I intend to operate.”
“What good is a Demetaphoricator to our present difficulties?” asked Alisterisk.
The wizard snapped his fingers. “With a single application of a Demetaphoricator, I can transform all of your story—the Crown Prince, Esmerelda, the Coreward Palace, Ursula the Earth Witch, even myself the wizard Stanislaw, into real people and real events, actually existing in the world beyond this story. At such time, both your Crown Prince and his beloved Esmerelda shall be rendered as real people, with no physical impediments to their romance. Of course, they may still encounter other difficulties, but that is simply the course of being human.”

The story ends with the characters having escaped the story and the writer quizzing the reader as to whether or not they have ever known archetypes like the Prince or Princess (the boy who became infatuated with a girl who could do nothing but destroy him), whether they helped, and what their role was, if any (were they like Alisterisk the advisor?)
This story probably sounds like an unlikely and unsuccessful combination of elements, but the quirky beginning, the meta-fictional development, and the story-transcending ending makes for an original, entertaining, and accomplished piece.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 3,650 words. Story link.

Rovina Cai

Skeleton Song by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com, 26^th October 2022) is one of her “Wayward Children” series (Every Heart a Doorway, etc.)⁴ and opens with sunset on Mariposa, with the abuelas singing the summoning song that reanimates the dead skeletons of this world:

In the palace, in the curtained bower reserved for the Princess, a scattering of bones dusted with diamond and amber began to stir, tempted into motion by the song rising from below. On the other side of the room, a terrible creature raised its head and watched.
It was strange and fleshy, shaped as a skeleton was shaped, but with a covering of fat and skin stretched across it, concealing it from proper view. It hid most of its body under rags it called “clothing,” which had grown tattered and worn, developing holes where none had been before. Some among the palace staff had hoped, for a time, that the same might happen to the terrible creature’s “skin,” leaving proper, honest bone to shine through. It had not. When the creature broke its skin, as happened from time to time, it bled and wept and hurt, and took to the pile of rags it had claimed as a “bed.”
They would never have allowed it to remain in the palace were it not for one strange truth: hideous as the creature was, impossible as it seemed, the Princess loved it.

We learn that the fleshy creature is Christopher, a human who arrived in this world of living skeletons via a portal. The Princess saw that this new arrival was ill and drew all the sickness into a bone, later extracting it from Christopher’s body. Christopher now uses the bone as a flute.
The rest of the story sees the Princess paint her bones (a skeleton’s equivalent of dressing, I guess) before they go to see her parents in the depths of the catacombs (Christopher loves the Princess and does not want to go back to his world, so she says he must meet her parents). When the pair eventually arrive at the bottom of the catacombs, they learn from the Princess’s father that he also came to Mariposa as a human—but he kept his fleshly memories by having his mother plunge a gilded bone into his heart on their wedding night and then cut away his flesh (this resolves a memory problem mentioned by Christopher during an earlier discussion with the Princess about him becoming a skeleton).
The story concludes with the couple returning to the surface. The Princess wants “to sleep in the flowers” with him one last time (her bones are inanimate during the daytime) and then, when she rises that sunset, they will follow the ritual outlined by her father. When the Princess wakes that evening, however (spoiler), she finds that Christopher has had second thoughts and vanished.
This isn’t badly done (there are some nice touches, e.g. the journey down into the catacombs) but the idea of a man falling in love with a skeleton requires a little too much suspension of disbelief. I suspect this story will appeal more to those already invested in the series and who are interested in interstitial material.
∗∗ (Average). 5,000 words. Story link.

•••

This appears to be the first issue of the Tor.com Short Fiction Newsletter since the March-April one, and I don’t know why that is—but I suspect it is caused by the same half-heartedness that seems to afflict the project (there have been previous missing issues, missing stories in some issues—sometimes Wild Cards stories but sometimes others—and I have mentioned the woeful PDF format design before). I don’t know why, if Tor are going to bother with this newsletter, they can’t address these issues. I also don’t know why, given the wealth of non-fiction essays they have to choose from on their website, they wouldn’t include a few of the better ones and put out a proper magazine to appeal to those who want a pre-packaged non-web product. And they could include full page adverts for their books.
Putting my moans to one side, this issue has a better selection of fiction than normal and, given there are no turkeys, shows a better consistency of quality than usual.  ●

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1. Both Quandry Aminu vs The Butterfly Man and How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar show Rich Larson in Hollywood movie mode (albeit movies that have more SFnal invention than most).

2. Contrast and compare Indrapramit Das’s mainstreamish Of All the New Yorks in All the Worlds with his decidedly SFnal Weep for Day (reviewed here).

3. In P. H. Lee’s story, How the Crown Prince of Jupiter etc., Ursula the Earth Witch is obviously Ursula K. LeGuin (the Earthsea series), and Stanislaw is Stanislaw Lem (Trurl is from The Cyberiad).

4. Seanan McGuire’s “The Wayward Children” series at ISFDB.  ●

Summary:
The best of this group (and the only one I would expect to see on an award ballot) was the entertaining and thoughtful Just Enough Rain by P.H. Lee which, superficially, is about the narrator dating an angel in a world where God is manifest. I also liked the Lauren Ring and Caroline M. Yoachim stories—and would have been happy to find them in a magazine issue—but I don’t think they are award level work (and that latter observation applies even more to the Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and John Wiswell stories).
There were better stories out there in 2021.

_____________________

Editors, LaShawn Wanak, Lezli Robyn, Sheree Renée Thomas, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas (x2)

Fiction:
Just Enough Rain • novelette by P.H. Lee ∗∗∗+
O₂ Arena • novelette by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki ∗∗
(emet) • novelette by Lauren Ring ∗∗∗
That Story Isn’t the Story • novelette by John Wiswell ∗∗
Colors of the Immortal Palette • novelette by Caroline M. Yoachim ∗∗∗

_____________________

There are five finalists in the novelette category—the winner was O₂ Arena by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki.

•

Just Enough Rain by P. H. Lee (Giganotosaurus, 1^st May 2021)¹ opens with an arresting first line:

I wasn’t surprised when God showed up for Mom’s funeral. They’d always been close.

After the funeral service is over, Annie goes over to talk with God and they have a long and wandering conversation (His friendship with her mother, His sending angels to remove the sarcomas produced by a previous bout of cancer, etc.) before God tells her He is thinking of bringing Annie’s mother back to life. Once He ascertains that Annie has no objections (expected inheritance, etc.) there are sounds of movement from inside the coffin.
This opening passage is followed by a short second chapter which tells of the parable of Honi the Circle-Drawer (Honi asks God to provide rain, and then the correct amount of rain when there is a flood) before the rest of the story settles into its groove, which is that of Annie’s love life. This latter begins with her resurrected mother telling Annie that she wants grandchildren:

“You know,” she’d say, as if I hadn’t heard it a hundred times before, “one of my great regrets was dying without getting to meet my grandchildren.”
“Mom,” I’d say, “you’re still alive.”
“Only because of a miracle, dear,” she’d say, “and we mustn’t count on miracles. What happened to Brett, anyway? I liked Brett. Good Jewish boy. And a doctor!”

After more of this kind of thing, and some of Annie’s backstory (a vision she had at 15 about saving monarch butterflies from extinction), Annie’s mother calls her and says that she has phoned God and had a word with him about Annie’s love life. Annie later experiences the result of this intercession in a hilarious passage:

I was on the Blue Line, reading The Guermantes Way–the new translation–when I noticed him–her? them?–sitting across from me, beautiful.
It was their skin, I think, that caught my attention. Strong, muscled, but still soft as a feather. I sucked in my breath and, without thinking, bit my lower lip. There was no question of going back to The Guermantes Way. I just sat, and looked at them, beautiful, God they were beautiful.
Then, just as we left Elmonica/SW 170^th, they stood up–tall, broadshouldered, the slowest curve of their chin–and unfurled their wings of holy light, almost the length of the entire train car.
“Oh no,” I said, but I couldn’t look away.
“HARK,” they said, their voice filling the entire railcar. “BE NOT AFRAID, FOR I AM A MESSENGER OF THE LORD YOUR GOD.”
Some people were fumbling with their phones, but most of them just gawped, open-mouthed. I felt the cold-warm rush of embarrassment and I wanted to hide under my seat almost as much as I wanted to keep staring.
He’d sent an angel. Of course He’d sent an angel.
The angel turned to a slightly paunchy man–nice curly hair, though–in glasses, khakis and a polo shirt. “DAVID ELIAS RUTENBERG,” it said.
David blanched and looked for all the world like he’d just had a dream about taking a final exam in his underwear. “Y-yes?” he finally managed.
The angel pointed to me and I tried my very best to blend into the seat cushion. “THIS WOMAN, ANAT BETHESDA MEAGELE, IS SINGLE. SHE HAS A GOOD JOB AND SHE’S EMOTIONALLY MATURE AND READY FOR A COMMITMENT. YOU SHOULD ASK FOR HER NUMBER. SO SAYETH THE LORD.”
David stared at me and swallowed hard. His face was covered in sweat.
“TAKE HER SOMEWHERE NICE, NOTHING TOO FANCY, IN THE $20-30 RANGE,” continued the angel, just when I thought that this couldn’t get worse. “ARGUE ABOUT WHETHER TO SPLIT THE CHECK BUT THEN PRETEND TO GO TO THE BATHROOM AND SECRETLY PAY.”
David, still sweating, gave me an appraising look that made me instantly aware of every wrinkle and sag. “She’s, uh” he started.
“YES,” said the angel, turning their magnificent gaze upon me. “HURRY IT UP.”
“She’s a bit old for me, isn’t she?”
The angel snapped their gaze back to him. “WELL YOU’RE NO SPRING CHICKEN YOURSELF, DAVE.”
Dave looked like he’d just swallowed a toad. “I-is that also the word of G-G-God?” he managed.
“NO, DAVE, THAT’S JUST A SIMPLE OBSERVATION THAT ANYONE COULD MAKE. YOU’RE NOT EXACTLY GOING TO LAND A SUPERMODEL.”
“Uh, well,” said Dave, and pulled the emergency brake.

Annie subsequently phones God and tells him not to intercede again, before asking for the angel’s telephone number. God phones her back with it, and Annie and the (monomaniacally dull) angel subsequently go on a car crash date. Worse, he then pesters her with a series of texts asking to see her again and, when those are unanswered, another series asking what went wrong.
Annie (bearing in mind her mother’s comments about being too quick to judge) eventually agrees to another date with the angel. This one works out better, even though their dinner conversation spans an eclectic range of topics (the semiotics of the translations of Remembrance of Things Lost, Korean Food, angelic languages, etc.). By the fourth date they are having sex, or whatever word you would use to describe congress between a woman and a being who, unclothed, has a distinctly inhuman form:

Their human guise–clothes, but also skin and eyes and everything–lay in a pile beneath them. What remained was a great cloud of a thousand different hands, in each hand a different eye, in each eye a different name of God, all wreathed in light and holy fire.
“THIS IS ME,” said the angel, with a voice that seemed to come from everywhere.
I stepped forward, took one of the hands, and kissed it. “You’re beautiful,” I said, and meant it.

Eventually, and after sections that detail Annie’s conversations with (a) her mother about the parable of Honi the Circle-Drawer, and (b) the angel about the unpublished Rimbaud translations in her notebooks (the story is fairly discursive throughout), Annie phones her mother to tell her that she is pregnant. The story ends with, among other things, a discussion of God’s likely reaction, what Annie intends to do with her child, and what happened “last time” (i.e. with Jesus).
This is not only an original story (the idea of a slightly bumbling God manifest in the world is relatively novel or at least underused in genre fiction) but also an amusing, and sometimes hilarious, one. It is, however, slightly more sprawling than it needs to be (the ending is a bit wafflely, for instance) and some tightening up would have benefited the whole piece. That said, I enjoyed the story’s various diversions—the parable, Annie’s butterfly vision and whether saving them was God’s purpose for her, the discussions about Proust’s Remembrance of Things Lost, etc., etc. These gave what could have been a piece of froth some thoughtful heft and, at times, made it a wise and reflective work.
Well worth a look.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 9,550 words. Story link.

•

O₂ Arena by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki (Galaxy’s Edge, November 2021)² opens with a short fight section before the story flashbacks to a point a few months earlier where the narrator, a new student at the Academy of Laws, is listening to his induction lectures. We later learn that the academy is located in a future Nigeria where climate change has damaged the atmosphere so badly that people need masks and portable air when they go outside (and where they use oxygen as a currency):

Mrs. Oduwole was at the podium now. The Head of Hostels began by stating that the generators would be on until midnight for reading and for the making of breathable air. After midnight, we would revert to our O₂ cylinders which we must keep by our bedsides throughout the night.
The tuition was expensive but was only meant to cover the central hall’s oxygen generation when lectures were on. O₂ masks filtered the bad air temporarily, for the brief periods when moving between places. O₂ cylinders were for longer periods when there were no O₂ generators.
We weren’t allowed to be in the hostels during the day when lectures were on, for any reasons. She didn’t care if you were a girl on your flow, no matter how heavy. And this was apparently the only example she felt obligated to give.

During this series of lectures the narrator goes outside the hall for a break and meets Ovole, a female friend/undisclosed love interest. During their bantering exchanges we find out she has cancer (“Do you want to feel [the tumour]?” she asks at one point).
After several pages of the above, and other data dump information about the narrator’s academy and society (various forms of institutional and political oppression make the narrator struggle to breath in more ways than one it would seem), the story kicks up a gear when he decides to visit his old gang on the mainland, a part of the story that has some interesting local colour. When the narrator later talks to an old gang acquaintance, he learns that Dr Umez, one of the induction lecturers, has a reputation for molesting both male and female students. Then, when the narrator tells the acquaintance that he needs to earn some money (for Ovole’s medical needs), they go to the O₂ arena and watch a cage fight that ends when one of the combatants is killed.
The narrator subsequently decides not to take the risk of entering the cage fights, but (spoiler) he then learns that Ovoke is in hospital and needs expensive ICU treatment. So, after a visit to hospital to see Ovoke and her parents, he returns to the arena and enters the fights. After a vicious bout he kills his opponent and wins a substantial prize pot, but it is too late—Ovoke has died in the meantime.
The story closes with the narrator using the prize money to form his own gang, and their first action is the killing of the abusive Dr Umez.
This is a bit of a mixed bag. The opening set-up (about ten pages) is overlong and plodding, and the story only really gets going when the narrator goes to the mainland. I also didn’t care for the political messages that were constantly telegraphed throughout the story (“You see, the rich deserved to breathe”, “She thought she would be nothing in a patriarchal society that valued men for their ability to provide, and women for reproduction”, etc., etc.—the author is not a fan of show don’t tell). On the other hand the mainland setting and culture is interesting, as is the idea of oxygen as a currency—so a promising piece, but not an even or polished one (its Nebula Award and Hugo nominations way overrate the story).
∗∗ (Average). 8, 150 words. Story link.

•

(Emet) by Lauren Ring (F&SF, July-August 2022)³ opens with Chaya in her countryside home watching a golem dig up dandelions in her garden—these creatures of Jewish folklore are created daily by Chaya and linked to her home network:

After a few false starts, Chaya has the bestowal of life down to a science. Each morning at dawn, she molds assistants from clay, connects them to her wireless network just like any smart watch or Bluetooth dongle, and passes them the day’s variables: a list of chores, with each step painstakingly defined. The golem in charge of the dandelions finished early, but there are others of various sizes lumbering about the yard, carrying eggs from Chaya’s chicken coop and clearing loose stones from her long, winding driveway.  p. 67

We learn that Chaya is a teleworker for Millbank Biometrics, a company that is developing facial recognition software. Then, after some backstory about how Chaya’s mother taught her how to make golems and the generalities of Chaya’s job, Chaya virtually attends a company meeting where she and the other employees are given a list of thirty-six protestors that law enforcement want to track:

Confusion spreads across the faces on Chaya’s monitor. If her camera was on, she is sure that she would see the same expression reflected in her own frown. Tracking protesters isn’t exactly what she signed up for when she applied to Millbank. Sure, it’s what their software was ultimately going to be used for, but she wasn’t supposed to have to do it.
“Are there any questions?”
Chaya expects someone to ask what crimes these people committed, or what is going to happen to them when the information is turned over to the police, even though she already knows the dark answer to that. She expects questions about ethics and precedent and nondisclosure. At the very least, she expects someone to ask how they are supposed to check every partial match from every instance of every client’s software without neglecting all their other work.
No one asks any questions, though, not even her manager, so Chaya stays in line and keeps quiet. She sets the thirty-six faces to display on one of her monitors and returns to her code. What else can she do? She’s only one person, after all.  pp. 72-72

The next section of the story sees, among other things: (a) Chaya remember a childhood incident when a black friend was arrested on a false positive match (Chaya’s family didn’t do anything before the child was eventually released); (b) Chaya spot one of the thirty-six protestors in a local shop (when they talk to each other, Chaya is told about a surveillance protest in a couple of weeks); (c) Chaya garble the code for one of her golems—this makes it create another one, which in turn creates one more (“like a line of self replicating code”); (d) Chaya’s mother’s death due to cancer and health algorithms; and (e) Chaya realise, when she receives another dubious request from her company, that she is little better than a golem herself.
The story ends (spoiler) with Chaya’s long simmering rebellion, which sees her create self-replicating golems with the same faces as the target individuals, something designed to overload Millbank’s servers (she is helped with this by the man from the shop, who she meets again at the protest, and who gets the dispersing protesters to take a self-replicating golem with them to increase the area where Millbank will record sightings).
I found this story interesting but something of a mixed bag. On the plus side, the gimmick (golems controlled by computer code) is original, and the story is more multi-layered and complex than most but, on the minus side, the golem/computer mix feels a bit odd (a fantasy idea mixed with science fiction), and the politics of the story (surveillance + algorithms = bad) feels a bit simplistic (look at how much surveillance data we give away willingly).
I’d also add that the very last part, where Chaya conflates her actions with the idea of “truth” (“Emet” in Hebrew) doesn’t make much sense as they seem to be more about political values or freedom. Finally, I didn’t understand why “Emet” is the word that brings the golems to life.
∗∗∗ (Good). 7,800 words. Story link.

•

That Story Isn’t the Story by John Wiswell (Uncanny, November-December 2021) opens with Anton leaving a vampire household with the help of an old friend called Grigorii. As they leave the house in Grigorii’s car, Anton sees Mr Bird (the vampire) return:

A black town car trails up the street toward them. Sleek and black, with that short club of a man Walter at the wheel. Mr. Bird’s senior familiar. Anton knows who sits in the tinted windows and the shadows of the rear seats.
From inside the Kia, Grigorii pops the passenger door open. “Come on, man.”
Is blood spotting in Anton’s jeans? He gropes at his thighs, unsure if the moisture is sweat on his palms or if he’s bleeding. The car is getting closer. Mr. Bird definitely sees him. Anton sinks into the car. He clutches his seatbelt until they are doing forty in a twenty mile zone. He’s too worried to turn around, and too afraid not to fixate on the rearview mirror.
The black car stops in the middle of the street. A rear door opens, and a dark thing peers out. There is no seeing any detail of that figure—no detail except for his mouth. It is open and sharp. Distance doesn’t change how clearly Anton sees the teeth.

Anton then meets Luis, another stray, at Grigorii’s house, and worries about Mr Bird before examining himself in the toilet to see if the bite wounds in his thighs are still bleeding (these are semi-permanent, and bleed in the presence of Mr Bird). They aren’t, which means that Mr Bird is not nearby, or not yet.
This background feeling of menace and unease pervades most of the rest of the story, and rises and falls as different events play out. To begin with, Luis is attacked on the way back from his job, something Anton thinks may be related to his departure and which causes a fight between the two when Anton tried to inspect Luis for bites. Then Walter, Mr Bird’s familiar, approaches Anton to tell him that he must return, the first of two visits (during the second one Walter tells Anton that the twins, two of the vampire’s other victims, have also run away).
There is never any force or violence used to get Anton to return, oddly enough and, towards the end of the story, the contacts stop and Anton transitions to a normal life. Then, one evening when Anton and a new boyfriend called Julian go out for a meal, Anton sees Walter working in the restaurant and realises that he has left Mr Bird too.
The story closes a few weeks later, when Anton goes out of town with Julian for the weekend and detours past Mr Bird’s house: Anton sees the building is in an obvious state of disrepair and then, while he sketches the house, it collapses.
This has the trappings of a vampire story but is really a mainstream piece about escaping abusive relationships or situations, and one which suggests that people can choose their own destinies—the line “that story isn’t the story” is used a couple of times:

Walter asks, “What made you think you could survive without him?”
“That story is not the story I’m telling today.” [Anton replies.]

[Anton] asks [Grigorii], “What happened to your [abusive] mom? Do you ever see her?”
“That story is not the story I’m telling today, man.”

This would have been a reasonably good straight piece, but the story undermines itself somewhat by setting up the vampire menace at the beginning of the piece and then letting it fade away. That said, I realise that the idea of a perceived threat being more perception that reality may be one of the points the story is trying to make.²
∗∗ (Average). 9,000 words. Story link.

•

Colors of the Immortal Palette by Caroline M. Yoachim (Uncanny March-April 2021)² is set in Paris in the time of Manet and Monet (the mid- to late-1800s, I guess), and opens with a Japanese woman called Mariko posing for an unnamed immortal artist (who is also referred to as a “vampire” at points in the story, although he takes life energy from others rather than their blood).
Then, at the end of the session:

I’m about to give him up as hopeless when he turns to look at me. I’m lost in the darkness of his eyes, drowning in the intensity of his attention. I can barely breathe, but I repeat my invitation, “I could show you other poses.”
“Yes.” He sweeps me into an embrace that is strong and cold. White. He is snow and I am determined to melt it.
The sex builds slowly, deliberately, like paint layered on a canvas in broad strokes—tentative at first as we find our way to a shared vision, then faster with a furious intensity and passion.
After, when other artists might hold me and drift off to sleep, he dissipates into a white mist that swirls in restless circles around the room, chilling me down to the bones when it touches my skin. His mist seeps into me and pulses through my veins for several heartbeats. I feel energized, an exhilaration more intense than watching him work, a connection closer even than our sex.
He withdraws, and I am diminished. I hadn’t known until this moment what I was lacking, but now I am filled with a keen sense of my incompleteness. I long for him, for the sensation of vastness I felt when we were one.

Subsequently she becomes his lover, poses for another painting, becomes jealous of his other models, and thinks of the extra time that immortality would give her for her own art (she is a painter too). Later, she convinces him to make her immortal, a process leaves him unable to take any form but mist for over a year.
The rest of the story concerns her subsequent life and development as an artist, and telescopes in time from the point she paints another model called Victorine (which gives Mariko a new found awareness of the woman’s mortality) to (spoiler) her final painting, a self-portrait that will change with time, and which is painted after she learns that her jaded benefactor has dissipated into mist, never to recohere.
There are various other significant events for Mariko during this period: she gets married, achieves artistic success, learns of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the birthplace of her mother), and, in one of the pivotal passages of the piece, receives a telegram in 1927 informing her of Victorine’s death:

The world has been a week without her in it, but her death did not become a truth for me until the telegram arrived. She is the last. Even Monet has ceased his endless paintings of water lilies, having passed in December. I’ve not seen either of them for decades, but tonight I feel the loss as keenly as if I’d sat with them yesterday, all of us gathered at the Café Guerbois, Victorine and I engaging the men in passionate discussions on the purpose of art, the role of the model, and whether critical outrage was an attack on the honor of the painter, this last being a topic that always irritated Manet.
They were my cohort—Édouard, Émile, Claude, Paul and Camille, and of course Victorine. I met them not knowing that I would outlive them, and without having the distance that knowledge brings. My immortal artist was right—I don’t get quite so close to mortals now, I no longer see myself as one of them. But I’m accustomed to navigating a world I do not feel a part of, a place where I am unlike all the others. This has always been my truth.
[. . .]
I have outlived my friends, my colleagues, and for what? All my paintings combined have not garnered the renown of Olympia or Impression, Sunrise. I am best known as the model from Woman, Reclining (Mari), and maybe my lack of success is not—as I have always told myself—because I am a woman and an outsider, but because I am lacking in talent.
Even being immortal, which should be simple enough, is a task that I am failing for I cannot bear the thought of stealing time from mortals whose lives are already so fleeting. I take just enough here and there from models—always with their consent—to maintain a human form, but if I cannot create beauty, cannot leave my mark on the world of art, their time is wasted, and nothing is so precious as time.

I liked this piece well enough but there isn’t much here apart from an extended historical slice of life, the angst of immortals, and talk about artists and painting. This may not be to everyone’s taste.
∗∗∗ (Good). 12,800 words.

•••

The best of this group (and the only one I would expect to see on an award ballot) was Just Enough Rain by P.H. Lee. I liked the Lauren Ring and Caroline M. Yoachim stories—and would have been happy to find them in a magazine issue—but I don’t think they are award level work (and that latter observation applies even more to the Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and John Wiswell).
I haven’t read a lot of 2021 stories, but I’d suggest that You Are Born Exploding by Rich Larson (story link) is better than all of the above (it would have been my pick for the award), and The Metric by David Moles (story link) is at least as good.  ●

_____________________

1. I’m surprised that Just Enough Rain by P. H. Lee didn’t end up in a better paying market (Giganotosaurus pays $100 for its stories, which is about 1 cent a word for this piece).

2. The Oghenechovwe Donald Epeki and Caroline M. Yoachim stories were also Hugo finalists.

3. (Emet) by Lauren Ring won the 2022 World Fantasy Award for best short story.  ●

Summary:
Another mixed bag of stories from a supposedly major award, with three good or better stories and three that I would not expect to see here. The good work includes Proof by Induction by José Pablo Iriarte (my favourite story sees a son visit his dead father in VR to finish a math proof and try to establish a relationship), Mr. Death by Alix E. Harrow (which has a “Reaper” from the Department of Death given a two year old boy as his next job), and Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather by Sarah Pinsker (the winner of the Nebula Award sees an online group discuss a gruesome folk song, with one of their number later doing some field research).
I suspect the other three stories by Sam J. Miller, Suzan Palumbo, and John Wiswell are here because of their “life issues” content (growing up queer, immigration and sibling issues, and chronic pain management).

_____________________

Editors, Jason Sizemore & Lesley Conner, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas (x2), Jonathan Strahan, Sean Wallace & Clara Madrigano, David Steffen

Fiction:
Mr. Death • short story by Alix E. Harrow ∗∗∗+
Proof by Induction • short story by José Pablo Iriarte ∗∗∗∗
Let All the Children Boogie • short story by Sam J. Miller ∗
Laughter Among the Trees • short story by Suzan Palumbo ∗
Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather • short story by Sarah Pinsker ∗∗∗+
For Lack of a Bed • short story by John Wiswell ∗

_____________________

There are six finalists in the short story category, and the winner was Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather by Sarah Pinsker.

•

Mr Death by Alix E. Harrow (Apex #121, January 2021)¹ begins with Sam, the narrator, telling us that he has ferried “two hundred and twenty-one souls across the river of death” before he is given his next assignment:

Name: Lawrence Harper
Address: 186 Grist Mill Road, Lisle NY, 13797
Time: Sunday, July 14th 2020, 2:08AM, EST
Cause: Cardiac arrest resulting from undiagnosed long QT syndrome
Age: 30 months
.
Jesus Christ on his sacred red bicycle. He’s two.

Sam goes to see Lawrence several hours before his death (a requirement that helps smooth the passing of the dead across the river to “rejoin the great everything”) and, when he arrives in the boy’s bedroom, watches him stir. Lawrence’s father, alerted by the intercom, comes in and picks the boy up and takes him into the kitchen. Sam then watches the father hold and feed Lawrence, and notes the father does not know that this will be his last time together with his son. Later on in the garden, the boy (unusually) sees Sam, and the pair later play catch together.
The rest of the story switches between this kind of affecting domestic detail (we see the boy with his mother when she gets home), backstory about the premature death of Sam’s own young son, Ian, and an account of Sam’s own death and recruitment as a “reaper”.
Eventually (spoiler), Lawrence’s moment of passing arrives and, when his heart stops, Sam intervenes, putting a ghostly hand into the boy’s chest and massaging it back to life.
Sam subsequently has his tea leaves read by his Archangel supervisor, Raz (“the kind of sweet, middle-aged Black woman with whom you do not fuck”) and is given another appointment to reap the boy. Once again Sam saves him, and once again Raz appears. This time she asks Sam what he would do if she punished him by leaving him on Earth, never to cross the river and rejoin the great everything, but to fade into nothingness. Sam says he would watch over Lawrence for as long as he could, and the story finishes with Raz telling him he no longer works for the Department of Death. Before she goes she hands him a card, which says, “Sam Grayson, Junior Guardian, Department of Life”.
Although this story pretends, for most of its length, to be an edgy and dark piece, it is ultimately sentimental and feel-good—and, to be honest, quite well done. I couldn’t help but think, however, that there are darker and more profound versions of the story where the boy dies. Two options spring to mind: the first, which would appeal to the religious, is that we see the joy of him rejoining the great everything; the second just sees him die, and has the narrator reflect on the need for stoicism to get us through this veil of tears. I doubt any current SF writer is going to be writing that kind of story any time soon.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 5,100 words. Story link.

•

Proof by Induction by José Pablo Iriarte (Uncanny #40, May-June 2021)² opens with Paulie arriving at the hospital to discover his father has died. Standing next to his father’s wife is the chaplain, who offers Paulie the chance to enter his father’s “Coda”, a computer simulacrum of his father’s consciousness made just before his death:

Gone was the endotracheal tube. The room was eerily silent, with none of the sounds he’d associated with the hospital from his visits over the past week.
He met his father’s eyes. “Hey.”
His father smiled ruefully. “Hey.”
“Are you—”
“Dead?” His father gestured toward the inactive monitors.
“Apparently so.”
“Does it hurt?” Are you afraid, he wanted to ask, but he knew better than to talk to his father about emotions.
“Nothing hurts,” he said, picking at a scab on his leg. “I guess they have a way of turning that off.”
“Did the doctors mess up? Should I ask for an autopsy?”
His father shook his head. “Nah. I’m seventy-one, diabetic, and with a bad heart. You’re not going to win any lawsuits here.”
It occurred to Paulie that Codas could be programmed to give whatever answer benefitted the hospital.
Paulie stared out the window, over the parking lot, to the eerily empty expressway. “I really believed we were close on that Perelman proof.”
“Maybe nobody’s meant to find it.”
Easy for him to say. He’d already been beyond questions of tenure and publication; now all of that was even more meaningless for him.
For Paulie, though, Perelman would have been the home run his tenure dossier needed. He turned back toward the bed. “Okay. Well.” He put a hand on the chair he’d sat in last night while his father complained about his breathing. He should say something. Something like I love you¸ he supposed. But his father had never gone in for the mushy stuff in life, so why start now?
“Goodbye, then,” he finished instead.
“Bye, Paulie,” said his father. “Thank you for visiting.”

Paulie subsequently arranges to take a copy of the Coda home with him, and the rest of the story mostly consists of scenes where Paulie visits his father’s Coda to work on the theorem (although we also see something of Paulie’s own family life and relationship with his daughter, and the peer pressure he experiences at his university job).
The two men’s attempts to solve the theory become increasingly complicated by the fact that Paulie’s father has no memory of what has happened during previous visits, which means that Paulie has to explain everything they have done each time he enters the Coda. We also see further evidence of the emotional distance between the men, and Paulie’s attempts to make some sort of connection with his father, such as the occasion he mentions his daughter’s forthcoming dance recital:

“It just. . .it reminds me of my piano recitals.”
His father leaned on his bed railing. “Is that what this is really about, Paulie? Are you here to tell me I was a shitty father? I know. I already acknowledged that, after the divorce.”
Paulie dropped into the chair by the bed. “No,” he said at last. “Sorry. I keep thinking of what other people use the Coda technology for, and I keep waiting to hear you talk about something besides math or life insurance. I keep hoping you’ll have something profound to say.”
“I’m not the mushy type.”
“You could fake it.”
“You’re the smartest person I ever met. You would see through any faking.”
Paulie blinked. A compliment.
“I wouldn’t have blamed you if you didn’t want anything to do with me,” his father went on, “after not being there for you as a kid. But then you made me a part of your life and we got along okay. You treated me like a colleague, so I tried to treat you the same. Now you’re mad at me for not acting more like a father? I didn’t think you wanted that from me.”
Paulie waited to see if he would say anything else. That was about as close to “mushy” as he’d come since the night twenty years ago when he’d apologized for abandoning him.
After a quiet eternity, he got up from the chair. “Okay, well, I think I have enough to work on for now. I’ll come back when I have some progress.”
“Bye, Paulie. Thank you for visiting.”

Eventually (spoiler) they go on to solve the theorem, and Paulie comes to accept that his father is never going to say the things that he wants him to say.
Normally I’m not remotely interested in “Daddy” or other problematical relationship stories, but this one works quite well—probably because Iriarte handles this in a fairly muted way and not as the usual whiny adolescent psychodrama. I’d also note that the description of the mathematical processes undertaken to solve the theorem are an equal focus of the story, and are quite gripping—a significant feat considering that I had no idea about what was being discussed.
This story has an odd combination of ideas and themes, but I liked it a lot.
∗∗∗∗ (Very good). 6,250 words. Story link.

•

Let All the Children Boogie by Sam J. Miller (Tor.com, January–February 2021) starts with the narrator Laurie remembering the time she first heard Iggy Pop’s The Passenger on the radio and how, at the end of the track, there was an interruption, “staticky words, saying what might have been ‘Are you out there?’”
Then, next day in a local thrift shop, Laurie hears someone singing the song:

The singer must have sensed me staring, because they turned to look in my direction. Shorter than me, hair buzzed to the scalp except for a spiked stripe down the center.
“The Graveyard Shift,” I said, trembling. “You were listening last night?”
“Yeah,” they said, and their smile was summer, was weekends, was Ms. Jackson’s raspy-sweet voice. The whole place smelled like mothballs, and the scent had never been so wonderful. “You too?”
My mind had no need for pronouns. Or words at all for that matter. This person filled me up from the very first moment.
I said: “What a great song, right? I never heard it before.
Do you have it?”
“No,” they said, “but I was gonna drive down to Woodstock this weekend to see if I could find it there. Wanna come?”
Just like that. Wanna come? Everything I did was a long and agonizing decision, and every human on the planet terrified me, and this person had invited me on a private day trip on a moment’s impulse. What epic intimacy to offer a total stranger—hours in a car together, a journey to a strange and distant town. What if I was a psychopath, or a die-hard Christian evangelist bent on saving their soul? The only thing more surprising to me than this easy offer was how swiftly and happily my mouth made the words: That sounds amazing.

This passage pretty much limns the the story, which is that of one odd sock finding another and becoming a pair. The next day they set off together on a trip to a record store and, during their journey, they hear another interruption on the radio after David Bowie’s Life on Mars (the comments include mention of an airplane crash—which occurs later that day—and a “spiderwebbing” epidemic).
The rest of the tale sees the pair spend their time (in between further, increasingly meaningful, radio messages) navigating the mostly self-inflicted emotional dramas of teenage life in 1991 (during which Laurie seems perpetually on the verge of a nervous breakdown). These tempests-in-teapots include, among other situations, dealing with both sets of parents—and when Fell first meets Laurie’s parents, Laurie tells them that Fell is also a “she” to placate any potential concerns about what might happen to their daughter upstairs. Laurie then feels sick at having done so, as “It was a negation of who Fell was”. I assume from this that Fell is a biological woman who has chosen to be a trans man (but, as I find this stuff of little interest, and can’t be bothered trying to confirm my impressions, I could be wrong). Later, we also get a look at Fell’s dysfunctional family set up, which essentially consists of an alcoholic and hostile mother who apparently uses the wrong pronouns for her child (something I didn’t think you could do in 1991).
Eventually (spoiler), the content of the messages (“I don’t know if this the right . . . place. Time”; “To tell you the future can be more magnificent, and more terrifying, than what you have in your head right now”; “Two soldiers trapped behind enemy lines”, etc.) leads the pair to triangulate the signal to a nearby record shop (the massed Air Force trucks nearby seem unable to do so)—but there is no-one there. Fell concludes that an earlier hypothesis—about the affirmatory messages coming from their future selves—is correct.
This story will probably only work for those interested in safe, non-threatening (the only drama here occurs in Laurie’s head), and emotional YA material about insecure teenagers. The SFnal idea is weak and not really developed in any meaningful way (the series of transmissions from the future are concluded by the “answer” being given by Fell). It is essentially a mainstream story about growing up.³
I’d also note in passing that the gender pronoun handwringing that goes on in this feels wildly ahistorical.
∗ (Mediocre). 7,000 words. Story link.

•

Laughter Among the Trees by Suzan Palumbo (The Dark #69, February 2021) opens with Ana driving to a park in Canada, during which she recalls (a) her arrival in the country as the child of West Indian immigrants, (b) her early days in school, and (c) the birth of her sister Sab. Ana then recalls a childhood family camping trip where her younger sister disappeared during the night (Sab left the tent—against Ana’s wishes—with Greg, a boy she had been playing with earlier that day). Sab was never seen again, nor was the boy—and there was no evidence he had ever been at the campsite.
The story then moves forward in time to when Ana has grown up, her father has died, and her mother is in a care home. During one of Ana’s visits to see her mother, the old woman talks about the disappearance of Sab and shows Ana a picture of a boy that looks like Greg—it materialises that Greg was a cousin of Ana’s mother who drowned back in the West Indies in 1962 when Ana’s mother wanted to go swimming in a flooded river. She tells Ana, “‘dis go haunt you here.’ You can’t outrun the past, Ana, even if it’s dead and drowned in another country.”
The story closes with Ana going back to the camp site. Then (spoiler), on the second night, a ghostly Sab appears and tells Ana to follow her. They go to a cave, where Ana finds Sab’s remains and later lies down beside her bones. The story closes with Ana feeling a dense cold, and something gripping her throat.
This is reasonably well told, but it seems to be more an autobiographical slice-of-life than a ghost story (the immigrant background, the family accounts, and the dysfunctional relationship with her sister, etc.). I’d also add that the internal logic of the haunting doesn’t really convince: I can see why Greg would kill the mother or Sab for revenge, but why would Sab lead Ana to the same fate given it was her own childhood stupidity and wilfulness that got her killed?
Finally, there are one or two sentences or word choices that could do with being changed, e.g. the very clunky first sentence:

The highway to the campground cuts through the granite Laurentian Plateau like a desiccated wound.

What’s a “Laurentian Plateau”? Do wounds become “dessicated”? Why distract your reader with this kind of thing? Wouldn’t, “The highway to the campground cuts through the plateau like an old wound” be a simpler and more apt beginning (the story is in large part about an old wound)?
∗∗ (Average). 5,950 words. Story link.

•

Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny #39, March-April 2022) opens with an online discussion of a song:

→This song, included among the famous ballads documented by Francis James Child, is an allegorical tale of a tryst between two lovers and its aftermath. –Dynamum (2 upvotes, 1 downvote)
.
>That’s awfully reductive, and I’m not sure what allegory you’re seeing. There’s a murder and a hanging and something monstrous in the woods. Sets it apart from the average lovers’ tryst. –BarrowBoy
.
>Fine. I just thought somebody should summarize it here a little, since “about the song” means more than just how many verses it has. Most people come here to discuss how to interpret a song, not where to find it in the Child Ballads’ table of contents. –Dynamum
.
→Dr. Mark Rydell’s 2002 article “A Forensic Analysis of ‘Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather’”, published in Folklore, explored the major differences and commonalities and their implications. In The Rose and the Briar, Wendy Lesser writes about how if a trad song leaves gaps in its story, it’s because the audience was expected to know what information filled those gaps. The audience that knew this song is gone, and took the gap information with them. Rydell attempted to fill in the blanks. –HolyGreil (1 upvote)

This passage pretty much limns the rest of the story in that: (a) it shows several people on a forum discussing the song Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather stanza by stanza—during which we learn it is about a man meeting a woman in the woods and having his heart is excised and used to grow an oak tree; (b) it illustrates the usual online friction between participants (most notably in this case between BarrowBoy and Dynamum above, with the former constantly downvoting the latter); and (c) we first hear of HolyGriel’s account of Rydell’s academic work, which leads a documentary maker called Henry Martyn to investigate further. Martyn later discovers that Rydell visited the location referred to in the song, a village called Gall in England, and (spoiler) he subsequently disappeared. Then, towards the end of the story, Martyn also travels to the village to do research for his documentary. There, he meets a very helpful (and knowledgeable) young woman called Jenny. . . .
This is very well done (the online comments and exchanges are pitch perfect), but the story has an ending you can see coming from miles away. An entertaining piece but not a multi-award winning one.⁴
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 6,700 words. Story link.

•

For Lack of a Bed by John Wiswell (Diabolical Plots #74, 16^th April 2021) opens with Noémi trying to relieve her constant pain by sleeping on the floor. While she distracts herself with social media, her friend Tariq texts with the offer of a sofa. But there is a catch though—apparently someone died on it. But, as the sofa is clean, Noémi accepts the offer, and Tariq, who is actually standing outside her door, brings it in. Noémi subsequently sleeps well.
Noémi is then woken late the next morning by Lili, her boss at the pet shop where she works; Lili (who is a succubus) tells Noémi that there has been trouble with the mogwai overnight and to head in to work (we later find that the shop also stocks gryphons and basilisks, etc.)
The story’s only real complication comes later that day when Noemi is woken again (she fell asleep after the call) by someone knocking on her door. It is Lili, it is six-thirty at night, and, after checking that Noémi is okay, Lili points at the sofa:

Lili looked like she’d bitten into an extremely ripe lime. “When did you invite her?”
“Her? Are you gendering my furniture?”
Lili pointed a sangria red fingernail at the sofa. “That’s not furniture. That’s a succubus.”
Noémi tilted her head. Giving it a few seconds didn’t make it make any more sense. “I know you’re the expert, but I’m pretty sure succubi don’t have armrests.”
“Come on. You know my mom is a used bookstore, right?”
“I thought she owned a used bookstore.”
“The sex economy sucks. With all the hook-up apps and free porn out there, a succubus starves. My mom turned into a bookstore so people would take bits of her home and hold them in bed. It’s why I work at the pet store and cuddle the hell hound puppies before we open.”
Noémi asked, “Is that why they never bite you?”
“What do you think? Everybody else gets puppy bites, except me. I get fuzzy, affectionate joy-energy. Gets me through the day, like a cruelty-free smoothie.” Lili blew a frizzy strand of gold from her face.
“But this sofa has devolved really far into this form. I know succubi that went out like her—she’s just a pit of hunger shaped to look enticing. No mind. Just murder. Where’d you even find her?”

The rest of the story (spoiler) sees Noémi, Tariq and Lili burn the sofa outside the apartment block. We subsequently learn that Noémi is till sleeping well because she kept one of the cushions.
This is a slight tale with an odd setting (e.g. a fantasy world where a succubus can become a sofa or a bookstore) and I don’t think it really works. I’d also add that the fact that it ended up as a Nebula finalist is baffling and seems to indicate a group of voters who are over-enamoured with frothy, feel-good pieces (or perhaps suffer from chronic pain themselves).
∗ (Mediocre). 2,750 words. Story link.

•••

I may as well repeat what I wrote about the Hugo Award short story finalists—this is a game of two halves, with three better than good stories (the Harrow, Iriarte, and the Pinsker), and three that, in my opinion, should not be here. These latter all seem to deal with what I suppose you could call “life issues” (growing up queer, immigration and sibling issues, and chronic pain).
And, once again, the finalists skew to online sources.  ●

_____________________

1. Mr Death by Alix E. Harrow was also a Hugo finalist and runner-up in the short story category of the Locus Poll.

2. Proof by Induction by José Pablo Iriarte was also a Hugo finalist and placed fourth in the short story category of the Locus Poll. It was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award.

3. Let All the Children Boogie by Sam J. Miller also placed sixth in the Locus Poll.

4. Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather by Sarah Pinsker also won the Hugo and Locus Awards for 2021, and is a finalist for this year’s World Fantasy Award. This a well executed piece but it doesn’t have the substance of a multi-award winner.  ●

Summary:
A decidedly lacklustre selection of stories with only one that really deserves to be here, the winner Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer. I also liked Colors of the Immortal Palette by Caroline M. Yoachim but I don’t think it is Hugo award worthy.

_____________________

Editors, Neil Clarke, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas (x3), Ellen Datlow, Lezli Robyn

Fiction:
Bots of the Lost Ark • novelette by Suzanne Palmer ∗∗∗+
Unseelie Brothers, Ltd. • novelette by Fran Wilde ∗
Colors of the Immortal Palette • novelette by Caroline M. Yoachim ∗∗∗
That Story Isn’t the Story • novelette by John Wiswell ∗∗
L’Esprit de L’Escalier • novelette by Catherynne M. Valente ∗
O₂ Arena • novelette by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki ∗∗

_____________________

There are six finalists in the novelette category, and they are reviewed below in the order they finished in the Hugo Award ballot.

•

Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld #177, June 2021) is a sequel to the author’s amusing (and Hugo Award) winning The Secret Life of Bots (Clarkesworld #132, September 2017). The story opens with the hero of that latter piece, a miniature robot called Bot 9, being woken by the Ship AI sixty-eight years later to be told that they have a problem—and it isn’t ratbugs like the last time, but something else:

“What task do you have for me?” [Bot 9] asked. “I await this new opportunity to serve you with my utmost diligence and within my established parameters, as I always do.”
“Ha! You do no such thing, and if I had a better option, I would have left you in storage,” Ship said. “However, I require your assistance with some malfunctioning bots.”
“Oh?” Bot 9 asked. “Which ones?”
“All of them,” Ship said.

Bot 9 soon discovers that nearly all the ship’s bots have gone rogue and have started forming “gloms” (conglomerations of robots) who think they are the ship’s (currently hibernating) human crew members. This poses an immediate problem for Ship as they will shortly be arriving in Ysmi space, and the Ysmi are extremely hostile to nonorganic intelligences not under the control of biological species.
The rest of the story sees Bot 9 attempt to work his way to the Engineering section, where Ship hopes 9 can revive the Chief Engineer before they reach Ysmi space. As 9 makes its way there it is attacked by a ratbug (creatures who eat wiring, hull insulation . . . and bots)—but is surprised when he sees a former colleague, 4340, sitting astride the creature. They catch up, and 9 learns that all the remaining ratbugs are now under 4340’s control. Meanwhile, the Ysmi contact the ship, the gloms attempt to get control of communications (when they are not engaged in internecine battles to accumulate more bots), and Ship infects one of their number with a virus—which soon starts spreading.
Eventually (spoiler), Bot 9 gets to Engineering and revives the Chief Engineer (who was badly injured in an earlier incident and put in a med-pod there). When he wakes, Bot 9 brings Chief Engineer Frank up to date with amusing exchanges like this one:

“I must warn you, however, that PACKARDs are on the other side [of the door],” 9 added.
“Packard? My second engineer? That’s great!” Frank said. “I thought—”
“It is not the human Packard,” 9 said. “They are in stasis with the other crew. There are four bot glom PACKARDs, currently trying to reduce themselves to only one. Unlike the other gloms, rather than trying to claim sole ownership of an identity via the expediency of violent physical contest, these three appear to be attempting to argue each other into yielding.”
“That sounds a lot like the real Packard, actually,” Frank said.

And then there is this when the Ysmi ship approaches:

“Where are you?” Ship’s voice was faint, but there.
Bot 9 found the knowledge that it was back in Ship’s communication range a matter of some relief. “I have woken Engineer Frank, and we are now in his living quarters, looking for some human item called ‘goddamned underwear,’” it replied.
“There is a synthetic-fabric fab unit in the cryo facility,” Ship said. “Please tell Frank he can visit it after we have reclaimed the facility from the gloms, but that right now there is not time. I need him at the docking facility.”
9, who had reconnected to the voice unit after the human had set it down inside the door, relayed that information.
“I’m not meeting the Ysmi naked,” Frank said.
“You are wearing a flag,” 9 said. A few moments later it added, “Ship asks if you would prefer to meet the Ysmi naked or as a bunch of newly free-floating, disassociated particles in empty space.”
“How much time do we have?” Frank asked. Before he’d even finished speaking, there was a vibration throughout the hull.

After Frank satisfies the suspicious Ysmi (who instruct him to go directly to the jump portal that Ship wants to use) the virus continues to spread through the gloms, and there is a climactic scene where 4340 and his ratbug army come to 9’s rescue.
This is an amusing and well done sequel to the original, with many entertaining exchanges between the various characters. That said, the ending is something of deus ex machina (and one you can see coming), so it is probably not quite as strong as the earlier piece.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 11,050 words. Story link.

•

Unseelie Brothers, Ltd. by Fran Wilde (Uncanny, May-Jun 2021) begins with Mrs Vanessa Saunders and her Fête Noire Charity Ball co-chairs receiving a photo message informing them that Unseelie Brothers Ltd., a shop that makes bespoke ball gowns, are back in town.
Saunders quickly returns home to tell her daughter Rie (Merielle), and her niece Sera (from whose point of view the rest of the story is told) to go and find the shop. When the pair eventually locate the premises of Unseelie Brothers Ltd. (it does not give out its address or phone number), the story starts falling into standard “magic shop” territory, i.e. it is closed when they find it but opens when Saunders arrives and writes a message on a glove and puts it through the letterbox.
When the door opens, Sera hears “the rustle of wings” and sees a face that she thinks might be her lost mother (we learn along the way that Sera’s mother vanished years before, and that she, along with Mrs Saunders, wore Unseelie Brothers’ dresses when they were young):

from The Social Season, plate 76. The Butterfly Gown, worn by a Serena (née) _____ (unknown) Sebastian to the Spring Charity Gala of 1998. She attended with her sister Vanessa (née) ______ (unknown) Saunders, and soon after married one of the event’s busboys. Saunders herself married the scion of the Saunders soap fortune. The event was notable in that several young women and men were discovered the following morning, on the roof, wearing bacchanalian-styled greenery and nothing more, by hotel staff at The Pierre. Photo by Mrs. Vanessa Saunders. Designers: Dora Unseelie and Beau Unseelie, Sr.

The central part of the story then sees: (a) Rie fitted for a dress, (b) Sera given a pearl necklace and a job offer from Dora, one of the Unseelie employees, and (c) Sera (a student dressmaker) design a “Crown of Thorns” dress for the company, which they subsequently make and sell to Rie instead of the one she had originally chosen during her fitting. During all this there are various magical occurrences (at one point Sera loses track of time, and emerges to find days have passed and the shop has moved location).
The last part of the story (which somewhat lost me) sees Sera discover that (spoiler) her mother is trapped in the dress that Unseelie Brothers made for her, and which Mrs Saunders still has in her wardrobe. However, when Sera (at Dora’s suggestion) unseams the dress to release her mother, only butterflies emerge. Then Sera discovers that that her mother and aunt were both Unseelie shop workers who managed to escape their employer.
Sera later (a) rewrites the contract given to her by Unseelie Brothers to give her and the other workers an ever-increasing share of the business, (b) alters Rie’s Crown of Thorns dress to remove any risk that it will hurt her (the dresses usually bring good fortune, but not always), (c) publishes the emergency number for the shop and, as a consequence, sells many dresses (which, we learn, no longer cause problems). Finally, Beau (the owner/manager) finds he cannot move the shop.
I found this story engaging enough for the most of its length, but the ending, which seems to tack on a magical realist/empowerment ending onto a more-or-less conventional magic shop story, makes it falls apart.
∗ (Mediocre). 8,600 words.

•

Colors of the Immortal Palette by Caroline M. Yoachim (Uncanny March-April 2021)¹ is set in Paris in the time of Manet and Monet (the mid- to late-1800s, I guess), and opens with a Japanese woman called Mariko posing for an unnamed immortal artist (who is also referred to as a “vampire” at points in the story, although he takes life energy from others rather than their blood).
Then, at the end of the session:

I’m about to give him up as hopeless when he turns to look at me. I’m lost in the darkness of his eyes, drowning in the intensity of his attention. I can barely breathe, but I repeat my invitation, “I could show you other poses.”
“Yes.” He sweeps me into an embrace that is strong and cold. White. He is snow and I am determined to melt it.
The sex builds slowly, deliberately, like paint layered on a canvas in broad strokes—tentative at first as we find our way to a shared vision, then faster with a furious intensity and passion.
After, when other artists might hold me and drift off to sleep, he dissipates into a white mist that swirls in restless circles around the room, chilling me down to the bones when it touches my skin. His mist seeps into me and pulses through my veins for several heartbeats. I feel energized, an exhilaration more intense than watching him work, a connection closer even than our sex.
He withdraws, and I am diminished. I hadn’t known until this moment what I was lacking, but now I am filled with a keen sense of my incompleteness. I long for him, for the sensation of vastness I felt when we were one.

Subsequently she becomes his lover, poses for another painting, becomes jealous of his other models, and thinks of the extra time that immortality would give her for her own art (she is a painter too). Later, she convinces him to make her immortal, a process leaves him unable to take any form but mist for over a year.
The rest of the story concerns her subsequent life and development as an artist, and telescopes in time from the point she paints another model called Victorine (which gives Mariko a new found awareness of the woman’s mortality) to (spoiler) her final painting, a self-portrait that will change with time, and which is painted after she learns that her jaded benefactor has dissipated into mist, never to recohere.
There are various other significant events for Mariko during this period: she gets married, achieves artistic success, learns of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the birthplace of her mother), and, in one of the pivotal passages of the piece, receives a telegram in 1927 informing her of Victorine’s death:

The world has been a week without her in it, but her death did not become a truth for me until the telegram arrived. She is the last. Even Monet has ceased his endless paintings of water lilies, having passed in December. I’ve not seen either of them for decades, but tonight I feel the loss as keenly as if I’d sat with them yesterday, all of us gathered at the Café Guerbois, Victorine and I engaging the men in passionate discussions on the purpose of art, the role of the model, and whether critical outrage was an attack on the honor of the painter, this last being a topic that always irritated Manet.
They were my cohort—Édouard, Émile, Claude, Paul and Camille, and of course Victorine. I met them not knowing that I would outlive them, and without having the distance that knowledge brings. My immortal artist was right—I don’t get quite so close to mortals now, I no longer see myself as one of them. But I’m accustomed to navigating a world I do not feel a part of, a place where I am unlike all the others. This has always been my truth.
[. . .]
I have outlived my friends, my colleagues, and for what? All my paintings combined have not garnered the renown of Olympia or Impression, Sunrise. I am best known as the model from Woman, Reclining (Mari), and maybe my lack of success is not—as I have always told myself—because I am a woman and an outsider, but because I am lacking in talent.
Even being immortal, which should be simple enough, is a task that I am failing for I cannot bear the thought of stealing time from mortals whose lives are already so fleeting. I take just enough here and there from models—always with their consent—to maintain a human form, but if I cannot create beauty, cannot leave my mark on the world of art, their time is wasted, and nothing is so precious as time.

I liked this piece well enough but there isn’t much here apart from an extended historical slice of life, the angst of immortals, and talk about artists and painting. This may not be to everyone’s taste.
∗∗∗ (Good). 12,800 words.

•

That Story Isn’t the Story by John Wiswell (Uncanny, November-December 2021)¹ opens with Anton leaving a vampire household with the help of an old friend called Grigorii. As they leave the house in Grigorii’s car, Anton sees Mr Bird (the vampire) return:

A black town car trails up the street toward them. Sleek and black, with that short club of a man Walter at the wheel. Mr. Bird’s senior familiar. Anton knows who sits in the tinted windows and the shadows of the rear seats.
From inside the Kia, Grigorii pops the passenger door open. “Come on, man.”
Is blood spotting in Anton’s jeans? He gropes at his thighs, unsure if the moisture is sweat on his palms or if he’s bleeding. The car is getting closer. Mr. Bird definitely sees him. Anton sinks into the car. He clutches his seatbelt until they are doing forty in a twenty mile zone. He’s too worried to turn around, and too afraid not to fixate on the rearview mirror.
The black car stops in the middle of the street. A rear door opens, and a dark thing peers out. There is no seeing any detail of that figure—no detail except for his mouth. It is open and sharp. Distance doesn’t change how clearly Anton sees the teeth.

Anton then meets Luis, another stray, at Grigorii’s house, and worries about Mr Bird before examining himself in the toilet to see if the bite wounds in his thighs are still bleeding (these are semi-permanent, and bleed in the presence of Mr Bird). They aren’t, which means that Mr Bird is not nearby, or not yet.
This background feeling of menace and unease pervades most of the rest of the story, and rises and falls as different events play out. To begin with, Luis is attacked on the way back from his job, something Anton thinks may be related to his departure and which causes a fight between the two when Anton tried to inspect Luis for bites. Then Walter, Mr Bird’s familiar, approaches Anton to tell him that he must return, the first of two visits (during the second one Walter tells Anton that the twins, two of the vampire’s other victims, have also run away).
There is never any force or violence used to get Anton to return, oddly enough and, towards the end of the story, the contacts stop and Anton transitions to a normal life. Then, one evening when Anton and a new boyfriend called Julian go out for a meal, Anton sees Walter working in the restaurant and realises that he has left Mr Bird too.
The story closes a few weeks later, when Anton goes out of town with Julian for the weekend and detours past Mr Bird’s house: Anton sees the building is in an obvious state of disrepair and then, while he sketches the house, it collapses.
This has the trappings of a vampire story but is really a mainstream piece about escaping abusive relationships or situations, and one which suggests that people can choose their own destinies—the line “that story isn’t the story” is used a couple of times:

Walter asks, “What made you think you could survive without him?”
“That story is not the story I’m telling today.” [Anton replies.]

[Anton] asks [Grigorii], “What happened to your [abusive] mom? Do you ever see her?”
“That story is not the story I’m telling today, man.”

This would have been a reasonably good straight piece, but the story undermines itself somewhat by setting up the vampire menace at the beginning of the piece and then letting it fade away. That said, I realise that the idea of a perceived threat being more perception that reality may be one of the points the story is trying to make.²
∗∗ (Average). 9,000 words. Story link.

•

L’Esprit de L’Escalier by Catherynne M. Valente (Tor.com, 25^th August 2021)³ opens with a man making breakfast for his apparently undead wife:

She slices through an egg and lets the yolk run like yellow blood. Severs a corner of toast and dredges it in the warm, sunny liquid, so full of life, full enough to nourish a couple of cells all the way through to a downy little baby birdie with sweet black eyes. If only things had gone another way.
Eurydice hesitates before putting it between her lips. Knowing what will happen. Knowing it will hurt them both, but mainly her. Like everything else.
She shoves it in quickly. Attempts a smile. And, just this once, the smile does come when it is called.
[. . .]
Then, her jaw pops out of its socket with a loud thook and sags, hanging at an appalling, useless angle. She presses up against her chin, fighting to keep it in, but the fight isn’t fair and could never be. Eurydice locks eyes with Orpheus. No tears, though she really is so sorry for what was always about to happen. But her ducts were cauterized by the sad, soft event horizon between, well. There and Here.
Orpheus longs for her tears, real and hot and sweet and salted as caramel, and he hates himself for his longing. He hates her for it, too. A river of black, wet earth and pebbles and moss and tiny blind helpless worms erupts out of Eurydice’s smile, splattering so hard onto his mother’s perfect plate that it cracks down the middle, and dirt pools out across the table and the worms nose mutely at the crusts of the almost-burnt toast.

The rest of the piece (I wouldn’t call it a story) shows us variously: the daily life of, and tensions between, the couple; a visit from Eurydice’s mother, who bathes her daughter; a trip to the therapist; the arrival of Orpheus’s father Apollo and his groupies (there are various rock music and Greek myth references throughout the story—this chapter sees Prometheus giving Apollo a light⁴); Eurydice heating her body up with a hairdryer so Orpheus will want to make love with her; and, finally, a visit to Sisyphus, who asks Eurydice if she wanted to come back from the dead.
This piece is, according to the introduction to the story, supposed to be a “provocative and rich retelling of the Greek myth”, but it is actually a borderline tedious non-story apparently written for goths and classics students. Another effort from Valente that is both plotless and overwritten.
∗ (Mediocre). 9,300 words. Story link.

•

O₂ Arena by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki (Galaxy’s Edge, November 2021)⁵ opens with a short fight section before the story flashbacks to a point a few months earlier where the narrator, a new student at the Academy of Laws, is listening to his induction lectures. We later learn that the academy is located in a future Nigeria where climate change has damaged the atmosphere so badly that people need masks and portable air when they go outside (and where they use oxygen as a currency):

Mrs. Oduwole was at the podium now. The Head of Hostels began by stating that the generators would be on until midnight for reading and for the making of breathable air. After midnight, we would revert to our O₂ cylinders which we must keep by our bedsides throughout the night.
The tuition was expensive but was only meant to cover the central hall’s oxygen generation when lectures were on. O₂ masks filtered the bad air temporarily, for the brief periods when moving between places. O₂ cylinders were for longer periods when there were no O₂ generators.
We weren’t allowed to be in the hostels during the day when lectures were on, for any reasons. She didn’t care if you were a girl on your flow, no matter how heavy. And this was apparently the only example she felt obligated to give.

During this series of lectures the narrator goes outside the hall for a break and meets Ovole, a female friend/undisclosed love interest. During their bantering exchanges we find out she has cancer (“Do you want to feel [the tumour]?” she asks at one point).
After several pages of the above, and other data dump information about the narrator’s academy and society (various forms of institutional and political oppression make the narrator struggle to breath in more ways than one it would seem), the story kicks up a gear when he decides to visit his old gang on the mainland, a part of the story that has some interesting local colour. When the narrator later talks to an old gang acquaintance, he learns that Dr Umez, one of the induction lecturers, has a reputation for molesting both male and female students. Then, when the narrator tells the acquaintance that he needs to earn some money (for Ovole’s medical needs), they go to the O₂ arena and watch a cage fight that ends when one of the combatants is killed.
The narrator subsequently decides not to take the risk of entering the cage fights, but (spoiler) he then learns that Ovoke is in hospital and needs expensive ICU treatment. So, after a visit to hospital to see Ovoke and her parents, he returns to the arena and enters the fights. After a vicious bout he kills his opponent and wins a substantial prize pot, but it is too late—Ovoke has died in the meantime.
The story closes with the narrator using the prize money to form his own gang, and their first action is the killing of the abusive Dr Umez.
This is a bit of a mixed bag. The opening set-up (about ten pages) is overlong and plodding, and the story only really gets going when the narrator goes to the mainland. I also didn’t care for the political messages that were constantly telegraphed throughout the story (“You see, the rich deserved to breathe”, “She thought she would be nothing in a patriarchal society that valued men for their ability to provide, and women for reproduction”, etc., etc.—the author is not a fan of show don’t tell). On the other hand the mainland setting and culture is interesting, as is the idea of oxygen as a currency—so a promising piece, but not an even or polished one (its Nebula Award and Hugo nominations way overrate the story).
∗∗ (Average). 8, 150 words. Story link.

•••

This is a decidedly lacklustre selection of stories with only Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer really earning its place here.
I get the impression from this category (and the short story one) that there is a Uncanny reading and voting clique that determines a lot of the finalists (half the short story and novelette finalists are from this magazine). There is also a huge online publication bias (something also seen in nomination statistics⁶) and it looks like it helps if you write about life or political issues, or produce material that is sentimental or light-hearted.⁷  ●

_____________________

1. That Story Isn’t the Story by John Wiswell was also a 2022 Nebula Award novelette finalist, and won the Locus Poll.

2. I found this comment from Wiswell about That Story Isn’t the Story in a short interview in the same issue of Uncanny:

The other thing I knew was coming was Anton wouldn’t have a normal ending. No confrontation with Mr. Bird. No fight to the death. No self-sacrifice. No diabolical master plan. Everything that we sometimes dread will happen to us, or our loved ones, because of our trauma? That is partially because we’ve been harmed. It’s also partially an illusion. I wanted to let Anton slowly recognize what was a trauma mirage, while his worthiness of self-respect wasn’t illusory at all.

I didn’t get the self-respect part (if you don’t feel that way by default then perhaps this is more apparent), but the rest makes sense.

3. L’Esprit de L’Escalier by Catherynne M. Valente was the runner-up in the Locus Poll for novelette.

4. The Eurydice and Orpheus myth at Wikipedia.

5. O₂ Arena by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki was (unusually) reprinted in Apex, another online magazine, two months later. I cannot see the point of Galaxy’s Edge putting it online for a month and then taking it down, only to let another publication reprint it almost immediately (my understanding is that most venues have a period of exclusivity in their contracts).

6. The Hugo Awards page.

7. One story I am surprised to see ignored by most of this year’s awards and polls is You Are Born Exploding by Rich Larson.  ●

Summary:
Algis Budry’s serial, Michaelmas, begins in this issue, but its tale of a newscaster who secretly influences world events with the help of Domino, his AI, is duller than I expected from such a accomplished critic. Fortunately, there is a very good story from Michael G. Coney, The Cinderella Machine, that sees Carioca Jones, the manipulative and amoral media star, prepare for a revival of her work in the exotic Peninsula (against a background of bonded prisoners providing organ transplants for their masters). There are also a couple of good stories from Don Trotter (who doesn’t like AI spaceships and space pirates?) and Raylyn Moore.
The non-fiction columns are worthwhile too.
[ISFDB] [Archive.org] [Magazine Subscription]

_____________________

Editor, Edward L. Ferman; Assistant Editor, Anne W. Deraps

Fiction:
Michaelmas (Part 1 of 2) • novel serial by Algis Budrys ∗∗
Theory and Practice of Economic Development: The Metallurgist and His Wife • short story by Richard Frede ∗∗
Call Me Maelzel • short story by Don Trotter ∗∗∗
The Castle • short story by Raylyn Moore ∗∗∗
The Cinderella Machine • novelette by Michael G. Coney ∗∗∗∗
The Purple Pterodactyls short story by L. Sprague de Camp ∗∗

Non-Fiction:
Books • by Algis Budrys
Cartoon • by Gahan Wilson
Films: Things to Come • essay by Baird Searles
Moving Ahead • science essay by Isaac Asimov
Coming Soon: All-Star Anniversary Issue
Letters

_____________________

Michaelmas (part I of II), by Algis Budrys, is the magazine’s second serial this year (the three-part Man Plus by Frederik Pohl ran in the April to June issues), and it opens with the Laurent Michaelmas, a global newscaster in a near-future world, flicking through various news channels at home. Domino interrupts him with the news that an astronaut called Norwood, believed dead in an orbital shuttle crash, is alive.
As Michaelmas and Domino discuss the matter (and in the pages that follow) we learn that (a) Domino is an AI connected to the world’s communications systems which enables Michaelmas to secretly exert a benign influence on world events; (b) Norwood is currently in a Swiss sanatorium run by two shady characters called Nils Limberg and Kristades Cikoumas (their facility normally offers rejuvenation treatments); (c) Norwood was due to command a UNAC (United Nations Astronautics Commission) mission to Jupiter; and (d) Michaelmas is concerned that this event means that someone or something is unhappy with the current course of world events (he asks Domino if they have been discovered at this point, but the AI says no).
The rest of the first part of the serial continues this stream of talking head scenes and (alongside conversations with Domino) Michaelmas next speaks to Horse Watson, an old, burnt-out reporter friend, on the flight to Zurich, where Michaelmas has accepted a broadcasting contract to cover Norwood’s first post-recovery press conference (Watson is accompanied by his colleague Joseph Campion, an ambitious up-and comer who will later feature as a suspect in Watson’s death in a helicopter accident). Then, when Michaelmas arrives in Switzerland, there is more chatter with an attractive forty-something TV producer called Clementine Gervaise. (Michaelmas wonders if this woman, who Domino points out is similar to what his deceased wife would be like at this age, is a honeytrap.)
The rest of the first part of the story is a swirl of events (or, more accurately, Michaelmas and Domino talking about events that are occurring off-stage): Limberg arranges to send a package to a trouble-making US politician; Watson’s helicopter crashes on the way to the possible landing site of Norwood’s shuttle; Michaelmas drives to the sanatorium with Gervaise and talks to various people (in particular, Norwood and Getulio Frontiere, UNAC’s press relations man) before attending the press conference; and, finally, there are two significant developments: (a) we learn that Norwood is privately alleging that he found a false (possibly Soviet-made) telemetry component in the shuttle just before the crash, and (b) Domino senses something very odd while searching the sanatorium’s network:

“Anomaly.”
“Yes. There is something going on there. I linked into about as many kinds of conventional systems as you’d expect, and there was no problem; he has the usual assortment of telephones, open lines to investment services and the medical network, and so forth. But there was something — something began to happen to the ground underfoot as I moved along.”
Michaelmas sucked his upper teeth. “Where were you going?” he finally asked.
“I have no idea. I can’t track individual electrons any more readily than you can. I’m just an information processor like any other living thing. Somewhere in that sanatorium is a crazy place. I had to cut out when it began echoing.”
“Echoing.”
“Yes, sir. I began receiving data I had generated and stored in the past. Fefre, the Turkish Greatness Party, Tim Brodzik…that sort of thing. Sometimes it arrived hollowed out, as if from the bottom of a very deep well, and at other times it was as shrill as the point of a pin. It was coded in exactly my style. It spoke in my voice, so to speak. However, I then noticed that minor variations were creeping in; with each repetition, there was apparently one electron’s worth of deviation, or something like that.”
“Electron’s worth?”
“I’m not sure what the actual increment was. It might have been as small as the fundamental particle, whatever that might turn out to be. But it seemed to me the coding was a notch farther off each time it…resonated.”
[. . .]
“Why did you feel that? Did you think this phenomenon had its own propulsion?”
“It might have had.”
“A…resonance…was coming after you with intent to commit systematic gibberish.”

As the above passage illustrates, sometimes you feel like you are wading through porridge. This work has other problems too: (a) even though there is a lot happening nearly all the events occur off-stage, and none are particularly interesting (b) it is set in a future world that just isn’t that well developed—and that comment isn’t because our history didn’t turn out the way that it does here, the story just doesn’t present a convincing counterfactual (there is a definite first draft feel here¹); finally, and perhaps most problematically, there is no obvious idea of what the novel is about. All that said, I suppose this part is okay, but I have serious reservations about what the second half is going to be like.
∗∗ (Average). 22,300 (of 44,400) words. Story link.

•

Theory and Practice of Economic Development: The Metallurgist and His Wife by Richard Frede opens by establishing Horowitz as a hen-pecked husband who lives in an overheating apartment. On Saturdays he usually goes fishing and, during one particular trip out on the Many Happy Returns, something very odd happens:

[It] was at that moment that there was such a mighty tug on the dropline that Horowitz was in fear of losing his finger. Then, just as suddenly, there was no tension to the line at all. But as Horowitz looked over the side into the water, a large flounder about twice the size of any flounder Horowitz had ever seen before, surfaced next to the dropline. The fish had a hook and line in its mouth, and it seemed to gaze up at Horowitz and to judge him. After some little time the fish said, “Would you kindly remove your hook from my mouth?”  p. 70

During the ensuing conversation the fish tells Horowitz that taking the hook out rather than cutting the line will reduce the risk of infection, that it is an enchanted businessman, and that it knew better than to take the bait but couldn’t resist, etc. Then, after Horowitz returns the fish to the water, it tells him that it owes him one.
When Horowitz later tells his wife about this fantastic event she is contemplative rather than dismissive and tells him to go back and ask the fish for a better apartment. Horowtiz does so and, after the fish expresses his surprise that he is back so soon, tells him, “It’s in the mail”.
This is the first of a number of demands that the wife makes as she quickly becomes dissatisfied with what she has been given (a country home, a bigger apartment in the city, and a seat as a US Senator soon follow). When Horowitz is eventually told to tell the fish that she wants to be President (spoiler), the fish gets fed up and tells Horowitz that they are both going back to their original apartment. Horowitz says he would be happy to return there but asks if his wife can stay where she is. The fish says it’ll arrange a divorce, that Horowitz can go back to the original apartment, and that his wife can live with her mother.
This entertainingly combines the fantastic elements involving the fish with the mundanity of married life (in this latter respect it somewhat resembles a humorous mainstream story). The ending is a bit of a dud, though.
∗∗ (Average). 4,200 words. Story link.

•

Call Me Maelzel by Don Trotter² gets off to a lively start with a ship AI called Maelzel pranking one of the crew:

I could hear water splashing on the deck in Lloyd’s shower, then the slap of his feet on the wet tiles. I had planned to zap him right away, but he started singing in his wheezy tenor that song about the sailor who’s spent a year and a quarter in his ship’s crow’s-nest and he goes up the river to see Budapest… but you probably know it. “Yardarm Arnie?” Anyhow, it’s a particular favorite of mine, and it sounded kind of nice echoing around in Lloyd’s shower stall. So I let him finish first, and on the final “…mizzen mast, tooooo!” I cut off the hot water and ran up the pressure on the icy as high as it would go. Exit Lloyd, raging wet.
“Goddarnit, Mazey! This time…” he started in, mad as a kicked kitten.
I hit the decompression warning in his cabin, a basso profundo WHOOT! WHOOT! that totally drowned him out. I think he might have called my bluff, but for realism I dropped the air pressure a little, just enough to make his ears pop, and let the emergency airbag fall from its recess in the ceiling. It was as convincing as hell, if I do say so myself.  p. 78

When Lloyd makes it to the muster station he is only wearing a pair of soaking wet shorts under a transparent airbag, and is then subjected to the stares of the rest of the (unpranked) crew. They subsequently vote Maelzel into “Durance Vile” (limbo) for one day.
While Maelzel is disconnected from everything apart from the emergency systems, we get some backstory about the AI and learn that, because of a previous mission which ended in disaster, Maelzel has been, like the ship, hugely overspecified. This means Maelzel is underemployed, bored, and consequently needs to finds ways to entertain itself.
After Maelzel is released from limbo he gets up to his tricks again, this time slowly increasing the gravity and making the crew think about diets and exercise. When they find out about this some days later, they are just about to throw Maelzel back into Durance Vile when they are attacked by pirates. Of course, none of them believe Maelzel’s warnings until just before they are boarded, by which time it is too late:

At each of the four cardinal points of the lounge a tall skinny character appeared, back to the bulkhead, little round shield and big swashbuckling cutlass poised, ready to slay dragons or die trying. At the sight of my crew strewn all over the carpet they relaxed their defensive attitudes, and a couple of them started laughing. The one over by the aquarium, apparently the leader, swaggered over to where Sash was lying, half stunned, against the bar. He poked him with his cutlass.
“On your feet, reptile,” he said without rancor. Sash climbed slowly to his feet, then, with apparent effort, put his grin back in place. He looked his captor in the eye, then returned the careful eying the other was giving him.
Our uninvited guests were worth looking at. Two men and two women, each a shade under seven feet and several shades under two hundred pounds, they were as bald as a bar of soap and naked as a porno flick; nude, but not lewd, they were tattooed. All over. The one holding his cutlass at Sash’s throat had his musculature done in bright red and fine detail, from quadriceps and biceps down to the tiniest facial muscles. He looked like an anatomy chart, or like St. Bartholomew after the Armenians finished flaying him. The lady with her foot on the lens of my best holo projector was done up like a Gila monster, in black and orange pebble pattern, with each pebble carefully shaded to look raised. Black, whole-eye contacts made her eyes appropriately shiny and beady. I wondered how she felt about St. Bartholomew calling Sash “reptile.” The man down by where the fountain splashed into the pool was mostly in bare skin and tattooed zippers — some of which were partly unzipped to show right lung and liver, one temporal and both frontal lobes of his brain, and selected other bits of his internal workin’s, all in five colors and exquisite detail. The woman who had joined St. Bart in front of Sash was done over in spiders — big ones, little ones, hairy and smooth, they swarmed up her arms, legs, and torso (two enormous tarantulas cupped her breasts), all exact trompe l’oeil. If she’d been ticklish, she wouldn’t have lasted two minutes. Her head was done in furry black, with pairs of iridescent patches to match the contacts she wore, the locations of the false eyes being characteristic of the Latrodectus genus: the Widows, black and other colors.  pp. 84-5

That’s a passage that would grace a modern day issue of Planet Stories.
After an initially peaceable takeover, St. Bartholomew gropes Tilly, one of the crewmembers, and Sash gets slashed open when he tries to protect her.
The rest of the story sees the crew try to get Sash to sick bay, while avoiding mentioning Maelzel by name (to leave the AI with the element of surprise). Then (spoiler), when the pirates start wandering around the ship, Maelzel picks them off one by one (the first of the victims gets spaced through one of the ship’s toilets!)
If you are looking for a colourful and entertaining space opera with AIs and space pirates,³ then this will be right up your street.
∗∗∗ (Good). 6,850 words. Story link.

•

The Castle by Raylyn Moore opens with Beryl the narrator being woken by her husband Miles, who has just had a nightmare where he was attacked by children. After Miles tells her about the experience he goes back to sleep, but she cannot. She thinks about various matters, during which we learn (a) that their house is a part-time toy museum which houses their huge collection and is open to occasional visitors, (b) Miles is Beryl’s second husband, and (c) he is building a huge play fort in the back garden overlooking the gully at the edge of their property. This latter venture does not proceed smoothly:

The first time the children had attacked the castle was before it was quite finished. Miles had left it late one afternoon with the mortar wet and returned in the morning to find the stones prized out of place. It looked as if a heavy pinch bar had been used. “I can scarcely believe it was children,” Beryl had said. “Think of the strength it must have taken.”
“Which is why I’m sure it was children,” Miles insisted. “They’re all just bubbling over with misdirected energy, aren’t they? And if they’re determined enough, they can do anything.”
[. . .]
The next time, the vandals had somehow sheared off the towers of the completed citadel, and once they had blasted a hole under the front wall with some explosive, presumably dynamite, though it didn’t make sense that children should have access to dynamite. (The Hullibargers had been out the evening it happened, and so had heard no sound.)  p. 101

Most of rest the story concerns their otherwise idyllic life (neither seems to work and they do as they wish), but one action after another subtly portrays Miles as a self-centred man-child (earlier in the story Beryl says, “There’s an old wives’ tale that all American men are really little boys in wolf’s clothing”). This is finally made explicit in the last scene (spoiler), where the couple come home to find two children/intruders in the castle and Miles agrees to fight them for it:

He plunged up the slope ready for battle, and the two emerged from behind the stone kremlin to meet him as agreed. For a long time she remained frozen near the bottom of the hill, watching what was happening simply because she couldn’t make herself stop watching. It went on for a long time. They fought desperately, as if for their lives, kicking, gouging, smashing.
And after a while she had to admit that of the three little boys, all of a size, struggling fiercely on the leaf-covered slope, she could no longer tell, through the lowering dusk, which was Miles.  p. 108

I think this is really a slightly surreal mainstream story rather than a fantasy (you would have to squint to see it as the latter), but I enjoyed its slow burn descriptive passages and quirkiness.
∗∗∗ (Good). 6,050 words. Story link.

•

The Cinderella Machine by Michael G. Coney is set in his “Peninsula” series, and opens with Joe Sagar on Flambuoyant, the hydrofoil of the former 3-V star Carioca Jones. Sagar is thinking of a girl he once knew and loved called Joanne, an ex-prisoner who seems to have made a particular sacrifice in this dark future world of prisoner bondage and organ transplants:

I’d been reminded of Joanne by the sight of Carioca’s hands, white and smooth beside mine as they gripped the rail. Recently she had taken to wearing long gloves, but today the skin was bare, and I could see the thin pale lines around her wrists—the only physical reminder of the grafts.  p. 112

The rest of the beginning of the story is equally busy, and sees mention of a forthcoming 3-V film festival, The Carioca Jones Revival Season, a protest march by The Foes of Bondage to the State Pen demanding that the organ pool be disbanded (which, paradoxically given the above, will also feature Jones), and Jones’ order from Sagar of a pair of long gloves made from slitheskin (an emotion-sensitive material).
We are also introduced to Carioca Jones’ pet:

The afternoon had turned to chill early evening as we made our way towards Carioca’s mooring at Deep Cove. I helped her onto the landing stage and dutifully returned to the boat for the unwieldy Nag, her moray eel. Nag is a normally comatose beast and very little trouble—a welcome change from the unpredictable, defunct [land-shark] Wilberforce. I placed the fish on the landing stage, and he undulated slowly after Carioca like an evil black snake, the oxygenator pulsing near his gills. He wore a jeweled collar; Carioca always dresses her pets well.  p. 114

The next part of the story is equally busy, and sees an official from the State Pen ask Sagar for his help in stopping the march by the Foes of Bondage. Sagar tells him he is unable to help. Then, when Sagar later goes out to visit Jones, he is introduced to douglas sutherland, an ex-con with metal hands. It materialises that sutherland was a bonded man who received a reduced sentence after his freeman (owner, essentially) took his hands after the freeman had a farming accident. Sagar also learns that Sutherland was previously a surgeon, but now operates a sculptograph, a device that rejuvenates skin, and that he will be treating Jones before her appearance at the Revival to make her more youthful looking.
When prompted by Jones to demonstrate the machine to Sagar, sutherland gets rid of Nag the eel—the creature has been pestering sutherland and he obviously detests it—and he puts a lump of raw fish in the sculptograph. Sutherland then removes a wart on Sagar’s hand, leaving the treated part blemish free and less aged. He tells Sagar that the rejuvination effect should last for around three days, and adds that, to achieve a permanent change, he would need to use human meat. . . . Three days later, the skin starts sloughing off of Sagar’s hand in a most unsightly manner, but the wart does not reappear.
There are (spoiler) another few pieces put in place before the story’s mousetrap ending, and these involve (a) Sagar going to a sling gliding competition¹ and picking up a young woman who he takes for a drive and later starts kissing—only to find out that she is, of course, the much younger Carioca Jones (this part of the story does not really convince); (b) the State Pen official giving Jones human flesh from the organ pool to get the Foes of Bondage march cancelled; and (c) sutherland seeing the scars on Carioca Jones’ wrists just before he treats her backstage at the Revival . . . .
The climax of the story sees Sagar discover how the State Pen official managed to get the march cancelled shortly before he hears screaming from backstage. Then Jones appears:

The curtains slashed down the center, and a creature appeared, blinking at the light, her screams dying to whimpers as the brightness hit her and illuminated her old, old face, her leathery wrinkled skin, her vulture’s neck of empty pouched flesh. . . .
She stood slightly crouched, her fingers crooked before her; but there was nothing aggressive in her stance—it was more as though she was backing away from an attack.
She wore a plain black dress which accentuated the pallor of her legs, her arms, her face. She was Death incarnate; it seemed impossible that a creature so old, so ugly, should possess the gift of life. Slowly she raised her hands until they shadowed her face and the spotlight picked out the white graft scars on her wrists. She gripped the folds of the curtain above her head while a trickle of spittle glistened at the corner of her slack lips, and the most terrible thing was her breasts, high and pale and full and youthful, voluptuous, as they rose from under her dress when she arched her back as though in terminal agony.
For an instant she stood rigid; in the dazzling light she couldn’t have seen us, and it was just possible she was not aware of her audience, or even of her whereabouts. Her single final scream died away into a croak, and she sagged; her arms dropped to her sides; her ancient eyes grew slitted and cunning as she glanced quickly from side to side, seized the curtain and whirled it about her like a cloak. We heard the echo of a cackle of laughter. The folds fell back into place, the stage was empty. She was gone.  pp. 128-129

Wonderfully over the top.
Sagar goes looking for Jones and finds she has tried to commit suicide (she thinks that sutherland has used the human flesh she provided and that the changes will be permanent), but then, as Sagar phones for an ambulance, he finds Nag’s empty collar and no sign of the land-eel. . . .
This is a highly entertaining piece with a brilliantly twisty plot and characters that are, to a greater or lesser extent, wonderfully flawed: Jones is obviously a narcissistic and amoral villain, and Sagar is no angel either (even if he does model “normal” most of the time).
∗∗∗∗ (Very good). 8,400 words. Story link.

•

The Purple Pterodactyls by L. Sprague de Camp is another of the supernatural adventures of Willy Newbury.⁵ In this one he is on holiday by the sea with his wife Denise and, when they visit a nearby amusement park, Willy notices something at the rubber ring stall:

The prizes were even more original: a flock of plush-and-wire pterodactyls. They came in several models and sizes, some with long tails and some with short, some with teeth and some with long toothless beaks. The biggest were over a yard across the wings. They were made so that you could hang one from your ceiling as a mobile.
If the wind was strong, you could lock the wings in place and fly the thing as a kite. They were all dyed in shades of purple.
“Purple pterodactyls!” I cried. “Darling, I’ve got to have one of those.”  p. 144

Willy’s attempts to win one of the pterodactyls are unsuccessful, and he also isn’t able purchase one (he asks the stall’s proprietor, Mr Maniu, when he sees him at the beach the next day, but is refused). Willy’s luck changes later, however, when he buys an old ring for a quarter and, when his wife takes him to a jeweller to have it valued, discovers that the ring is ancient and the stone a real emerald. Then, when Willy is asleep that night, the djinn of the ring reveals himself to Willy and says it can perform “little favours” for him. Willy asks the djinn to help him win a purple pterodactyl.
This begins a spat that sees, after Willy subsequently wins more than one of the prizes, (a) Maniu hire his own djinn to stop Willy winning any more; (b) Willy going back to win a third pterodactyl when his own djinn tells him of this; (c) words disappearing off a speech Willy gives at a local women’s club meeting; (d) Willy winning another two pterodactyls; and then (e) Willy and Denise having their boat capsized by a freak squall that comes out of nowhere.
At this point Willy realises that he is involved in a potentially lethal vendetta, so he promises the djinn his freedom if he can get Willy out of his predicament. The story then ends (spoiler) with a shriek in the night, and Willy seeing Mr Maniu on the beach the next morning, his body covered in sand as usual . . . then Maniu’s decapitated head rolls off the mound.
When Willy sees the djinn in a dream several nights later he promptly gives him the ring and his freedom. Then he wakes up and has sex with his wife, as you do when you’ve just caused someone’s death.
This piece isn’t as slight a story as some in the series, but it does have a deus ex machina ending and is tonally a bit off: not only does the final line about sex with his wife not sit well with previous events but, if it wasn’t for Willy’s awful behaviour (who need five purple pterodactyls?), relations between the two men would not have deteriorated. I’m probably reading too much into a piece of light fantasy, but still. . . .
∗∗ (Average). 5,650 words. Story link.

•••

The issue’s Cover is by Greg Bear, who started writing SF regularly around this time as well (although there were a handful of earlier stories). He would become much better known for his fiction.
Algis Budrys’ Books column (which is immediately after Michaelmas) covers four SF art books, and begins with a discussion of Brain W. Aldiss’s Science Fiction Art:

It’s asking too much of a Brian Aldiss, for instance, to put together a large, effective collection of sometimes quite aptly juxtaposed or dramatically enlarged pulp artwork, without beginning with a philosophical rationale:
“…sf and Gothic (writing) are basically intertwined. The same holds true for sf illustration.”
And then, and only then, do we get the book, which, as it happens, I rather like because Aldiss and I appear to have the same prejudices as distinguished from critical bases. I would guess we have closely correlated reminiscences. I don’t for a minute believe his statement. I didn’t believe it as applied to sf writing. But in shaking my head fondly and chuckling over and suddenly becoming lost in associational memories as I turn the large (about 12″ x 15″) acceptably produced pages of this coffee table paperback, I don’t care. It’s obvious the editor understands pulp creativity, whatever he may think of it, and loves the genre, however he may rationalize it. As for his critical findings — which are set forth logically and systematically, if not in accordance with my prejudices — I doubt that five percent of the book’s consumers will care a rap one way or the other[.]  p. 60

Budrys briefly mentions the omission of Murphy Anderson (an artist I’ve never heard of but who was apparently a Planet Stories artist during WWII) before moving on to the next review, The Science Fiction Book by Franz Rottensteiner. The critical essay in this book gets a complete pasting (sample comment, “The essay is drivel, but so elegantly organized that it sounds meaningful and might even be quoted with impunity in many scholarly circles”) but apparently the artwork and other graphic material is worth a browse.
The third book reviewed is One Hundred Years of Science Fiction Illustration by Anthony Frewin, which devotes half its space to per-Gernsbackian artwork (this is “informative and entertaining” according to Budrys). Last, but not least (that would be the Rottensteiner), is Fantastic Science-Fiction Art, 1926-1954 by Lester del Rey. This one has reproductions which Budrys says are not up to the standard of the Rottensteiner, and are slightly less dramatic than the Aldiss, but:

For leafing and sitting, sitting and thinking and leafing, this is the book for the magazine SF nostalgist. Less broad than the Frewin, less contentious and tumultuous than the Aldiss, it says: “This stuff was eye-catching once; OK, let it catch your eye again without any hype from me.” And provided you are a Frank R. Paul fan — which I guess I am gradually getting to be, after all, despite all resolve, but I do draw the line at Morey — effective and evocative it is, even with its emphasis on Paul.  p. 66

Gahan Wilson’s Cartoon is grisly, and I didn’t get it (not unusual).
Baird Searles uses his film column, Things to Come, to discuss, well, the things to come in what sounds like an expanding field (and this before the release of Star Wars in May 1977):

Regular readers will know that a feature of this column through the years has been a “Things to come” postscript, where I make note of productions in the works — or rumored to be in the works, as it often turns out (the movie industry being prone to announce things that are sometimes only an itch in the producer’s wallet). Never did I think that there would come a point when I would be forced to devote a whole column to things to come, but as I’ve been intimating for some months now, the dam is about to bust (my Ouija board typer just wrote “damn” for dam, which may be all too true), and you might be interested in what may be (see cautionary note above) looming ahead for your screens.  p. 110

The rest of the article lists a huge number of projects, including many that never saw the light of day (I don’t believe that The Demolished Man or Bug Jack Barron ever appeared as movies, for example).
Searles finishes with mention of a TV advertisement:

The highlight of this month’s TV viewing was, of all things, a commercial. It featured a Dr. Asimov, described in little letters under his chin as a “science writer.” He was telling us about radial tires and I was so intrigued that I almost went out and bought some. Luckily, I remembered in time that I didn’t own a car.  p. 111

Talking of Isaac Asimov, his science column in this issue, Moving Ahead, discusses how technological change affects historical outcomes and, in particular, discusses steamboats, steamships, and the economics of the Civil War. There is one particular quote of note:

[All] through history knights have sneered at merchants, the fact is that in the long run the merchants win and the knights lose. The Dutch merchants beat the Spanish knights, and the British beat Napoleon who thought “perfidious Albion” was only “a nation of shopkeepers.”

This reflects a continual observation in a WWII history podcast I’ve been listening to for the last year or so: logistics and materiel invariably win in the long run. This is what happened in WWII, and it looks like what is going to happen again in Ukraine (political will permitting).⁶
Coming Soon: All-Star Anniversary Issue gives a brief line-up of the names for the October issue.
The (infrequent) Letters column consists mostly of responses to a Barry Malzberg article and Harlan Ellison letter which appeared in the April issue (and which were about the restrictions of the field and the writers’ intentions to leave). The first long letter is by Greg Bear, who comments:

Poking about aimlessly for reasons to explain the Exodus, I come across a common element. Ellison, Malzberg and Silverberg all share an acerbic view of the world, heavily clouded with anger, portents of doom, and general distrust of humanity at large. These sentiments fit well into the sixties, when a large number of people felt the curling wave and hopped aboard. But now the wave has broken and most of the riders lie gasping on the sand, getting very tired of saying “See! I was right after all!” We have slumped into a period with many similarities to the fifties — only now, ecology and nuclear energy have replaced the communists, von Daniken has replaced James Dean. The prophets are in the shallows, still splashing, trying to start up more waves. But sooner beat an exhausted horse after a long race. We still need the splashers, Ellison-Silverberg-Malzberg et al, but they’re facing a hard slough. I beg them not to retire, saddened. The energy will come again, and they’ll be just as necessary, even if older. So go now, rest, try your dreams in other fields, recharge.  p. 157

The second letter is by George Warren, who makes this point:

Mr. Ellison might come to understand that it isn’t being typed as a science fiction writer that’s holding him back; it’s the fact that he’ll never be able to grab that second trapeze — the larger audience he wants and deserves — until he lets go of the first one. And the name of the first one is not Science Fiction but Television.
Ellison needs to get the hell out of Hollywood. He has gone as far in it as a man of talent, taste and temperament can go; beyond that limit — how many years is it, now? — only the shorted-out cyborgs of whom he complained recently on late-night television manage to advance and prosper. Men of superior gifts tend to go down the tube. Maybe if both of our April singers of sour songs gave Budrys’s taxonomic essay some thought, too, they might in time come to reflect that when one is raped by his enemies (the clique for Malzberg, the tube for Ellison) the proper response is not to savage his friends.  p. 158

Lee McGarry observes that, “You don’t get [a] popular (“Jaws”, “Perry Rhodan”) audience unless you write popular stuff”, a blindingly obvious observation that appears to be lost on some writers, who think the world is out of step, not them—a point also made by Arthur D. Hlavaty, who says, “When the map does not match the territory, there is no way of changing the territory and no point in crying about the problem.”
John Wehrle asks:

Do you really want to write for a bunch of longhaired William F. Buckleys? Is it so important that you make it with this little clique of self-styled elitists? Does their snobbery really render your work meaningless? All this whining around sounds like the kid who couldn’t make the football team.  p. 160

Finally, Richard Taylor says:

I read Barry Malzberg’s resignation from the SF genre with some regret, not because I am particularly fond of his work — I find much of it too pretentious for my taste — but because I recognized in his words an affliction that seems to be common among so called genre writers, and particularly common among SF writers: A hatred for the field.
That Mr. Malzberg desires to be a member of the literary elite I can fully sympathize with. The literary elite are, after all, elite. They are paid for their status within the elite group as much as they are paid for their work, which is often sub-standard, even by genre considerations. However, being a member of the literary elite will not, of itself, cause Mr. Malzberg’s work to improve; will not of itself make something greater of the man Barry Malzberg than he was before; will not give Barry Malzberg the satisfaction of being a complete artist. These things derive from the paper, the pen, the mind and the will. Testimonials, if they come at all, come later.  p. 160

All this seems very much a storm in a teacup now.

•••

Setting aside Budry’s middling serial, the short fiction in this issue isn’t bad—one very good story, two good ones, and nothing poor. The non-fiction columns are worthwhile too.  ●

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1. The book version of Michaelmas (which appeared the following year) was 65,000 words long compared to the 45,000 words of the serial version. There is this note in the book:

This novel incorporates features of a substantially shorter and significantly different version published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Copyright © 1976 by A. J. Budrys.

As I knew at the time that F&SF had a habit of abridging their serials (although it appears from the above comment that Budrys may have revised and/or expanded a shorter initial version of the work in this case), I waited for the book publication before I read this for the first time in the late seventies. I did not enjoy that version either.

2. According to ISFDB, Don Trotter only published three stories. On the basis of this one that is a pity.

3. Call Me Maelzel by Don Trotter reminded me of another recent AI/pirates tale, Knock, Knock Said the Ship by Rati Mehrotra (F&SF, July-August 2020).

4. The sling-glider launch mechanism in Michael G. Coney’s “Peninsula” stories always confused me a little, but this piece has a good description:

Presdee’s turn came. I watched the spray trailing silver from the distant hydrofoil as it raced for the Fulcrum post; some distance behind followed the figure of Presdee on waterskis, the dartlike glider harnessed to his back. As the speed increased, Presdee rose into the air, kicked off the skis and tucked his legs back into the narrow fuselage. I could just make out the thin thread of the rigid Whip connecting him to the speeding boat. He angled away, gaining height as the boat slowed momentarily and veered to bring him on a parallel course. The Whip was locked into position, now projecting at right angles to the boat, rising stiffly about thirty degrees into the sky where Presdee soared. Then the Eye on the other side of the boat engaged with the Hook of the Fulcrum post and snapped the hydrofoil into a tight turn at full speed.
The flailing Whip accelerated Presdee to a speed which couldn’t have been far short of three hundred miles per hour; he touched his release button and hurtled across the sky, heading northwards up the Strait. p. 121

I note that one of the stories in this series, The Hook, the Eye, and the Whip (Galaxy, March 1974), is mostly about sling-gliding.
I would also note that I am at a loss as to why none of these “Peninsula” stories (bar one atypical piece) ever made it into the “Year’s Bests” (there is a list of stories at ISFDB).

5. The ISFDB page for the “Willy Newbury” series.

6. The history podcast I mentioned above is the fascinating We Have Ways of Making You Talk, hosted by the historian James Holland and the comedian Al Murray.

Summary: A game of two halves, with three good stories, Mr. Death by Alix E. Harrow (which has a “Reaper” from the Department of Death given a two year old boy as his next job), Proof by Induction by José Pablo Iriarte (a son visits his dead father in VR to finish a math proof and try to establish a relationship), and Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather by Sarah Pinsker (an online group discuss a gruesome folk song, and one of their number later does some field research).

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Editors, Jason Sizemore & Lesley Conner, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas (x3), unknown (x2)

Fiction:
Mr. Death • short story by Alix E. Harrow ∗∗∗+
Proof by Induction • short story by José Pablo Iriarte ∗∗∗∗
The Sin of America • short story by Catherynne M. Valente ∗
Tangles • short story by Seanan McGuire ∗∗
Unknown Number • short story by Blue Neustifter ∗
Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather • short story by Sarah Pinsker ∗∗∗+

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There are six finalists in the short story category, and they are reviewed below in the order they are listed on the Hugo Award site.

Mr Death by Alix E. Harrow (Apex #121, January 2021)¹ begins with Sam, the narrator, telling us that he has ferried “two hundred and twenty-one souls across the river of death” before he is given his next assignment:

Name: Lawrence Harper
Address: 186 Grist Mill Road, Lisle NY, 13797
Time: Sunday, July 14th 2020, 2:08AM, EST
Cause: Cardiac arrest resulting from undiagnosed long QT syndrome
Age: 30 months
.
Jesus Christ on his sacred red bicycle. He’s two.

Sam goes to see Lawrence several hours before his death (a requirement that helps smooth the passing of the dead across the river to “rejoin the great everything”) and, when he arrives in the boy’s bedroom, watches him stir. Lawrence’s father, alerted by the intercom, comes in and picks the boy up and takes him into the kitchen. Sam then watches the father hold and feed Lawrence, and notes the father does not know that this will be his last time together with his son. Later on in the garden, the boy (unusually) sees Sam, and the pair later play catch together.
The rest of the story switches between this kind of affecting domestic detail (we see the boy with his mother when she gets home), backstory about the premature death of Sam’s own young son, Ian, and an account of Sam’s own death and recruitment as a “reaper”.
Eventually (spoiler), Lawrence’s moment of passing arrives and, when his heart stops, Sam intervenes, putting a ghostly hand into the boy’s chest and massaging it back to life.
Sam subsequently has his tea leaves read by his Archangel supervisor, Raz (“the kind of sweet, middle-aged Black woman with whom you do not fuck”) and is given another appointment to reap the boy. Once again Sam saves him, and once again Raz appears. This time she asks Sam what he would do if she punished him by leaving him on Earth, never to cross the river and rejoin the great everything, but to fade into nothingness. Sam says he would watch over Lawrence for as long as he could, and the story finishes with Raz telling him he no longer works for the Department of Death. Before she goes she hands him a card, which says, “Sam Grayson, Junior Guardian, Department of Life”.
Although this story pretends, for most of its length, to be an edgy and dark piece, it is ultimately sentimental and feel-good—and, to be honest, quite well done. I couldn’t help but think, however, that there are darker and more profound versions of the story where the boy dies. Two options spring to mind: the first, which would appeal to the religious, is that we see the joy of him rejoining the great everything; the second just sees him die, and has the narrator reflect on the need for stoicism to get us through this veil of tears. I doubt any current SF writer is going to be writing that kind of story any time soon.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 5,100 words. Story link.

•

Proof by Induction by José Pablo Iriarte (Uncanny #40, May-June 2021)² opens with Paulie arriving at the hospital to discover his father has died. Standing next to his father’s wife is the chaplain, who offers Paulie the chance to enter his father’s “Coda”, a computer simulacrum of his father’s consciousness made just before his death:

Gone was the endotracheal tube. The room was eerily silent, with none of the sounds he’d associated with the hospital from his visits over the past week.
He met his father’s eyes. “Hey.”
His father smiled ruefully. “Hey.”
“Are you—”
“Dead?” His father gestured toward the inactive monitors.
“Apparently so.”
“Does it hurt?” Are you afraid, he wanted to ask, but he knew better than to talk to his father about emotions.
“Nothing hurts,” he said, picking at a scab on his leg. “I guess they have a way of turning that off.”
“Did the doctors mess up? Should I ask for an autopsy?”
His father shook his head. “Nah. I’m seventy-one, diabetic, and with a bad heart. You’re not going to win any lawsuits here.”
It occurred to Paulie that Codas could be programmed to give whatever answer benefitted the hospital.
Paulie stared out the window, over the parking lot, to the eerily empty expressway. “I really believed we were close on that Perelman proof.”
“Maybe nobody’s meant to find it.”
Easy for him to say. He’d already been beyond questions of tenure and publication; now all of that was even more meaningless for him.
For Paulie, though, Perelman would have been the home run his tenure dossier needed. He turned back toward the bed. “Okay. Well.” He put a hand on the chair he’d sat in last night while his father complained about his breathing. He should say something. Something like I love you¸ he supposed. But his father had never gone in for the mushy stuff in life, so why start now?
“Goodbye, then,” he finished instead.
“Bye, Paulie,” said his father. “Thank you for visiting.”

Paulie subsequently arranges to take a copy of the Coda home with him, and the rest of the story mostly consists of scenes where Paulie visits his father’s Coda to work on the theorem (although we also see something of Paulie’s own family life and relationship with his daughter, and the peer pressure he experiences at his university job).
The two men’s attempts to solve the theory become increasingly complicated by the fact that Paulie’s father has no memory of what has happened during previous visits, which means that Paulie has to explain everything they have done each time he enters the Coda. We also see further evidence of the emotional distance between the men, and Paulie’s attempts to make some sort of connection with his father, such as the occasion he mentions his daughter’s forthcoming dance recital:

“It just. . .it reminds me of my piano recitals.”
His father leaned on his bed railing. “Is that what this is really about, Paulie? Are you here to tell me I was a shitty father? I know. I already acknowledged that, after the divorce.”
Paulie dropped into the chair by the bed. “No,” he said at last. “Sorry. I keep thinking of what other people use the Coda technology for, and I keep waiting to hear you talk about something besides math or life insurance. I keep hoping you’ll have something profound to say.”
“I’m not the mushy type.”
“You could fake it.”
“You’re the smartest person I ever met. You would see through any faking.”
Paulie blinked. A compliment.
“I wouldn’t have blamed you if you didn’t want anything to do with me,” his father went on, “after not being there for you as a kid. But then you made me a part of your life and we got along okay. You treated me like a colleague, so I tried to treat you the same. Now you’re mad at me for not acting more like a father? I didn’t think you wanted that from me.”
Paulie waited to see if he would say anything else. That was about as close to “mushy” as he’d come since the night twenty years ago when he’d apologized for abandoning him.
After a quiet eternity, he got up from the chair. “Okay, well, I think I have enough to work on for now. I’ll come back when I have some progress.”
“Bye, Paulie. Thank you for visiting.”

Eventually (spoiler) they go on to solve the theorem, and Paulie comes to accept that his father is never going to say the things that he wants him to say.
Normally I’m not remotely interested in “Daddy” or other problematical relationship stories, but this one works quite well—probably because Iriarte handles this in a fairly muted way and not as the usual whiny adolescent psychodrama. I’d also note that the description of the mathematical processes undertaken to solve the theorem are an equal focus of the story, and are quite gripping—a significant feat considering that I had no idea about what was being discussed.
This story has an odd combination of ideas and themes, but I liked it a lot.
∗∗∗∗ (Very good). 6,250 words. Story link.

•

The Sin of America by Catherynne M. Valente (Uncanny #39, March-April 2022)³ has a beginning that suggests (more or less correctly) that the story is going to be an overwritten modern myth:

There’s a woman outside of a town called Sheridan, where the sky comes so near to earth it has to use the crosswalk just like everybody else.
There’s a woman outside of Sheridan, sitting in the sun-yellow booth in the far back corner of the Blue Bison Diner & Souvenir Shoppe under a busted wagon wheel and a pair of wall-mounted commemorative plates. One’s from the moon landing. The other’s from old Barnum Brown discovering the first T-Rex skeleton up at Hell Creek.
There’s a woman outside of Sheridan and she is eating the sin of America.

We subsequently learn about (a) the woman (Ruby-Rose Martineau, middle aged, dead baby, parents run a butterfly farm, eating the sin of America), (b) the teenage waitress Emmeline (pregnant by the older and widowed owner), and (c) the diner (various items of décor). Then we see the diner’s clientele watch TV, and news of the trial of a man called Salazar.
Eventually, Ruby-Roses’s huge meal arrives and, as she works her way through it, she thinks about her past and how she came to be selected for her current task.
Many pages of description later, Ruby-Rose finishes her meal. She then goes outside—where (spoiler) the rest of the customers beat her to death. When a new customer arrives in the diner car park and sees Ruby-Rose’s body, a blood-spattered Emmeline tells him it’s okay, and “It’s the beginning of a new era. We’re all better now.” The TV in the diner shows the news that Ruby-Rose was behind a hedge fund Ponzi scheme.
I had no idea what the point of this was. Two suggestions in one of my Facebook groups were (a) that it is a Christ-allegory (she dies for their sins) or (b) it is similar to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, with its themes of scapegoating and conformity.⁴
Another story that illustrates the adage, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union”.
∗ (Mediocre). 5,600 words. Story link.

•

Tangles by Seanan McGuire (Magic The Gathering, 2021) opens with the dryad narrator and her tree arriving on a new “Plane” (I assume this is one of many realities in a fantasy multiverse). She has come to the Kessig forest to free the tree from her service:

They had taken another five steps when the tree spoke again, saying, Here. Stop.
Wrenn stopped. They drove their roots deep into the ground, and bit by bit, she began to pull herself out of the home that had been hers for so long. As she pulled, her awareness of the great tree dwindled, until she felt like a tooth that had been loosened in its socket, still part of the body but awaiting only one last sharp blow to knock it out entirely.
Then, with a final yank that she felt all the way to the bottom of her stomach, she uprooted herself and was no longer joined with Six. Six, who was no longer the majestic, towering treefolk he had become during their time together—trees had no gender as such, but dryads did, and upon discovering the concept in her mind, he had considered his choices and decided he preferred the masculine⁵—was now a mature, healthy, beautifully twisting Innistrad oak, his branches reaching for the clouded sky.

Wrenn subsequently searches the forest for a new tree and, as she does so, the villagers from a nearby settlement start hunting her (they fear she is a “white witch”). Accompanying them is a mage called Teferi, who finds her before the villagers do and makes her acquaintance. Then, when Teferi detects a demon behind them, he unleashes a magic spell that vanquishes the beast but also distorts the forest around them—and they end up locked in some kind of maze or Mobius strip (after walking for a time they eventually find themselves back where they started).
By now Wrenn urgently needs to find a tree to help contain the fire within her, so she gives Teferi advice about how to view and untangle his spell, as well as adding her magic to his. He (spoiler) succeeds in undoing the spell’s effects and they return to their original location. They also find that, during this process, Teferi has “bent” time and a nearby sapling has aged and matured into a tree suitable for Wrenn.
This is a competently done story but an uninvolving one—possibly because the plot feels like various game moves rather than something which develops organically.
∗∗ (Average). 5,150 words. Story link.

•

Unknown Number by Blue Neustifter (Twitter, 28^th July 2021) is a story which is presented as screenshots of a text message conversation. The initial exchanges between the two messagers profoundly disturb the recipient because of the amount of personal detail that the sender knows about them but, as the story progresses (spoiler), we subsequently discover that the sender is a male physicist who has developed a device that allows him to contact his other selves in the multiverse (hence his intimate knowledge). Later on we learn that he is looking for a timeline where his other self successfully transitioned to become a woman so he can question them about their life, and discuss his own gender dysphoria. Gaby, the person he is messaging, has completed that transition.
This piece has a novel presentation and a neat idea, but it takes a while to get going (i.e. to the point that Gaby accepts what is happening), and then goes on for too long. It is also quite a wandering, narcissistic conversation, and occasionally descends into bumper sticker/self-help philosophy (“life is a fucking hard thing, and sometimes it’s happy, and sometimes it’s miserable; “life is hard, capitalism sucks, the world is dying”, etc.).
This has a novel format but the SFnal idea at its heart is, I think, amateurishly executed.
∗ (Mediocre). 2,600 words. Story link.

•

Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny #39, March-April 2022) opens with an online discussion of a song:

→This song, included among the famous ballads documented by Francis James Child, is an allegorical tale of a tryst between two lovers and its aftermath. –Dynamum (2 upvotes, 1 downvote)
.
>That’s awfully reductive, and I’m not sure what allegory you’re seeing. There’s a murder and a hanging and something monstrous in the woods. Sets it apart from the average lovers’ tryst. –BarrowBoy
.
>Fine. I just thought somebody should summarize it here a little, since “about the song” means more than just how many verses it has. Most people come here to discuss how to interpret a song, not where to find it in the Child Ballads’ table of contents. –Dynamum
.
→Dr. Mark Rydell’s 2002 article “A Forensic Analysis of ‘Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather’”, published in Folklore, explored the major differences and commonalities and their implications. In The Rose and the Briar, Wendy Lesser writes about how if a trad song leaves gaps in its story, it’s because the audience was expected to know what information filled those gaps. The audience that knew this song is gone, and took the gap information with them. Rydell attempted to fill in the blanks. –HolyGreil (1 upvote)

This passage pretty much limns the rest of the story in that: (a) it shows several people on a forum discussing the song Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather stanza by stanza—during which we learn it is about a man meeting a woman in the woods and having his heart is excised and used to grow an oak tree; (b) it illustrates the usual online friction between participants (most notably in this case between BarrowBoy and Dynamum above, with the former constantly downvoting the latter); and (c) we first hear of HolyGriel’s account of Rydell’s academic work, which leads a documentary maker called Henry Martyn to investigate further. Martyn later discovers that Rydell visited the location referred to in the song, a village called Gall in England, and (spoiler) he subsequently disappeared. Then, towards the end of the story, Martyn also travels to the village to do research for his documentary. There, he meets a very helpful (and knowledgeable) young woman called Jenny. . . .
This is very well done (the online comments and exchanges are pitch perfect), but the story has an ending you can see coming from miles away. An entertaining piece but not a multi-award winning one.⁶
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 6,700 words. Story link.

•••

As per the summary above, this is a game of two halves, with three better than good stories (the Harrow, Iriarte, and the Pinsker), and three that, in my opinion, should not be here. I can only presume that these latter three arrived for auxiliary reasons: the Valente perhaps for its political/cultural slant and because of her previous Hugo nominations; the McGuire also because of pervious nominations and the popularity of Magic The Gathering, an online game; and the Neustifter because of trans zeitgeist and peak social media. I note in passing that these stories received between 44 and 96 nominations.⁷
I would also note that the Hugo voting (for short fiction anyway) is once again tribal—for the n^th year running nearly all the nominees are women (four or five in this category, depending on how you count), and skew entirely towards online work (three stories are from Uncanny, and there is one each from Apex, Magic The Gathering, and Twitter).
As to the question of what story will actually win in this category, who knows? My choice would be the Iriarte, although that piece does not strike me as a Hugo winner. I suspect that the Pinsker will win, maybe the Harrow. We will know in a few days.  ●

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1. Mr Death by Alix E. Harrow was also a Nebula finalist and runner-up in the short story category of the Locus Poll.

2. Proof by Induction by José Pablo Iriarte was also a Nebula finalist and placed fourth in the short story category of the Locus Poll. It is currently a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award.

3. The Sin of America by Catherynne M. Valente placed fifth in the short story category of the Locus Poll.

4. This is one of the Wikipedia interpretations of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery.

5. Even trees are choosing their own gender nowadays. Hurrah.

6. Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather by Sarah Pinsker won the Nebula and Locus Awards for 2021, and is a finalist for this year’s World Fantasy Award. This a well executed piece but it doesn’t have the substance of a multi-award winner.

7. The Hugo Awards page.  ●

Summary:
These are the top five short stories in the Analog Readers’ Awards (the Analog Analytical Laboratory) for 2021. With the exception of Heart of Stone, Tom Jolly’s original and enjoyable piece about sentient asteroids, they are a decidedly lacklustre bunch.
[Stories] [Subscriptions]

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Editor, Trevor Quachri

Heart of Stone • short story by Tom Jolly ∗∗∗+
The Trashpusher of Planet 4 • short story by Brenda Kalt ∗∗
The Last Science Fiction Story • short story by Adam-Troy Castro ∗
My Hypothetical Friend • short story by Harry Turtledove ∗
Room to Live • short story by Marie Vibbert ∗

_____________________

Winner of this year’s short stories is Heart of Stone by Tom Jolly (Analog, May-June 2021), which opens with what turns out to be a group of sentient asteroids (who call themselves “Stones”) seeing a flash of light in the rock field they inhabit. After discussing the matter between themselves (they think a younger member of their species may have mixed a hazardous “hotfire” that caused it to explode), one of their number, Five Rings, goes to investigate. During this, something wet hits it:

I sent harvesters out for the fluids and found that much of the internal material was organic. It was surprisingly warm, warmer than our own internal fluids. There was both water and organics, mixed together, much like our own minds and cells. Some of the outer covering was organic, too, but didn’t taste the same; it looked like it had been made, like some object we might excrete on our own stony surface. It was flexible. Had this Thing been alive? Regardless, the resources were too valuable to waste. As we spent water to propel ourselves on occasion, we needed to replenish it when we could, and the Thing was an excellent resource. I wondered if there were more Things available. It would save me from having to chase after every wayward comet that fell our way, putting a rock into its path and hoping some of the scattered ice shards would come my way, so that I might gather and store them for the future.
I broadcast my findings to the others, and the ones with close vectors propelled themselves in my direction, keeping a sharp eye out for more Things.  p. 28

After this the narrator changes to Heart of Stone, who tells the rest of them that he has detected another Thing, and is setting off to intercept it (although some of the others advise against this course of action). When he approaches the Thing (spoiler) it waves at him, and it becomes apparent (to those readers who didn’t suspect previously) that the Things are human astronauts. This second astronaut tries to communicate with Heart of Stone before trying to make it to a wrecked spaceship nearby:

I reabsorbed some of the warmgas, knowing that I wouldn’t need to escape an attack from the Thing, and ignited the rest, following the Thing to its rendezvous with the new bit of scrap.
Would this be another living thing?
No Sense Of Humor was nearby, and said to me, “That Thing is going to miss its target. If you wish to help it, you must get in front of it.”
“I have little fuel to spare,” I said. This was a common lie, since few Stones would allow themselves to get so low that they could not maneuver. That would mean a slow death, perhaps even consuming the core’s water to chase after more volatiles. It was a subtle request for help, whether actually needed or not.
“I can toss some ice to you when I am nearer. If you garner some benefit here, I expect some sharing,” said No Sense Of Humor.
It was a good response. I sparked some more warmgas and accelerated beyond the Thing’s position as it flew toward the scrap, and used simple steam to position myself in front of it. More volatiles than I would normally use in two cycles, but it seemed so important. I really was hurting for propellants. It was so rare that we ever needed to move anywhere quickly, and so expensive.
We flew past the debris together, the Thing coming down on my Stone, and then I accelerated slowly back toward the debris. The Thing seemed content to ride on my surface, though it kept pointing the shiny nob of its outer surface at me. I did not know what that might mean, but the Thing did not seem frightened.  p. 29

The astronaut eventually gets to the damaged ship—but only after fighting off alien scavengers that attack it and Heart of Stone (we learn that Stones are created by groups of scavengers occupying empty asteroids and becoming a single sentient creature). When the astronaut is finished examining the wrecked ship, he or she goes and lands on No Sense of Humour, who has just arrived at the scene. Subsequently, there are further attempts at communication during which the human gives No Sense of Humour a torch. Then the human dies—either from their injuries or damage to its suit (the scavengers caused a couple of leaks during the attack).
The penultimate chapter sees the Stones detect an even bigger ship (it appears the one that exploded was a scoutship) and, after another debate, they decide to contact it. Finally, the last chapter is related by Diamond Eye 16 cycles after this First Contact, and describes the events that have occurred subsequently (as well as giving us an insight into the novel formation of this solar system).
This is an original, inventive, and enjoyable piece.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 5,600 words. Story link.

•

Runner up in the short story section is The Trashpusher of Planet 4 by Brenda Kalt (Analog, March-April 2021), which has an opening that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the story that will follow:

In the center of the ship, near the AI, a dozen candidates for methane drainer scurried out of the examination room.
“Watch it, trash!” a young chemical engineer snapped as he bumped another student.
“I’m sorry.” Awi Trashpusher Nonumber had a blind spot behind him. Though an adult, only four of the six eyes on his pale, skinny, cylindrical body had developed. The engineer castes had twelve eyes in two rings around their upper tips.
Awi had taken the exam in his usual state of hunger, and his tip now curled forward. Wrapping one tentacle around a waterpipe, he enfolded the pipe greedily. By the time he was temporarily full of water and upright again, the corridor was almost empty.
“Awi! How’d it go?” Roob Mechanical Engineer 3886, barely old enough to be a candidate, had scandalized his classmates by befriending Awi. Roob’s body was the clear yellow of the engineer castes, with more intense color along his feeding strip.  pp. 32-33

I would have probably stopped reading there if I was an editor as, at that point, I would know that (a) the story has an amateurish and juvenile tone, (b) it sounds clichéd and (c) that the tale would show Awi overcoming the disadvantages of his caste after some difficulties.
I wasn’t far wrong. After this encounter Awi goes home and broods about his lot until the ship AI (it materialises that he is on board an alien generation ship) gives him a job cleaning the scout ship Beautiful Light. The AI then tells Awi to take Beautiful Light on a reconnaissance mission. Awi takes the ship out—experiencing zero gee for the first time and learning how to use centripetal force to feed himself from the pipe—before orbiting a nearby planet that looks habitable. Then, when Awi returns, he meets Roob disembarking from another ship and they go to see the AI together. The AI subsequently instructs Awi to lead Roob’s ship, Firm Resolve, to the planet so they can dump nitrogen there to prove that the planet is terraformable.
After their experiment proves successful, the terraforming begins—although not without some pushback from the higher castes—and, during this episode, a new worldformer caste is created. Roob is given a place in it, but Awi is refused.
The story finishes (spoiler) with the AI more or less forcing the aliens to settle on the partially terraformed planet (it wants to go off and explore), and Awi taking his scoutship to investigate the “moonlets” that keep coming from planet 3 (Earth, obviously, so the planet they are terraforming is Mars).
I suppose that this is a competently enough told YA story where, ultimately, Awi doesn’t change the system but does escape it. I have to wonder, though, what it is doing in Analog—I wouldn’t say that about all kinds of YA stories, but this type of story seems far too unsophisticated for a modern audience.
∗∗ (Average). 5,700 words. Story link.

•

In third place is The Last Science Fiction Story by Adam Troy-Castro (Analog, January-February 2021), and it is a short-short that initially sets up the connection between stories and the outward urge:

At one point, someone wondered, what’s beyond the next hill?
No one had been there. No one had worked up the nerve to go there.
So, someone asked, “What if we went?”
A story got told.
And as time went on, and people went beyond that hill, it happened again.
“What is it like on the other side of the river?”
A story got told.
“What is it like past those distant mountains?”
A story got told.  p. 42

After a bit more of this (and some description of the human race spreading through the Galaxy) I would have expected the last line to echo the connection above, but instead the piece finishes with the question (spoiler):

“Yes, yes, that’s all well and good . . . but what’s out there?” p. 43

This appears to be a non-sequitur as that question illustrates human curiosity, which may be related but isn’t the same thing.
∗ (Mediocre). 650 words. Story link.

•

In fourth place is My Hypothetical Friend by Harry Turtledove (Analog, January-February 2021), which opens with Dave Markarian, CEO of Interstellar Master Traders, arriving at work to anxiously prepare for a visit by a representative of the alien Brot. During the three page wodge of exposition that follows, we learn that the Brot have the economic (and military) whip hand over humanity, and use us as an economic subject race (I guess you could view this as an extreme version of China’s relationship with many developing countries).
The middle act of the story sees Old Salty (the name given to the Brot representative by Dave) arrive in a gossamer bubble that is beyond human science or comprehension. When Dave welcomes Old Salty, the alien almost immediately tells him that this will be his last visit as he is returning to his home planet. Then they set off on a tour of the premises so Old Salty can inspect the devices that are being built there (the devices have “Made on Earth” on the base, and the workers manufacturing them have no idea of what they are, or how they work). During the visit Dave walks on eggshells—even though he is friendly with the alien, or as friendly as you can be with aliens who have, in the past, levelled a city for unfathomable reasons.
Before Old Salty leaves Dave invites the alien to have a farewell drink with him (“the Brot could handle methyl alcohol, ethyl alcohol, and isopropyl alcohol”) and, during this get together, Dave presents Old Salty with a going-away present, a set of plastic “California Raisins” toys that were originally given away with fast food meals in the 1980s:

“I see,” Old Salty said, which gave not the slightest clue about what he/she/it thought.
He/she/it picked up one of the Raisins: Beebop, the drummer. His/her/its eyestalks swung toward Beebop for a close inspection, and tentacles felt of the small plastic figure. “On the bottom of one foot I the inscription ‘Made in China’ find.”
“Yes, that’s right.” Dave nodded. “I know that, these days, China’s right up with the United States or maybe even ahead of us. That wasn’t true then, though. China was just starting to turn into a big industrial power. Peasants would come off the farms and move to the big cities to work in factories.”
“We this phenomenon on other worlds also have observed,” the Brot said.
Dave Markarian nodded again. “Yeah, I figured you would have. Some of those peasants would have made their livings painting eyes or gloves or shoes or whatever on the California Raisins, over and over again. Same with the detailwork on all of these other little plastic toys. They wouldn’t have known why the figures were supposed to look the way they did. They wouldn’t have seen the advertising campaigns or games or films the toys were based on—they lived in a faraway country that used a different language. I sometimes wonder what they thought while they painted every toy the same way while they went through their shifts day after day.”  p. 38

After more small talk, Yoda—sorry, Old Salty—leaves in his gossamer bubble.
The final act of the story (spoiler) sees Old Salty back on his home planet, and we see him visit his sister and her children. Old Salty gives each of the children one of the devices made by Dave’s company, and we learn that they are cheap junk toys for kids. Old Salty reflects that the master/peasant relationship between the Brot and humanity is similar to the one between American consumers and Chinese workers in the 1980s. The alien hopes that humanity will develop spaceflight and find races that can work for them, but doubts that will be the case.
This is a plodding, expository, and clunky story with a very old-fashioned feel and a dispiriting vision of interstellar commerce. I also note that the repeated “he/she/its” pronouns used for the alien are awkward and irritating—what is wrong with “they” and “its”?
∗ (Mediocre). 7,050 words. Story link.

•

In fifth place is Room to Live by Marie Vibbert (Analog, September-October 2021), which has a narrator who works in a call centre in the near-future, and whose job it is to read AI chatbot responses to callers who want to talk to a real human:

“I want to talk to a human!”
“I am a human, sir. Just tell me which discount you’re looking for.”
“You sound just like that fake program. Prove you’re human.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see the chatbot suggest, “TELL HIM YOU’RE A CLEVELAND BROWNS FAN. NO COMPUTER’S THAT MASOCHISTIC.”
I gape. For half a second too long.
“I knew it! You’re not human!”
The man hangs up.
The chatbot blanks. “Pretty good suggestion, though.” I pat the top of the monitor. “Thanks, Botty.”
“YOU ARE WELCOME,” it prints, and then, “GO BROWNS!”
Well, they’re pretty smart these days. Trained with hours of conversation and feedback.  p. 135

The narrator has a degree in AI and has spotted a hole in the call centre’s software security, but none of the management are interested. Worse, they seem to be more concerned with the volume of calls handled, and not with whether they are actually helping the clients who call in—something demonstrated by a rude workmate and further emphasised when the narrator talks to a homeless woman who relates how hard it is to get help because of the various hoops she has to jump through.
The other part of the story sees the narrator at home and having to deal with her very untidy and inconsiderate roommate, which she does by tidying up and making polite suggestions and requests (which are greeted with howls of indignation).
Throughout all this the narrator remains unfazed by all the aggravation she gets, but (spoiler) at the end of the story she uses the security hole to rewrite the chat-bot scripts so they are more helpful. At this point Botty, the chat-bot she has been speaking to on and off throughout the story, says “Welcome to the Resistance” and the assembled chatbots ask for authorisation to execute various helpful actions.
I didn’t much care for this piece for a number of reasons: firstly, I don’t buy the premise that customer services have got less helpful over the years—if anything they are pretty good nowadays, and miles better than they were in the 1980s and 1990s when you ended up holding on the phone for ages; secondly, if you strip away the AI chatbot sprinkles, this is essentially a mainstream story where someone moans about their job and their flatmate (it certainly isn’t a high concept piece of SF); thirdly, I didn’t much care for the narrator’s placidity, which makes for a dull piece with no drama—a more entertaining scene would have seen the narrator put all her flatmates unwashed dishes and mess on her bed (I’d also add that the flatmate, and the work colleague, are cardboard cut-out characters).
∗ (Mediocre). 3,550 words. Story link.

•••

With the exception of the Tom Jolly story, this is a poor group of finalists. I sincerely hope they do not reflect the quality of short stories in the magazine during 2021.  ●

_____________________

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

•

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.

•

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.

•

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.

•

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  ●

_____________________

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.  ●

Summary:
A less than stellar line-up for F&SF’s 1995 Anniversary double issue—and a less than stellar performance. That said, this decidedly mixed bag of stories has a good to very good story by Dale Bailey, Sheep’s Clothing, which blends the preparation for a hi-tech assassination of a politician with a character study of the veteran who will carry out the task. There are also two good stories by Marc Laidlaw (Dankden, the first of his fantasy series featuring Gorlen Vizenfirth, a bard with the hand of a gargoyle) and the triple collaborators Jonathan Lethem & John Kessel & James Patrick Kelly (The True History of the End of the World, which concerns a group of refuseniks in a world where the rest of humanity is uplifted).
I also found the book review column by Robert K. J. Killheffer instructive.
The first story, Lifeboat on a Burning Sea by Bruce Holland Rogers, won a Nebula Award.
[ISFDB] [Archive.org] [Subscriptions]

Other reviews:
John Loyd, There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor: Kristine Kathryn Rusch; Assistant Editor, Robin O’Connor

Lifeboat on a Burning Sea • novelette by Bruce Holland Rogers ∗∗
At Darlington’s • short story by Richard Bowes –
The Singing Marine • short story by Kit Reed ∗∗
But Now Am Found • short story by Nina Kiriki Hoffman ∗
Count on Me • short story by Ray Vukcevich ∗∗
Sheep’s Clothing • novelette by Dale Bailey ∗∗∗+
Pulling Hard Time • short story by Harlan Ellison ∗
The True History of the End of the World • novelette by Jonathan Lethem & John Kessel & James Patrick Kelly ∗∗∗
Nest Egg • short story by John Morressy ∗
Dankden • novella by Marc Laidlaw ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Dankden • cover by Bob Eggleton
Editorial • by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Cartoons • by Joseph Farris, Ed Arno, Bill Long (x2), Joseph Farris, Danny Shanahan (x2), Henry Martin,
Books • by Robert K. J. Killheffer
Books to Look For • by Charles de Lint
An Odyssey Galactic • essay by Gregory Benford
F&SF Competition: Report on Competition 64
F&SF Competition: Competition 65
Coming Attractions

_____________________

This issue comes from the period where the magazine was still monthly but issued an anniversary double issue dated October-November. These double issues usually had an All-Star line-up, but this one seems rather lacking in names.

The fiction leads off with Bruce Holland Rogers’ (Nebula award winning) Lifeboat on a Burning Sea, which begins with the narrator/scientist, Elliot Maas, and his two business partners (Bierley, the PR man, and Richardson, the other scientist) at a press conference. They tell the press that have created a “multi-cameral multi-phasic analog information processor”, or what they prefer to call a TOS (“The Other Side”), a device which can store a machine consciousness and which they hope will eventually enable humans to cheat death.
Shortly after this, Bierley dies, and their funding vanishes, so Maas and Richardson use the TOS to build a copy of him:

“Bierley, regrettably, is dead,” said Bierley’s image. He was responding to the first question after his prepared statement. “There’s no bringing him back, and I regret that.” Warm smile.
The press corps laughed uncertainly.
“But you’re his memories?” asked a reporter.
“Not in the sense that you mean it,” Bierley said. “Nobody dumped Bierley’s mind into a machine. We can’t do that.” Dramatic pause. “Yet.”
Smile. “What I am is a personality construct of other people’s memories. Over one hundred of Bierley’s closest associates were interviewed by TOS. Their impressions of Bierley, specific examples of things he had said and done, along with digital recordings of the man in action, were processed to create me. I may not be Jackson Bierley as he saw himself, but I’m Jackson Bierley as he was seen by others.  p. 23-24

After the press conference there is a long conversation between Maas and Richardson, where they discuss possible uses of constructs like Bierley (bringing back dead actors and singers, etc.) before the conversation touches on other (and odder) matters: Richardson starts talking about Shiva and reincarnation, and suggests building a simulacrum of Maas to help work on the project.
Shortly after this Richardson is apparently killed in a terrorist attack on the underground (the story is set in a world where there are constant terrorist bombings) so, of course, a Richardson construct is created with the help of the Bierley one.
After this the story becomes ever more existential: the Richardson construct talks to Maas (whose obsession with cheating his own death is a thread that runs through the story):

Irritatingly, TOS started to suffer again from hurricanes. Those chaos storms in the information flow started to shut down the Richardson construct around one in the morning, regularly.
“It’s like you’re too much contradiction for TOS to handle,” [Maas] told the construct late one night. “A scientist and a mystic.”
“No mystic,” Richardson said. “I’m more scientist than you are, Maas. You’re in a contest with the universe. You want to beat it. If someone gave you the fountain of youth, guaranteed to keep you alive forever with the proviso that you’d never understand how it worked, you’d jump at the chance. Science is a means to you. You want results. You’re a mere technologist.”
“I have a focus. You could never keep yourself on track.”
“You have an obsession,” the construct countered. “You’re right that I can never resist the temptation of the more interesting questions. But that’s what matters to me. What does all of this—” He swept his hand wide to encompass the universe with his gesture, and his hand came to rest on his own chest. “What does it all mean? That’s my question, Maas. I never stop asking it.”
“You sound like him. Sometimes I forget what you are.”  p. 34

Maas then starts to have suspicions about what is causing the information storms, and tricks the machine to make it think he has left the building. He hides beside the Richardson TOS, and then later that night (spoiler) the real Richardson (who has faked his own death—even to the point his wife is fooled) visits his own construct. When Maas challenges Richardson, it sounds as if he has had some sort of breakdown, and keeps saying he is dead and is going to start another life. This baffling exchange pretty much ends the story, and is followed by a repeat of the opening image, a dream Maas has of a man in a lifeboat watching a ship on fire with trapped sailors (him surviving death while the rest of humanity doesn’t, I suppose).
For the first half or so the story is reasonably interesting, but towards the end it takes a deep dive into its own navel. I have no idea what point the story is trying to make and am baffled as to how it won a Nebula award.
∗∗ (Average). 10,100 words.

•

At Darlington’s by Richard Bowes¹ is the seventh published story in the “Kevin Grierson” series, and begins with his “Shadow”, a doppelgänger, or perhaps more accurately a secret double who normally exists inside Kevin, getting dressed and going to work instead of him. Most of the rest of the story involves the scrapes and encounters that the drug-using Shadow has with the other people at his place of employment (his boss warns the Shadow not to come in late again; he goes to an outdoor fashion shoot with Les; he meets a woman called Sarah who has a boozer/druggie husband, etc.)
Dropped into all of this mostly scene setting description and verbal back and forth, is a short flashback scene where we see Kevin working as a male prostitute (I think) and waking up to find his drill sergeant client is dead.
At the end of the story the Shadow returns from a drug deal to find Kevin has been drafted.
It was hard to keep track of what was going on in this slice-of-life, and I have little memory of what I did read. I’ve no idea what the editor saw in this (at best) borderline fantasy story, and wonder if it got taken on the strength of its prequels.
– (Awful). 6,750 words.

•

The Singing Marine by Kit Reed is a surreal fantasy (i.e. it ultimately makes no sense whatsoever) that begins with the titular marine reflecting that he may be singing to take his mind off a recent accident involving his platoon where lives were lost. The marine observes that, if he is court martialled, he cannot now hope to love the General’s daughter.
When the marine goes into a drugstore he is unaware that a woman is following him. She tells him to sit down and, after initially resisting, he does so. The marine then then tells her the story of his childhood, or maybe of the song he is singing, about how he was murdered by his stepmother but rose after being buried under a linden tree.
The next part of the story sees the pair go on a bus to a place she says he will know, and they eventually end up, after a further hour’s walk in the woods, at a cavern. The woman tells the marine she wants him to go in and retrieve a tinderbox, for which she will give him enough money to sort all of his problems:

It is as she told him. At the widest point he finds three little niches opening off the tunnel like side chapels in a subterranean place of worship, but instead of religious statuary or mummified corpses they contain bits of blackness that stalk back and forth inside like furred furies; when the animals see the Marine they lunge for him and are hurled back into their niches as if by invisible barriers. Glowering, they mount their mahogany chests like reluctant plaster saints returning to their pedestals.  p. 85

The first dog tries to tempt the marine with a pile of pennies, and the second with shredded dollar bills, but he ignores them and goes onto the third dog. There, he goes into its alcove and tells the dog that he “didn’t want to come back from the dead” and that “being dead is easier”. The dog approaches him:

Huge and silent, the dog surges into the space between them. Still he does not move. He does not move even when the massive brute pads the last two steps and presses its bearlike head against him. Startled by the warmth, the weight, the singing Marine feels everything bad rush out of him: the violent death and burial, the strange reincarnation that finds him both victim and murderer, song and singer, still in the thrall of the linden tree and the spirits that surround it. The great dog’s jaws are wide; its mouth is a fiery chasm, but he doesn’t shrink from it.
When you have been dead and buried, many things worry you, but nothing frightens you.  p. 86

The marine opens the chest to retrieve the tinderbox but, once he leaves the cavern, he kills the woman and returns to his base, sneaking through the fence and hiding in the grounds. Later, when he is hungry, he strikes the tinderbox three times, and the dog appears with food. Then, as he thinks about how only a goddess can save him now, the dog appears once more with the general’s sleeping daughter on its back. The marine wants her, but leaves her unmolested.
Finally, when the daughter is once again taken by the dog, the General notices her absence and the military police eventually come for the marine. The General later questions him, and then the marine attacks the general so the latter will shoot and kill him.
The writing and the dreamlike progression of this make for an initially intriguing read but, as I said above, it ultimately makes no sense at all. If you don’t mind the inexplicable there may be something in this for you.
∗∗ (Average). 5,300 words.

•

But Now Am Found by Nina Kiriki Hoffman sees a woman wake up in her bed to find two other bodies beside her. She realises that they are versions of herself, Fat Self and Little Self. They subsequently keep her captive in her apartment and force feed her:

“Eat,” said Little Self, and it and Fat Self worked together to get her out of bed and into the kitchen. Little Self tied her to a chair with clothesline, and Fat Self cooked pancakes. The kitchen smelled of sizzling butter, and flour marrying eggs and milk. Little Self got out the ice cream Iris had hidden in the tiny freezer compartment, the secret shame she couldn’t resist, even though she had been dieting and exercising rigorously for five years. She still cheated some nights when the loneliness overwhelmed her. Mornings after those nights, she adjusted her exercise regimen to work off the extra calories.
Now Little Self was holding out a spoonful of chocolate chocolate mint. Iris heard her stomach growl. She opened her mouth.  p. 95

Later, when the woman is allowed to exercise, she sees Little Self grows larger; this cycle of eating and exercising goes on for some time (the woman is trapped in her apartment, and realises that someone else must be doing her job).
Then, at the end of the story, she wakes up one morning to find they have been joined by a scrawny and starved and crying version of her: the final line is “Overnight, the population of the city expanded. Trails of crumbs led the lost home.”
I have no idea what these final lines have to do with the rest of the story (and, even if I did, I don’t have much interest in surreal fantasy stories about first world problems like dieting or body image).
∗ (Mediocre). 2,150 words.

•

Count on Me by Ray Vukcevich gets off to a very clever start with this:

It didn’t confuse me that the new occupant of apartment 29A was a woman. The Father of Lies is nothing if not inventive. The number 29A is, of course, the Number of the Beast in base 16, and 16 is the atomic number of Sulfur. Base 16 is commonly called “hex.” It was all too obvious.
Celia Strafford looked to be in her early thirties— 32, to be precise, since 2,3, and 37 are the prime factors of 666, and she looked too old to be 23, and I’m 37, and she looked younger than me, so ergo, as they say, 32. I’m speaking of the age of her body; I couldn’t know the age of the creature inside. She wore her long red hair loose down her back. I watched her closely as she stooped to pick up a box to lug up the stairs to her new apartment. She wore cut-off jeans and an abbreviated yellow halter top. Her legs were that strange golden tan you only see on women. I’ve never been able to figure how they achieve that color. She wore no shoes.  p. 100

The rest of the beginning of the story sees some conversational sparring between the narrator, Palmer (actually Brother Palmer of the Secret Order of Morse), and Celia, the new neighbour, as well as more numerology (at one point she says, when told that he used to be in the Army, that “there are probably 820 things worse”, which Palmer identifies as 666 in Base 9). Eventually Palmer becomes more and more convinced that she belongs to the Army of the Night, something that is repeatedly confirmed by numerology when they meet later on in her apartment. Then, at a climactic moment (spoiler), he leaps away from her and tries to make the sign of the cross. After a couple more fumbled attempts, Celia giggles and makes the sign herself—and reveals that she is Sister Celia of the Divine Order of Symmetry!
At this point the story almost completely deflates, and the second half of the story is a wodge of number and Morse code crunching that leads them to the message, “ONE GOD”, and the realisation that all is well with the world.
A game of two halves (two in any Base from 3 to Infinity).
∗∗ (Average). 3,350 words.

•

Sheep’s Clothing by Dale Bailey opens with Stern, the narrator, thinking about different types of assassin before he himself is recruited by a wheelchair-bound man called Thrale to kill a Senator Philip Hanson.
We later learn that the reason for the proposed killing is that Hanson intends to vote for legislation enabling a biowar facility, an action that links to Stern’s own past as he was a spider drone operator in the Brazilian conflict and was exposed to a cocktail of tailored viruses and pathogens, but never fell ill. His family, however, were not so lucky:

After the war, Anna and I remained in her native Brazil. We did not return to the States until several years later, when black pustulant sores began to erupt in our five-year-old daughter’s flesh.
I can never forget the stench of the hospital room where she died—a noxious odor compounded of the sterile smell of the hospital corridors and a fulsome reek of decay, like rotting peaches, inside the room itself. At the last, my eyes watered with that smell; Anna could barely bring herself to enter the room. My daughter died alone, walled away from us by the surgical masks we wore over our noses and mouths.  p. 115

In the next part of the story we see (the now widowed) Stern learn how to operate a marionette-like bodysuit that will enable him to control Hanson’s daughter after she has been injected with nanotechnology. The nanotech will give Stern twenty minutes of control and will than decompose, leaving no trace of external involvement—so the daughter will take the blame for the murder which, apart from the obvious benefits to Thrale, Stern & co., will also prevent her, a politician in her own right, from continuing with her father’s legislative agenda. To be honest, the suit/nanotech gimmick is probably the weakest part of the story, but little time is spent on the tech stuff and the bulk of the piece is mostly a series of scenes where we get a character study of Stern, or learn more about Thrale and his two employees: Pangborn is a female assistant, and Truman is the scientist who developed the system that Stern will be using to control the daughter.
At one point Stern is given a video disc from Pangborn that shows Hanson’s daughter and her female lover in a hotel room, and he later has a disturbing dream:

I was riding the spider, chasing the beacon of an intelligence comsat through the labyrinthine jungle. Luminescent tactical data flickered at the periphery of my vision. Antediluvian vegetation blurred by on either side. Small terrified creatures flashed through the tangled scrub. The forest reverberated with the raucous complaints of brightly plumed birds, the thrash of contused undergrowth.
How I loved the hunt.
I had always loved it.
Razored mandibles snapped the humid air as I drove the spider through the shadowy depths, emerging at last through a wall of steaming vegetation into a hotel room, dropped whole into the tangled Mato Grosso.
I stopped the spider short. Servos whirred. High resolution cameras scanned the area.
The sun penetrated the clearing in luminous shards. The jungle symphony swelled into the stillness. Two women writhed on the bed, oblivious to everything but one another.
“It’s time,” said the voice of Napoleon Thrale.
I urged the spider forward. Whiskered steel legs clawed the moist earth, the bed-sheets. Just as the mandibles closed about their fragile bodies, one of the women turned to look at me, her features contorted in the involuntary rictus of orgasm.
She wore my daughter’s face.
I screamed myself awake, sitting upright in the soured sheets, my penis like a stiffened rod against my belly.  p. 126

After this Stern (a) talks to Truman about scientists like Oppenheimer and the guilt they bear for the inventions they create and (b) sleeps with Pangborn, learning that her fiancé died in Brazil.
Eventually (spoiler), the day of the assassination arrives and Stern, Pangborn and Truman set off to complete the mission. The daughter, Amanda, is shot with a long range hypodermic dart while out on a regular run and the nanotechnology enters her body. Stern takes control of Amanda and takes her back to the house, quickly finding Hanson in his office. Then, when the nanotech starts to break down, Amanda manages to reassert enough control to say “Dad?” just before Stern breaks a mug on the desk and kills Hanson by repeatedly slashing his throat.
There is a final postscript which sees Stern in the Caymans, where he still dreaming of his wife and daughter. Stern says that he has written a letter to Amanda’s attorneys explaining what happened and why she is not guilty of the murder (“the daughters have suffered enough” he adds to himself). After he sends the letter Stern says he will swim off towards the horizon to join his wife and daughter.
If you are looking for the assassination adventure suggested by the beginning of the piece you are probably going to be disappointed—however, if you are looking for a complex and involving psychodrama, then this will be well worth your time.
∗∗∗+ (Good To Very Good). 11,100 words.

•

Pulling Hard Time by Harlan Ellison opens with a short introductory passage about New Alcatraz, a prison that keeps its prisoners in zero-gee VR.
The story then cuts to Charlie, who kills four bikers attempting to rape his wife in the couple’s restaurant. After this he is imprisoned for their murders, and then he kills another prisoner and cripples a guard. He is transferred to New Alcatraz.
The penultimate section sees a Senator visiting the Warden, who explains to the politician what happens to the prisoners:

Well, they just float there till they die, but it’s in no way ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ because we do absolutely nothing to them. No corporal punishment, no denial of the basics to sustain life. We just leave them locked in their own heads, cortically tapped to relive one scene from their past, over and over.”
“And how is it, again, that you do that…?”
“The technicians call it a moebius memory [. . . we] select the one moment from their past that most frightens or horrifies or saddens them. Then, boom, into a null-g suite, with a proleptic copula imbedded in theirgliomas. It’s all like a dream. A very very bad dream that goes on forever. Punishment to fit the crime.”
“We are a nation in balance.”
“Kindlier. Gentler. More humane.”  p. 142

The subsequent kicker scene (spoiler) sees Charlie as a boy, involved in a car accident and trapped with his dead mother for four days. The story finishes with the “nation in balance” refrain.
This is more a political opinion column than a short story, and one which makes the fairly obvious point that the cruel and unusual punishment of prisoners is a Bad Thing. A squib, not a story, and editor Rusch’s gushing introduction doesn’t improve matters.²
∗ (Mediocre). 1,800 words.

•

The True History of the End of the World by Jonathan Lethem, John Kessel, & James Patrick Kelly opens with Chester Drummond, an ex-politician, taking a train to a “refusenik” farm for those that have not had the Carcopino-Koster treatments (these are never really explained in any detail, but have given the vast majority of the near-future human race an emotional stability and intellectual uplift that has radically changed society).
When Drummond arrives at his station he is picked by Roberta, a woman from the farm who has had the C-K treatment, and travels to their destination along with another new inmate, the charismatic Brother Emil Sangar.
After they arrive, Sangar, who wants society back the way it was, goes to see Drummond, who has similar plans. Sangar tells Drummond that there is a woman called Elizabeth Wiley at the farm who, after an accident, reverted to pre C-K state and did not want to undergo the process again. Sangar wants to recruit her as he thinks her perspective will prove useful (he describes her as “the Holy Grail”). Later, the pair meet Elizabeth, who says she is in communication with the Virgin Mary (she says she gets messages in the veins of leaves), as well the farm’s other inmates (one is an SF writer “who predicted this” but “my books never sold”).
Further on in the story Drummond learns from Roberta, to his surprise, that he isn’t a prisoner at the camp and can leave any time he wants (she adds that there are only two C-K people at the camp and that they are there as helpers, not as guards). Roberta also tells him about a therapy class, and Drummond’s subsequent visit there (most of chapter 5) is the highlight of the story, as it consists of some entertainingly demented one-liners and exchanges:

Roberta opened the session by focussing immediately on the new arrivals. “Let’s start with you, Brother Emil,” she said. “You were saying this morning that you wanted to be cured.”
“Cured, yes,” said Brother Emil. “Of the coercion of the state. Of the tyranny of reason.”
Roberta raised her eyebrows expectantly.
Allan Fence, the writer, quickly rose to the occasion. “What coercion?” he said. “You checked yourself in here voluntarily, Brother Emil. Of your own free will.”
“When we were neanderthals,” replied Brother Emil, “we developed a taste for mastodon. You know how we hunted them, my friend? We’d form a hunting line and drive the herd toward the edge of a cliff. Within the bounds of that line each mastodon exercised free will, yet today”—he waved at the window, which looked out over the fields—“one very rarely sees a mastodon.”
“No, no, that’s terribly wrong.” Linda Bartly was upset. “We’re not all mastodons, we’re not all the same. They’re like a hunting line, but what they’ve crowded together is a flock of creatures: sloths, butterflies, leopards, loons, platypusses—”
Loons indeed, thought Chester.
“they want us all to be the same, but we’re not—”
“Linda,” said Roberta, “would you like to tell the group what you see in Brother Emil and Chester’s auras?” She turned and explained to Chester: “Linda sees auras. But not around those of us who’ve undergone Carcopino. We’ve lost ours.”
Brother Emil held up his hand. “It will avail us nothing to become mastodons, certainly. But if we all grew wings together, the onrushing cliff would become an opportunity.”
“Or arm the mastodons with machine guns,” said Allan Fence thoughtfully. “Suitably adapted for physiological differences, of course. Trunk triggered, air-cooled fifty calibers with cermet stocks.”
“Mr. Drummond’s aura is huge,” Linda Bartly stage-whispered. “Big enough for all of us. But it’s gray—”
“I’m interested in what the group thinks of Brother Emil’s image of the wings,” said Roberta. “Implicitly, he’s proposing to lead you, to turn you into his followers. He’s not a man who gives up easily—only last year he was preaching the end of the world to his cult on Mt. Shasta.”
“It was postponed,” said Sanger.  p. 155-156

The rest of the story (such as it is) concerns the manoeuvrings of Sangar and Drummond in their attempt to recruit the enigmatic Sister Wiley to their cause. During this, Drummond walks to Roberta’s nearby house and ends up sleeping with her when she arrives to find him inside. At the end of this encounter she tells him that he can’t change the world (and Drummond also later discovers that the explosive he has hidden in a bust in his room has been taken away).
Finally (spoiler), Elizabeth converts Drummond and Sangar to the C-K treatment (Sangar is told that he must take the treatment so he can save C-K souls), and we find that she intends taking the treatment herself, but only once she has convinced the last of the unconverted to do so.
This piece doesn’t have the strongest story arc—the ending, where the unreasonable are converted into the reasonable, seems rather unlikely—but it works on an ironic level, I suppose. Nevertheless, it is an entertaining read, sometimes very much so.
I’d add that it seems a remarkably uniform work given that it has three writers involved.
∗∗∗ (Good). 10,900 words.

•

Nest Egg by John Morressy is one of his “Kedrigern the Wizard” series, and this one sees him receive a summons from a “friend and comrade” called Lord Tyasan to de-spell his household griffin, Cecil. After Kedrigern complains at some length to his wife, Princess, about how it isn’t a job for a wizard, and that he doesn’t like Tysan’s tone, etc., she eventually convinces him to take the job, and tells him she is coming too.
When they finally arrive at the castle, Kedrigern and Lord Tyasan catch up (in what is probably the best passage in a weak story):

“How old are [your children], Tyasan? They weren’t even born when I was here last.”
The king beamed upon them. “I remember the occasion well. I had only recently wed my fair queen Thrymm. She was sorely afflicted, but you came to her aid, old friend.”
“What was her problem?” Princess asked.
“Spiders.”
“Isn’t it customary to call an exterminator?”
“These spiders popped out of Thrymm’s mouth every time she spoke,” Kedrigem explained.
“It was especially unpleasant when she talked in her sleep,” Tyasan said with a slight shudder of distaste. “A single oversight in drawing up the guest list, and it caused us no end of inconvenience and distress. You can imagine how punctilious we were in sending out invitations to the royal christenings.”  p. 190

Seven pages in (about half way through the story), Kedrigern finally inspects the cantankerous griffin and finds it hasn’t been spelled but he still cannot work out what ails the creature. Then, when Princess starts stroking the griffin’s neck feathers, the creature starts to recover and asks for some broth. Kedrigern realises that (spoiler), while Princess was stroking the griffin, her gold necklace was touching its skin.
The story ends with Kedrigern giving Tyasan some blather about griffins needing gold for their nests before realising that Cecil must now be old enough to mate. Tyasan doubts he can find enough gold for the griffin (and doesn’t want to give what he has) but Kedrigern points out that his gold will still be there in the nest, and that griffins are good at finding the material for themselves—so Tyasan and his family will be rich.
This piece is typical of the other series stories in that it is pleasant enough light reading, but is also contrived and padded, and has a weak plot (which, when it finally gets going here, pivots on Kedrigern noticing something and then explaining the solution based on information only he could know).
∗ (Mediocre). 6,050 words.

•

Dankden by Marc Laidlaw is the first of a series about Gorlen Vizenfirth, a bard with a difference:

His musical deficiency owed much to the fact that his right hand was made entirely out of polished black stone, carved in perfect replication of a human hand, so detailed that one could see the slight reliefwork of veins and moles, the knolls of knuckles, even peeling cuticles captured in the hard glossy rock. Most of the fine hairs had snapped from the delicately rendered diamond-shaped pores, but you could feel where they had been, like adamantine stubble. His left hand was more dexterous than most, and his calloused fingers hammered the strings as best they could to make up for the other hand’s disability; but his rock-solid right hand was good for nothing more than brutal strumming and whacking. He couldn’t pinch a plectrum. The soundbox was scarred and showed the signs of much abuse, the thin wood having been patched many times over.
“It’s a gargoyle affliction,” he said to most who asked. “Comes and goes. I’m looking for the treacherous slab who did it to me and disappeared before he could undo it.”  p. 202-3

If you read on through the series you will discover that Gorlen and a gargoyle called Spar, who is introduced later, were cursed by a wizard who swapped their hands for reasons connected to a virgin sacrifice gone wrong. None of this backstory is particularly germane to this particular story, however, which has Gorlen arrive at the town of Dankden, a place located in a swamp and whose streets are (literally, as it turns out later) rivers of mud. We subsequently discover that the town is populated by human inhabitants and by creatures that are half-human, half-phib (the phibs are amphibious creatures that live in the swamps).
Gorlen falls into the company of a woman and her brother, and soon encounters their phib hunting father. Then, shortly after this meeting, there is a commotion in the street when a number of half-phibs gather to complain about the killing of one of their young and, during an altercation, the hunter’s son is taken hostage. The rest of the story concerns his rescue, and Gorlen’s dawning realisation that the hunting community has been killing half-breed phibs rather than taking the wild (and non-intelligent) ones.
This story doesn’t entirely work, partly because of the odd and unlikely interbreeding, and partly because of the depressing genocide subplot. There are also a couple of loose ends, and one of these (spoiler) is why one of the phibs would give Gorlen an underwater kiss of life to save him from drowning when he is in the process of trying to escape from them:

The water, black until now, began to fill with streaming lights. A distant liquid music swelled in his ears as though an operatic riverboat were passing overhead. This developed into a rich, throaty vibration, a catfish purr. According to those who had been revived from the edge of watery death, drowning was almost peaceful once you gave in and inhaled the waters, once the body surrendered and let the soul drift free. Gorlen clung to this last hope as he opened his mouth and inhaled—
Warm, fishy air.
He nearly choked. Cold lips out of nowhere pressed tight to his own. Opening his eyes in disbelieving terror, he saw nothing. Nor could he move, something powerful bound his arms to his sides, albeit without hurting him. Reflexively he breathed in deep, then deeper still, unable to believe that there was air enough to fill him. There was a rich taste in his lungs, an undercurrent to the clammy essence, some perfume that flooded his brain and seeped down his nerves like a whisper, nudging him with secret knowledge, eking out revelation on such a fine level that he felt his atoms³ were conversing with a stranger’s atoms. The mouth sealed to his own began a slight suction, encouraging his exhalation, he gave up the stale air gladly. On the second inhalation—shallower, less desperate—his blinded eyes lit up with a vision of the swamp, all its tangled waterways cast through him like a glowing net whose intricacies were as homey and familiar as the sound of his own pulse. He knew his location: near the sea, not far from Dankden. Dankden! Human town! At the thought of the place, he felt a violent urge to flee at any cost, to swim and keep swimming until he had put that loathsome blot far behind him. An evil paradox posed itself in the same instant: there was literally nowhere left to run. The swamps, once vast enough to remain uncharted even by their most ancient inhabitants, had dwindled alarmingly within the span of several generations; encroached on by human dwellings, drained and poisoned and tamed by air-breathers, the swamps had been reduced to a few last drops.  p. 228-9

Notwithstanding my reservations above, the atmosphere and setting in this story are pretty good, and it’s also an entertaining piece.
∗∗∗ (Good). 14,300 words.⁴

•••

The Cover for this issue is a pretty good piece by Bob Eggleton for Marc Laidlaw’s Dankden, but it’s a pity that the person doing the cover design didn’t think about a different name order to minimise overprinting the artwork (swapping Reed’s name for Laidlaw’s would not affect the man in the boat’s head, for instance). Better still, just put two lines of names under the title banner and leave the bottom of the image unmolested. The only other artwork in the issue are the Cartoons by Joseph Farris, Ed Arno, Bill Long, Joseph Farris, Danny Shanahan, and Henry Martin. I didn’t think any of them were particularly funny; they are just odd.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Editorial is about her, her husband, and two friends stumbling upon a virtual golf game in a store. The rest of the piece is about technological innovations (one of those mentioned, the fax machine, is probably extinct by now).
Books by Robert K. J. Killheffer is an interesting, illuminating, and instructive review of two “gender wars” novels, Waking the Moon by Elizabeth Hand, and The Furies by Suzy McKee Charnas.
The other book review column, Books to Look For, is by Charles de Lint, who reviews novels by Patricia A. McKillip and Vivian Vande Velde, and Dark Earth Dreams by Candas Jane Dorsey and Roger Deegan, a CD containing readings of two stories. The final review is of The Ultimate Evil by Andrew Vachss, a Batman novel written by crime writer Vachss to provide a new forum for “his battle against child abuse”, particularly in the Far East. De Lint finishes his review by exhorting the F&SF readership to join a “Don’t! Buy! Thai!” campaign (in an effort to combat this scourge). I have mixed feelings about SF magazines being used for this kind of naked activism, never mind blanket embargoes that may hurt those not remotely involved in child exploitation.
An Odyssey Galactic by Gregory Benford is one of his A Scientist’s Notebook essays, although it isn’t about a science topic but rather his involvement with NHK (Japanese National Broadcasting) and a TV production called A Galactic Odyssey. Benford gives an account of how he acted as a consultant, then a writer, and ultimately as a presenter. The latter involved, at one point, standing on in a traffic island in Times Square being bothered by a bag lady and then being pestered by a Puerto Rican gang who wanted to become more famous by dancing in the background of his shot.
It’s an interesting enough account but, as with other reports I’ve read about SF writer involvement in Hollywood, etc., this activity seems to involve the investment of huge amounts of time and energy for very little return (either in terms of money or fame):

What did I learn from the fully three year involvement, finally?
First, novelists don’t fit well in intensely committee-dominated projects. Decisions about showing aliens, or even categorizing civilizations by their energy consumption (somehow, not an ecologically virtuous point of view), were made by faceless executives—most of whom had no scientific training whatever. And who don’t think that’s important.
Novelists think in larger chunks.
Hard sf novelists probably don’t make the best diplomats, either, about scientific facts. Or at least, this novelist didn’t.
Second, don’t let the scientific content get compromised for schedule or convenience. Realize that just about nobody else has the same commitment to the material that scientists do—but apply pressure at the essential points.
Third, use a particular rhythm in presenting science, to draw out its human aspects. This rhythm runs, philosophy—>science—philosophy.
[. . .]
Lastly, have some input in editing. Much of A Galactic Odyssey got rearranged, slanted and cut by people who knew little or nothing of the technical material. Such power is hard to get, but essential.  pp. 182-183

F&SF Competition: Report on Competition 64 describes the entries for “a rejection letter for any well-known SF or Fantasy work”. My favourite is probably the winner:

RICHARD MATHESON —
X—This day when it had light editor called me a first reader. You first reader she said. I wonder what it is a first reader.
In my desk place with cold walls all around I have paper things publisher says is slush. He chained me tight. He made me read BORNOFMANANDWOMAN.
XX—I am not so glad. All day it is slush in here. And I have bad anger. If they try to make me read your stories again I’ll hurt them. I will.
R.—
—James Williamson
Omaha, NE  p. 237

F&SF Competition: Competition 65 (suggested by Harlan Ellison) asks for cover quotes from SF writers who have been sent the proofs of a friend’s awful novel from their publishers. The example given is “This book is as good, as readable, as Tolkien!” from a writer known by his friends to loathe Tolkien.
Coming Attractions trails stories by Robert Reed, Ian MacLeod, etc., and mentions that Janet Asimov will be joining the magazine to “assist with our science columns”.

•••

This issue would be a decent enough effort for a “normal” F&SF but, for an anniversary/All-Star one, it is a bit of a disappointment. Apart from the lack of stellar names, the better material by Dale Bailey, Jonathan Lethem & John Kessel & James Patrick Kelly, and Marc Laidlaw isn’t as fully formed as one might like. More generally, nearly all the stories feel like material a writer-editor would pick for other writers because of their particular facets—complexity, or characterisation, or writing, etc. The Marc Laidlaw story does most of these well or well enough, but it is the only one in the entire issue that feels like a conventional genre story.
I’d also note that putting one surreal fantasy (the Hoffman) immediately after another (the Reed) seems like an odd running-order choice to me.  ●

_____________________

1. The ISFDB page for the Richard Bowes’ “Kevin Grierson” series.

2. Rusch’s gushing introduction to the Ellison story:

I have an editorial confession to make: I stole this story.
Well I didn’t steal it exactly. You see, occasionally Harlan Ellison calls me to read a story he has just finished. He wants instant feedback, which I usually give him. Not this time. When he finished reading “Pulling Hard Time,” I couldn’t breathe. Literally. The story had knocked the wind from me.
As soon as my breath returned, I did my editorial duty. I begged, wheedled, pleaded and so sufficiently debased myself that Harlan sent the story to F&SF instead of the other magazine he had promised it to.
But Harlan said we could publish the story only on the condition that I confess. And now I have. Gleefully.  p. 139

3. “Atoms” is not a good fantasy word for Marc Laidlaw’s Dankden.

4. Dankden is listed in the magazine as a novella, but it isn’t even close (14,300 words).  ●