Distillations: Short Fiction Reviews, March 1977

From Locus, March 1997.
Copyright 1997 by Mark R. Kelly.

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Asimov’s 4/97

Analog 4/97

Interzone 1/97

F&SF 2/97

Playboy 2/97

The April issue of Asimov’s is the magazine’s 20^th anniversary issue (the first issue, actually, was dated Spring 1977; close enough), and it features a solid if not spectacular lineup of stories.

L. Timmel Duchamp’s "Quinn’s Deal" is, coincidentally, the first of two stories this month about someone named Quinn. It’s set in a dreary urban near-future similar in flavor to that in the author’s story "Ms Peach Makes a Run for Coffee" reviewed two months ago. Here the setting is Seattle, where Quinn is a blue-collar worker with no medical insurance. After a diabetic collapse he’s brought into a robotic Indigent ER Unit, where after he recovers a doctor offers him an unusual deal to pay for his medical expenses. If Quinn agrees to have a tiny chip implanted behind one of his eyes, in return his sponsor—the one watching—will pay for his treatment.

Quinn agrees and is soon back to work, unmindful of the implant, more concerned with his everyday life: his job on a team evacuating old people from apartment buildings scheduled for demolition, the room he rents from a kindly older woman, the multi-user VR Parlor in which he acts out classics like War and Peace. Duchamp delineates Quinn’s life in fine detail, in tight close-up; Quinn isn’t concerned about the social issues behind the work he does. Only when two events threaten his precarious financial situation does he remember about his watchful sponsor, whom he sets about trying to contact. Quite incidentally he learns about the sponsor’s true reasons for monitoring him--but he doesn’t care. Subtly yet dramatically Duchamp shows how social oppression can come about simply because most ordinary people are too busy living their lives to notice.

Mark W. Tiedemann’s "Rust Castles" is another story set in a depressing near future. The locale is rural Nebraska, where Cory Pulham returns to her family’s farm after years of estrangement from her relatives. She finds it deserted and guarded by a security robot. Her parents, she learns, were forced out of business for not meeting production quotas and the property was seized by the federal government. Cory tracks down her parents in a nursing home and has an uncomfortable reunion with her mother. Cory’s brought a friend, Tal, an illegal immigrant from Armenia, whom she had been hoping to hide on the family farm. Now she learns from her mother that she’s not so different from her family after all. Tiedemann combines an unsentimental family drama and the familiar small town setting with a vision of a bureaucratic, isolationist future US that is especially disturbing for its impact on a prototypical American setting.

John Brunner’s "Blood and Judgment", presumably the last of his China stories, is one of the best. Qing, a divorced and thus disgraced wife of a government official, but also a biologist, travels into an impoverished zone to bring new medical equipment to a hospital. While visiting with local officials, she learns from TV news that her daughter has been arrested and charged with murder. Qing immediately suspects that her ex-husband, who wanted a son and was prevented by strict population laws from having a second child, is maneuvering to "remove" his daughter and gain permission to have another child. Furthermore, he’s depending on the very medical equipment that she’s distributing to implicate their daughter—blood typing machines that aren’t as accurate as are commonly thought. She and her new friends concoct a plan to trap her ex-husband and foil his scheme. The story reads like it could have used another draft—the opening is rough with convoluted syntax, and the switch in perspective late in the story is awkward, and perhaps unnecessary—but the insight into Chinese culture and how it nervously deals with western technology makes it worthwhile.

Ian R. MacLeod’s "The Roads" is a brief reminiscence about growing up in 1917 by Jack, a boy whose father is off fighting the Germans in France. Father comes home at intervals for brief and awkward visits. One day Jack is in the local arboretum when he runs into his father, apparently just back for another visit. They sit in a café and Jack’s father talks about building roads, the same job he had before the war. In later years the conversation lingers in Jack’s memory as a sort of final message from his father, whom he never saw again. The story is gracefully written, and its setting is evocative, but I wish there were more to it.

Ron Goulart’s "Downsized" is a solid example of Goulartian humor. Norm Keenan is a Hollywood actor on the verge of becoming a has-been. He decides to take his agent’s advice to visit a voodoo surgeon for a weight-loss treatment. The spell has the effect of shrinking him down to the size of a beer can. Fortuitously he uses his new situation to spy on his cheating wife, and inadvertantly ends up commanding vast new power in Hollywood. The title is to be taken literally and is thus a bit misleading; there’s nothing in the story about corporate staff reductions.

Jack McDevitt’s "Never Despair" is set in a post-holocaust world in which two explorers from Illyria are searching the ruins of cities from the age of the Roadmakers for some sign of Haven, the place where ancient knowledge was stored. They are on the verge of returning home in defeat when an electric storm activates circuitry in the ruined building they’re camped in. A simulacrum of a man named Winston appears and converses with them, though it’s soon clear that neither side understands much of what the other is talking about. The story tries to be inspirational, but the situation is so generic and coincidental that it’s hard care much one way or the other.

The best story in the issue is Paul J. McAuley’s "Second Skin". Some two centuries hence a trade delegation arrives at Proteus, the moon of Neptune, via individual personal capsules dropped from a passing transport. One of them is Ben Lo, referred to intermittently in the narrative as "the spy," who is nearly 200 years old himself, a former actor and former husband of Avernus, one of the leaders of Proteus when it fought a trade war recently. Lo arrives in Elfhame, an enclosed city like a shopping mall built in a rift valley of Proteus. He engages in routine diplomatic negotiations while coverty seeking out Avernus and planning for her defection and escape to the inner system. In the climactic escape attempt, he discovers not only that Avernus has some plans of her own, but an uncomfortable truth about himself.

The story is well crafted, both in its thumbnail portrait of the complex political situation of this future solar system, and in the use of the appositive "spy" to hint at the final revelation--which is an example of the way an SF story can take a figurative grammatical distinction and literalize it in a SF’nal context. In its speculative content the story is an example of (as editor Dozois points out) what is sometimes called "radical hard science" fiction--avoiding the burdensome technical details of Analog-style engineering fiction on the one hand, and the cliche-ridden props of space opera on the other. McAuley combines evident technical background with far-ranging imagination in an example of the best kind of hard SF.

The April Analog includes a cover story seemingly written to be illustrated with fantastic images (which if any I haven’t seen, reading the story in galleys). It’s about a desert planet grown with gigantic, genetically engineered cacti, and aliens that look like and are called Bagpipes. "Finder’s Fee" by David Alexander and Hayford Peirce is about an interstellar freighter captain at the end of his rope. His sponsor has died, his artificial pancreas will expire unless he makes his next mortgage payment on the spaceship, and now he’s stuck on the remote world of New Sonora because his target destination Charon IV has become unstuck in nullspace, leaving him in a place where his cargo of high-grade crystals is apparently useless. The last is true because he’s ended up on the planet where the crystals were originally mined and where they’re so common as to be worthless. On the other hand, he’s met a beautiful woman and gone flying with her on the back of a giant butterfly. But then the Bagpipe aliens show up, upset that the crystals have been mined at all. No one knows much about the Bagpipes, except that they seem to have no difficulty navigating nullspace. You can probably guess the rest: the captain discovers the secret of the crystals and comes out way ahead by the end of the story. It’s high-spirited and colorful (except for the typically dull Analog title), told with Peirce’s usual careful attention to matters of law and commerce.

"The Mendelian Lamp Case" is the latest story by Paul Levinson about the forensic scientist and ladies’ man Dr. Phil D’Amato. Weekending in the Pennsylvania Amish country, he meets an old friend with wild theories about sophisticated but non-technological bio-warfare accomplished through breeding plants. Then (of course) the friend collapses and dies from some bizarre allergic reaction, and D’Amato faces a scientific mystery that threatens his friend’s family and himself. Levinson seems to specialize in trying to rationalize outlandish scientific theories, and though there’s nothing in this one as extreme as the ideas in last year’s "The Copyright Notice Case", the notion of fireflies bred for heat to cause "Mendel bombs" is pretty nifty.

Another sequel is Wil McCarthy’s "The Dream of Castles", following up on his "The Dream of Houses" from November 1995. The automated house belonging to Chuck Jefferson, now married to Lucy, has been "castled," fortified with all sorts of defenses, but it continues to serve its owners’ mundane needs by manufacturing or "faxing" food and vehicles on demand, playing appropriate music, and so on. It senses a crisis when angry bankers show up demanding foreclosure; Chuck has lost his job as an indirect consequence of the very technology that’s made the house possible. The resolution is a clever extrapolation of the "man’s home is his castle" idea, made conceivable through technology that makes a house completely self-sufficient and defensible.

Uncle River’s "Warrior’s Honor" is about a computer game programmer trying to invest the characters in his role-playing game with emotions. When a warrior succeeds in killing an enemy, for instance, he feels shame. During dinner with a girlfriend he rues the discovery of his remote New Mexico hometown by the arts crowd, with the inevitable population expansion that brings problems like gang assaults. These thoughts give way to an inspiration for further enhancing his his game. The connection between the worlds of gaming and real life is provocative, even if the consequences don’t seem especially important.

G. David Nordley’s "This Old Rock" is a new story set in the author’s future solar system. Dolph Wigner is living with his wife and infant daughter in a spaceship tethered to the small asteroid they plan to homestead. First they have to pass inspection from the Interplanetary Association. The inspector is a harridan who finds fault with everything, insisting on expensive modifications even to systems Dolph has built to spec. He appeals to the association, but gets no relief: he’s living on a frontier with no elaborate legal system, and what the inspector says, goes. So he tries to cooperate, and right on cue there’s a crisis that proves the inspector’s attitude to be well justified. This story’s a little more obvious and predictable than most of Nordley’s, but it’s smoothly written with considerable technical savvy.

The January Interzone begins a new novella by Brian Stableford, "The Black Blood of the Dead", which is a sequel to his well-received "The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires" from a couple years ago. Since only the first half appears here, I’ll wait to comment on the story until it concludes next issue.

Elsewhere in the issue is a story by Michael Marshall Smith, a popular horror writer who also has an interview this issue. "Save As" concerns a man who has a dreadful traffic accident one evening that kills his wife and child. Leaving the hospital he heads for the office of Same Again to fulfill his emergency contract. Soon he’s arriving home with his family, arranging a party with friends, and living a normal life...except for small details that don’t seem right--he sees his wife lighting a cigarette, for instance, and realizes that she never used to smoke. The story is effective in the gradual setting in of alarm and dislocation, but vague in addressing the sort of practical questions one would expect of an SF story. Compared to John Varley’s stories of keeping backup copies of one’s mind, for example, in Smith’s story it’s unclear exactly what’s being backed-up--reality itself?

Geoffrey A. Landis’s "Turnover" is a playful vignette that inverts the cliche about a professor and his beautiful assistant. In this story the professor is a woman, and her assistant, required according to scientist’s guild rules, is a well-built young man. The two are on Venus investigating why the planet’s surface, as indicated by the pattern of craters, seems to be all the same age. The assistant dutifully fulfills his role of asking leading questions so the professor can expound theories at length.

Ian Watson’s "Nanunculus" is the name of a cyber-agent that roams the net in the service of Dr. Thomas Ginzburg, a Cal Berkeley scientist investigating negative time. Ginzburg is burdened by disturbing memories from his past, and is suicidal; the cyber-agent is his psychiatrist's prescription. The agent spends its time making correlations of esoteric data (like the nature of the pole on which Christ was crucified) and thinking about protecting its own existence, never mind Ginzburg’s, while Ginzburg hangs out in the cybercafe and meets a nice young girl who turns out to be his psychiatrist in disguise. The story seems like a grabbag of disparate ideas at first, but in typically inventive fashion Watson brings them together in an illuminating fashion.

Peter T. Garratt's "The Inauguration" concerns the arrival in Washington of president-elect Thaddeus "Toad" Gettrich and his vice-president William Graham Bobson, a former religious broadcaster, to take the reigns from outgoing president Ellery Hilton. The carefully chosen names signal a not so-subtle satire on current US political figures, as Garratt establishes through dialogue describing the new administration’s planned agenda. When Gettich and Bobson arrive at the White House, Hilton lets them in on an executive secret—the bodies of two alien creatures hidden in a secret room. Soon the Bible-thumping Bobson is getting first-hand experience with the aliens in an episode straight out of UFO-encounter folklore. The story’s a hilarious combination of political satire and tabloid journalism.

The other Quinn story this month is Dale Bailey’s "Quinn’s Way" in the Feburary F&SF. It’s a look back at small town life 40 years ago to when the narrator is a 12 year old boy in Sauls Run, West Virginia, living in Bradburyesque vibrance with his best friend Jemmy E. Both boys have abusive fathers, but this was a time when such things weren’t spoken of, though of course they still happened. The narrator’s father disapproves of circuses, and he disapproves of Jemmy E, but this doesn’t stop the boys from sneaking out to see the circus when it comes into town. Later they meet the master of the circus, Quinn, who offers them a magical escape from the brutal consequences of their disobedience. One of the boys take it, and the other doesn’t.

The story’s about not escaping. (And, incidentally, the fantasy element is so slight as to be inconsequential.) It’s a considerable strength of the story that Bailey takes the time to give us insight into why the narrator’s father is such a stern disciplinarian, with a harrowing reminiscence of his wartime experience. Still, the story indicts all the neighbors who know of the abuse and do nothing, while at the same time acknowledging that illusions are sometimes necessary to keep society from falling apart. It’s a slightly mixed message, but ultimately the story’s strength in recognizing the complexities that underlie a difficult human problem.

The middle stories in this issue are mostly routine material. Mary Turzillo’s "Mate" imagines a time when equitable childhood training will allow females to compete in chess tournaments as commonly as males do. But the details of the story undermine this premise: Sophia is driven to compete only by her overly protective father, and she’s easily lured away from the tournament tables by a romantic offer. Richard Bowes’s "Drink and the Devil" is yet another story about Kevin Grierson, the man plagued by a doppelganger "Shadow" as he leads a streetwise existence in 1970s New York. I’d be interested in reading Grierson’s entire story (one assumes a novel is forthcoming), but individually the stories retread familiar ground without resolving anything.

"That Cruel Pauli Exclusion" by the late Kent Patterson might be called "science fantasy." After the Superconducting Super Collider has finally been completed in Texas, establishments arise catering to both the cowboy and the physicist crowd, like the Cowboy Galileo Country Western Physicist’s Bar and Grill. That’s where Roy Strahling discovers he’s fallen in love with a woman who seems to be his Pauli exclusion partner, a person who can never exist in the same place at the same time as himself. The story takes physical principles and reifies them in a way that exceeds metaphor (based in this case on the so-called "Pauli Exclusion Principle" of physics), but it also, alas, goes on at too great a length for such a fragile conceit.

Sheila Finch’s "A Flight of Words" is a new story about the Guild of Xenolinguists. Lingster Corry Padmasam comes to a planet to assist the occupying race, the hive-like Tlokee, in communicating with the native bird-like race. She works in a cell with the native prisoner and is pressured by the High Mother of the Tlokee to extract information about a native "Protector." Corry soon rebels against the Tlokee abuse of their subjects and is faced with an ethical quandry that threatens her guild membership. The issue is that of human vs. alien standards, so basic a problem that I found myself wondering how it was the Lingsters already knew the Tlokee language without knowing about their abusive tendencies, or how, for that matter, the Guild has handled dilemmas such as this in the past.

Robert Reed’s "The Dragons of Springplace" is an excellent SF story disguised via the title and cover illustration as a fantasy. Indeed it seems like fantasy at first--statues of dragons and warriors on a high plateau coming to life to frighten away primitive denizens of some remote age. But the time is the far future, and after this opening frame, Reed jumps back a way to tell the story of Daniel, the 5 year old son of a sociopathic father. Father and son visit Springplace, an elaborate park built around a nuclear waste site designed with statues of creatures writhing in pain and a complete ecosystem populated by poisonous bugs, foul plants, and carnivorous beasts. It’s also surrounded by a "Luddite" field that suppresses the functioning of advanced technology. The entire establishment is designed to ward away future generations from the nuclear waste that lies beneath.

Daniel is soon orphaned and passed between foster homes. A teenage dare to sneak into Springplace ends with the deaths of three friends, but Daniel’s career becomes tied to the "dragons" within its ecosystem, and he becomes a supplier of illegal dragon parts. Then he’s hired by a wealthy client to lead an elaborate expedition inside Springplace for reasons other, Daniel realizes, than simply killing dragons.

Reed weaves an inventive, extravagent tale around the concern of how to warn future generations away from nuclear waste sites, even long after technological civilization may have crumbled. The difficulty, the story shows, is that there will always be individuals in society challenged by such warnings, even when they know full well the reasons for them. Reed’s characters are more than convincing on that account.

The February Playboy has a playful Terry Bisson story, "An Office Romance", in which the Office of the title is "Microserf Office 6.9." Workers in this office live inside a virtual reality environment wearing icons of their own choosing. One day Ken678 notices Mary97 in the corridor between Search and Print, and later they pause to chat at the Window overlooking April in Paris. Soon they are flirting with romance. Mary takes Ken to an "Easter Egg" (something left by a programmer as a surprise), a room where turning over playing cards resets options inside their environment, like the color of Mary’s fingernails or the amount of her clothing.

Bisson’s touch is lighter here than in some of his other recent comedies, and he’s especially clever in extrapolating familiar protocols of PC software to interactions between people. Ken is a bit slow-witted, for example, but after Mary interrupts him he doggedly finishes what he’s saying--because it was already in his buffer.