Distillations: Short Fiction Reviews, May 1977

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

Back to Mark's CS homepage.

Asimov’s 6/97

F&SF 4/97

Interzone 3/97

SF Age 5/97

Omni Online 3/97

Occasionally events in the real world focus a harsh spotlight on our world of science fiction. The Heaven’s Gate cult suicides in southern California in late March implicated science fiction directly, both in the Star Trek obsession of many of the cult’s members and in the space-alien metaphysic of the cult’s doctrine. Harlan Ellison makes a valiant attempt, in an essay in the April 7th Newsweek, to distinguish the superficial "sci-fi" of the cult’s mentality (and of Star Trek, X-Files, etc.) from the philosophical seriousness of "science fiction," but the distinction between science fiction readers and UFO believers seems to be lost in most media coverage (as it was in Newsweek’s own cover story last year on science fiction), and probably among the general public as well. (When you tell a casual friend you’re involved in science fiction, which do they ask you about first, UFOs and Star Trek, or which books you’ve read lately?)

These thoughts emerge in this month’s short fiction with a story by Paul Di Filippo in the March Interzone that eerily echos several aspects of the Heaven’s Gate event, though in ways secondary to the story’s main concern. There are alien visitors, UFOs above world capitals, and a San Francisco cult with science fiction connections.

The story is really about those science fiction connections, literary and conceptual. It’s one of several Di Filippo has done lately playing with characters, both real and fictional, in alternate histories. "Alice, Alfie, Ted and the Aliens" is about science fiction writers, as the story’s photo-montage-illustration makes obvious. It’s the 1960s, and Alice Sheldon is head of the CIA, confronted with visitations of alien Svabhavikakaya around the globe who periodically cause handfuls of people to disappear. She and her assistant Ursula hatch a scheme to contact a UFO cult in San Francisco. She joins forces with the editor of Holiday magazine, a drunk womanizer named Alfred Bester, and goes to the house in the Haight district of San Francisco where the leader of the "Swabbies," Ed Waldo, lives in intimate association with a mute black man named Chip. Waldo, now called Ted Sturgeon, is certain he understands what the aliens want from humanity, and he’s proven correct in a bizarre apotheosis that heals psychis scars in Sheldon and Bester and units them all in a godbody whole.

Di Filippo’s portraits of Sheldon and the others are vivid and only slightly larger-than-life. The story’s section titles twists Tiptree titles--"Harsh Smoke Rises Up Forever on a Hudson Bay Blanket"--and the prose is filled with allusions to Tiptree and the others: "She senses some kind of rightness in her actions, an obedience to a plan of love and death. Tensions of a lifetime melt within her. It is good to abandon a world well lost." At times this all seems just too clever, too precious, and even a bit superficial--more genuine insight might have come out of a more leisurely treatment. But the combined blend of these writers’ works is remarkably insightful and persuasive. As fiction, of course.

Also in Interzone, Storm Constantine’s "The Rust Islands" offers more familiar, predictable revelations. Serami is a member of an archaeological team digging on old Earth, a planet now inhabited only by primitive abos. She finds a small playback device, decodes it, and listens to the account of a young girl who in her own time searches for the truth of her origins, a truth which may involve the "rust islands," ancient abandoned factories, off the coast. When Serami and her team become stranded on Earth, the girl’s recorded saga begins to echo the team’s current predicament. The story has the strong flavor of ancient astronauts and science-fictional explanations of religious myths. The twist that Constantine introduces toward the end muddles it all up a bit without any convincing metaphysical rationale; the consequences justify the the character’s humility, but don’t really earn the profundity suggested at the end.

William Spencer’s "The Mind Slice" depicts a future art-scene in which professional artists don’t paint anymore (they do other, bizarre, things), leaving painting to more-or-less talented amateurs. The technology of the "mind-slice" allows a less-talented painter, Gregory, to download a recording of a more popular painter named Neilsen. The investment pays off as Gregory is inspired to the point of obsession, neglecting his career and enraptured in artistic production to the extent that he is uninterested even in selling the canvases he produces. Spencer gives an insight into the potentially self-destructive nature of the artistic temperament, as opposed to practical artistic professionalism, that might equally apply to the field of literature.

David Hutchinson’s "The Trauma Jockey" uses another piece of mind-transfer technology, a device called a "Bridge" that reads emotional states and transfers them from one person to another. The narrator makes his living by letting his clients literally dump their griefs and woes into his mind. Then he gets a psychopathic client who has no emotions to transfer, only violent, shocking images. Given the premise that emotional effects are cumulative and so easily transmittable, the resolution to the problem is a clever one.

Terry Dowling’s "No Hearts to be Broken" is a story set in Twilight Beach, the setting of several earlier Dowling works, and was inspired by the Shaun Tan painting on the cover of the issue. Twilight Beach is a future Australian colony dominated by artistic temperamentality and baroque technology. Two passing floating islands apparently release the "aerotropts" depicted in the painting. The denizens of Twilight Beach, members of factions with differing positions on the proper origins and roles of artificial lifeforms, debate their origin and fate. The brief story doesn’t do justice to the provocative setting (I haven’t read the earlier books or stories), but it more than adequately elaborates the unusual artwork.

The June Asimov’s includes an interesting Charles L. Harness story, "The Flag on Gorbachev Crater", with a curious mix of themes: a near-future sf tale, focusing on the race to plant a flag and claim ownership of the moon Ganymede, with a time travel fantasy involving a young woman and magic carpet from the 13^th century. Daniel Beckwith is an attorney working the US agency engaged in the Ganymede race. During a high school football game a young woman materializes in the middle of the stadium, and Beckwith’s fortuitous knowledge of Arabic and French put him in an ideal position to assist the lady in distress. (What everyone else in the stadium is doing during this scene is unclear.) Soon Beckwith is convinced of the truth of az-Zahra’s history and the power of her carpet. Then he is brought up on charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, illegal immigration, etc., and forced into a courtroom demonstration of the magic carpet that, dramatically, addresses the space race problem as well.

There is a slight attempt at a scientific rationale of the magic carpet--metallic fibers, spinning motion, etc.--but this isn’t Analog-style hard-sf. The best scene brings Harness’s legal expertise into play with questions like, Is a time traveler from the 13^th century, and another continent, an illegal immigrant?. More of that, and less contrived stage-setting, would have made it a more compelling story.

Sonia Orin Lyris’s "Payback" is a space opera parable about truth and reality. A mysterious figure known as the Key Giver receives supplicants from many races with greivous problems. The Key Giver, apparently omniscient, dispenses "keys" that comprise information in small boxes: the cure for a plague; a weapon against an oppressor; a counter-weapon against the first weapon. The Key Giver is dispassionate, always providing solutions to goals as long as the goals do not conflict. Inevitably, some supplicants plead with him to stop what he is doing, while others respond with unwanted payments. Lyris shows that ultimate knowledge plays no favorites--knowledge itself is the ultimate weapon.

James Patrick Kelly’s "Itsy Bitsy Spider", in contrast, is a near-future character story about a middle-aged woman who seeks out her father after 20 years. She finds him in a retirement community, where she’s greeted at the door by a little girl, or rather a bot playing the role of herself as a little girl, complete with her own dolls and toys. Her father is senile, unaware of who this adult woman is in his house. There are no surprises or profound morals here, just a touching, subtle story of a way in which technology might allow the indulgence of avoiding the complications of real-life relationships.

Deborah Wheeler’s "Mother Africa" shows a young girl and her family traveling to Africa as part of a "village reclamation project." "Slim" disease (AIDS) has killed so many Africans that African-descendants from America are coming to take their places. The girl and her family are processed in the city and then travel out into the wilderness to their site. They take in a starving young boy they find along the way. There are plenty of signs that being African is not as simple as the family thinks--they hear of tribal rivalries, suspicion of outsiders, etc.--so that when the family suffers the consequences of their naivete, we feel pity rather than sympathy.

Rebecca Ore’s "Sarey Rose in Deep History" invites even less character sympathy. Sarey Rose is a member of an engineering department that has developed a time-viewer, and she is assisting members of a mixed black and white family intent on peering into the lives of their 19^th century ancestors. Voyeur-like, they search for the moment when their white great-grandfather impregnated their black great-grandmother. To their surprise they also discover an inverse relationship between the plantation overseer and the mistress of the house. The situation has obvious potential for dramatic revelations, but all emotional payoff is muffled by Ore’s tendency toward monotone, staccato prose, and the irritating technique in this story of merely imagining what the historical characters are saying rather than somehow letting this be known through the time-viewer. Historical understanding is difficult enough without hiding it under layers of supposition.

Greg Abraham’s "Front Man" is a fascinating ugly-character story that works well as science fiction--though it’s not so much a character-driven sf story as a character-as-metaphor sf story. It’s about Ron, a 40-something gay man who lives with Thump, a 20-something queer musician. Ron feels constantly put upon and embarrassed by Thump’s naivete and gracelessness, whereas Thump is happy and uninhibited. They attend a party where the guest of honor is a Noiesni, an alien race that has come to Earth to help humanity deal with its self-destructive qualities. When Thump monopolizes the alien’s attention with musical insights, Ron is alternately mortified and angry; he storms out of the party and later throws Thump out of his house. Ron’s self-destruction is horrible yet fascinating to watch, like a car crash. It metaphorically shows the plausibility of such tendencies even when the stakes are high.

The best story in the issue is Paul J. McAuley and Kim Newman’s "Residuals", an alternate history story of sorts about two survivors of a widely-publicized alien abduction in the 1970s. Ray and his partner Mitchell survived the explosion of the alien ship and then a blitz of fame and publicity that eventually abandoned them. Now years later Mitchell arranges to rendezvous with Ray in the desert north of LA. Ray is trailed by FBI men, suspicious that Mitchell is experimenting with chunks of alien mineral. What is initially a realistic alien-contact scenario resolves into something creepier and weirder, like something out of the X-Files (a show I confess I’ve never seen). And the thumbnail sketch early in the story of the cultural fallout of the 1970s alien abduction, from the talk-show circuit to a play by Sam Shepard, is dead-on.

Like this month’s Interzone, the April F&SF includes stories based on a pre-existing cover painting, though in this case the scheme was editorially motivated. The added spin is that there are three stories, by Mike Resnick, Esther M. Friesner, and Nina Kiriki Hoffman, and they represent fantasy, science fiction, and horror respectively. The cover painting, by Barclay Shaw, shows a standard-issue mermaid wrapping herself around the helmet of an alarmed-looking male diver.

Resnick’s "The Gefilte Fish Girl" is mildly amusing Jewish-mother shtick about a scuba diver explaining to his mother that he’s marrying a mermaid. The humor derives from the priorities of the mom and what concerns overcome her shock over the nature of her son’s bride. Resnick interprets the painting fairly literally.

Hoffman’s "Manna" interprets the painting more loosely. The brief story evokes deep sea creatures who live off "gifts from above" while avoiding the storms of nets that snatch up those who rise too closely to the world above. The horror comes from the unexpected way the creatures deal with a wayward diver, not at all what is typically suggested by the idea of a mermaid.

Friesner’s "King of the Cyber Trifles" is furthest from the subject matter of the painting. The mermaid scene occurs, but only as virtual reality, and incidentally. Told in hard-boiled private eye manner, the story concerns a cyber-detective named Blaze Knightly who tracks down troublemakers on the net. His latest case involves a fast-working operative who’s wooed and then taken advantage of love-lorn netheads. The story mixes satiric barbs with science fiction in-jokes, and alternates being heavy-handed (in being overwritten or with jokes that are groaners) with being genuinely funny.

Richard Bowes’s urban fantasy tales about Kevin Grierson reach a culmination in "Streetcar Dreams". Grierson has lived much of his life under the influence of a Shadow, or Double, a duplicate of himself that represents both his dark side and his protector. Now middle-aged, Grierson is relatively happy and prosperous, owner of an antique shop in Manhattan, his Shadow unseen for 20 years. As a former lover of his lies dying on life support, his friends start reporting seeing someone who looks like him. Kevin reflects on key incidents from his past--living with Aunt Tay, who sang a little song about "me, myself, and I"; being rescued by Leo Dunn (key figure in several earlier stories)--and experiences a new round of dreams in which he sees images of the important people from his life aboard an old style streetcar. Nervously he anticipates a reunion with his Shadow, and discovers, in a dramatic finale prefigured by his aunt’s ditty, the key to a more complete existence than he ever suspected. Though described as "urban fantasy" these stories are primarily psychological. Through the fantasy device of the Shadow they explore the diverse career of a gay man from a rocky childhood, sordid young adulthood, to a relatively peaceful maturity. This story encapsulates, at times cursorily, elements from all these eras, suggesting that the cumulative impact off the stories, when woven together, should be considerable.

Turning to more conventional science fiction, both Sheila Finch’s "The Roaring Ground" and Mary Soon Lee’s "Universal Grammar" involve aliens and linguistics. Finch’s story is the latest concerning her Guild of Lingsters, an interstellar service organization specializing in contact with new alien races. Delfin Hayward is a lingster student handicapped with an exoskeleton and predisposed toward becoming emotional where the guild insists on neutrality. She is on the verge of failing her final exam for this reason when a crisis involving an alien orphan child erupts that (of course) is solved by Delfin’s unorthodox inclinations. This plot is predictable and melodramatic, though effectively told. The underlying premise is curious, though. One can appreciate the guild’s concept of Neutrality--serving anyone, never judging the message, the sender, or the cause (rather like the stance of Lyris’s Key Giver)--but it is reasonable to suppose that actual translation could be effective without taking into account emotional content?

Lee’s story concerns an alien first-contact in 2039. Janna Suzorsky is part of the academic team trying to decipher the aliens’ ambiguous initial gestures. She doesn’t get along with her boss, Holman, so she is sitting in a bar in east-end London while Holman, in orbit, tries to understand the significance of a tank-full of octopus creatures sent out from the aliens’ airlock. Then, as the author reflects on the work of Noam Chomsky, Janna has a breakthrough insight. Chomsky’s work on the innateness of fundamental linguistic structures gives a firm basis to the standard science fictional assumption of the ease of communicating with aliens--so, ironically, the conclusion of this story isn’t particularly remarkable. What makes the story distinctive is the edgy relationship between the human characters, Janna and her boss.

Rebecca Ore’s "My Mother, the Alien, and Me" is an offbeat alien-contact story in which the author’s clipped prose somehow works for the story rather than against it. Lisa and her mother find the alien, like a man but with tentacle-things all over his face, lying in their pond. Mother, recently abandoned by her husband and still a sucker for males in pain, takes him in. The alien, remarkably, speaks perfect English, and tells of being an outcast from a race condemned to die for being evil. Lisa and her mother procure live animals for the alien to eat and care for it for years thereafter, while Lisa grows up, enduring humiliation and relationships of various sorts with boys and men. Ore’s quirkish tale suggests that the alien is a challenge no less mysterious to these women than the men in their lives.

The May SF Age features a solid hard-sf tale in Geoffrey A. Landis’s novella "Ecopoiesis", which might have been called "Brown Mars". Landis imagines the planet several centuries hence, when the exciting places to explore are light-years away and the failed terraforming experiment on Mars has left it a forgotten backwater. Two researchers, the first in over a century, have been mysteriously killed on the surface, so now a team of three investigators arrives on the planet to find out why.

First they clarify that what was done to Mars wasn’t terraforming, but rather ecopoiesis--the establishment of an appropriate, completely original ecology. Mars wasn’t suited for anything else, so now it’s covered with anaerobic bacteria. Factions who still object to the idea might be behind the current killings--might still be out there, in fact. Two of the three investigators set off to explore the Boreal ocean, find it percolating with carbon dioxide, and perceive the true nature of the threat on Mars. The key to the mystery, to the story’s credit, isn’t sociopolitical but scientific, in solid hard-sf fashion. Landis’s thesis is a provocative wet blanket to the rosey optimism of most other recent Mars stories, especially Kim Stanley Robinson’s. Not only won’t Mars be a terraformed paradise, Landis argues, it’s doomed to reverting to a frozen rock.

"Your Eyes, My Darling, Black and White and Blue" is the grandiose title of Karen Haber’s conventional story of human-alien contact from the alien’s point of view. Tali emerges from among her nestmates to gather fruit, and senses the presence of a strange creature nearby. Fortunately she can read its mind, and shapeshift to hide herself, but she soon succumbs to the alien’s honest curiosity and lets him talk to her. Later she faces discipline from her nestmates, who insist the intruder be killed. Haber achieves moments of poignancy, and a frisson of forthcoming horror at the end, but the sci-fi gimmicks of telepathy and shapeshifting make them too easy.

Rather similar is George S. Walker’s "The Sunhouse Trap", a far future tale in which construction of a Dyson sphere and contact with a malevolent alien force is told in the context of the life of Tabitha, who’s implanted with an augment at age one, whose mother changes sex when she’s age two, and so on. Life in the far future is all too recognizable; fashion and sex dominate people’s lives, and humans beat out the aliens with hardly any effort at all.

Mark W. Tiedemann’s "Broca’s Ghost" uses an interplanetary setting to make an ambitious statement about the nature of society and prisons. The scenario is a complicated one: Evan Borik is a former prison warden from the planet Petersgate, which has recently fought and lost a rebellion. Petersgate was intended as a utopian society, but it eventually recognized the necessity of dealing with incorrigibles and built an elaborate prison called Terminal City. Now the builders of the prison, the Corovais family, is trying to break inside it, despite the modifications made by Petersgate which Borik claims to know nothing about. Tiedemann ponders social ideals as the story build to an apparently ironic conclusion--but the situation is so convoluted I’m not sure if the point I got was what the author intended.

Jack Williamson’s "The Firefly Tree" is a brief tale of childhood magic and loss. A young boy moves with his parents to his grandfather’s farm, where an odd plant with black arrowhead leaves causes the boy to dream of alien fireflies who are ready to invite humanity into the confederation of worlds. But he tells his dreams to adults and suffers the tragedy of a hostile cruel world.

Gregory Benford’s "The Voice" is set in a post-technological future shared with last year’s "Zoomers". Klair and her lover Qent discover the ability to "read" the marks on the walls of their habitat without the interpretation of the ever-present Voice. It’s a classic science fiction situation, analogous to the man who learns to add without a calculator in Asimov’s "The Feeling of Power". Klair and Qent keep the secret to themselves, exploring caches of old books, until they see a hand-scawled sign that seems to suggest a meeting place. They contact a man who tells them about a secret assembly of readers, hiding from the society that would persecute them.

Just as Klair becomes a target of that persecution, the story breaks out of her point of view and her story to show us a farther future in which even the signs on the walls no longer exist. Benford avoids getting embroiled in the melodrama of the initial situation while underscoring the timeless power of its theme.

The Omni website has a new story for March, Paul Park’s "Get a Grip". A New York man spots an old friend in a bar, a Russian he met several years ago in Moscow. The Russian, Nathan, denies being the friend, then is paranoid about them being seen together. Doesn’t he realize that wasn’t really Moscow, but rather in a theme park outside Helsinki? That his "wife" was an actress hired for a role, and that Nathan is a performance artist? The narrator tries checking up on Nathan’s story and finds clues that shake his faith in reality. Suddenly everywhere he looks, people and places don’t seem to be as real as they should be. He falls apart, loses his job, ends up sleeping in a park. And then a voice calls out "that’s a wrap."

But that’s not the end of the story. Park recapitulates a classic Twilight Zone reality-breakdown scenario up to a point, then opens it up as a satire on the future of the entertainment industry. And then when that makes a certain bizarre sense, the story pulls the rug out again. As in the narrator’s reality, the story fiendishly undercuts itself and leaves the reader unsure of its basic assumptions.