Distillations: Short Fiction Reviews, June 1977

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

Back to Mark's CS homepage.

F&SF 5/97

Interzone 4/97

Asimov's 7/97

Realms of Fantasy 4/97

Terra Incognita Spring 97

On Spec Spring 97

Omni online 4/97

Science fiction has always drawn upon current events, both social and technological, for speculative inspiration. The risk of this approach is that reality has a tendency to overtake fiction. Several stories this month deal with biomedical issues straight out of current headlines.

Two such stories appear in the May F&SF (the last issue nominally edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch). S. N. Dyer's "Sins of the Mothers" depicts Arwen Wildflower, a middle-aged earth mother who's visited on her ranch in California by an emaciated rock star who claims to be the child she gave up as an infant. (Shades of the film "Secrets and Lies".) He's suffering from a debilitating disease and needs a pancreas transplant--from his clone, which he needs her to help start. Arwen agrees (reflecting regretfully on the circumstances in which she gave him up many years ago), on the condition that she be allowed to carry the child. Soon she is pregnant and the target of the tabloid press and of abortion protestors (shades of another recent film, "Citizen Ruth"). The situation is exactly one of those hypothetical circumstances that so troubles the commentators debating the ethical implications of the recently cloned sheep named Dolly. You've noticed that no one ever invites science fictions writers to these debates (except maybe when held by science fiction magazines). This is too bad, because Dyer for one does not fall into the trap, as do so many others, including those who should know better, of over-simplifying the mechanics of cloning or of presuming a clone to be something other than what it would be. Moreover Dyer gives the story dramatic and thematic depth by contrasting the cloning controversy with the repressive social conditions that forced the young Arwen to either seek an (illegal) abortion or give up her child. The counterpoint invites obvious ironic comparisons.

Alan Brennert's "Echoes" uses another potential biological innovation, genetic engineering of humans, as an element in a story about making choices in life. Kathy Brannon is the product of genetic enhancement by her parents, who desired a musical prodigy free of their own neuroses. As a teenager Kathy begins encountering people no one else can see--a neighborhood boy with a sketchpad, various girls in school who resemble her--and soon she's put into a hospital where a therapist talks about the "psychotic breaks" that are not uncommon among the genetically enhanced. The people she sees are alternate versions of who she might have been. She recovers, is accepted at Julliard, and in New York lives free of the echoes for a while, until they catch up with her and again threaten to overwhelm her life.

The scientific premise is that the genetically enhanced are more prone than normal people to perceiving these echoes because of the expanded range of potential alternates that genetic enhancement allows. This rationale is dubious on a couple grounds; for one, it begs the question about "normal" people, as so many sf stories about clones have done by presuming for them some special talent like telepathy, forgetting about twins. Brennert is a smooth writer though, and the story is filled with compelling characters and situations. It would have been better as a straight fantasy without the dubious technical rationale.

Susan Wade's "A Recent Vintage" is a compelling psychological mystery. Natalie Emerson comes home from her evening run to find that her car has been riddled with bullets. Her new boyfriend, Paul, quickly comes over to take care of her, even though she has thus far tried to shield her private life from him. Now she's forced to reveal her secret--she has no memory of her past, and only vague recollections of her family triggered by the furniture she's accumulated. Paul soon insinuates himself into her life. She begins having dreams about someone called the tinker, the agent that suppressed her memories and now bargains to revive them. This is another story in which the drama might have been stronger without the fantasy element. The tension comes (as it did in an old Twilight Zone episode that this story strongly resembles, "Nightmare as a Child") from realizing that the solution to the mystery is hidden but could be uncovered at any time.

Other stories in F&SF include two by new writers. Leo Kenden's "Jinx" is about the parents of a "special" child, Oliver, who has to be watched constantly lest he cause damage or hurt other children. His parents acquire a new therapy tool, a robot companion called Jinx. It handles Oliver just fine, but the parents suspect it of ulterior motives in trying to control their lives. The problem with the story is that it's written in the 2^nd person, for no reason whatsoever. The 2^nd person has its occasional uses by experienced writers but they use it sparingly since it so easily calls attention to itself. It's also a fascinating gimmick for beginnings; someone should have talked Kenden out of it.

"Tally", by another new writer, Deborah Coates, is the dog story of the issue (there's a cat story too). Elizabeth's dog is shot by a cruel neighbor who just doesn't like dogs. Stunned, Elizabeth digs out a legacy from her mother, something called a tally stone which "keeps count… When the counts are skewed, the tally stone can set them right." Soon the cruel neighbor is being plagued by packs of spectral dogs. The characterization is touching, especially when Elizabeth speaks of how the dog influenced her own personality. But as a story I never got past its essentially escapist approach: the implicit premise is that the only way to deal with an obnoxious neighbor is by way of a magical stone.

The cat story in the issue is Ian Watson's cover story, "The Last Beast Out of the Box", a charming tale about a young girl, an old lady, and an old wooden box with cats painted on all sides. The old lady, Mrs. Meadows, explains to Amanda that she painted the box as a girl and then watched it come true: all the cats she'd painted came into her life, one after the other, ending with the marmalade cat she has now. She gives the box to Amanda with instruction to repaint it for herself. Amanda does, fancifully, with more than just cats. The development becomes predictable, but Watson quickens the pace to avoid exploiting it as a horror story and ends with a sweet sentiment instead.

Esther M. Friesner's "Miss Thing" involves characters who are ambiguous in more ways than one. It's set in a club where the performers do impersonations and are known for not being who or what they appear to be. One day a child, Zo, turns up and is quickly taken in by one of the performers, Cherisse. Zo has an uncanny ability at imitation herself, and soon becomes the club's star act. Cherisse's colleagues assume some hanky-panky between Cherisse and Zo, but Cherisse insists not--because Zo is a girl; she's said so. The others don't believe it; they've seen things. Meanwhile Zo has tried to explain about being co-mothers with Cherisse, and about her male, who has claws, poison spit, and a stinger, but none of this sinks in for Cherisse until a climactic scene in which the true nature of Zo's, ah, equipment, is made clear. The unusual situation and characters give ample reign for Friesner's sometimes droll, sometimes outrageous humor. The story gives new meaning to the phrase "has a mind of its own."

The April Interzone has the first new short fiction from Greg Egan in over a year, "Reasons to Be Cheerful". It fits this column's theme in being about brain chemistry. Scientists have reported correlations between dopamine and addiction; Egan speculates how other substances might determine entire personalities. Mark, a 12 year old in 2004, is preternaturally happy as the result of a tumor that releases great quantities of a certain endorphin into his brain. But the tumor will kill him, so he undergoes treatment to have it removed. Then he feels exactly the opposite, as if the pleasure centers in his brain have all been burned out. Some years go by before he's offered experimental therapy in "prosthetic reconstructive neuroplasty," a way of rebuilding those paths in his brain based on a database of neural scans from 4,000 other people. It works, but too well: everything is now equally wonderful, delicious, sublime. Yet further treatment allows Mark to consciously alter his reactions to things, to tone down mindless attraction and develop an individual personality. And this reveals the ultimate arbitrariness, and difficulty, of life: he has to find a balance between meaningless happiness and meaningless despair. This story is a bit thick as Egan stories go, but it's worth the effort. As in the best science fiction, rigorous exploration of the implications of a scientific discovery leads to an unsettling insight into the nature of the human condition.

By comparison, Meg Turville Heitz's portentously titled "Reality" is muddled. Cal is a university researcher hanging out at a bus stop acting crazy in order to chart the reactions of passersby. He finds an envelope containing a 3-D magic picture, wavy lines concealing a three-dimensional image of a seductive woman lying on a couch. After a while the image moves, and Cal sees a man in the picture with the woman. Staring at the picture takes over his life as he starts to interact with the people inside it. The author presumably intended some analogy between Cal's research and his metaphysical trap, but the point of his tragic fate is unclear.

Ben Jeapes's "Winged Chariot" is composed of several conventional science fiction elements. Dr. Morgan lives in the isolated town of Porthperron, teaching the locals advanced medical techniques to help them treat an inbred tendency toward cancer and tumors. In alternating scenes he recalls his former life as member of a medical Directorate, which broke up in political turmoil and forced him to flee. It becomes belatedly clear--the story seems needlessly coy on this point--that Morgan has escaped the turmoil by going back into time, to Porthperron, using a conveniently just-invented time machine. But eventually his enemies find him and the story builds to a time travel recomplication. There are two or maybe three stories here, awkwardly grafted together, with the most provocative one, about the near-future medical cabal attempting to subvert the archaic oath of Hippocrates, given the shortest shrift.

Dominic Green's "Everywhen" is a breathless space opera of cosmic scope. It's set on a planet in the pocket universe where ships that traverse singularities wrongly all end up. After two pages of introductory exposition, the human narrator, Jack Huyghens, gets tangled up in a dispute between alien Devil Dolls and another human who ran out on gambling debts. This leads to revelations about alien Automats, who have created a stable pocket-universe of only a few thousand tons, and a dreadful something that may lie hidden under the floor of the universe. The story is exhaustingly inventive, heavy on exposition, and dramatically compressed; it would have been more comfortably expressed at three or five times the length.

Another exhausting but dazzling story is the centerpiece of the July Asimov's, Eliot Fintushel's "Izzy and the Father of Terror", featuring the character from several previous stories, motel manager Izzy Molson. He's traveling cross-country with his pal Sarvaduhka to find some female action in Memphis. But the point of view character is a hitchhiker named Mel Bellow, who has fallen in with a pack of hippies in New Mexico and met a shaman who "pricks a hole in his mind" before Mel escapes. Now Mel encounters Izzy and his pal at a roadside diner, where the pair warn Mel about the shaman and also about some star guys from Sanduleak who are all out to control him. That's the barest beginning; soon we meet Mel's virtual father, Gone Joe, and two aliens from Sanduleak, Gypsy and Nora, who spirit the roadside diner into space on a trip to another galaxy.

Reading this story reminded me of the famous writing strategy of A. E. van Vogt, which was to introduce a new idea about every 600 words. Fintushel's interval is slightly less than that. What's amazing is that the ideas do eventually come together into an elaborate, outlandish, almost comprehensible whole--involving ancient Egypt (oh that Memphis) and the identity of the father of terror. It takes a certain amount of stamina to get through this story, but the effect is an order of magnitude greater than that of anything Fintushel, one of the few truly distinctive voices in contemporary speculative fiction, has done before.

Just as outlandish but far more frivolous is the cover story, R. Neube's "The Holy Stomper Vs. the Alien Barrel of Death". It's a first contact story about aliens who slavishly imitate the first three 1957 television shows they've tapped into on their way past Earth: a soap opera, a local news show, and a wrestling match. Now the key to establishing communication seems to lie with Citizen Scorpio, a famous wrestler who follows his instincts and head-butts the first alien he's introduced to. Scorpio is cleverer than the military men in command or the xenologists trying to figure the aliens out, so he quickly hatches a complicated plan to make zillions in profit. This is one of those stories in which the question of why the aliens should be so slavishly imitative of humans in the first place is not one you're supposed to wonder about.

In extreme contrast to those two is a quiet fantasy by Tanith Lee, "After I Killed Her". The narrator is a mighty warrior who's grown weary of years of wandering and carousing. He is hired by the inhabitants of a beautiful city to slay a dragon that threatens them from across a lake. He does this handily, noticing that the dragon was female, and returns to riches and rewards. But these soon pall as he recalls the vitality of the dragon compared to the self-centeredness of humanity. And so he returns to the dragon's cave to attempt some sort of recompense. A cliché fantasy situation becomes the occasion for the consideration of the place of humans in the larger world--an unusual and welcome perspective in a genre not known for such philosophical perspective.

A more conventional, if more idiosyncratic, fantasy is William Sanders's "Words and Music", which portrays another standard fantasy situation, a skirmish with the devil. The perspective is that of the author's earlier stories, that of American Indians. Jimmy Hominy is a Cherokee shaman who is summoned by the preacher of a local church that he's afraid has been witched. The preacher arranges an all-night gospel singing at the church. It starts well but is interrupted by the arrival of a demonic band of white-suited men led by one Brother Seth Abadon. Jimmy takes them on in a furious duel of guitar playing. The almost-formula plot development is given considerable life by the author's obvious expertise both in musicianship and in Indian lore.

John C. Wright’s "Guest Law" is the only conventional science fiction story in the issue. A huge ship, the Procrustes, flies through space, about to make a rare contact with another ship. The Procrustes crew is highly stratified and decadent. Its captain, chancellor, and knights debate whether the unknown ship is unarmed, or if the Guest Law applies--the code for exchanging greetings and tributes between spacecraft. A single crewman emerges from the unknown ship. He’s invited into the Procrustes and sat down to a highly ritualized dinner, during which the knights taunt him with insults and vague, then not-so-vague, threats. The setting is like the court of Louis XIV (as recently seen in the film "Ridicule") raised to deadlier stakes. Fascinating as it is, those stakes paint the author into a corner; the only way out is a deus ex machina.

Tony Daniel’s "Black Canoes" is the only story in the issue involving people that readers of the magazine might meet in real life. The narrator, Edward, is a potter who grew up in the South and who’s had an intermittent friendship with Carol Verdane, a specialist in pre-historic Plains Indians. Their paths cross in St. Louis, and then again back in Alabama, where Edward has taken residence in a cabin near Lookout Mountain and the Little River. Edward has always experienced a preternatural attraction for Carol, and now she's ready to reveal the reason behind it. She leads him on a canoe trip through a cave into a land populated by real Indians, a place she’s been to before. Is this the past? Another dimension? No, a sort of inverse, Carol tries to explain. Then she undergoes a bizarre ritual of rebirth. The situation and characters are compelling, even if the origin of the metaphysic behind the strange rebirth remains mysterious.

The April Realms of Fantasy starts with a strong Robert Silverberg story, "The Church at Monte Saturno", the theme of which--a westerner confronted by ancient religions--resembles that of his previous story in the magazine, "Diana of the Hundred Breasts" (February ‘96). Gardiner is an American professor of art history, idly wandering through southern Sicily on the lookout for ancient mosaics. He stops for the night in the town of Monte Saturno, meets a fiery young woman named Serafina, and spots a ruined church on a nearby hill. He’s elated to discover a mosaic in the ruined church, but then frightened when the images on the mosaic change between visits. Meanwhile he's assaulted by Serafina's brother, who's angry that Gardiner has not treated his sister properly. Gardiner is disoriented both by local mores and by the disturbing images of an ancient belief system. This story is weaker than "Diana" because Gardiner is a passive character; he withdraws rather than resolve the challenge to his own worldview. But both stories skillfully depict the crises of faith that result from the juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern.

Richard Parks reconsiders the back-story of a traditional dragon tale in "The Right Sort of Flea", which depicts an aging King Beowulf haunted by the ghost of the monster he slew. Determined to banish the new evil he senses is present, he seeks out the beast's lair and discovers a dragon who needs him in a way complementary to the way he needs it; they are two of a kind. Parks's story resembles Tanith Lee's this month in its reconsideration of the motives behind a traditional scenario; but Parks ultimately justifies the proceedings while Lee undercuts them.

Other stories in the issue include Susan Wade's "Stormchild", a ghost story about a sheep farmer on the northern prairies whose pregnant daughter appears unexpectedly in the midst of a blizzard. Trying to understand how she came to be out there, he helps her deliver her child and realizes that his late wife's superstition about "storm children" has a basis in truth. William R. Eakin's "Lawnmower Moe" also deals with ancient superstition as captured in a Druid song about five trees. The setting, incongruously, is the Redgunk, Mississippi of an earlier Eakin tale. Iva May Hart's husband has collapsed dead while tending to his daily mowing of their 40 acres of weeds. Iva's son Chris struggles to understand why his father's ghost appears at night to continue the mowing, and learns that this superstition is not only true, but that it must be controlled. Anne Harris describes the enigmatic inhabitants of "The House" as they pursue clues involving diaries and pull-toys in the attic while searching for a way to see outside. It's the sort of story where interest in the characters is pointless; they are all subordinate to the revelatory "key" which explains everything in the final lines.

Batya Swift Yasgur and Barry N. Malzberg's "Blessing the Last Family" is an intense consideration of faith and family harmony. Uriel the good angel and Ashmodai the bad angel watch over Rabbi Davidson as he returns home from Friday synagogue; the two angels vie for dominance over the harmony of the household, and each angel is obligated to bless the victory of the other. Uriel has been losing; the Davidsons are the last stronghold of harmony. So Uriel breaks a rule and shows himself to the Rabbi's wife to bolster her faith. The tactic backfires and Uriel finally perceives a truth about the true source of faith. The story has the revelatory power reminiscent of Malzberg's "Understanding Entropy" from a few years ago--if not quite that story's clarity.

The second issue of Terra Incognita includes several solid stories. Brian Stableford's "Community Service" is about a teenage drug dealer, Eveline, who's given a chance by her social worker to participate in a medical experiment. She can have as much of her drug, Hydeyhigh (as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), as she wants; she just has to let a scientist monitor her. The scientist, Dr. Saxon, explains that a computer will represent the changing state of her mind with images on a screen before her as she gets high. In the trial she sees herself, and an analog image of a Jaguar 2-seater, transform into malevolent entities. Eveline soon not only cooperates but also tries to take advantage of the experiment, without quite understanding that she is a pawn in a larger scheme. Stableford's premise is fascinating but extravagant, to the point where the plausibility that the drug-addicted street kid understands what's going on is undercut.

Timons Esais's "Crash Site" is a traditional man against nature story with aliens added. Lambert, an archaeologist exploring the mountains of China, is waiting out a sudden blizzard when he sees a huge vehicle pass overhead and crash farther up the mountain. But it's not a 747 or Airbus; the survivors he finds are not human. He struggles to drag his supplies up the mountain to help as best he can, but the creatures, who have been studying Earth and can speak English, can't eat his food and won't kill any native life even to save themselves. Lambert can; he sets about chopping down trees and building fires to keep the aliens warm while they reconstruct their ship. The solid realism of the mountain survival situation gives the familiar sf premise a new vitality.

The strongest story is Terry McGarry's "Mindchild", which ties into this month's theme about current biotechnology. Corrine, 17 and pregnant, escapes a near future US dominated by religious repression to Canada, where she checks into a hospital to have an abortion. In the same hospital is Margery, a woman suffering from Alzheimer's who doesn't remember her husband or her career as a geologist. Margery is given a new treatment in which fetal brain-cell tissue is grafted into her own brain as the basis for filling in the damaged tissue. It works: her memory comes back and so, to her husband's dismay, does her taste for the Fundamentalist Truth Channel that she watched in the states. She becomes hysterical and demands to meet the mother of the child she becomes convinced is growing inside her.

The two stories, Corrine's and Margery's, dovetail neatly and build toward an emotional climax: the authorities are about to catch up with Corrine, but Corrine's presence is the key to Margery's recover. The final outcome is certainly consistent with everything that's gone on before, though it's unexpectedly harsh.

The Spring issue of On Spec includes a story about cloning, Darren Latta’s "Einstein, the Sequel", in which various famous men and women--Einstein, Dillinger, Nixon--are recreated. Surprise surprise, none of them turn out to be anything like their originals; Einstein becomes a rock star. But the story doesn't pretend to be serious speculation; it's an exercise in amusing anachronisms.

The theme of the issue is "Canadian Geographic". Most of the stories have at least a nominal identification with places in Canada, though in all but a couple the relationship is only nominal. In Edo van Belkom and David Nickle’s "Rat Food", an elderly woman, determined not to be sent to an old folks’ home by her daughter, attempts to hide evidence of rats in her house by providing a ready food supply at their hole. When she suffers a stroke, she lies immobile at their mercy. The setting in Toronto is incidental, as it also is in Michael Stokes’s "The Shuffleman", which replaces rats the cockroaches and adds a mysterious vagrant who haunts the lives of two roommates. Both stories end in bizarre rituals of mutual nourishment.

A meal is also critical in fiona heath’s "Casserole Diplomacy", about a Newfoundland widow who lives to cook. One day there's a knock at her back door. This is significant because in Newfoundland friends and neighbors come to the back door, and only strangers and tourists knock at the front door. Unfazed when a troop of aliens walks in, she makes them feel at home with a bountiful meal, hospitality that pays off in the subsequent official contact by the aliens. All of this borders on being too precious, but the author provides the widow some depth of character with reflections about her sea-faring husband and in a sassy scene with nosey investigators.

The story most specifically about Canada is Derryl Murphy's "Canadaland", a collage of vignettes, phone transcripts, and news reports that depict Canadian response to the overwhelming interest of vacationing Americans. The segments are bedecked with explanatory footnotes about Canadians sports teams, tv shows, terms, etc., designed for American readers, since the purpose of the story is "to show Americans how Canadians think they view us." Which is, apparently, that Canadians are hypersensitive to losing their national identity in the shadow of American cultural dominance--and that Americans think this preoccupation is rather silly. Woven through the cultural cues is a story about a draft for a Canadian army to fight off the influx of cultural imperialism. Both draft and story succeed in making their points.

The April Omni story (online) is Simon Ings's "Open Veins". An investigator named Iain Prior arrives at an abandoned army base where a woman, Joanne Rynard, has died while hotwired into a leftover net connection. Prior is an "eraser," intent on removing all traces of the crime. He seeks out the two residents of the base, a couple running a school, Laura and Peter Lewis, the latter an artist and the former a political activist. One of them has apparently helped Rynard to die. Prior's investigation uncovers Rynard's involvement in a secret government project about "near-death neurology", but the solution to her death lies in understanding the bizarre relationship between the two Lewises. The technical premise is secondary to the kinky psychology, and the writing is tight and cool. The story will be expanded in the author's forthcoming fouth novel, Headlong.