Analog, May/June 2022
“Burning the Ladder” by Adam-Troy Castro
“Boy in the Key of Forsaken” by Eric Del Carlo
“Planetfall” by A.C. Koch
“Faster than Falling Starlight” by C.H. Hung
“Aconie’s Bees” by Jessica Reisman
“Our Road to Utopia” by Adele Gardner
“Firebreak” by Alice Towey
“Now We’re Talking” by Jerry Oltion
“Beachhead” by Timons Esaias
“Beacon” by Sean McMullen
“Bounty 1486” by Wendy Nikel
“Trajectories of Maximum Happiness” by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro
“Gateway Drug” by Louis Evans
“One Way” by Filip Wiltgren
“Subsidiary Class 2 Museum Report” by Tim McDaniel
“Retirement Options for Too Successful Space Entrepreneurs” by Brent Baldwin
“Shopping Expedition” by Brendan DuBois
“A Hundred Mouths and a Voice of Iron” by John Markley
“Proof of Concept” by Auston Habershaw
“Simple Pleasures” by Bud Sparhawk
Reviewed by Victoria Silverwolf
With no less than twenty new pieces of fiction, many of them quite short, this issue is sure to offer something for any reader of imaginative literature.
“Burning the Ladder” by Adam-Troy Castro is the magazine’s only novella. Two women are stationed at a remote desert backwater on an alien world. They have both become indentured to the diplomatic corps as a desperate way to escape even worse lives. Their superior has assigned them to this useless and boring position as a form of punishment for minor offences against her authority.
One of the women witnesses an alien child nearly killed by local predators. After saving its life, she learns that it was deliberately set out to die. Due to difficulty in understanding the local culture, the two fail to comprehend the reason for this seemingly cruel act. They attempt to take the child to a place of safety, only to face very difficult decisions when the truth is revealed.
The author raises serious ethical issues and does not supply any easy answers. Although the ending suggests a possible solution to the dilemma, it is made clear that success is not guaranteed. Both characters have tragic pasts that have important effects on their actions, heightening the story’s tension.
Another abandoned child appears in “Boy in the Key of Forsaken” by Eric Del Carlo. The adult guardian of the title character leaves him alone in a place full of many different kinds of aliens, but no other humans. He becomes involved with beings who grow living starships, eventually taking a misshapen one, meant to be discarded, as his own. Together the two misfits face an impending war.
The author creates truly exotic aliens, giving the story an effective sense of strangeness. Despite the threat of war, this is a gentle, heartwarming tale. The relationship between the boy and the starship reminds me of the award-winning short French film The Red Balloon. There is no explanation for what the child is doing in this weird setting, or why he was left on his own, so the reader is left with many unanswered questions.
In “Planetfall” by A.C. Koch, a starship approaching its destination is unable to decelerate sufficiently to make a landing, due to an unexpected loss of fuel. The current captain of the century-long voyage has to free the vessel’s only prisoner, who was convicted of murder, in order to make use of his expertise. She also has to make a dangerous excursion outside the ship to save the crew from drifting endlessly in space.
The narrative blends technological problem-solving with human drama, not always in a graceful way. The exact nature of the relationship between the captain and the murderer is withheld from the reader until the middle of the story, which seems like an artificial way of providing a plot twist.
Two veterans of interstellar travel appear in “Faster than Falling Starlight” by C.H. Hung. They are both returning to Earth, but for different reasons. One is bringing the ashes of his dead wife to the home world. The other is intent on retaining her eggs, removed from her ovary when she went into space. She faces an unexpected discovery.
This is essentially a two-person drama, highlighting the isolation of those who travel to the stars, due to the time dilation effect of near-light velocities. It also shows how camaraderie develops between those who share the same situation. The characters are fully developed, and are the most appealing aspect of a story with minimal plot.
“Aconie’s Bees” by Jessica Reisman involves a machine in the shape of a human being that is able to create genetically engineered creatures to keep an artificial ecology in balance. Abandoned long ago by its makers, the machine now serves the descendants of space travelers who crashed on the planet where it resides. When the passage of time threatens the organisms it made, the machine performs one final action.
Although definitely science fiction, this story has the dreamy, poetic feeling of fantasy. The inhabitants of the planet think of the machine as a witch, and its abilities do seem magical. Fittingly, the climax creates an almost mystical sense of wonder.
“Our Road to Utopia” by Adele Gardner is a very short account of two elderly people contemplating the possibility of moving to Alaska in order to escape climate change. This brief character study is essentially a quiet love story, with only a small amount of futuristic content in the background.
In “Firebreak” by Alice Towey, a firefighting drone with artificial intelligence assists a convict who is battling the blaze in an attempt to reduce his sentence. Although just as short as the previous story, it has a more complex plot, and the AI comes across as a clever, thoughtful character, obeying the letter of its instructions while helping the convict find a better life.
“Now We’re Talking” by Jerry Oltion features a scientist researching ways to communicate with hypothetical extraterrestrials by recording the sounds made by cats and interpreting their meanings. Her discoveries provide help during an emergency.
Although not overtly comic, this story is definitely on the light side. It might best be described as cute, for good or bad. This featherweight tale will please cat lovers, if nothing else.
“Beachhead” by Timons Esaias is a violent account of future warfare. The invading army is made up of groups of clones who share their minds. When one dies in battle, another takes over his or her consciousness and continues the fight. The plot follows the adventures of one such group of clones, leading to an ironic ending.
Most of this story consists of battle sequences, with little or no background about who is fighting and why. Although described with great vividness and intensity, these scenes are apt to leave the reader cold, without the knowledge to understand what is at stake.
In “Beacon” by Sean McMullen, the simulated consciousness of a man who worked on an unmanned interstellar probe wakens to discover itself on the vessel, and that an immense amount of time has gone by. The probe was designed to investigate a signal coming from space, but the source turned out to be much farther away than first thought. Now approaching the source, with hundreds of other simulated human minds aboard, the probe uncovers the extraordinary truth about the signal.
The plot is full of concepts that stretch the reader’s imagination. The author provides a unique solution to the so-called Fermi Paradox, which ponders the question of why there are no signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, if science suggests that it should be abundant. Although the simulation appears to experience the same emotions as the long-dead original, the reader may find it difficult to empathize with it, due to its artificial nature.
The protagonist of “Bounty 1486” by Wendy Nikel works in Earth orbit, eliminating space junk in order to prevent it from posing a hazard to navigation. She faces a crisis when an astronaut is stranded away from his space station. Only she is close enough to rescue the man before he runs out of air, but she has a very limited amount of fuel to spare. It takes all her ingenuity to figure out a way to save both their lives.
The character is an enjoyably ordinary one, with a job that lacks all the glamour of space travel. The plot is a bit on the old-fashioned side, the kind of problem-solving tale that frequently appeared in Astounding before, and sometimes after, it changed its name.
“Trajectories of Maximum Happiness” by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro is a tiny story about alien devices that show the users the choices most likely to produce contentment. The author suggests that anticipation and remembrance of joy, and experiencing it in an unexpected way, is better than being told exactly what to do to find it. It’s an interesting lesson, if only lightly fictionalized.
“Gateway Drug” by Louis Evans is this issue’s Probability Zero tall tale. People take a hallucinatory drug that makes them believe they’re on a version of Mars right out of old science fiction stories. While in this state, they experience another form of mind-altering substance, which puts them on an equally archaic Venus. The cycle continues throughout the solar system, with a twist ending when they come back to Earth.
The story’s hallucinations-within-hallucinations structure is amusing, and readers of outdated SF stories will get a kick out of the descriptions. The ending turns the whole thing into an extended joke or shaggy dog story, which may not be entirely pleasing to some readers.
In “One Way” by Filip Wiltgren, four people are trapped in a spaceship that was supposed to travel to Saturn, but is now headed out of the solar system forever, due to an accident. With limited power for the communications system, they have to decide whether to receive messages from Earth or transmit to the home world. The quartet is unable to come to a decision, until the narrator offers a third choice.
The situation is interesting, if contrived. The decision the four agree upon is inspiring, even though they are all doomed anyway.
Barely over two hundred words long, “Subsidiary Class 2 Museum Report” by Tim McDaniel is a description of an exhibit of life on Earth all the way back to Precambrian times, and forward to a future far beyond humanity. In such a limited space, there is hardly room for anything except the basic idea. It shows fine imagination, and makes the reader wonder who is making the report.
In “Retirement Options for Too Successful Space Entrepreneurs” by Brent Baldwin, the person who convinced investors to send colonists to Mars, living on the red planet many decades later, tries to help the struggling inhabitants in little ways. Less than two pages long, this is primarily a mood piece and character study. Some readers may find the second-person narrative style less than fully effective.
“Shopping Expedition” by Brendan DuBois takes place at a time when artificial intelligences control all public systems, resulting in disaster. The machines operate vehicles, tear down buildings, and construct new ones, all without apparent concern for the people involved. The narrator is a young girl who accompanies her father to an automated grocery store, and even this trip is full of hazards. The reader learns what her mother had to do with the debacle, and what the narrator hopes to do about it.
This is an unrelievedly grim tale, with little hope for the future, despite the narrator’s optimism at the end. The chaos is vividly portrayed, although it may be difficult to believe that the situation got so far out of hand.
The narrator of “A Hundred Mouths and a Voice of Iron” by John Markley is a man transformed into an enhanced, nearly immortal being. In his sentient starship, he travels the galaxy, acting as judge, jury, and executioner for artificial intelligences that harm human beings. His latest voyage takes him to a planet where the controlling AI destroyed all the inhabitants. Instead of immediately rendering a death sentence for the machine, he listens to the reasons for its actions, and comes to a decision.
The dark, pessimistic mood of the story is relieved by a touch of hope at the end. Both the narrator and the AI, weary of existence, come to understand why they must survive. The author considers the dangers of revenge, and points out how all circumstances must be considered before rendering judgments.
“Proof of Concept” by Auston Habershaw is narrated by a blob-like, shapeshifting entity, with part of its memory destroyed by weapons that pierced its body. Unable to recall who attacked it or why, it follows a pair of criminals after a biological weapon, even disguising itself as the object in order to infiltrate the stronghold of their bosses. It turns out that nothing is what it seems to be, as the narrator learns about its own nature and how it was used by others.
With the feeling of a hard-boiled crime story, the work creates a complex setting without human characters. The author manages to make readers empathize with a being utterly different from themselves. Some may find the ending, coming after so much violence, undramatic.
“Simple Pleasures” by Bud Sparhawk takes place in the Chesapeake Bay region in the very near future. A scientist is working on using floating islands of vegetation to absorb pollutants from the water. The project fails, due to lack of funding, but she gets an offer from a wealthy businessman to use a similar technique to remove phosphates. She wonders if the man has unspoken motives of his own.
Meanwhile, her friend, an elderly man living in isolation in a shack in the marsh, offers help to her assistants, while dealing with the declining health of his beloved dog and his own aging body.
This is a fine example of a story where science fiction meets mainstream fiction, and both are the better for it. The plot’s speculative content is highly plausible, and the author does not neglect important literary values of style and characterization. As a bonus, the Chesapeake Bay region comes to life in vivid descriptions, obviously from the pen of one who knows the area intimately.
Victoria Silverwolf thinks this issue has the shortest story she ever reviewed.