Clarkesworld #216, September 2024
“The Music Must Always Play” by Marissa Lingen
“Broken” by Laura Williams McCaffrey
“The Children I Gave You, Oxalaia” by Cirilo Lemos
“A Theory of Missing Affections” by Renan Bernardo
“Fish Fear Me, You Need Me” by Tiffany Xue
“How to Remember Perfectly” by Eric Schwitzgebel
“Those Who Remember the World” by Ben Berman Ghan
“A World of Milk and Promises” by R H Wesley
Reviewed by Victoria Silverwolf
Half a dozen short stories and a pair of novelettes, one relatively short and one relatively long, appear in this issue.
“The Music Must Always Play” by Marissa Lingen begins with a gigantic alien spaceship crashing on Earth, killing all the occupants. The protagonist is a linguist, studying the inscriptions throughout the vessel as well as the sounds it constantly produces. She also deals with the fact that her father is stricken with cancer.
The two subplots described above are not directly related, but seem to be thematically linked, the deaths of the extraterrestrials compared to the possible loss of the main character’s father. One aspect of the story I found difficult to understand is the fact that the arrival of the spaceship leads to large, violent riots, with more than a hundred people killed in a single day. Even the characters wonder why this should happen, as do I.
“Broken” by Laura Williams McCaffrey is narrated in backwards order, with sections of the text numbered from seven to one. It begins with the protagonist regaining the virtual reality helmet that allows her to engage in combat in a simulated world a few days after it was damaged. It ends with the loss of the device, forcing her to abandon what she thinks of as the real world for a brief time.
The author effectively conveys the main character’s perception of the outside world as unreal, with its inhabitants seen only as shadows. The reverse narrative structure adds little, if anything, to the story. The simulated VR combat in which the protagonist engages is apparently somehow related to an actual war in the real world, but in what way is unclear.
“The Children I Gave You, Oxalaia” by Cirilo Lemos, translated from Brazilian Portuguese by Thamirys Gênova, is just barely long enough to be a novelette. It takes place in an alternate version of the 1920s in which space travel throughout the solar system is common, and Venus is inhabited by sentient aliens. The plot involves Venusian refugees from a war on their planet, some of whom have been born on Earth. One of them raises two human children as if they were her own. Efforts to force the refugees to leave Earth lead to violence.
The text alternates between sections told from the points of view of the Venusian woman and a human who is fascinated by the aliens. The story can be read as an allegory for the problems faced by immigrants, particularly those forced to leave their homelands due to war. Some of the human characters are caricatures of xenophobic bigots, all too eager to kill the aliens if they display any resistance.
Two sisters are the main characters in “A Theory of Missing Affections” by Renan Bernardo. Raised by different fathers, one travels through a space warp to study artifacts left behind by an ancient alien species. The other remains at home on a farm planet, and is part of a cult that thinks of the aliens as gods, whose artifacts should not be viewed by humans. The impending closure of the space warp forces the sisters to remain forever separated, or for one to choose to join the other.
Much of the story consists of descriptions of the alien artifacts, all of which seem to have been designed to have effects on emotions. Some appear to have been used as torture devices or for mind control, others used voluntarily to enhance emotions. This provides a comparison with the emotions of the sisters, who are drawn together despite their very different lifestyles and views of the aliens. Depending on the reader’s opinion as to the importance of family loyalty versus living one’s own life, the ending might be seen as disappointing.
“Fish Fear Me, You Need Me” by Tiffany Xue takes place after gigantic floods cover much of the eastern part of the United States with water. The characters are two men surviving the disaster by fishing. The story takes a sudden turn about halfway through, when the reader finds out that most people have been transformed into fish. One of the men searches for his wife, believing she will be one of the fishes they catch.
The sudden change from apocalyptic science fiction to fantasy threw me for a loop. Given the matter-of-fact narrative style, the work might be considered an example of magic realism. In any case, the complex love/hate relationship between the two men is more interesting than the surreal premise.
In “How to Remember Perfectly” by Eric Schwitzgebel, a device allows an elderly woman to control her emotions, from serenity to healthy sorrow. It also allows her to create false memories that seem real. She shares this technology with a friend, who in turn uses it in an important way.
Most science fiction stories dealing with this kind of technology would emphasize the dangers of the device. In this work, it is seen as benign. The characters know that their induced memories aren’t real, but are able to enjoy them anyway. (A contrast might be made with Philip K. Dick’s 1966 story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” which involved a similar theme. The present work is more serious and more realistic, which does not detract from Dick’s classic tale.) They also make use of their enhanced emotions in appropriate ways. The author has a gift for characterization through the use of small details, which makes even the minor players in this story seem very real.
“Those Who Remember the World” by Ben Berman Ghan is the issue’s longest and most complex story. It is also the most difficult to describe. In brief, it takes place in a city controlled by an artificial intelligence that makes use of bioengineered animals as its servants. It has also created a human being, with some characteristics of a bat, as an investigator. This is the protagonist, who becomes involved in the killing of a young man that is linked in a strange way with a mysterious message transmitted from one person to another biologically.
This synopsis is much more linear and logical than the story itself. It also makes it sound more like pure science fiction, rather than a blend of SF and so-called New Weird fiction. Fans of writers like China Miéville and Jeff Vandermeer will best appreciate this dense and difficult work, while others are likely to find it confusing.
The narrator of “A World of Milk and Promises” by R H Wesley is the only survivor of a crash landing on an alien world. Pregnant and struggling to survive, she discovers that the organisms inhabiting the planet are all part of one symbiotic ecosystem, without predators or prey. This leads to strange happenings after her daughter is born.
The story begins with the most striking of these strange events, so it is not giving too much away to reveal that the narrator and her second daughter (apparently some sort of induced parthenogenesis) live inside the giant skeleton of the first daughter. We are also told right away that the second daughter is both walking with her mother as a toddler and yet still inside the narrator’s womb at the same time. Even given the extraordinary biology of the planet, this is difficult to explain.
Victoria Silverwolf has not seen either of the films loosely based on “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.”