Asimov’s, May/June 2022
“Coyoteland” by Evan Marcroft
“The Lights That No One Else Can See” by Alice Towey
“Rocket Girls” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
“30” by Rich Larson
“The Last Tutor” by Ursula Whitcher
“Destiny Delayed” by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki
“The Wine-Dark Deep” by Sheila Finch
“The Leviathan and the Fury” by Andrea Kriz
“Silverado” by R. Garcia y Robertson
“The Waylost Café” by James Van Pelt
“Meryl’s Cocoon” by Zack Be
“The Abacus and the Infinite Wheel” by Vikram Ramakrishnan
“First Fish” by Bruce McAllister
“Necklace of Memory” by Robert Reed
Reviewed by Mike Bickerdike
This issue of Asimov’s contains 7 novelettes and 7 short stories. Overall, it’s quite a strong issue, containing several imaginative and thoughtful stories.
“Coyoteland” by Evan Marcroft is a gritty, noir, SF novelette set in a dystopian, fractured, American future. The USA is no more and has been replaced by thousands of autonomous microstates, all of which defend their boundaries with lethal force. Boundaries are either physical or digitally defined and relations between neighbouring states are in a constant state of flux. A young but capable woman, living a hand-to-mouth existence in a microstate that used to be part of California or Arizona, is employed by a traveller who needs to get a vaccine across several dangerous borders. The tech presented here is quite inventive, and the environment is well-rendered into a believable, albeit uninviting, future. This is ultimately a story about the journey, rather than the destination or eventual outcome. Having developed an interesting world, the story may have been strengthened with a more conclusive ending, and one gets the impression this could become a short story series, as there would be a good deal more to explore here.
“The Lights That No One Else Can See” by Alice Towey presents a traditional, straightforward UFO-sighting story. A young couple goes out on a first date—which goes poorly—and on their way home encounter a UFO. Over the next few days or weeks, they each experience further sightings on several occasions. Brought together by these events, they learn more of each other’s past, and consider why they may be the individuals upon whom the UFO is focussing its attention. The story is very readable and well-told, but there is little new here in truth, and the end rather lacks impact.
“Rocket Girls” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch is an entertaining novelette, and well worth a read. A group of teenage girls attend ‘space camp’ in Florida in a future where most of the girls were born off-world, and Florida’s area has been much depleted by rising sea levels. Inspired by ancient pulp magazines, especially the titular ‘Rocket Girls’, the teens manage to cobble together an actual space rocket that they plan to ride into orbit. Their mischievous venture has gone down in history and helped make them famous, and the tale is recounted by one of the girls, in a jaunty off-hand manner, many years later. The stylistic approach taken by Rusch is perfect for the material, and the light-hearted tale is both reminiscent of and respectful to the pulp era, while acknowledging its obvious faults.
“30” by Rich Larson is a great idea for an SF short story; reality has somehow splintered on a quantum level to enable people to see, but not interact, with other iterations of themselves, as they may exist in parallel realities. The protagonist (who’s approaching 30) sees instances of himself daily which appear to be happier, more successful, or wealthier than he is, and never seems to see any version of himself who’s doing less well. The set up is great and a bit surreal, though it seems to end rather abruptly and perhaps makes less of a great concept than one might have hoped. Nevertheless, it’s well conceived and well written and is recommended.
“The Last Tutor” by Ursula Whitcher is a rather challenging novelette and is likely to split reader opinion. The protagonist Ise is a non-binary character (referred to by the pronoun ‘they’). Ise lives on a colonised world and is the daughter of a wealthy family who runs the local trains. These trains each have a convict installed in them, with hardwire connections to their minds to help run the engine. One train crashed sometime in the past and both the driver and the cybernetically-installed convict were killed. Ise dwells on this and seems to be the only one who has any concern for the convict who died. The prose here is dense and the author doesn’t make the proceedings clear or easy to follow. The use of the pronoun ‘they’ for the protagonist is somewhat problematical, as it’s used in scenes where there are two or more characters, such that the reader has to work out if ‘they’ is used to refer to the main character only, or multiple characters, given that most readers will naturally read ‘they’ as plural. This certainly interrupts the flow of the story. The author also makes frequent use of expletives, not in dialogue, but simply for effect. However, the effect here is to make the story and characters appear colder, angrier, and less sympathetic than would otherwise have been the case. The rather dense and occasionally awkward purple prose is unfortunate, as there are some interesting SF world-building and good ideas buried here.
“Destiny Delayed” by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is an interesting short SF story that’s worth a read. In Nigeria, the technology to track and analyse souls and human destinies are in development and are already secretly in commercial use by the major banks. One scientist who is desperate for cash gets a loan held against his daughter’s adult destiny. But can he pay it back in time, and what happens if he doesn’t? This is an intriguing idea and seems like a genuinely novel concept. The writing is fresh and readable, using a direct and simple style that suits this rather fantastical tale. This is certainly not ‘hard’ SF, but it’s refreshing to see an SF story that so overtly prioritises an interesting idea over technological likelihood.
“The Wine-Dark Deep” by Sheila Finch is a rather good novelette and also worth a read. Finch is now an octogenarian, though there’s nothing here that might indicate her seniority. An American marine biologist, who specialises in cephalopod communication, is invited to fly to Greece to assess some pictographic markings that were recently discovered on the walls of a deep underwater cave. Who could have made the markings, and how might she unravel the mystery? The characterisation is good, the prose is well paced and engaging, and the SF idea is clever and well considered. Recommended.
In “The Leviathan and the Fury” by Andrea Kriz a historian relives the years during WWII in the French resistance and the political years thereafter, trying to subtly change the outcome for the better each time. The ‘leviathan’ in the tale appears to represent the protagonist’s power over time, though it is not clearly explained; the leviathan “thrashed beneath,” “rears its head,” “stirs within me,” and so on. The ‘fury’ refers to the multiplicity of histories the protagonist has lived through and has a similar meaning to its use in Macbeth, perhaps (“life is a tale… full of sound and fury”). This all sounds very literary, and that is perhaps a principle aim of the tale. Whether it really works well, I’m slightly less sure. The story focusses on the protagonist meeting an old mentor to try and persuade him to speak with de Gaulle regarding the French Presidency. It’s densely structured, clever, but rather dry, and doesn’t really nail the landing.
“Silverado” by R. Garcia y Robertson is an SF novelette that is difficult to summarize. This is a story that switches between chapters set in the ‘real world’ and those set in virtual realities. Amanda, a teenage girl still at school, is also the commander of a military spaceship in the vicinity of Jupiter’s moons. Amanda and her contemporaries live out their lives partially in virtual reality (“3V”) worlds, which seem to have legally-binding ramifications (in respect to debts, arrest warrants and so on). This doesn’t stop the protagonists from committing heinous crimes in 3V, however, though perhaps they would have had an easier time of it if they didn’t. Amanda spends much of her time in a simulacrum of Tombstone, Arizona in 1881, where she lives a riotous life as a gunslinger with her cousin and a friend named Cole, and where they all get into trouble with law enforcement (yes indeed, with Wyatt Earp). The importance of the scenes set in Tombstone and how they connect to the sections set on the spaceship is not entirely clear. In the spaceship chapters, ‘bad people’ (who are not described) are trying to blow up the ship, arrest the key characters and wage war. I’m sure there’s a reason for all this; indeed, we’re told there is a war on, though who the belligerents are, or why there’s a war, isn’t clearly explained. It’s almost as if this was a rather jumpy, confusing chapter in the middle of a novel, not a standalone novelette. Perhaps with multiple readings it might make more sense, but the inclination to return to it is not strong.
“The Waylost Café” by James Van Pelt is a well-conceived story that will appeal to readers who enjoy adventure on alien, colonised worlds. A down-on-his-luck brewer gets a job at a pub located on the frontier of a colonised world. The forests of this world give off an intoxicating pollen that enables them to trap and consume those who don’t take precautions against this danger. As well as tending bar and brewing ale for the pub, the man is also responsible for visitors who may get lost in these dangerous woods. Things go awry when two girls get lost, and he undertakes to rescue them. The idea of intoxicating plants on alien worlds doesn’t come across as especially novel, but Van Pelt does a good job of selling the scenario. Characterisation is good, and it wraps up in quite a satisfying manner.
“Meryl’s Cocoon” by Zack Be tells the tale of the titular musical band (a young female duo) in a future in which musical appreciation is no longer mostly from humans. AI identities (referred to by humans as ‘sims’) tend to make up the great majority of attendees at music gigs, where they dance wildly, but not in response to the same auditory and contextual input as people. This is making Nia (one half of the band) increasingly unsatisfied with their musical career, while Brit is more sanguine about it. Things come to a head when Brit suggests inviting an AI player to join them for some concerts. Overall, the tale is quite engaging and enjoyable. It is very difficult to provide a convincing impression of music through prose, especially when it is music of the future, but the author does a pretty good job here by focussing on the energy of the performances, rather than the actual sound, and by centering the tale largely on conversations between the girls before and after the gigs.
“The Abacus and the Infinite Wheel” by Vikram Ramakrishnan reads well and is nice enough, if one accepts the central premise, which is a bit of a stretch. A university professor dies a week before he was due to emigrate to Mars for work and was going to take his wife and daughter with him. Following the man’s death, his wife and daughter travel to Mars anyway. When they arrive at Mars after months in a deep sleep, the Martian university is surprised to discover the husband is not with them. The wife then needs to find work to remain on Mars, or she will have to return to Earth, in some shame. It seemed inconceivable to me that the wife and her six year old child would be allowed on the spacecraft to Mars once her husband had died, given they were only going as the man’s family. However, if we gloss over this, the tale itself is quite brightly told, and the Indian cultural background of the family is fairly interesting. For what is ostensibly ‘hard’ SF, the author makes a bit of a scientific clanger: it is noted that a representation of the stars as they look from Earth are provided in some residence quarters, to help maintain a connection with Earth. However, the constellations look exactly the same from Mars as they do from Earth anyway, of course.
“First Fish” by Bruce McAllister is a super, creepy, little tale of alien contact. It’s so short, it’s hard to say much more without giving away the story, which would be a shame. A little reminiscent of Clifford Simak’s pastoral alien visitations, but with a darker edge, this is well worth a quick read. Less can be more.
“Necklace of Memory” by Robert Reed continues the author’s long-running Great Ship series of novels and stories. For those who don’t know, the ‘Great Ship’ is a planet-sized alien spaceship, found drifting and empty by humanity, who take possession and pilot it throughout the galaxy, taking on and dropping off alien species as residents for eons thereafter. The stories are all set in the very far future and combine highly imaginative ideas with extremely advanced technology. This novelette is no exception and will doubtless appeal to Great Ship fans. A ‘woman’ is taken into custody for murder, under suspicion of genocide and discovered to be a construct, with a bioceramic (and therefore everlasting) brain. Clearly, she is not simply human, and over time she reveals to Ash, her human interrogator, her understanding of the nature of the universe, as a ‘necklace of memory’. Ultimately, the various ideas in this story do coalesce into a conclusion of sorts, but it’s not trivial to follow. In the foreword to the story, Reed notes that while the logic of his ideas sometimes ‘fades away’ as he writes, he’s confident that isn’t the case here. I’m not quite so certain that it all makes sense, but each reader will decide for themselves, perhaps. One slight issue I have with the story is that we are told Ash has unique capabilities as an interrogator, but we are not shown any evidence of this and have to take it on trust. One wonders if Reed has written so many Great Ship stories by now, that he’s assuming readers have a better grasp and knowledge of the ship, its extremely speculative technology and its people, than may often be the case.
More of Mike Bickerdike’s reviews and thoughts on science-fiction can be found at https://starfarersf.nicepage.io/