Asimov’s, March 2008

In the March, 2008, issue of Asimov’s, Brian Stableford depicts a world overrun by biotech in “Following the Pharmers.” Daniel Anderson has retired to a remote part of the Yorkshire Everglades, hoping to be left alone. He once worked for a big pharmaceutical corporation, but has now virtually stopped growing bio-engineered plants—keeping only a few simple crops to make a living on. But when artificial alates make their appearance on his veranda, he is forced to make the acquaintance of his new neighbour, Judith Hillinger, a powerful and well-connected plant engineer.

Stableford depicts a fascinating world, where plants can be engineered to produce anything and where genetic artists make flamboyant gestures by creating new varieties of psychotropics. The mounting tension between Hillinger and Anderson makes for a taut narration; and even the slight infodump near the story’s close is forgiven in the light of the single, shattering moment of revelation that forms the pivot of the plot. Recommended.

In “Kallakak’s Cousins,” Cat Rambo takes a familiar scenario—the struggle of the small entrepreneur to survive against more ruthless forces—and transplants it to an unfamiliar setting. In this case, Kallakak—a multi-armed alien with a bladder problem and an inability to lie—has a small souvenir shop in a busy thoroughfare aboard a space station. His business, established over a number of years with his wife, since departed, is threatened with takeover by a pair of Jellidoos, humanoid life-forms who have concocted a prior claim on the space occupied by the shop. Given the volatile nature of the station’s political and administrative system—‘twould seem that administrators who serve only a short spell in post in between changes in government are very susceptible to bribes—there’s a high probability that Kallakak will lose everything. The situation is compounded by the arrival of Tedesla, Desla, and Sla, three cousins of of Kallakak’s absent wife. Unlike most Ballabels—who are born as one of a pair of twins—the cousins were born as “a disreputable and unlucky triad.” The narrative traces Kallakak’s efforts to deal with their apparent dependence on him and to resist the Jellidoos attempts to cheat him out of his business.

Despite being taken with the quirkiness of Kallakak’s character, his resistance to aggression—or what he calls “dominance rituals”—and his essential decency, the story’s playfulness borders on the annoyingly whimsical. Even when things appear at their worst for him, there’s no real sense of threat, no tension with which to spike the reader’s interest. I found myself more concerned with the interaction between Kallakak and the cousins, and the reappearance of the Jellidoos at the end felt intrusive. Where the narrative’s energy originally seemed to stem from the negotiations and threatened conflict between two separate species, Rambo’s own innate desire to explore the relationship between Kallakak and his in-laws dissipates the story’s drive and leaves us with a too neat ending that was already signalled midway through.

“The World Within the World” by Steven Utley features a haunted jump station, one with a computer that keeps beeping for no comprehensible reason. The crew of the station spin a variety of hypotheses about the mysterious beeping.

I must confess that even after rereading this story several times, the significance of the ending eludes me. The discussion about the metaphysical phenomena that might lie behind the beeps is interesting, if not groundbreaking. I am probably trying to read too much into this; you should give it a try and see what you think.

In “Shoggoths in Bloom” by Elizabeth Bear, Professor Harding hires out a boat to study the shoggoths: huge jelly creatures who cling to the rocks of the coast of Maine and seemingly live forever. Harding is a veteran of the Great War—and trying very hard not to pay too much attention to the developing World War II across the Atlantic.

Bear depicts her setting with authenticity, tackling issues of race and social class in addition to Harding’s quest to understand the shoggoth lifecycle. The histories of Harding and of the shoggoth race meld together in a short, powerful climax that wraps this novelette up perfectly.

Ian Creasey’s “This is How it Feels” suggests that social behaviour can be modified and corrected through the use of implants that trigger powerful empathetic responses to specific emotional scenarios. Nathan, a salesman and conscientious father, appears to be grieving over the death of his daughter, Jenny. With his wife away at work, he tries to cope with looking after his young son as well as fulfilling the onerous round of travel, meetings, conference calls, and targets demanded by his job. Jenny, it seems, was killed by a speeding car, an event which has affected Nathan to the extent that he barely crawls along in his own BMW.

However, as Creasey alerts us very early in the story, things are not what they appear to be. As Nathan tries to circumvent the grief, he tells himself that “it isn’t real,” and soon we realise that his feelings are prompted by an implant which has been programmed with the very real distress of a father whose daughter has been killed by a speeding motorist. Nathan has chosen to be fitted with the implant in preference to losing his driver’s license after being caught speeding. Dependant on his car for work and arrogant enough to believe he can ride out the emotional storm, Creasey is good at delineating Nathan’s sense of being overwhelmed by sorrow, despair, and helplessness. His inability to cope and the crushing sense of guilt he feels are all convincingly rendered. The story is less successful in dealing with the consequences of a decision Nathan makes after failing to attend a sales meeting. The decision itself seems melodramatic, prompted more by Creasey’s desire to introduce a note of tension rather than by any narrative imperative. Rather than explore the other, perhaps more sinister, implications of the implant, Creasey foregrounds the inherent, but somewhat obvious, irony of the device making Nathan more human than he was.

In “Sepoy Fidelities” by Tom Purdom, the world has been taken over by the alien tucfra—who have settled in an artificial desert paradise and who keep a tight grip on the politics of many countries. Their technology of transferring minds into artificially-grown bodies allows them to use human agents who take on new identities as their missions require it. Jason and Francesca are two of those agents whose goal is to rescue Michael Gratzhausen, the ruler of the Commonwealth of Sovereign Jersey, from a band of terrorists.

Purdom paints a fascinating world, and I was most interested in the character of Jason—a former paralysed man who owes loyalty to his tucfra masters because of the new, fully functional body they gave him, but who cannot help questioning the cold-blooded orders the tucfra give him. His budding relationship with Francesca is well-done. However, the story felt overlong at times, and I was more interested in the original setting than in the plot, which is a fairly pedestrian rescue operation. But nevertheless, it’s worth a read.

In “Spiders” by Sue Burke, the narrator, who lives on a colonised planet, takes his son, Roland, out for a walk in the forest. This is far from innocuous, as the forest is an unfamiliar setting for the colonists—one which holds a variety of animals, not all harmless.

I liked the setting of “Spiders,” but the story never coalesced for me. The walk turns into a catalogue of odd fauna and flora on the planet, which, while interesting, did little to advance the plot. Also, while the underlying tension between Roland’s mother—who, like many of the colonists, wanted to stay in the enclosed, safe places of the city—and the narrator—who is genuinely curious about the native creatures—made for an interesting overall theme, I felt the ending failed to fit in with the rest.

“Master of the Road to Nowhere” by Carol Emshwiller is told in snatches by a group of outcasts living on the fringes of society. They are guided by Grandma, one of the oldest women among them. Their Big Man (and the narrator), Janeson, is responsible for scavenging food and other resources from the nearby cities and villages. But the position of Big Man is open to anyone who can beat Janeson, and Janeson himself dreams of marrying Rosalia—an impossibility in this matrilinear society.

I loved the description of the group’s customs; how they manage to survive on the edge of the society we know is completely believable. Emshwiller succeeds admirably in depicting an alien way of thinking but one we can still empathize with. I was less convinced by the ending, though, and had to reread it several times to understand what truly happened.

[Reviewed by Aliette de Bodard except for “Kallakak’s Cousins” by Cat Rambo and “This is How it Feels” by Ian Creasey which were reviewed by Mike O’Driscoll.]