The Metric by David Moles (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2021) opens on a far future Earth with a spaceship crashing near the city of Septentrion after the vessel is forced out of the metric (a universe wide system developed aeons ago which has its nexus on Earth). When a rescue party from the nearby city of Septentrion arrives, one of the members called Piper spots something in the wreckage, and he races his twin Petal to get to it.
When Petal arrives first and picks up a small sphere a stranger appears beside him and starts talking to the pair in an unknown language. One of the other group members gets their armour to translate what he is saying: they learn that the universe is ending.
Piper and Petal subsequently take the sphere and its intelligence, which calls itself Tirah, back to the city. Tirah applies for provisional citizenship and requests the fabrication of a body. While this happens, we learn about Tirah’s home world:

Hoddmimis Holt, the world that had sent Tirah, had been built perhaps two hundred million years ago, as Septentrion counted years; built when there were still stars in the sky, and when ships like Thus is the Heaven still plied the metric, knitting a web that spanned galaxies, even as the quintessence was drawing those galaxies apart, emptying the spaces between the stars to drown each galaxy alone in red darkness. It was a great city, as Petal understood it, built mostly of things more clever and more enduring than brute matter: nootic mass, dissociated fields, knots of space-time akin to the metric itself; and home only to purely computational intelligences, as far beyond the computationals of Septentrion as the Holt itself was beyond Septentrion’s towers of carbon and crystal.
The Holt was made in nearly full knowledge of the inevitability of the quintessence and the limitations of the metric, and made to last. Its makers poised it on the edge of a singularity with the mass of twenty billion stars, the core of a galaxy far from humanity’s birthplace, a black hole so enormous that even light would take days to girdle its vast event horizon; and there it spun, balanced at the equilibrium point between the singularity’s hungry mass and the even hungrier quintessence. p. 26

The passage above gives you a good idea of the baroque and information-dense style of the story but, in the next few pages, the detail of Tirah’s warning becomes clearer and we learn that the quintessence is slowly destroying the universe. The metric, a system built to ameliorate the effects of the quintessence, needs to be shut down otherwise space-time will not come to an end—and this will prevent a new universe being born.
Tirah subsequently petitions the City Authority to shut down the metric but is unsuccessful (funnily enough, no-one wants the Earth and the Universe to come to an end before it has to). Tirah is then confined to the Archive grounds, but Petal, after discussing the matter with Gauge (a “motile” from the Archive), helps Tirah escape. When Piper realises that Petal and Tirah intend making the long overland journey to another city called Meridian, he and the rest of what remains of the rescue team are tasked to follow and retrieve them.
The second half of the story is devoted to the long overland trek that Petal and Tirah (and their pursuers) make in arctic conditions that prevail over most of this far-future Earth. Along the way there are deserted wastelands, buried cities, messages from their pursuers which make the pair detour, and periods when there is no light at all:

Petal and Tirah made more than twenty leagues that first day, the flat land of the lakeshore giving way to rolling hills, and there was just no reason to stop, not when Petal didn’t feel tired, not when the going was so easy, and Tirah so light in Petal’s arms. Petal could have kept on, continuing into the dark. But the scale of what they’d done, what Petal was committing to, was starting to sink in.
They’d outrun the storm, or it had passed over them, and they were under a clear black sky with only a faint dusting of silver sparks, very high up, that Tirah said was probably debris from colliding mirrors. The snow was smooth and very flat and seemed, through the armor’s eyes, to shine with its own light.
“What will it be like?” Petal asked—meaning the new cosmos. “Will there be stars?”
“Not to be known,” Tirah said. “It might be the same. It might be different. What’s most important is that it will be.”
Petal’s hand sought and found Tirah’s.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Petal said.
Tirah said nothing.
They couldn’t really touch, not through the armor, and in this cold the armor wouldn’t have opened if Petal had asked. But it was almost as though they could.
Three thousand leagues, Petal and Tirah, just the two of them.
And at the end of it, the end of the world. p. 36

Eventually, after a hundred and seventy days on the ice, Petal and Tirah reach Meridian, only to see that parts of the city are on fire because of misaligned orbital mirrors. Then they realise that they are going to have to go through a restricted area (Petal’s armour and life support system tells him, “Under the terms of the 57th Diatagmatic Symbasis and its implementing regulations and orders, entry to the peripheral conservation area is permitted only to authorized persons”). They nearly make it, but are caught by the city cohorts.
Petal is taken to a cell and (spoiler) is surprised to see it is already occupied by Piper—he and his team arrived earlier as they used a crawler to travel overland. Petal also learns that several members of his old team died on the way.
Petal and Piper are then taken to the city, where they meet another old colleague, Hare, and then learn that Tirah will be allowed to see the sacella to make his case for shutting down the metric. Petal wants to go with him, and tells Piper to come along.
The final scene sees Tirah attempt to approach the sacella, but he is a machine and is disintegrated before he can speak with them. The twins, after some existential agonising, take his place—and the story ends with the implication that they are successful (the chapter headings form a temporal countdown throughout the story, with the last one being TΩ-2×103—thirty three minutes before TΩ).
This story struck me as the kind of piece that a more cerebral and current day Planet Stories might use—a enjoyably high density (there is as much detail here as some novels) super-science tale set on an exotic, far-future Earth, and one which ends with the death and rebirth of the universe!
***+ (Good to Very Good).1 16,300 words. Story link.

1. I liked this story (a Theodore Sturgeon Award finalist, by the way) better than all the other novelette finalists in the Asimov’s Readers’ Poll for 2021. I don’t know how this one didn’t make the cut—too complex, too hard a read?

The Dark Ride by John Kessel (F&SF, January-February 2021)1 gets off to an engrossing start at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, where Leon Czolgosz is trying to assassinate President McKinley. When the crowds prevent Leon from getting near enough he decides to wait until the President returns to visit the Temple of Music.
To fill the time Leon wanders around the grounds of the Exposition looking at the exhibits and later decides to go on “A Trip to the Moon”. This is supposedly an aerial trip to the moon followed by an excursion to an underground city for an audience with the ruling Grand Lunar.
As Leon listens to the guide’s entertaining pre-flight briefing he wonders if McKinley has been on the ride, and thinks about the possibility of assassinating him on the surface of the Moon. Then his thoughts turn to a woman called Emma Goldman, an anarchist activist Leon has seen speaking and has briefly talked with. (Later on in the story, Leon goes to her home in an attempt to become more involved in the anarchist movement, and his infatuation with Goldman is one of the factors influencing his desire to kill the President). Eventually, after the guide has finished the briefing, Leon and the other passengers go through a set of double doors to board the airship:

As they ascended, they passed through clouds of mist. A storm arose. The wind increased, lightning flashed, thunder echoed, the airship shook. The young women clutched their boyfriends’ arms. The breeze became a gale.
Then they were past the storm and into outer space. Below, Leon could see the outline of Lake Erie shrinking until all of North America was visible. As they continued to rise, the entire Earth shrank to a disk, falling back into the distance.
It was a vision of the world that one never had. The entire human race lived on that one planet. All history, the rise and fall of nations, the great conflicts, the great achievements, had occurred on that sphere. What differences existed between human beings that could compare with the fact that they shared the Earth? Except they didn’t share it. Some people owned it, and others did not. Humans had invented ownership, and it had taken over their minds.
He observed his fellow passengers. The bourgeois man held his wife’s gloved hand and whispered something into her ear. The two couples were laughing, the fellow with his sleeves rolled up sliding his arm around the blonde’s waist.
The clouds began to clear and stars came out on all sides, bright, clear pinpoints in the blackness. Ahead, the Moon hove into view, with the grinning face of the Man in the Moon.
What hokum. Leon shifted in his seat.  p. 96

After Leon arrives on a vegetation covered Moon the story cuts to Leon outside the attraction after the trip is complete. He decides to go to the Temple of Music and join the queue to meet the President and, in the line, he gets talking to a tall, black man called Parker (Leon can’t work out why a black man wants to shake McKinley’s hand given the Republicans sold out the blacks in the election of 1896).
As Leon waits in line we also get more backstory about his family background (his mother died and his father remarried an unsympathetic woman), his involvement in labour politics (dangerous practices and strikes and black-listing), and his general disillusionment with capitalism and the church. Leon also finds a baby bottle-like nipple in his pocket but can’t remember where he got it, or what happened on the trip after they arrived at the Moon.
McKinley eventually arrives, the queue moves forward, and Leon reaches the President and shoots him twice. Leon is restrained by Parker and almost shot out of hand by a soldier shortly afterwards, but McKinley (who is injured and will die of an infection two weeks later) intervenes.
The rest of the story mostly alternates between an account of Leon’s subsequent treatment and questioning by the authorities, and flashbacks to what happened after he arrived on the Moon during his trip. During these latter scenes the trip metamorphoses from an exhibition attraction to what appears to be a pulp adventure:

Dark at first, the cave grew darker still as they advanced, and the women drew closer to their escorts. Gradually a blue light rose around them. Farther in were lights of crimson and gold. Jewels gleamed in the rough walls. The cave opened into a chamber large enough to hold all of the earthlings. Here were more Selenites, small females whose long hair draped undone over the shoulders of their glittering gowns. A couple of them played stringed instruments. All bowed their heads when the visitors were assembled.
The little males bent sideways and looked up at them. The spiky tops of their heads looked like cactus plants. They smiled and shook hands with the passengers.
All this struck a chord in Leon. Earlier that summer, lying around his rented room in West Seneca through a sweltering July, out of work, spending down his savings, Leon had passed his time reading newspapers and magazines. In Cosmopolitan he had read a scientific romance by the British writer H. G. Wells titled The First Men in the Moon, about a failed businessman named Bedford and a crazy scientist named Cavor who flew to the Moon in an antigravity ship. Wells’s moon had giant fungi on its surface and was honeycombed with caverns where lived insectile Selenites. Clearly the designers of the Trip to the Moon had read Wells’s story and turned it into this exotic music hall show.
Although these were midgets and children, and the grotto was constructed of plaster, in the blue light and the play of shadows the faux rock looked real, and out of the corner of his eye, Leon was startled when one or another of the Selenites moved in a way that no human might move. That one in the corner, bent forward, head wobbling—it looked more like a big drunken grasshopper than a person. But when Leon peered at it, he saw it was just a sideshow midget dressed up in green tights and bloomers.
To the right and left, visible between glowing stalactites, shadowed galleries ran off into darkness, giving the illusion that this complex must reach far below the Pan-American fairgrounds. The air was cool. They followed the guide and the Selenite captain through another tunnel. The floor trembled with a vibration that made Leon think of the machines in the wire mill, and in the distance he thought he heard twittering. As he passed one of the openings, he glimpsed some large, pale thing in the darkness, something like a huge slug, heaving along the floor on no legs.  pp. 104-105

The rest of the story limns Leon’s interrogation and trial, and also his escapades on the Moon. The former thread begins with Leon’s examination by two alienists (during this we learn of a infatuation with a prostitute who eventually refuses to marry him as she earns more than he does), his dissociation from the events surrounding the assassination, and then his regret at his actions (he thinks at length about the effect on his family and the on the President’s epileptic wife, “In killing her husband, Leon was killing her as surely as if he had put a bullet in her belly, too”).
Meanwhile on the Moon, Leon rescues Wilma, one of the dancing slave girls from the court of the Grand Lunar and, after Leon kills a number of pursuing Selenite warriors (“Leon’s fist broke through the thing’s skull as if it were an eggshell”), the pair descend down into the lunar tunnels. They briefly stop to eat some of the mushrooms that grow everywhere and drink the glowing water (Wilma says it glows because “it is infused with a miraculous invigorating element, radium”). Next, they arrive at a child factory, where the next generation of human slaves are grown—soon to become “cogs in the Grand Lunar’s industrial machine”. Leon is particularly horrified when he sees very young children crammed into bottles with only their arms free, a modification intended to make them more efficient machine tenders. Finally, the pair arrive at the secret chamber of the Brotherhood of Lunar Workers, where Wilma’s comrades thank Leon for her rescue. Then, after he learns more about the evil rule of the Selenites, he agrees to use his pistol to assassinate the Grand Lunar.
So far, so anti-capitalist (and, in places, anti-church). However, the last section of the story (spoiler) did not go where I thought it was going (e.g. a successful anti-capitalist uprising on the Moon as opposed to Leon’s presumed failure to change anything on Earth). Instead we see Leon’s attempt to kill the Gran Lunar fail when he is disarmed by a whip-like tentacle as he draws his pistol in the middle of another tour party visit.
Finally, as Leon argues with a priest in his cell shortly before his execution, the two threads of the story merge together:

The priest sighed. It was dark in the cell, and Leon could not make out his expression. Leon looked out of the cell into the gallery, where the sunset light had turned everything so bright that he had to squint.
“Many things you think you know are wrong,” the priest said.
His voice sounded different, sibilant and high pitched.
Leon turned to face him, and everything was changed. The cell was altered, larger, much larger. It wasn’t a cell anymore; it was a vast cavern dimly lit with blue light. His cot and his shit bucket were gone. It was foolish even to expect such things in this place, ornately decorated and suffused with a glowing blue mist. Around them stood a horde of misshapen, dark figures. The priest, too, was changed. He did not sit on the wooden stool but on a dais, and it was not the priest at all, but rather some monstrous thing with a huge head and a tiny face. Around it hovered insectile creatures carrying odd devices. One of them sprayed a cooling mist around the monster’s great dome of a skull.
“You are about to die,” the Grand Lunar said, “but before you do, we would take it as a courtesy if you would answer some questions for us.”  pp. 144-145

The next two pages sees the Grand Lunar give a spirited defence of the benefits of Lunarian society, and a critique of Leon’s ideas about freedom. Some of the Grand Lunar’s comments are sophistry, but the pair’s final exchange suggests that the story may be more about the use of political violence to achieve one’s aims rather than the shortcomings of capitalism:

The Grand Lunar said, “Your heart is full of anger. Tell me this: What happens when a free human wants something, and another wants the same thing?”
“They share.”
“Is this what happens on Earth?”
Leon would not lie. “Sometimes they fight, and one wins and the other loses.”
“So the freedom you speak of only means that people will discover reasons to fight one another.”
“They have the ability to share. No one has to own or be owned. We can preserve good things and make new ones that are equally good. We can give ourselves freely and love one another.”
“And that is why you attempted to kill me? You would bring down the order that we have created over generations, which has tamed the lunar world and created this vast number of variegated beings, in order to replace it with a teeming conflict of individuals in the hope that they will not fall to killing each other. They will ‘give themselves freely and love one another.’”
“Yes. They will.”
“Why, then, is your Earth not a paradise?”
“Not everybody can do it, yet. The powerful ones repress the others. The violent ones insist on imposing their will. There are—”
“Yes, I see. I see one such in front of me.” The Grand Lunar slowly closed his eyes and opened them again. He waved a feeble arm at one of his attendants. “Take this one to be executed.”  pp. 146-147

The last scene sees Leon back in prison and in the execution room. Then, after he is strapped in to the electric chair, the Grand Lunar gives the order to proceed (we are back on the Moon again), but Wilma and her rebels arrive to rescue him—presumably this Leon’s dying fantasy.
This a very impressive piece of work that manages to blend a historical account of a real event, the psychological study of an assassin, political commentary about capitalism and resistance to that system, and a pulp action adventure into a highly readable, entertaining and thought provoking piece (and one which, I suspect, will bear several re-readings). It also, perhaps, provides a timely examination of the use of political violence to achieve one’s ends.
****+ (Very Good to Excellent). 23,850 words. Purchase link (USA).

1. This was a finalist for the 2022 Theodore Sturgeon Award. I am really surprised that it was not on the Hugo and Nebula final ballot (especially the latter).

Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison (Amazing, June 1976) begins with two Highway Patrolmen taking Willis Kaw to identify the body of his daughter after she has been involved in a car accident (“The dark brown smear that began sixty yards west of the covered shape disappeared under the blanket”). We then see more of Kaw’s travails: he is a diabetic; his son, who is ninety-five per cent disabled, lives in a hospital; his house roof leaks in heavy rain; and so on. During these various trials Kaw thinks that he may be an alien:

He dreamed of his home world and—perhaps because the sun was high and the ocean made eternal sounds—he was able to bring much of it back. The bright green sky, the skimmers swooping and rising overhead, the motes of pale yellow light that flamed and then floated up and were lost to sight. He felt himself in his real body, the movement of many legs working in unison, carrying him across the mist sands, the smell of alien flowers in his mind. He knew he had been born on that world, had been raised there, had grown to maturity and then. . .
Sent away.
In his human mind, Willis Kaw knew he had been sent away for doing something bad. He knew he had been condemned to this planet, this Earth, for having perhaps committed a crime. But he could not remember what it was. And in the dream he could feel no guilt.  p. 35

Kaw later visits a psychotherapist and tells him about these alien thoughts and feelings, and speculates that Earth is a planet where bad people are sent to atone for their crimes. After listening his patient for some time, the psychotherapist recommends that Kaw places himself in an institution.
The story ends with Kaw committing suicide and (spoiler) he then finds himself being welcomed back to his home world by the Consul. When Kaw (now called Plydo) asks the Consul what he did to be banished to such a terrible place, the story flips the paradigm and Kaw/Plydo is told that he wasn’t being punished but honoured—life on Earth is so much better than on his home world!
The sophomoric message1 in this story, and the way it is delivered, is a useful reminder that Ellison didn’t do subtlety (or use Western Union).
* (Mediocre). 2,800 words. Story link.

1. Earth may have provided a pleasurable existence for a few but, for the vast majority of humanity throughout the ages, life has been short and brutal.

Good and Faithful Servant by Thomas F. Monteleone (Amazing, March 1976)1 begins with an exoskeleton clad future soldier called Denek reporting to his controller in Chicago that he has located approaching intruders and is going to engage. The subsequent combat sequence (which extends through the night and into the next day) sees him destroy three vehicles with laser and mortar fire. During the action we learn that Chicago may be the only world that Denek knows:

He wanted to finish this last one and return home. He missed the protective shell of the City, wrapped around him and the others like a great cocoon. It was incredible that anyone would wish to destroy Chicago. It was so unnatural to him, he could not understand.
What type of beings were the intruders? The question emerged slowly in his simple brain. Never seen, they were only known as an invading force that occasionally appeared on Chicago’s warning screens. Perhaps he would someday learn more about them.  p. 113

Before Denek leaves the battleground he notices one of the intruders is still moving. When he investigates he discovers it is a woman. Denek starts talking to her and learns that she is from another city state like Chicago, they have made a number of efforts to contact his city, and, unlike Denek and his fellow citizens who are controlled by Chicago’s computer, they are free.
Later that evening (spoiler) Denek takes off his exoskeleton and he and the woman make love but, when he wakes the next morning and puts it on again, the controls are overridden. Denek watches as his arm rises and the laser fires at the woman, killing her. The Chicago computer tells Denek that it is aware of what he did last night—and what he learned—before using the exoskeleton to tear his body apart.
This is a readable enough piece, but the action is fairly formulaic, and some may wonder why the computer didn’t override him the moment the woman started talking (thus saving itself a trained soldier).
** (Average). 4,200 words. Story link.  

1. This story and three other “Chicago” stories, Chicago (Future City, 1973), Breath’s a Ware That Will Not Keep (Dystopian Visions, 1975) and Far from Eve and Morning (Amazing, October 1977), were incorporated into the novel, The Time-Swept City (1977).

Stone Circle by Lisa Tuttle (Amazing, March 1976)1 opens with the narrator (after a short passage where, I think, she fantasises about being a huge stone statue) performing oral sex on a government inspector in exchange for meat (there are further indications that set this story in a totalitarian and oppressive society). After the inspector leaves, the building manager comes sniffing around and agrees to cook the meat for her.
When the narrator is later out in the street she ends up saving a young woman called Kit (who is under the influence of a drug called “Chill”) from being run over by a vehicle. Kit ends up going home with her and they become lovers.
After the couple have been together for a while, Kit—previously described as a “young revolutionary”—discovers there is an underground movement and starts meeting with two young men. The narrator isn’t interested in becoming involved, but agrees to let Kit and the men meet in her flat when one of the men loses his.
The final part of the story (spoiler) sees another government agent arrive at the flat to question the narrator about Kit, who is out at the time. He threatens to take the narrator’s flat away from her, before suggesting he will overlook the matter in exchange for sex. She gets undressed and he toys with her for a while before leaving abruptly. He tells her he will be back.
The narrator subsequently sees Kit kissing and groping one of the men in the stairwell of the building. Then, the next day, the narrator watches as the couple enter her flat on their own—at which point she betrays them to the government agent. Kit is not in the flat that evening, but the agent later turns up for sex.
There isn’t much to this brief piece apart from sexual exploitation and betrayal, a dystopian background, and some stone based imagery (“my marble flank”, “he’ll get no milk from my granite teat”, etc.). It’s hard to see what the point of all this is.
* (Mediocre). 4,150 words. Story link.

1. This story was a Nebula Award finalist.

The Album of Dr. Moreau by Daryl Gregory (Tor Novellas, 2021)1 opens with Bobby, a human-ocelot hybrid and one of the members of the boy band WyldBoyz, waking up after a huge after-tour drink and drug taking binge to find his manager, Dr M., lying beside him in bed. He has been brutally murdered and Bobby is covered in blood.
Bobby goes to get hold of the rest of the band members, who are also human-animal hybrids, and they assemble in Bobby’s room to examine the body and discuss what they are going to do. During this they talk about what happened the previous night and also allude to matters that they must not mention to the police.
At the end of this section Bobby says, “I’m going to need a really good publicist”. This, and an earlier hopeful comment, “Please don’t be a dead hooker”, are the first glimmerings that this is going to be an overtly humorous piece (I didn’t realise for sure until further on in the story).
After this set-up the point of view switches to Detective Lucia Delgado, who is assigned to the case with her partner detective Banks. Co-incidentally, Delgado has a daughter interested in the band:

[Melanie] was nine years old—dead center in the band’s demographic sweet spot of preteen females—and a huge fan. A poster of the band—the one where they’re wearing space suits from the Unleashed album—hung over her bed. Luce knew the names of every member of the band, because Melanie talked about them as if they were her personal friends. Devin, “the romantic one,” was three-quarters bonobo; Tim, “the shy one,” was a large percentage of pangolin; Matt, “the funny one,” was a giant bat; and Tusk, “the smart one,” was a hybrid elephant. Last but by no means least in the heart of Luce’s daughter (and on the LVMPD person-of-interest list) was “the cute one,” Bobby O.
Next to her mirror Melanie had pinned up a Tiger Beat cover filled with Bobby O’s face. The headline read: “O Is for Ocelot! We Luv a Lot!” And indeed, Melanie adored him. Last week Luce was feeling bad she hadn’t ponied up the $38.50 a ticket for the WyldBoyZ show at the Matador. She had zero interest in watching a bunch of genetically engineered manimals sing and dance like some Chuck E. Cheese nightmare, but Melanie would have lost her mind with joy. Now Luce was grateful she’d skipped.

The rest of the story sees Delgado and Banks investigate the murder and interview the members one at time (we get these interviews from Delgado’s point of view, and then a chapter from the band member’s point of view—which sometimes varies significantly from what they have told Delgado).
Sequentially, we see: (a) Bobby remembering a huge argument between the band and Dr M. about the imminent break-up of the group; (b) Devin revealing that he and Tusk created the songs (lyrics and music respectively) but that Dr M. owned the rights; (c) Tusk telling the detectives about the band’s escape from a barge that went on fire; (d) Luce and Banks finding a costume and the murder weapon in the toilets after watching a security video; and (e) Tim (the pangolin-hybrid) worrying about shell cancer and giving the detectives a one-page lecture on pop-song construction (an atypically dull section in the story2).
During this latter interview we also get the band’s origin story when Tim reveals that, after a fire on an illegal floating laboratory where they were experimental subjects, they drifted on a life-raft in the Pacific for two weeks before being rescued:

The fishermen towed them east for two days and cut them loose at Isla Isabella. “Oh my God,” Matt had said. “We’re in the Galápagos Islands. This is where Darwin figured out evolution.”
“Why are you laughing?” Tim asked.
“Because a hundred years ago, we could have fucked his shit up.”

We also learn that when the group finally got to mainland Peru they met Dr M. and Kat, their roadie (who Luce later discovers is pregnant).
Although this has the structure of a mystery story, a lot of it is played for laughs (Luce’s partner Banks has a stream of puns and one liners, e.g., “I’m sure we can get the pangolin to come out of his shell”), and hits peak humour when Luce interviews two members of the fan-club, who are as deranged and pedantic as you would expect—they explain in depth the differences between the two fan types that are “zoomies” and “zoomandos”. We also go beyond puns, one-liners and amusing scenes to metafictional humour in Matt’s interview, when he reels off a list of murder mystery writers and their asides to readers about the stories:

“I hate metafiction,” Delgado said.
Banks said, “A couple hours ago she was telling me we’re either in a locked-room mystery or a science fiction story. She said she really doesn’t want to be in sci-fi.”

A little while after this interview, Luce announces to Banks that she knows who committed the murder. Then, after a few more puzzle pieces are presented—there is a interview with Dr M.’s wife, the recovery of a missing laptop, and a short conversation with her Captain and two men who are supposedly “Fish and Wildlife” agents (and who who have a photograph of someone who looks like Kat’s twin brother)—Delgado discovers the laptop files include a capella versions of the band’s songs and a list of the subjects at the floating lab. She notes that all of them were terminated apart from the band members and the original experimental subject.
The climactic scene of the story (spoiler) sees the band flee the hotel (much to the chagrin of the two agents) but they later turn up at Delgado’s house. She tells them how she thinks the murder was committed (she thinks Matt is the murderer, if I recall correctly), and then the band tell her what actually occurred: Matt glided/bungee-jumped onto Dr M.’s balcony and opened the door so the rest of the band members and Kat could enter. They searched the room for the laptop and its incriminating information, and then Kat killed Dr M. to prevent him revealing the band’s secrets, mutilating his body to make it look like a deranged fan did it. Finally, we learn (a) Kat is the mother of all the WyldBoyz—she is the original protean subject on the list (I presume “protean” in this case means that she is able to give birth to various types of life), and (b) the Feds are closing in (the Fish and Wildlife guys actually work for a much more sinister department, the one that detained Kat during WWII and repeatedly made her give birth3). Also, during all this back and forth, Delgado’s daughter Melanie comes through briefly and ends up singing with her favourite band (this will no doubt be the finale in the musical of the story).
Overall this is an enjoyable read and one that is quite funny in places—as well as Banks’s puns, there are numerous amusing exchanges and scenes, mostly about boy bands, animals and their habits, and, as already mentioned, fans. There are also a lot of throwaway references to pre-2000 music, e.g. when the lack of a female band member comes up, one of them says “We’re not The Cure”—presumably a joke at the expense of the singer Robert Smith; also, when Dr M. forms the band in Peru, The Animals is discounted as a name.
I note that most of the humour is in the middle part of the story as, at the beginning and end, the mystery requirements are prioritised. And, while we are talking about the murder mystery aspects, I doubt that anyone could figure out the circumstances of the murder from the clues that are presented. The story is also a bit longer than it needs to be (it’s a very long novella), and there is no convincing explanation as to why the Feds, having let them remain free for so long, suddenly become interested in them at the end of the story.
*** (Good). 37,750 words. Purchase link.

1. This was a finalist for the 2022 Theodore Sturgeon Award.

2. The Apologies section at the end of the book reveals the song construction lecture comes from Gregory’s son, “I asked my second born, Ian Gregory, to write the first draft of Tim’s impassioned defense of pop music, and they gave me the perfect rant.”

3. It becomes obvious at this point in the story that Kat is a survivor from The Island of Dr Moreau.

The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr by George R. R. Martin (Fantastic, May 1976) opens with Sharra passing through a world gate. She has injuries from her fight with the gate’s guardian, and washes her wounds before falling asleep in a sheltered spot in the wood. Then Sharra regains consciousness to find that she is being lifted into the arms of a man. She is too weak to struggle, and he takes her to a nearby castle that was not there before.
When Sharra next wakes up she finds out that her saviour is called Laren Dorr, and the rest of the story sees them spend a month together at the castle (she agrees to stay and rest if he will show her where the next gate is). During this time, they talk and travel, and eventually become lovers.
From their conversations we learn the backstories of both characters: Sharra is making her way through various world gates as she searches for her lover, Kaydar, but the Seven don’t want her to succeed and have instructed the guardians of the gates to prevent her from passing; Dorr lost a battle with the Seven an age ago, was banished here, and has spent many years alone. Some of the information about Dorr is revealed through the songs that he sings for Sharra while playing an exotic sixteen-string instrument:

He touched it again, and the music rose and died, lost notes without a tune. And he brushed the light-bars and the very air shimmered and changed color.
He began to sing.
I am the lord of loneliness,
Empty my domain . . .
. . . the first words ran, sung low and sweet in Laren’s mellow far-off fog voice. The rest of the song—Sharra clutched at it, heard each word and tried to remember, but lost them all. They brushed her, touched her, then melted away, back into the fog, here and gone again so swift that she could not remember quite what they had been. With the words, the music; wistful and melancholy and full of secrets, pulling at her, crying, whispering promises of a thousand tales untold. All around the room the candles flamed up brighter, and globes of light grew and danced and flowed together until the air was full of color.
Words, music, light; Laren Dorr put them all together, and wove for her a vision.
She saw him then as he saw himself in his dreams; a king, strong and tall and still proud, with hair as black as hers and eyes that snapped. He was dressed all in shimmering white, pants that clung tight and a shirt that ballooned at the sleeves, and a great cloak that moved and curled in the wind like a sheet of solid snow.
Around his brow he wore a crown of flashing silver, and a slim, straight sword flashed just as bright at his side. This Laren, this younger Laren, this dream vision, moved without melancholy, moved in a world of sweet ivory minarets and languid blue canals. And the world moved around him, friends and lovers and one special woman whom Laren drew with words and lights of fire, and there was an infinity of easy days and laughter. Then, sudden, abrupt; darkness, he was here.  pp. 50-51

At the end of the month Shaara tells Dorr it is time for her to leave, and he takes her to the gate which, to Shaara’s surprise, is in third tower of the castle. On their arrival (spoiler), she is surprised to discover that there is no guardian present—at which point Dorr reveals himself and pushes her through the gate.
I thought this was a very good piece the first time I read it, but this time around I thought it was somewhat overwritten and a little slow-moving (see the passage above). That said, the part where Dorr pushes her through the gate rather than detain her is a neat twist (I think my subconscious was expecting him to be the guardian but I did not anticipate his actions) and, overall, it is a decent mood piece.
*** (Good). 7,250 words. Story link.

By Any Other Name by Spider Robinson (Analog, November 1976)1 is a post-collapse story—this time humanity’s fall is caused by the intentional release of a virus that hugely enhances human sense of smell and causes what is known as the Hypersomic Plague:

Within forty-eight hours [of the release of the virus] every man, woman and child left alive on earth possessed a sense of smell approximately a hundred times more efficient than that of any wolf that ever howled.
During those forty-eight hours, a little less than a fifth of the planet’s population perished, by whatever means they could devise, and every city in the world spilled its remaining life into the surrounding countryside. The ancient smell-suppressing system of the human brain collapsed under unbearable demand, overloaded and burned out in an instant.
The great complex behemoth called Modern Civilization ground to a halt in a little less than two days.  pp. 29-30

This change to the human sensorium also enables the afflicted survivors to detect an invisible, gaseous race of beings called “Muskies” who, once they discover that humans can sense them, go on the attack:

It is difficult for us to imagine today how it was possible for the human race to know of the Muskies for so long without ever believing in them. Countless humans reported contact with Muskies—who at various times were called “ghosts,” “poltergeists,” “leprechauns,” “fairies,” “gremlins,” and a host of other misleading labels—and not one of these thousands of witnesses was believed by humanity at large. Some of us saw our cats stare, transfixed, at nothing at all, and wondered—but did not believe—what they saw. In its arrogance the race assumed that the peculiar perversion of entropy called “life” was the exclusive property of solids and liquids.
Even today we know very little about the Muskies, save that they are gaseous in nature and perceptible only by smell. The interested reader may wish to examine Dr. Michael Gowan’s groundbreaking attempt at a psychological analysis of these entirely alien creatures. Riders of the Wind (Fresh Start Press, 1986).  pp. 31-32

If these two gimmicks sound like they stretch credulity to breaking point, they come close, and it is a testament to Robinson’s storytelling skills that he manages to hold the story together. I’m getting ahead of myself, however.
The tale opens with (unusually for the time) a black narrator called Isham Stone accidentally shooting a cat as he enters a post-apocalyptic New York (he is on edge, has an infected arm, and acts before thinking). Stone has travelled to the city to kill a man called Wendell Carlson, who Stone’s father has identified as the man responsible for the virus (Stone’s father worked with Carlson before the Plague).
When Stone reaches Central Park he stops for a rest, and is disturbed by an old leopard. He presumes the animal is a zoo escapee so he gives it something to eat, and then collapses with exhaustion. He smokes a joint, and thinks about his self-defence training and the mission that lies ahead of him.
After a little more post-collapse travelogue Stone eventually arrives at Columbia University, Carlson’s reported abode. He waits outside for Carlson to appear and, when he does, takes a shot—he misses, and is then attacked by six Muskies. Stone manages to kill five of them with his “hot-shot” shells and grenades before he loses consciousness.
The story then cuts, after another of the data-dump chapters (these post-plague accounts of the collapse of civilization and the advent of the Muskies alternate with Stone’s account of his journey), to Stone arriving back at Fresh Start to tell his father that he has killed Carlson.
The final section of the story then flashbacks to what actually happened after Stone woke up. This begins (spoiler) with Stone seeing that his arm has been partially amputated before Carlson arrives with food and drink and the news that he has been unconscious for a week. Then, as Stone begins his long recovery, he is informed of two significant pieces of information: (a) Carlson has learned to communicate with the Muskies; and (b) Stone’s father (Carlson’s laboratory assistant before the plague) was the one who was responsible for releasing the virus.
The final scene sees Stone back in Fresh Start, booby-trapping his father’s toilet with bleach (which produces chlorine gas when mixed with an appropriate substance). Stone knows his father has had his adenoids removed and that he will not, unlike the rest of the residents of Fresh Start, be able to smell the gas.
As I said above, these plot elements (and the data-dump chapters) do not suggest a promising piece but, while the story isn’t worthy of a Hugo Award,2 it is an engaging read because of Robinson’s informal narrative style—the narrator effectively chats to the reader—and its passages of effective description:

This old cat seemed friendly enough, though, now that I noticed. He looked patriarchal and wise, and he looked awful hungry if it came to that. I made a gambler’s decision for no reason that I can name. Slipping off my rucksack slowly and deliberately. I got out a few foodtabs, took four steps toward the leopard and sat on my heels, holding out the tablets.
Instinct, memory or intuition, the big cat recognized my intent and loped my way without haste. Somehow the closer he got the less scared I got, until he was nuzzling my hand with a maw that could have amputated it. I know the foodtabs didn’t smell like anything, let alone food, but he understood in some empathic way what I was offering—or perhaps he felt the symbolic irony of two ancient antagonists, black man and leopard, meeting in New York City to share food. He ate them all, without nipping my fingers. His tongue was startlingly rough and rasping, but I didn’t flinch, or need to. When he was done he made a noise that was a cross between a cough and a snore and butted my leg with his head.  p. 35

*** (Good). 23,850 words. Story link.

1. This story forms the first six chapters (about a quarter of the length) of the novel Telempath (1976).

2. I suspect that Robinson’s Hugo was more a popularity award given variously for his convention presence, opinionated book review columns in Galaxy (I think the first one was subtitled Spider Versus the Hax of Sol III), and possibly his “Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon” story series. Robinson’s ISFDB page.

The Burning Man by Ray Bradbury (Long After Midnight, 1976)1 opens with a boy called Doug and his Aunt Neva driving to the lake in a “rickety Ford” on a baking hot day. On the way they stop to pick up a hitchhiker, a strange man who, as soon he gets in the car, starts raving about the heat, whether it can make you crazy, and various other things. Eventually, after asking Neva if she thinks there is genetic evil in the world, he articulates his strangest idea yet:

“Now,” said the man, squinting one eye at the cool lake five miles ahead, his other eye shut into darkness and ruminating on coal-bins of fact there, “listen. What if the intense heat, I mean the really hot hot heat of a month like this, week like this, day like today, just baked the Ornery Man right out of the river mud. Been there buried in the mud for forty-seven years, like a damn larva, waiting to be born. And he shook himself awake and looked around, full grown, and climbed out of the hot mud into the world and said, ‘I think I’ll eat me some summer.’”
“How’s that again?”
“Eat me some summer, boy, summer, ma’am. Just devour it whole. Look at them trees, ain’t they a whole dinner? Look at that field of wheat, ain’t that a feast? Them sunflowers by the road, by golly, there’s breakfast. Tarpaper on top that house, there’s lunch. And the lake, way up ahead, Jehoshaphat, that’s dinner wine, drink it all!”
“I’m thirsty, all right,” said Doug.
“Thirsty, hell, boy, thirst don’t begin to describe the state of a man, come to think about him, come to talk, who’s been waiting in the hot mud thirty years and is born but to die in one day! Thirst! Ye Gods! Your ignorance is complete.”
“Well,” said Doug.
“Well,” said the man. “Not only thirst but hunger. Hunger. Look around. Not only eat the trees and then the flowers blazing by the roads but then the white-hot panting dogs. There’s one. There’s another! And all the cats in the country. There’s two, just passed three! And then just glutton-happy begin to why, why not, begin to get around to, let me tell you, how’s this strike you, eat people? I mean—people! Fried, cooked, boiled, and parboiled people. Sunburned beauties of people. Old men, young. Old  ladies’ hats and then old ladies under their hats and then young ladies’ scarves and young ladies, and then young boys’ swim-trunks, by God, and young boys, elbows, ankles, ears, toes, and eyebrows! Eyebrows, by God, men, women, boys, ladies, dogs, fill up the menu, sharpen your teeth, lick your lips, dinner’s on!”

At this point Aunt Neva, who is obviously alarmed by the man’s raving, stops the car and tells him to get out, adding that she is armed with various items to ward off evil (crucifixes, holy water, wooden stakes, etc.). Aunt Neva and Doug continue their journey to the beach, and he learns that she lied to the man about being suitably equipped.
After a few hours at the lake they drive home in the dark. On the way (spoiler) they pick up a nine-year-old boy who has supposedly been left behind after a picnic. He is silent for a while, but then says something to Aunt Neva that makes her go pale. When Doug asks the boy what he said the car’s engine stops, and the boy asks whether either of them have ever wondered “if there is such a thing as genetic evil in the world?”
This is, like most late-period Bradbury, over-written and fanciful, and in this case has also a random ending—presumably the boy is another incarnation of the man, but this doesn’t tie in with the creation theory outlined earlier, or explain why the man didn’t pull this trick when he was first in the car. Just because this is a fantasy, it doesn’t mean that any old thing can happen.
* (Mediocre). 2,400 words. Story link.

1. According to ISFDB, this was first published as El Hombre Que Ardea in Gente (Argentina), 31st July 1975.

Piper at the Gates of Dawn by Richard Cowper (F&SF, March 1976) opens1 with Peter, an old and itinerant tale-spinner, and Tom, the piper of the story, on the road to York as the third millennium approaches in a drowned, climate-changed, and post-collapse Britain.2 The pair pause by a stream to catch some dinner, which Tom apparently does by charming the fish out of the water with his pipe; while Tom plays Peter has a vision of a dragonfly, and then hears splashing when Tom successfully catches a huge salmon.
We see a further demonstration of Tom’s powers when the pair later approach a homestead which Peter lodged at years earlier:

They had passed almost through the herd before the farm dogs got wind of them. They came hurtling out from behind the stables, three lean, vicious-looking fell hounds, snarling and yelping in their eagerness to savage the intruders.
The boy stood his ground, calmly waited till the leader was but a short stone’s throw distant, then set the pipe to his lips and blew a series of darting notes of so high a pitch that the old man’s ears barely caught them. But the dogs did. They stopped almost dead in their tracks, for all the world as if they had run full tilt into a solid wall of glass. Next moment, the three of them were lying stretched out full length on the wet grass, whining, with their muzzles clasped in their forepaws and their eyes closed.  pp. 7-8

Shortly after this—once Peter tells the woman of the farm he stayed here before, and she realises he knows her husband—they are invited in. Then, when the young daughter of the house asks Tom to play, we learn that he was a pupil of Morfedd, The Wizard of Bowness, and that his pipe has been made for and also “tuned” to him. We also learn that Tom is now on his way to join the Minster Choir in York.
When the father and son return they all eat and, over dinner, we learn more about this primitive society, the “Drowning” that created it, and millennial rumours of peace and brotherhood that will soon be brought by “The White Bird of Kinship”. Then, after Peter tells a story of the times before the Drowning, Tom plays his pipe. After several tunes he plays a lament that he composed after Morfedd died:

To their dying day none of those present ever forgot the next ten minutes, and yet no two of them ever recalled it alike. But all were agreed on one thing. The boy had somehow contrived to take each of them, as it were, by the hand and lead them back to some private moment of great sadness in their own lives, so that they felt again, deep in their own hearts, all the anguish of an intense but long-forgotten grief. For most the memory was of the death of someone dearly loved, but for young Katie it was different and was somehow linked with some exquisite quality she sensed within the boy himself—something which carried with it an almost unbearable sense of terrible loss. Slowly it grew within her, swelling and swelling till in the end, unable to contain it any longer, she burst into wild sobs and buried her face in her father’s lap.  p. 18

The next day the pair leave and continue their journey, performing at various locations. Then, when the amount of money they start earning because of Tom’s playing wildly exceeds anything Peter has seen before, he tries to convince Tom to join him on the road. Tom says he must go to York because he promised Morfedd he would, and this was something his mentor had planned before Tom’s birth. Eventually, Tom’s playing (in particular a song about a “forthcoming”) begins to be linked with the millennial appearance of The White Bird of Kinship. This beings him to the attention of one of the church’s “crows”, and results in the appearance of a cross-bow bearing Church militiaman, or “Falcon”. Tom negates this threat by playing for him:

Whiteness exploded in the man’s mind. For an appalling instant he felt the very fabric of the world rending apart. Before his eyes the sun was spinning like a crazy golden top; glittering shafts of light leapt up like sparkling spears from hedgerow and hilltop; and all about his head the air was suddenly awash with the slow, majestic beating of huge, invisible wings. He felt an almost inexpressible urge to send a wild hosanna of joy fountaining upwards in welcome, while, at the same time, his heart was melting within him. He had become a tiny infant rocked in a warm cradle of wonder and borne aloft by those vast unseen pinions, up and up to join the blossoming radiance of the sun. And then, as suddenly as it had come, it was over; he was back within himself again, conscious only of a sense of desperate loss—of an enormous insatiable yearning.  p. 29

The Falcon—who is called Gyre—departs peacefully, apparently having forgotten that he heard Tom piping. Peter asks Tom what he did, and Tom says he told the man about the White Bird, something that, one day, he intends to do for everyone.
Eventually the pair arrive at York and the story’s final scenes drive the narrative to its climax: Peter bribes the Clerk to the Chapter to delay Tom’s entry to the Minster Choir so he can accrue a retirement nest-egg; the Chief Falconer of the Church Militant takes an interest in the increasing numbers of people arriving in York for the millennium, and the heretical rumours of the impending appearance of The White Bird of Kinship (one of his Marshalls tells him that the event is also referred to as ‘the forthcoming’ and it will offer humanity a another chance); Tom also meets Gyre again, and the Falcon warns him to leave York as he has had a premonitory dream about the boy three nights running.
The climactic scene sees Peter paying off the Clerk and then climbing the wall to see the bonfires outside, whereupon he hears Tom playing a lament for the White Bird of Kinship. Then, as Peter shares a transcendent experience with the crowd (“he too began to hear what Gyre had once heard—the great surging downrush of huge wings whose enormous beat was the very pulse of his own heart, the pulse of life itself”), Gyre shoots Tom with a crossbow bolt and kills him.
There is an extended postscript that reveals Gyre has no memory of his actions, and then, after the church tries to co-opt Tom’s death by burying him in the Minster, mourners at his funeral are seen to drop white feathers onto the coffin rather than earth. Meanwhile, one of the Marshalls tells the Chief Falconer that the end of the Kinship fable states that when the blood of the white bird splashes the breast of the black one, then the black bird becomes white itself. . . .
Finally, three days after the funeral, Peter rides out of the city with Gyre as his bonded man. Peter sets Gyre free and, to Peter’s surprise, Gyre takes out Tom’s pipe and starts playing it. Peter then has a number of epiphanies, including the thought that Tom may have arranged his own death. The last paragraphs suggest that Peter and Gyre will become the first preachers of this new religion:

A huge calmness descended upon him. He stretched out his arm and gripped Gyre gently by the shoulder. Then he walked down to the water’s edge and dipped both his hands into the sea. Returning, he tilted back Gyre’s head and with a wet finger drew across his forehead the sign that Tom had once drawn on a misty window of an inn—a child’s representation of a flying bird.
“Come, friend,” he said. “You and I together have a tale to tell. Let us be on our way.”  p. 51

I liked this story a lot—Cowper writes wonderful prose and tells a very readable and well characterised story, albeit a complex and symbolic one (I fear the synopsis and comments above barely plumb the depths of the piece). The story’s seemingly mythical or religious ending,3 and the apparent lack of an rational explanation, rather put me off this the first time around but it wasn’t a problem this time. I’d also add, for those who are not of a religious persuasion and are not interested in a replay of the Christ myth, or spotting the parallels, there are subtle hints that far-future technology or paranormal powers may have been deployed by Tom and his mentor Morfedd (the precognition of Morfedd, the tuning of Tom’s pipe, etc.). I can’t remember whether or not this climactic event is further explained in the trilogy4 that follows this story.
**** (Very Good). 21,100 words. Story link.

1. The story actually opens with a brief introduction from an Oxford academic in 3798 who, somewhat unconvincingly, sounds exactly like someone from our current day world.

2. I’m loathe to note the story’s mention of climate change and melting ice caps because most of the predictions SF writers make are usually wrong—but this is quite striking for a 1976 story:

The Drowning was the direct result of humanity’s corporate failure to see beyond the end of its own nose. By 1985 it was already quite obvious that the global climate had been modified to the point where the polar ice caps were affected.  p. 38

3. The writing and tone of this, along with the ambiguous ending, reminded me of Keith Roberts’ The Signaller (Impulse #1, March 1966).

4. This story, which was a Hugo and Nebula finalist, and second in the Locus Poll novella category, was followed by the “The White Bird of Kinship” trilogy: The Road to Corlay (1978), A Dream of Kinship (1981) and A Tapestry of Time (1982). The US edition of A Road to Corlay conveniently includes this story as a prologue.