The Hugo Finalists (novellas), Part 7

First of all, apologies are in order. We just couldn´t review all the stories we wanted in time for the Hugo Awards ceremony. We´ll try harder next time so we can review the stories way before the Worldcon (especially because both me and Jacques will be at Anticipation in Montreal.

Having said that, I must also apologize for another thing - as I hadn´t finished reading all the novellas before the end of the convention (and I just plainly forgot to save the pages) I couldn´t read Lucius Shepard´s Stars Seen Through Stone because The SF Site removed it just after Denvention. Sorry about that. The other novellas, though, are being reviewed here.

Let´s start with The Fountain of Age, by Nancy Kress. The story takes place almost a century from now, when a fortuitous accident (the discovery of a spontaneously modified kind of tumor in a woman´s brain) makes possible for people to interrupt the aging process. The D-Treatment (the D is for Daria, formerly a prostitute from Cyprus who married a British billionaire-financier) is seeked by a big number of people, specially nobility and celebrities.

Not only because this treatment if obscenely expensive, but also because there is a catch: the D-Treatment doesn´t make you live longer, on the contrary - every single person who takes it dies exactly twenty years after, no matter what your age or your health.

But that doesn´t matter for old people. Specially for Max Feder, a former soldier who fought in The Mid-East War and had a love affair with Daria. Today, an eighty-six year-old Max lives of his memories, and all he want to do is to see Daria (the only person who, due to her tumors, still retains the same age after more than half a century) one more time.

He is also a rich man (ironically, thanks to her, who, just after the brain surgery who made the breakthrough, gave him money and the tip to buy shares of her husband´s company. Peter Morton Cleary had offered to be the first subject to receive the D-Treatment. Evidently, he died after twenty years. But, even so, people still kept searching for this illusion of immortality. His company, LifeLong, Inc. reorganized financially, renamed itself Sequene, and moved out of London to a Greek island. Even the death of the King of England, the Sultan of Bahrain and a famous actress made no difference whatsoever. People kept coming to Sequene.

In time, terrorist attacks made Sequene go orbital, and that´s where Daria lives now. After a lifetime refusing to take the treatment, he finally decides to go for it - but because he wants to see her. Not because of their love (for time has move on inexorably, and she doesn´t love him anymore), but because she gave him a locket with strands of her hair and a kiss on a paper - and he lost it.

It seems a futile reason? Let´s hear what Max himself has to say about it:

"Stevan, it's like this: To be old, in the way I'm old, this is to live in a war zone. Zap zap zap--who falls next? You don't know, but you see them fall, the people all around you, the people you know. The bullets are going to keep coming, you know this, and the next one could just as well take you. Eventually it will take you. So you cherish any little thing you still care about, anything that says you're still among the living. Anything that matters to you."

When he´s up there, he finally manages to see Daria, but things didn´t go according to his plan (best laid plans...), but, taking the D-Treatment, he will at last have part of her inside him, and that´s have to be enough for him.

It´s a very interesting story - simple and straightforward in its main theme, even if the narrative is convoluted (as a good plan should be).

Kristine Kathryn Rusch´s Recovering Apollo 8 is a curious story. In an alternate Earth where Apollo 8 didn´t make it back, a man is obsessed with recovering the module and bringing back to Earth the astronauts Lovell, Borman, and Anders.

The story is curious because the failure of Apollo 8 not only did not hinder the progress of the NASA space program as it apparently boosted it - probably because the astronauts themselves pleaded for it before they died:

What worried him--what frightened him--was that this failure of the space program would end the program. It worried the astronauts as well. They made a joint appeal with what would be damn close to their last breath.

(I don´t know it that was supposed to be an emotional moment. Maybe for the American people. But that´s funny in a weird way, because, as a "foreigner", I watched the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon in 69 from my aunt´s color TV in Rio de Janeiro, and, even as a child, I had the feeling that we were living in what McLuhan called a global village, for it simply didn´t matter to me (then and now) that the first man on the moon was an American. He was a human being, and that was the thing we should keep in mind all the time - Kim Stanley Robinson did a superb job at that with the First Hundred in his Martian Trilogy)

Be that as it may, the fact is that humankind not only established a beachhead on the Moon, but it has a colony in Mars as well. And the obsessed man, Richard Johansenn studied astronomy in university, did his post-grad studies in aeronautics and engineering and had just started the company that would make him the country's first billionaire by 2007 (hiring a pretty good geek to help him, a certain Bill Gates). And so he will try to get the capsule back.

All his plans, all his hopes (....), were based on the theory (the certainty) that the astronauts were dead. And that Apollo 8 would survive again and return.

The ships he had built, the missions he had planned during those years, were based on the idea that he was going after a death ship, a bit of history. He was going to recover Apollo 8, the way an archeologist would resurrect a tomb from the sand or a deep-sea explorer would record the remains of famous ships like the Titanic.

Richard had spent much of his fortune and most of his life finding ways to greet Apollo 8 on its next near-Earth return.

He sends a big ship, the Carpathia, with a docking bay huge enough to cradle the capsule. And he finally does it --

-- to find that there is no one in the capsule.

He had waited a lifetime for that moment. And would spent almost another one to figure what happened to the astrounauts (they had boldly decided not to die crammed in a sardine can and got out of it for themselves to die in the vastness of space - a thing that doesn´t look like very easy to do, even if you are a hero, but let´s accept the suspension of disbelief here). And he will spent the rest of his life trying to recover their bodies.

From that point on, the story seems to stretch itself almost to the point of boredom (which is fine by astronomical standards, because those things take time, but not in a story). In 2018 he manages to find the first lost astronaut, Jim Lovell.

Surprisingly, due to a deal with the Chinese government (much to Richard´s dismay) It´ll take just two years for him to find the second astronaut. But Richard does not get so lucky with the third: he will only find him in 2068, near the newly opened Mars colony - but that´s there our leap of faith in the story becomes a huge effort, for suddenly the gap turns out to be a canyon - first, Richard just happens to look through the on-deck telescope of the ship that is taking him to Mars... and finds the last astronaut!! AND HE MANAGES TO BE THE GUY WHO (even though, Rusch herself tells us, he is "108 and frail") GETS TO RESCUE THE BODY!!

Sorry, but there´s a limit to everything. I love space colonization stories and the story of the Apollo program, but Recovering Apollo 8 didn´t succeed - at least, not beyond the patriotic appeal (which I respect, but don´t feel moved by it).

On the other hand, in All Seated on the Ground, Connie Willis contrives a plot worthy of Fredric Brown when it comes to strange aliens. The beings from Altair simply land their spaceship in Denver, in the middle of the DU campus, and marched ("well, actually marched is the wrong word; the Altairi's method of locomotion is somewhere between a glide and a waddle") straight up to the front door of University Hall in classic "Take me to your leader" fashion:

They (there were six of them) didn't say, "Take us to your leader!" or "One small step for aliens, one giant leap for alienkind," or even, "Earthmen, hand over your females." Or your planet. They just stood there.

And stood there.

And stood there.

Most of the story is focused in the useless and pathetic attempts of humans to establish contact with them.

They continued to stand there for the next three weeks, through an endless series of welcoming speeches by scientists, State Department officials, foreign dignitaries, and church and business leaders, and an assortment of weather, including a late April snowstorm that broke branches and power lines. If it hadn't been for the expressions on their faces, everybody would have assumed the Altairi were plants.

It starts to look funny - as if it was all a good prank on the aliens part.

But it´s not as if they didn´t move anything at all - they made faces. Disapproval faces. Faces that make the narrator, Meg Yates, who is recruited to replace one of the language experts, remember her Aunt Judith, a very uptight woman who was always complaining about manners.

Evidently, Yates can´t find anything useful - until she finds by accident that they respond to music. Along with a girl´s choir director, Calvin Ledbetter, she strives to find the rationale behind their responses. But the answer, as we´ll find later in the story, has much more to do with her Aunt Judith than with the music.

The big thing of All Seated on the Ground is the principle that the Argentinian writer Ricardo Piglia calls "the secret story", that is, the undercurrent story behind the main plot. The end comes as a surprise, but not so, because only then you see that the tips were scattered along the story. But Willis keeps us interested all the time. And that´s one of the most important things where narratives are concerned: to keep the reader´s attention. An excellent story - no wonder it won the Hugo.

The last novella reviewed here is Gene Wolfe´s Memorare - which, sadly, is not online anymore, but can be easily found now that it was just published in David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer´s Year´s Best SF 13.

Memorare is a very intriguing story set in a not too distant future, but where mankind not only created orbital habitats as also space memoriais scattered through most of the solar system. Some of them simple shrines to pay tribute to a single person or entire families - but some also places where strange cults thrive.

All this attracts the attention of March Wildspring, an old-fashioned filmmaker who is making a documentary called "Vaults in the Void". He is particularly interested in the weird aspects of the memorials:

"There are at least five sects and cults whose members believe the deceased will be served though all eternity by those who lose their lives at his or her memorial. Some claim to be offshoots of major faiths. Some are openly satanic. We haven't seen enough to identify the bunch that built this one, and frankly I doubt we will."

Wildspring and his partner, Kit, are trying to investigate one of the most intriguing memorials, when they receive a help signal - which happens to be a plea from Wildspring´s ex-wife, who is running away from her current husband, a wife-beater. Now Wildspring must contend with both and at the same time try to explore the strange memorial.

When he finally gets in there, he is received not only by the regular memorial holograms, but by an entire community of people living in peace, beauty, and harmony - or are they? Wildspring must fight to make sure that everything he is experiencing is really what there is, or if there is someone (or something) messing up with his mind.

Memorare is an action-packed space adventure with echos of Zardoz, old ST:TOS episodes - mementos of a kind of SF that one doesn´t see much these days. And that Wolfe manages to work very well, as it is to be expected. It´s the space-age side of Wolfe, a side that we don´t see much these days; a very welcome and refreshing return to SF after the retelling of myths of The Wizard Knight dualogy.