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How We Play the Game in Salt Lake and Other Stories
From the pen of acclaimed writer M. Shayne Bell, winner of the Writers of the Future Contest, here are futures to make come true . . . and also futures that should never come true -- but will.
308 pages, Paperback
First published May 15, 2001
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May 12, 2021
CONTENTS
"Mrs. Lincoln's China"
"The Shining Dream Road Out"
"Lock Down"
"Inuit"
"Nicoji"
"How We Play the Game in Salt Lake"
"Homeless, with Aliens"
"Bright, New Skies"
"The Thing about Benny"
"With Rain, and a Dog Barking"
"The Sound of the River"
"Bangkok"
"Second Lives"
"Soft in the World, and Bright"
"Jacob's Ladder"
"Balance Due"
I have enjoyed much of what I had previously read by M. Shayne Bell, including some of the stories in this book. The one that I think I like most is not included here, unfortunately; that is "The Pagodas of Ciboure," a fantasy from 2002. The sixteen stories in this book were published in the years 1987 to 2000.
The prevailing tone of these stories seems to me to be one of gentle regret. That is certainly not the case with each story here, however.
The oldest tale in the book is Bell's first published science fiction story, "Jacob's Ladder." This is a story about a space elevator, a much discussed topic in science fiction stories of that time. Wikipedia states of this proposed technology:
A space elevator is a proposed type of planet-to-space transportation system. The main component would be a cable (also called a tether) anchored to the surface and extending into space. The design would permit vehicles to travel along the cable from a planetary surface, such as the Earth's, directly into space or orbit, without the use of large rockets. An Earth-based space elevator would consist of a cable with one end attached to the surface near the equator and the other end in space beyond geostationary orbit (35,786 km altitude). The competing forces of gravity, which is stronger at the lower end, and the outward/upward centrifugal force, which is stronger at the upper end, would result in the cable being held up, under tension, and stationary over a single position on Earth.
In "Jacob's Ladder," terrorists have taken over the top of the new elevator and are murdering reporters who have come to cover the story. Three of the reporters decide to make their way down the outside of the elevator, coming down from miles above the Earth using available equipment. This seems somewhat unlikely, but it does make for an exciting story, very different from most of Bell's other work in this collection.
There are only a few stories here that I don't like. I neither like nor understand "Second Lives," the shortest story here. The narrator is assigned to find and bring back a man known to be somewhere in a massive temple.
The title story, "How We Play the Game in Salt Lake," combines baseball, AIDS, and magic in a tale that I find unpleasant and not believable. A community discovers that disfiguring sacrifices made by one of its members may bring about a desired end. I considered saying that this might make sense if the reader accepts the magical premise, but I don't think that the premise itself makes sense. How would anyone have ever thought that this might work?
"Bangkok" is a violent tale of a wartime siege.
I liked the rest of the stories better. I think, though, that they seem to have been chosen to cover as many science fictional topics as possible: a time travel story, a story involving virtual reality, an alien invasion tale, a story of Earth people living on another planet, a cryogenics story, a tale about artificial intelligence, a story of political unrest, a story about people living in an artificial environment, three stories about life during or after environmental catastrophes, and a story about plants in offices. Well, maybe that last one is not a well-known science fiction topic.
"Lock Down" is a time travel tale about racism, based on an incident that actually occurred when the African-American opera singer Marian Anderson appeared in Salt Lake City in 1948. The story is, of course, fiction; it is shameful that the actual situation was all too real.
A paleontologist specializing in fossilized insects is confronted by invading alien creatures who share her interest in "Homeless, with Aliens." The aliens' fascination with the subject is not academic.
A formerly very rich man comes out of cryogenic preservation at some point in the future in "Balance Due." He finds that his expectations are far different from the facts.
In "The Shining Dream Road Out," virtual reality is one of the things that help a young man working delivering pizza to change the lives of a desperate family. His own life is changed as well.
A man who had suffered a broken neck now shares his body with an artificial intelligence in "Soft in the World, and Bright." The AI is decaying and needs to be replaced, but the man has reasons for this not to happen.
The story that I mentioned about plants in offices is "The Thing about Benny." It has been found that plants people keep in their offices are sometimes rare species no longer found anywhere else. Once in a while, those plants prove to have medicinal properties. The man who is the expert in locating these is Benny, whose interests are plants and the music of Abba.
The reason that a dog keeps barking in "With Rain, and a Dog Barking" is as his response to a high-pitched whine which most humans can not hear. That noise is due to environmental problems that befall Utah.
There is a much more extensive environmental disaster in "Bright, New Skies." The depletion of the ozone layer has continued. People can no longer go outside with their skin uncovered, and without wearing special goggles when outside, people will go blind. But this is not limited to people, and there is no way to give goggles to every animal.
There are more environmental problems in "The Sound of the River." This is a tale narrated by an American staying in Niamey, the capital of Niger. There is a terrible drought. The Niger River once flowed through "a land more lush than anyone living now in Niger could remember"; now it is a dry riverbed. The narrator recalls his childhood when he had loved the music of a group from Niger. He finds that the leader of the group is still living there. He meets with the musician and asks why, when given a chance, the group did not re-record their first album. The mournful answer is the point of the story.
My favorite story in this collection is "Mrs. Lincoln's China." In a time of political unrest, people in Washington, DC break into the now-deserted White House and ransack it. The narrator, an African-American mother with grown children, is determined to save some of the presidential china, particularly from the Lincoln administration. This fine story was nominated for a Hugo Award.
In the late 1980s, science fiction author Mike Resnick wrote a series of stories that were collected under the title Kirinyaga, about life on a satellite set up to resemble Kenya in the past. The people of Kenya chose to go there and have their own world. At almost exactly the same time, M. Shayne Bell published his story "Inuit," in which a similar world-in-a-satellite has been established to duplicate the present North American home of the Inuit people. The major difference in the situation is that the Inuit have not all been told that their environment is artificial. The ones who do know face new problems.
"Nicoji," the longest story in this book, later expanded into a novel of the same name, also reminds me of another science fiction tale, "Logic of Empire," a 1941 story by Robert Heinlein. Heinlein's story is set on Venus, in an area that is mostly swampland. The indentured workers have very little hope of ever being able to pay off their debt to the people for whom they work. The indigenous inhabitants seem to be of limited intelligence.
"Nicoji" is also set on an alien planet in an environment that is largely swampland. Workers from Earth are indentured to companies. There is some question of whether the indigenous inhabitants are actually sentient.
"Nicoji" is a tale of two young men who live by gathering animals called nicoji that are considered a delicacy. After they refuse to have chips implanted in them, they are beaten and tortured by people from the company that they work for. They strike out for another settlement about which they have been told.
Bell is a good author. I think that this would be a better book if there were more variety in the mood of the stories. I think that most of the stories are good, but the only ones that I would recommend without reservations are "The Sound of the River" and "Mrs. Lincoln's China."
"Mrs. Lincoln's China"
"The Shining Dream Road Out"
"Lock Down"
"Inuit"
"Nicoji"
"How We Play the Game in Salt Lake"
"Homeless, with Aliens"
"Bright, New Skies"
"The Thing about Benny"
"With Rain, and a Dog Barking"
"The Sound of the River"
"Bangkok"
"Second Lives"
"Soft in the World, and Bright"
"Jacob's Ladder"
"Balance Due"
I have enjoyed much of what I had previously read by M. Shayne Bell, including some of the stories in this book. The one that I think I like most is not included here, unfortunately; that is "The Pagodas of Ciboure," a fantasy from 2002. The sixteen stories in this book were published in the years 1987 to 2000.
The prevailing tone of these stories seems to me to be one of gentle regret. That is certainly not the case with each story here, however.
The oldest tale in the book is Bell's first published science fiction story, "Jacob's Ladder." This is a story about a space elevator, a much discussed topic in science fiction stories of that time. Wikipedia states of this proposed technology:
A space elevator is a proposed type of planet-to-space transportation system. The main component would be a cable (also called a tether) anchored to the surface and extending into space. The design would permit vehicles to travel along the cable from a planetary surface, such as the Earth's, directly into space or orbit, without the use of large rockets. An Earth-based space elevator would consist of a cable with one end attached to the surface near the equator and the other end in space beyond geostationary orbit (35,786 km altitude). The competing forces of gravity, which is stronger at the lower end, and the outward/upward centrifugal force, which is stronger at the upper end, would result in the cable being held up, under tension, and stationary over a single position on Earth.
In "Jacob's Ladder," terrorists have taken over the top of the new elevator and are murdering reporters who have come to cover the story. Three of the reporters decide to make their way down the outside of the elevator, coming down from miles above the Earth using available equipment. This seems somewhat unlikely, but it does make for an exciting story, very different from most of Bell's other work in this collection.
There are only a few stories here that I don't like. I neither like nor understand "Second Lives," the shortest story here. The narrator is assigned to find and bring back a man known to be somewhere in a massive temple.
The title story, "How We Play the Game in Salt Lake," combines baseball, AIDS, and magic in a tale that I find unpleasant and not believable. A community discovers that disfiguring sacrifices made by one of its members may bring about a desired end. I considered saying that this might make sense if the reader accepts the magical premise, but I don't think that the premise itself makes sense. How would anyone have ever thought that this might work?
"Bangkok" is a violent tale of a wartime siege.
I liked the rest of the stories better. I think, though, that they seem to have been chosen to cover as many science fictional topics as possible: a time travel story, a story involving virtual reality, an alien invasion tale, a story of Earth people living on another planet, a cryogenics story, a tale about artificial intelligence, a story of political unrest, a story about people living in an artificial environment, three stories about life during or after environmental catastrophes, and a story about plants in offices. Well, maybe that last one is not a well-known science fiction topic.
"Lock Down" is a time travel tale about racism, based on an incident that actually occurred when the African-American opera singer Marian Anderson appeared in Salt Lake City in 1948. The story is, of course, fiction; it is shameful that the actual situation was all too real.
A paleontologist specializing in fossilized insects is confronted by invading alien creatures who share her interest in "Homeless, with Aliens." The aliens' fascination with the subject is not academic.
A formerly very rich man comes out of cryogenic preservation at some point in the future in "Balance Due." He finds that his expectations are far different from the facts.
In "The Shining Dream Road Out," virtual reality is one of the things that help a young man working delivering pizza to change the lives of a desperate family. His own life is changed as well.
A man who had suffered a broken neck now shares his body with an artificial intelligence in "Soft in the World, and Bright." The AI is decaying and needs to be replaced, but the man has reasons for this not to happen.
The story that I mentioned about plants in offices is "The Thing about Benny." It has been found that plants people keep in their offices are sometimes rare species no longer found anywhere else. Once in a while, those plants prove to have medicinal properties. The man who is the expert in locating these is Benny, whose interests are plants and the music of Abba.
The reason that a dog keeps barking in "With Rain, and a Dog Barking" is as his response to a high-pitched whine which most humans can not hear. That noise is due to environmental problems that befall Utah.
There is a much more extensive environmental disaster in "Bright, New Skies." The depletion of the ozone layer has continued. People can no longer go outside with their skin uncovered, and without wearing special goggles when outside, people will go blind. But this is not limited to people, and there is no way to give goggles to every animal.
There are more environmental problems in "The Sound of the River." This is a tale narrated by an American staying in Niamey, the capital of Niger. There is a terrible drought. The Niger River once flowed through "a land more lush than anyone living now in Niger could remember"; now it is a dry riverbed. The narrator recalls his childhood when he had loved the music of a group from Niger. He finds that the leader of the group is still living there. He meets with the musician and asks why, when given a chance, the group did not re-record their first album. The mournful answer is the point of the story.
My favorite story in this collection is "Mrs. Lincoln's China." In a time of political unrest, people in Washington, DC break into the now-deserted White House and ransack it. The narrator, an African-American mother with grown children, is determined to save some of the presidential china, particularly from the Lincoln administration. This fine story was nominated for a Hugo Award.
In the late 1980s, science fiction author Mike Resnick wrote a series of stories that were collected under the title Kirinyaga, about life on a satellite set up to resemble Kenya in the past. The people of Kenya chose to go there and have their own world. At almost exactly the same time, M. Shayne Bell published his story "Inuit," in which a similar world-in-a-satellite has been established to duplicate the present North American home of the Inuit people. The major difference in the situation is that the Inuit have not all been told that their environment is artificial. The ones who do know face new problems.
"Nicoji," the longest story in this book, later expanded into a novel of the same name, also reminds me of another science fiction tale, "Logic of Empire," a 1941 story by Robert Heinlein. Heinlein's story is set on Venus, in an area that is mostly swampland. The indentured workers have very little hope of ever being able to pay off their debt to the people for whom they work. The indigenous inhabitants seem to be of limited intelligence.
"Nicoji" is also set on an alien planet in an environment that is largely swampland. Workers from Earth are indentured to companies. There is some question of whether the indigenous inhabitants are actually sentient.
"Nicoji" is a tale of two young men who live by gathering animals called nicoji that are considered a delicacy. After they refuse to have chips implanted in them, they are beaten and tortured by people from the company that they work for. They strike out for another settlement about which they have been told.
Bell is a good author. I think that this would be a better book if there were more variety in the mood of the stories. I think that most of the stories are good, but the only ones that I would recommend without reservations are "The Sound of the River" and "Mrs. Lincoln's China."
January 23, 2014
I love this book. I LOVE this book. I LOVE THIS BOOK!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews