“Embot’s Lament” by James Patrick Kelly and “Berb by Berb” by Ray Nayler have several elements in common, including my disappointments. They were readable enough, and had some entertaining aspects, but both ended before they could reach critical storytelling mass.

As a reader, especially one who has been reading science fiction for decades, I come to every short story hoping to discover a classic. But the reality, at least in the SF magazines, is classic stories are rare discoveries. James Patrick Kelly isn’t going to write “Think Like a Dinosaur” every time at bat. It’s even unfair of me to expect another “Mr. Boy” or “10¹⁶ to 1.” Ray Nayler hasn’t written his classic yet, but he’s starting to write standout stories like “A Rocket for Dimitrios” and “The Ocean Between the Leaves.”

No writer can sit down and intentionally write a classic science fiction story. Unfortunately, if you’ve read enough classic stories, their impact stays with you, and you compare everything you read to those past favorites. This is one of the disadvantages of getting old.

In the blurb to “Embot’s Lament” Kelly says Embot came to him in a dream, and Jane showed up the next morning. Embot is a neat idea. I assume it’s short for empathy robot (or I could be way off and it could be for embedded robot or some other such thing). Embot is a conscious entity sent from the future that lodged in Jane Bell Lewis’ mind. Jane doesn’t know the Embot is there. The Embot is not supposed to interfere, but merely report back to the future how people of the past live and think. The senders of such time-traveling probes have no control over who and where the Embot will land in the past. Jane is an uneducated lower-class housewife with an abusive husband. The Embot is disappointed it didn’t land in someone like “The Rock, Taylor Swift, or one of the Kardashians.”

I’m disappointed too. Combining a neat science fiction idea with a quite common literary plotline seemed like a poor choice for a science fiction magazine audience. And the obstacles that Embot watch Jane overcome seem cliche and far too mundane. She gets beaten up by her drunk husband, takes an Uber to the bus station, and leaves town. If you compare this to “Fondly Fahrenheit” where a psychotic robot psychologically corrupts Alfred Bester’s character, you’ll see what I mean. Even if we stay with the wife abuse plot, the story would have been far more powerful, unique, and challenging to write if Embot had gotten embedded in the husband’s mind.

But I can think of many more character types I’d like to see Embot haunt. A truly fun person would have been a science fiction writer. Think of the recursive SF possibilities. But the obvious type of character would be a Donald Trump like politician, an Elon Musk type billionaire, or terrorist or mass shooter. It’s too easy to empathize with Jane, or a victim like her. A somewhat challenging storyline would be to embed an empathy robot in a repugnant character and change them. A writing challenge equal to climbing Mt. Everest would embed the empathy robot in a repugnant character and have it find something to empathize with.

“Embot’s Lament” ends when I think it’s just getting started. I wondered if Kelly plans to make it into a novel. The same thing is true for “Berb by Berb.” Nayler ends his story just when we want to know more. Nayler has written other stories set in the same alternate reality as “Berb by Berb.” ISFDB called the series “Disintegration Loops.” The history of this timeline involves the United States finding a crashed UFO during WWII and reverse engineering its technology to win the war and dominate the world afterwards with super science. Berbs are creatures that assemble themselves out of spare parts due to some alien pixie dust escaping the lab.

“Berb by Berb” barely introduces us to the berbs and then the story is over. It’s very slight, and there’s not enough science fictional razzamatazz to rationalize why the berbs form as they do. Nayler needed to give us some anti-entropic theories.

When I read “A Rocket for Dimitrios” I was amused that Eleanor Roosevelt and Hedy Lamarr had become action heroes in this alternate reality. Nayler name drops Hedy Lamarr name again in this story. When I was younger, it excited me when a science fiction writer would use a famous person from history as a character in their story. For example, Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld series, which featured Mark Twain and Sir Richard Burton.

Now, it disappoints me when a writer does this. I feel it’s a cheap cheat for making a story more appealing. A kind of pop cultural appropriation. And not just when science fiction writers do it. There have been many fictional bestsellers that capitalized on famous people in recent years. History is hard enough to get right in history books, so I hate seeing famous people being exploited in fiction. Still, Hedy Lamarr was one of the most beautiful women ever, and it was delightful to discover she was an inventor. I think Nayler just wanted to pass on that info. People do need to read Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World by Richard Rhodes if they want to know something closer to fact.

I like Nayler’s idea of using a crashed UFO to create an alternative history. But so far, he’s only played around with the idea in simple ways. It’s a slight-of-hand excuse for his stories, and “Berb on Berb” is very slight. He needs to do a Pavane, Bring the Jubilee, or The Man in the High Castle.

Both stories involve creating a science fictional being and then pairing it with an ordinary human. That’s a common story idea in science fiction. However, I think the authors of both stories should have set them aside for a while until they produced better reasons for their beings to exist and encounters with humans. Both stories needed a second stage, and even a third stage to lift them into orbit.

Embot is a neat idea. But why put such an artificial mind into a human mind if you didn’t want it to change the person? Especially a person who needed to change every aspect of her life. What if the future were seeding the past with insight, empathy, and intelligence? I think the idea of embots needs to be worked on, it has real possibilities. Like a cross between Brainwave and Timescape.

Embot also reminds me of The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. Jaynes theorized humans heard voices that guided them in prehistoric times to explain tales about people hearing gods talk to them.

A berb is a much harder creature to rationalize. Its creation feels more like something L. Frank Baum would have imagined. Why did the aliens invent that magic dust? Are they seeding worlds with it? Reality is entropic, and life is anti-entropic. That offers some germs of ideas to work with. Nayler should have given us more speculation on why berb creatures would form.

I know it’s unfair of me to compare current science fiction to my all-time favorite science fiction, but I do. If book and magazine editors only published classic level stories, there would only be three SF novels and one issue of a SF magazine coming out every year. Even when I read best-of-the-year anthologies, I’m usually disappointed with over half the stories. Luckily for writers and publishers, readers don’t all pick the same stories to love.

These two stories made nice fillers for this issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. But I wonder what Asimov’s Science Fiction would be like if it was quarterly paperback, or twice yearly hardback and published less filler? This is just me thinking aloud. I’m going to try and finish the Nov/Dec issues of Asimov’s and Analog, but I’m not sure I’ll want to continue to read them. Magazines might not be the right delivery system for short science fiction for me anymore.

I was inspired by Robert Silverberg’s column this month, “Homo Superior–Us?” It makes me want to chase down some classic science fiction about Neanderthals I haven’t read before and reread some that I have.

James Wallace Harris, 11/14/23