"Trap Line" by Timothy Zahn

Published by ‎ Amazon Original Stories on March 25, 2025

“Trap Line” is a short science fiction story. Nearly every sf story of any merit is eventually anthologized, so readers might soon find it in a larger volume if they decide not to invest their money in a relatively short story.

Toby Collier is an engineer. He is employed to send his consciousness (or “astral”) from his body to a clone (or “replicate”) of his body. His current mission is to send his astral to a replicate on a ship that is many light years from Earth. The ship’s transmitter isn’t working. Toby’s job is to fix it, using the replicate’s body, before sending his astral home.

Toby’s astral is captured on his way to the ship. He joins captives belonging to an alien race who call themselves Hyfisk. Despite being nothing more than a disembodied consciousness, Toby can see the alien astrals if he squints just right. They communicate in a common language, or perhaps Toby somehow translates their thoughts into English. Timothy Zahn offers no real explanations for these convenient facts but at least makes clear that they puzzle Toby. In any event, there would be no story if Toby couldn’t chat with the Hyfisk.

Toby learns that members of a third alien species — a family that includes a young daughter — work for the Overmasters. They set trap lines to capture astrals. Their best pay comes from catching Hyfisk. Why the Overmasters want to capture astrals is far from clear (they’ve already learned all they want to know about the Hyfisk), but the family is worried that their standard of living is in decline because they are capturing fewer astrals. The family also worries that a human astral might not be worth much of anything to anyone. Toby sympathizes with his captors, perhaps because worrying about money and trying to shield children from that concern is a very human trait — at least for humans who aren’t born into wealth.

In the grand tradition of science fiction, humans (especially human engineers) are smarter than aliens, so when Toby sets out to escape, the reader knows he has a pretty good chance of success. He does so in a reasonably entertaining way that involves an alien version of a cat. He even takes into account his desire to keep his captors from filing bankruptcy (or whatever aliens do when they go broke).

The story sets up a moral dilemma when Toby has to decide whether to free the Hyfisk. He sets up a test to decide whether they are morally worthy of being rescued. I didn’t buy the test. Neither did I buy Toby’s sympathy for a family that, like human slave traders, think it is okay to earn an income by capturing and imprisoning astrals, but perhaps I am less forgiving than Toby.

The story earns points for its originality. It moves quickly but raises more questions than it answers. Still, it does just enough to provide a measure of entertainment.

RECOMMENDED

The Third Rule of Time Travel by Philip Fracassi

Published by Orbit on March 18, 2025

Time travel stories can be fun but doing them right can be tricky. Authors usually take note of the paradox — kill your grandfather in the past and you never come into existence and thus can’t travel to the past to kill your grandfather — but they don’t always address it effectively. One approach is to avoid the paradox by traveling to the future. Another is to travel observationally, watching the past through a lens without interacting with it and thus avoiding changes. Another is to travel to the past with the intent to change nothing, usually followed by a mishap that changes everything. Another is to have the traveler change something that doesn’t prevent her birth and then returning to the past to undo the change. Another is to assume the existence of multiple time streams, so that changing the past either shifts the observed reality into a different stream or begins a new one. Perhaps because The Third Rule of Time Travel incorporates all these approaches to varying degrees, it fails to tell a convincing story.

Beth Darlow and her husband Colson invented a time travel machine. The device opens a wormhole that transports the traveler’s mind into her body at an earlier time. The two minds cohabit in the traveler’s past body although (for reasons left unexplained) the past mind doesn’t seem to recall the visit from future self after the experience ends. The mind transported from the present, on the other hand, is aware of the past mind and recalls what she observed through her past self’s eyes. The only physical evidence that two minds are sharing a body is a whitening of the eyes in the traveler’s body while it’s inhabited.

The travel ends after ninety seconds. A skeptic might think that the machine is merely stimulating memories and not transporting the traveler, but evidence (other than the temporary change of eye color) eventually emerges to suggest that a mostly useless form of time travel has actually occurred.

Colson died in a car crash, leaving Beth to further the research and to replace him as the time traveler. Beth is trying to understand how the time machine chooses arrival points. She thinks that directing time travel to a specific date will make the machine more useful, but the traveler will still observe only the things she has already seen. I can imagine some scenarios where that might be helpful (a crime victim who can’t identify an assailant might notice more details when revisiting the assault), but a lot of money is being invested in technology that hardly seems to justify the cost.

The research is funded by a creep who wants profitable results. His efforts to attract new investors cause Beth to take risks. This leads to an inevitable confrontation between the investor, who believes he has exclusive rights to the invention, and Beth, who is one of the few people who understand how the contraption works. It turns out that her understanding is less than complete.

When Beth begins traveling, she notices that the machine always sends her back to traumatic moments in her life, including identifying her husband’s body in the morgue. Beth eventually realizes why that’s happening, but the explanation [spoiler alert] amounts to “the universe doesn’t like to be messed with.” Nonsense of that sort bleeds the science out of science fiction.

Beth begins to see the ghost of her dead husband. Then she changes the past in a way I won’t spoil. How she does that is never made clear, a startling omission since one of the titular rules is that travelers can’t interact with the past and thus can’t change it. I guess we’re supposed to accept the theory that observing a quantum system causes it to change, but the application of that theory to the plot is disappointingly fuzzy.

Beth only knows the past was changed because, before she travels, she sends answers to certain questions to an off-planet location where they won’t be affected by any changes to Earth history. (This has something to do with the inverse square law and the assumption that the machine’s energy pulse will lose its energy as it travels away from the Earth, leaving the pre-recorded answers invulnerable to change.) The story’s tense moments result from Beth’s desire to undo the changes she made and the owner’s desire to stop her from revealing the harm that his useless but expensive technology might cause.

The setup is interesting even if Beth isn’t. The story’s resolution combines metaphysical gibberish with simplistic pseudoscience. Now, there’s so much we don’t understand about the universe that maybe Philip Fracassi got it right, but other writers have made a more convincing case [second spoiler alert] that time is an illusion, that there is only the now, and that the now encompasses all possible pasts and futures. This convenient theory empowers Beth to construct the reality she wants and thus enables a happy ending, but science fiction’s demand that readers suspend their disbelief needs to be supported by a plausible reason to do so. Metaphysical gibberish about an angry universe and simplistic pseudoscience didn’t get me there, particularly when the ending doesn’t address the many ramifications of the story’s underlying theory.

That leaves us with a conventional thriller — a race to save the present by undoing changes to the past — surrounded by the trappings of science fiction. This science fiction thriller is more effective as a thriller than as science fiction, but the thriller aspects are unoriginal. Thriller fans might nevertheless enjoy it. Hardcore sf fans, not so much.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton

Published by ‎ St. Martin's Press on February 25, 2025

‎I’m not sure if this was Edward Ashton’s intent — he may have intended only to entertain by crafting a science fiction thriller — but I view The Fourth Consort as an exploration of culture and the difficulty of understanding or adopting cultural norms that differ from our own. Like Mickey7, the novel is also about diplomacy and moral behavior as an alternative to fighting needless battles.

Ashton’s books tend to be uncomplicated stories that don’t require the support of a large cast of characters. In The Fourth Consort, two primary species are in interstellar conflict with each other. Both species are roaming around in our part of the universe in search of new species that might benefit from their guidance. One is called Unity; their leaders belong to a race of creatures with hard shells whose members are known as ammies. The other group is called the Assembly. Members of the race that dominates the Assembly are described as stickmen. The aliens are unimaginative, but that's a small knock on the story.

Unity visited Earth and made a lot of promises about forming an alliance that don’t seem to have been kept. Dalton Greaves is a human. Dissatisfied with his life, Dalton took a job with Unity in exchange for the promise of a vast fortune when he returns to Earth. Dalton’s job is to make first contact with aliens and act as a diplomat for Unity. He’s on a survey ship captained by an ammie named Boreau, who is probably more interested in taking a planet’s resources than in diplomacy.

The planet is populated by minarchs. Minarchs fight with their mandibles, supplemented by spears. Two political factions are struggling to control the planet. The city is ruled by something like a queen, but she is being challenged by members of the competing faction.

Dalton and another human, Neera Agarwal, take a lander to a planet, only to find that a stickman named Breaker has already made contact with the minarchs. The Assembly and Unity ships in orbit manage to destroy each other, leaving Dalton, Neera, and Breaker stranded on the planet. They nevertheless continue their diplomatic missions, a task Breaker pursues by trashing Dalton as a sneaky human who can't be trusted.

The story follows Dalton as he develops relationships with the minarch queen, her Counselor, the Prefect who wants to displace the queen, and Breaker. Dalton earns the minarchs’ respect (or triggers their fear) when he uses his bare hands to defeat a fearsome creature that attacks him in his room. Fortunately, the creature’s venom doesn’t kill humans, making Dalton seem more powerful to the minarchs than he actually is.

The queen takes a liking to Dalton and decides he will be her new consort. To his relief, Dalton won’t be required to have sex with the queen. He is nevertheless unhappy to learn that the queen ate her first consort. The second and third are marking time until they are devoured. Dalton is the fourth.

As events unfold, Dalton makes an enemy of the Prefect, whose lover is killed by the Counselor as she tries to protect Dalton. This leads to Dalton’s designation as the second in a duel between the Prefect and the Counselor. Minarchs tell him that honor compels him to fight his own duel with the Prefect. The duels are dictated by cultural norms that Dalton doesn’t share. Some people go all shivery at the mention of the word honor, but the novel suggests that dishonorable (or just stupid) behavior often results from cultural adherence to notions of honor that serve no purpose. The honor killings of female relatives after they are raped are a human example of abhorrent acts taken in the name of honor.

Novels often benefit from a protagonist who is forced to make a difficult moral choice. Dalton has to decide whether to let Neera rescue him with superior firepower. If he goes with her, his actions as a consort will reflect poorly upon the queen and will probably lead to her death. If he stays and battles the Prefect, his choice will probably cause his own death. If Dalton substitutes his own sense of honor for the views of the minarchs, what choice will he make?

Ashton always tells a good story. The novel moves quickly. It has enough action scenes to give it the feel of a science fiction thriller, but it also has some hidden depth. The characters have well-defined personalities. Ashton is a likeable guy who messed up his life and is trying to atone, or possibly to disappear. Either way, he remains true to himself, even when he must decide whether to make unselfish choices. The blend of action and philosophy has always drawn me to science fiction, and Ashton is following the best traditions of the genre.

RECOMMENDED

The Garden by Nick Newman

First published in Great Britain in 2025; published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on February 18, 2025

Global warming stories dominate the current crop of post-apocalyptic novels, perhaps because the harm that will inevitably result from climate change is obvious to all but the willfully blind. The Garden, however, is more a novel of domestic drama than one of survivors struggling with the consequences of an overheated planet.

Evelyn and Lily are sisters.  For many years, they have lived together in the kitchen of their family home. Apart from the kitchen, boards have been nailed over all the windows and doors. The sisters spend their days alone, tending a large garden and harvesting honey from beehives. Occasionally they play a game of hide-and-seek. They don’t recall how old they are, but they are feeling the effects of aging. They take direction — when to prune the trees, when to plant and harvest — from an almanac compiled by their mother. The sisters quarrel and bicker but they’ve been doing that their entire lives. They particularly argue about whether they have wasted their lives following their mother’s instructions.

The backstory reveals something of their history. At some point in the past, fierce storms required them to dig out and replant their garden. There were once several people living on the estate, apparently operating as a co-op, but they all left, perhaps at their mother’s insistence. Their mother apparently went mad before she died. Their father abandoned them, or so their mother told them. Their mother boarded up the rest of the house and forbade the sisters from entering it because it is filled with dangerous things — men’s things. Their mother had a bug up her bum about men. The sisters only knew one man (their father), and their mother viewed him as an exemplar of poor male behavior.

A wall around the estate needs repair. The sisters know nothing of the outside world because their mother told them that they shouldn’t look over the wall. “The land outside was so dry and so bright it could blind you at a glance, Mama had said.” The sisters are certain that danger lurks inside their boarded house and outside the walls of their estate. “Their mother forbade them from even thinking about exploring the countless halls and rooms that made up the rest of the house.” Nick Newman eventually supplies a plausible explanation for their demented mother’s instructions.

The sisters finally meet a male when a boy of indeterminate age makes his way over a collapsed section of the wall. The sisters debate whether to kill him (he’s emaciated and would be easy prey), but Evelyn feeds him, thinking they need an able-bodied worker now that their aging bodies are less adept at performing chores. Lily eventually takes a shine to him, leading to another round of quarrels and setting up the novel’s defining conflict.

The story is slow-moving and only sporadically interesting. It fails to build tension and the sudden arrival of tense moments is insufficient to give the story the weight Newman must have intended. The apocalyptic background is underdeveloped, I suppose because it is only a means of setting up the odd relationship between the sisters. The story contains only one surprise, but it’s a good one. Another unexpected twist in the story is less surprising but sets up a final confrontation between the boy and the sisters.

Nick Newman’s prose is stylish. I can’t say the story seemed plausible. Nor can I say that I cared much about the sisters, both of whom seem intolerable, although I suppose post-apocalyptic isolation would not be a formula for a winning personality. Still, Newman didn’t make me warm up to the sisters. The boy is a more sympathetic character but he’s more an empty vessel than a clearly defined character. In its effort to give literary heft to post-apocalyptic fiction, The Garden is a cut above the dreck that permeates the genre but it never gives the reader a reason to care about its characters.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

All the Water in the World by Eiren Caffall

Published by St. Martin's Press on January 7, 2025

Postapocalyptic fiction continues to be popular despite the formulaic nature of the genre. All the Water in the World imagines an environmental crisis caused by global warming. Unfortunately, that takes little imagination, given the prevailing American insistence that fossil fuel consumption is patriotic and that global warming isn’t a thing, or at least isn’t a thing that human behavior affects. Corporate America uses Fox News to tell the far right what they should believe and the far right dutifully joins every culture war — whether a nonexistent war against Christmas or the notion that alternatives to fossil fuels are bad for America — without giving any thought to the consequences of their victories.

The novel begins with a family and a few others living on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The adults were museum employees who remain dedicated to preserving knowledge, but violent storms are making it impossible for humans to survive in Manhattan. How deer have managed to overtake Central Park without drowning like humans is a bit of a mystery.

The central characters are sisters. Norah, the narrator, likes to be called Nonie. She’s thirteen. Her sister Beatrice likes to be called Bix. She’s sixteen. Their mother has a bad kidney and, since hospitals no longer function and pharmacies have all been raided, everyone knows she’s going to die. Their father and the other important character, a Black guy named Keller, manage to salvage a Native American canoe from the museum just before the building collapses. They will use the canoe to begin a journey.

Journeys — the quest to find a safe place where life can be remade — are standard plot drivers in post-apocalyptic fiction. The protagonists hatch a plan to take the boat up the Hudson and then walk along highways until they reach a farm where Nonie’s mother grew up. Along the way, they will encounter and overcome obstacles, including infections and a group of bad guys who want to rape Bix. After two of the travelers contract dangerous infections, the protagonists manage to find a doctor, but she’s in a community controlled by a selfish a-hole who believes that medical care and antibiotics should be reserved for community members. The a-hole doesn’t want new people to join the community unless they can work and contribute, which doesn’t describe people who need to heal.

Postapocalyptic fiction often divides survivors of the apocalypse into groups of good people and bad people, the bad people consisting of rapists, thugs, racists, and dictator wannabes, the good being those who resist subjugation. The good are open to helping others; the bad are not. Well, that’s how preapocalyptic society works, so it makes sense that an apocalypse would only enhance division, selfishness, and delusions of entitlement. Better examples of the genre make clear that the dividing line between good and bad can be fuzzy when people fight for survival, but Eiren Caffall doesn't trouble the reader with subtle thought.

There is nothing particularly interesting, or credible, about the journey that the protagonists undertake. One of the kids turns out to be handy with a gun, but how she managed to capture the gun from grown men is never made clear. A character or two will die during the trek because that’s what the formula demands, but the story creates little tension regarding the fate of the resilient sisters. Caffall does, however, offer a convincing atmosphere as she depicts the dangers inherent in global warming, including flooding and mosquito-borne illnesses.

Perhaps with a view to giving the narrator a personality, Nonie has an affinity for water. The parameters of this superpower are unclear, except that Nonie knows when storms are coming. She keeps a water logbook to record her impressions of the water. Her entries are silly and pointless.

Flashbacks to the preapocalyptic world slow the novel’s pace, as do the intermittent entries from Nonie’s logbook of water. The story otherwise proceeds swiftly to its predictable conclusion. Genre fans who just can’t get enough postapocalyptic fiction might want to add All the Water in the World to their reading lists, but nothing about the novel causes it to stand apart from other formulaic depictions of post-apocalyptic struggles for survival.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS