A Letter from the Emperor

Short Story by Steve Rasnic Tem

Jacob and Anders are an Imperial Recording Team, basically a combination of the Postal Service and the Census Bureau. They collect messages and data, and deliver them. They've been working together for years, all alone, traveling the fringes of a gigantic empire but not seeing anything as exciting as you might think. One day, Anders dies.

He probably killed himself, although we're never 100% sure, and it doesn't really matter. Which is the point. He was depressed, and now he is dead, and Jacob has all kinds of regrets. The freak accident or suicide question doesn't matter much. This is a strong point in the story's favor by page one.

It turns out that besides depression, Anders had also been hiding his aspirations of adventure and friendship from his crewmate. His diary is filled with fictional stories he made up about his and Jacob's fantastic adventures, and their wonderful friendship. In reality, they'd never been particularly close, just work acquaintances. It's an extremely sad, regretful story, and it takes place all around the fringes of the central plot.

With Anders dead, Jacob has to deal with their next planet, and a retiring Colonel who expects a letter from the Emperor that Jacob can't seem to find. The relations with the small outpost planet, ironically named Joy, form the meat of the story, and allow for some interesting exploration of the functioning (or lack thereof) of the empire. Not all that far from the ideas explored in Reed's The Long Retreat, and plenty of other stories I'm sure, but Tem focuses on the internal communication aspects. It makes for an interesting backdrop, but I'm glad there is more to the story. So much more.

Tem manages a huge amount of musing on loneliness, isolation, loss, replacements for things lost (better or worse, never the same), and the utility of telling yourself helpful little lies. The last page or so is absolutely great, with Jacob taking up Anders' writing both as a way of coping, and (to my reading) as an homage to the friend he never bothered to make, but regretfully realizes he should have. Especially impressive for so few words. A simple story that in some ways reminds me of Asimov, with an ocean of emotional and philosophical depth hiding beneath. The poem isn't as good as it could have been, although it reeks nicely of pulp-SF, but otherwise a near-perfect short story.

5 depressive fiction-writing mailmen out of 5.

The Jekyll Island Horror

Novelette by Allen M. Steele

The story is presented as a manuscript by another writer, discovered by Allen Steele while visiting Jekyll Island for a wedding. The story takes place in March, 1934 and is told by the Sol Hess, the valet of a wealthy but struggling pulp magazine publisher, Mr. Russell.

While wintering at the fancy Jekyll Island Club in Georgia, Russell and Hess both enjoy themselves in their own ways, meeting women, and Hess finds time for his ambition to be a pulp SF writer. But one day, a strangely large meteorite is seen falling towards the island, and then things move into traditional Lovecraft story territory.

In that vein, I actually like Steele's style here better than Lovecraft's or Howard's, although it's still a homage to the era. There is a partially explained, implied scientific explanation for events, and the ending is nice and unresolved, but I'm not terribly impressed. Mostly I think it's that I was underwhelmed by the horror itself, and not terribly interested in the first half or so of the story, although by the end I was pretty interested in Hess' life.

The main value of the story is in the possibility that a pulp SF writer left a story as a sort of one-last-joke on his descendants, and the whole thing being within Steele's supposedly true frame narrative adds another layer to our examination of the plausibility of "true stories" told by SF writers. So an interesting conceit, in an average, not bad, not great, story.

3 gentlemens' gentlemen out of 5.

Poetry Roundup: Asimov's January 2010

DoT Acolytes by Ruth Berman

The MN department of Transportation are acolytes to the God of roads. When they don't fix potholes, he gets angry and makes worse potholes. Not funny, not clever, not complex. Blah.

Louisa Drifting by Mark Rich

Like this one quite a bit. Two astronauts dying after an accident, drifting apart. Metaphor for ending a relationship. More serious that Berman, but also funnier. Implication is obvious, but Rich doesn't completely spell it out.
Actually, in the final reading of things, I consider this the best Asimov's poem of the year.