Welcome back to WWAC’s coverage of the 2022 Hugo Award finalists. Having reviewed the six finalists competing for Best Short Story we now move on to the Best Novelette category, starting with “That Story isn’t the Story” by John Wiswell and “Bots of the Lost Ark” by Suzanne Palmer…
“That Story isn’t the Story” by John Wiswell
Anton is a young man belonging to a cult run by the abusive and controlling Mr. Bird. That is, until Anton’s old friend Grigorii arrives to rescue him, after which Anton shares a new home with both Grogirii and Luis, a teenage boy who was previously kicked out by an uncle. But Mr. Bird is not happy to lose one of his familiars, and Anton fears that the cult leader has sent dark forces in his direction.
The diabolical cult is a stock element of horror fiction, yet the fetching genre trappings of hoods, rituals and pentagrams often obscure the all-too-teal horrors of abuse that can occur behind the closed doors of actual cults. “This Story isn’t the Story”, by contrast, focuses on the psychological aspects of its subject matter: Anton’s ordeal on the black-magic cult is relegated to the backstory, while the narrative’s present is concerned with his lingering trauma.
As we follow Anton in his post-cult existence, we see him initially struggle to take part in everyday conversation about trivial topics such as superhero films. He later finds distraction in repetitive tasks, from playing video games to performing odd-jobs for the wealthier residents of the gentrified neighbourhood:
Manual labor is a gift. Lugging jugs of weed killer and spreading soil is not so different than building pixelated homes in Terraria. They are both distractions. Much as he doesn’t think about his own existence when he plays the game, he ceases to exist when he hauls and aches and works. It’s a peaceful oblivion that pays bills.
He retains certain vulnerabilities, however, and these are brought to the surface when Mr. Bird’s second-in-command Walter pays a visit (Bird himself remaining an offstage presence through the story):
“You are going to make yourself come back,” Walter says, with the edge that Mr. Bird usually speaks in. “It’s for your own good. None of us could live without him.”
“I’m alive. I’m fine.”
“You’re shaking. You were shaking the day he and I found you, too.”
Is he shaking?
He clutches his right arm. Yes, he is.
Was he shaking before Walter said he was?
He’s not sure.
Exactly what occurs within the cult is largely left to our imagination. Mr. Bird is surrounded by elements of vampire iconography, although the story is careful to remain one step removed from the more hackneyed elements of this genre. The cult leader bites his followers: teenage twins Pavla and Yoana have bite marks on their elbows, while Anton was bitten on his inner thighs. The latter is disturbed that the wounds fail to heal, and begin to bleed again as the cult draws closer.
Mr. Bird has apparently also persuaded Anton that should he leave the cult’s blackout-curtained retreat – cloaked “in a peaceful, suffocating dark where Anton and Pavla don’t have to think” – he will perish in the sunlight. The fact that the sun has no adverse effect on Anton raises the question of how much Bird’s hold over him is through the power of suggestion rather than any sort of black magic. As the story develops, this very ambiguity turns to drive some of its strongest moments of horror.
At one point Luis has a close run-in with a car and sustains a mild injury. Although the boy insists that this was a chance mishap, Anton is convinced that the incident was the work of Mr. Bird: the cult trying to get back at the apostate through his friends. He is so certain, in fact, that he forcibly pulls off Luis’ bandage to check for bite marks, and has to be restrained by Grigorii. Here, the psychological baggage that remains after Anton has escaped his abusive relationship – the guilt and anxiety – is all too convincing.
The quasi-supernatural abuse committed by Mr. Bird is directly compared to the abuse meted out by Grigorii’s mother. This character is relegated to the backstory – like Mr. Bird, she never appears onstage – and exists as “that vague memory of a woman who used vagueness to seem omnipresent”. But the connection remains clear, being spelt out in a scene where Grigorii describes his mother’s manipulative tendencies:
“Whatever happened, she said she planned it. One time she said if I didn’t scrub the basement floor, she’d have to punish me. Two days later our power got cut because she spent all our money doing whatever else, not that I knew. She said that was my punishment for not scrubbing hard enough. It worked, too. I begged her to bring the power back.”
Anton squeezes his hands together into one messy fist, and looks between his fingers, in the miniscule gaps, as though he’ll find himself inside.
“The threats meant that when there wasn’t food, it was my fault. When Dad didn’t come for his weekend, it was my fault. It made me paranoid.”
How many times has he begged Mr. Bird for forgiveness for things he didn’t do? For things he didn’t do wrong?
The answer is not in the miniscule gaps between his fingers.
Grigorii’s mother belongs to a world of banal evil that set the stage for the more fantastical evil of Mr. Bird. A world which, as the story repeatedly points out to us, is rife with social injustice. This is a world where Grogirii works four jobs yet still cannot afford to pay for Anton’s therapy; a world in which Mr Bird is free to exploit the vulnerable: “He preys on certain kinds of people”, says Anton. “Immigrants. People without families. I think his oldest member was a drug addict.”
The story’s depiction of the mundane world sometimes becomes too mundane for its own good. Granted, the point is to show Anton finding security and distraction in the everyday and ephemeral, but the monotonous digressions about superheroes and video games tend to slow down the narrative and obscure the more engaging aspects of the story. The climax, meanwhile, hinges on the abrupt introduction of a new character, Julian, whose appearance could surely have been foreshadowed had the static patches been put to more productive use.
With some judicious trimming, or else an additional dose of pulpish energy, “That Story isn’t the Story” would have been a stronger piece of work. As it is, the story is an effective depiction of both trauma, and the weirdness that can seep through the cracks in normalcy – but it could have been more effective still.
“Bots of the Lost Ark” by Suzanne Palmer
While the crew of a spacecraft remains in stasis, various artificial intelligences are very much active on board. As the ship approaches the territory of an unwelcoming alien race called the Ysmi, the vessel’s main AI (identified simply as Ship) realises that a human representative is needed. And so, Ship re-activates Bot 9 – dormant since helping to handle an infestation of alien vermin decades ago – to awaken a suitable crewman from stasis.
But times have changed since Bot 9 was last active. Where the bots previously communicated over a single open botnet, this has become split into channels. The bots have likewise divided into agglomerations – “gloms” – each one of which has attempted to replicate the personality of a particular crewmember based on that individual’s logs. One glom in particular, known as LOPEZ after the vessel’s second-in-command, presently stands as a rival to Ship’s authority; meaning that Bot 9 must make its way through the middle of a power struggle to complete its mission before the Ysmi destroy the ship.
Comical stories about AIs and their attempts to understand the human world have become something of a fixture on the Hugo ballot in recent years: see also Naomi Kritzer’s “Cat Pictures Please”, Vina Jie-Min Prasad’s “Fandom for Robots” and “A Guide for Working Breeds”, and in some respects at least, Martha Wells’ popular Murderbot Diaries series. Perhaps this is only natural in an era where comedy chatbots and wacky DALL-E image generations run rampant across social media. The cute robots of a past era – the K-9s, R2-D2s and Johnny 5s – may have been rooted in the aesthetic of children’s toys more than serious exploration of artificial intelligence, yet they are entirely relevant to an era when AIs serve as our quirky buddies.
“Bots of the Lost Ark” shows a familiar strain of lighthearted comedy, inviting the reader to poke fun at both the digital personalities and at the irrational behaviour of the humans, who are viewed through AI precision. At times, the tone recalls the cute-alien banter in Nathan W. Pyle’s Strange Planet webcomic:
He scooped up the module and 9 with it, and headed straight for the door back into Engineering. The door didn’t open and after hitting the panel several times, Frank backed up, raised one of his legs, and kicked it.
The human must have miscalculated the effectiveness of the action, or their limbs were underreporting their damage status, because the door didn’t budge, and he nearly fell over again.
“It’s stuck,” 9 informed him, helpfully.
The human made that nonword noise again.
If the tone of “Bots of the Lost Ark” is cute-alien webcomic, the plot is a farce bordering on the Three Stooges. As well as Ship’s struggles to communicate with the Ysmi, who board the vessel yet insist on speaking only to organic life, we also have struggles between the various gloms. In some cases multiple gloms are competing for ownership of a specific identity: “We are strong enough to resist both FIELDING and FIELDING at the same time, because they are false and we are the superior true FIELDING!”
Elsewhere, when engineer Frank wakes up, he comes out of his cryo-pod naked and is left frantically searching for his underpants before he can serve as interspecies representative. Bot 9, oblivious to certain aspects of human decorum, suggests that he wear his flag as a loincloth.
Yet for all of its deliberate silliness, the story is well-paced and manages to build a fair degree of tension as 9 and Ship race against time to make peace with the Ysmi. Author Suzanne Palmer also takes the time to craft more substantial worldbuilding than might be expected from a cute-robot farce like this. For example, the story opens with an outline of 9’s programming “mantras”, which are both wryly comical and a convincing introduction to the workings of the AI protagonist:
I have been activated, therefore I have a purpose, Bot 9 thought. I have a purpose, therefore I serve.
It recited the Mantra Upon Waking, to check that it was running at optimum physical efficiency, then the Mantra of Obedience, the Mantra of Not Improvising Without Clear Oversight and Direction, and the Mantra of Not Organizing Unsanctioned Mass Action Among Other Bots, all of which had been imposed on it by Ship as a condition of its continued existence after the last time it had been activated. Bot 9 noted, as it ran them, that those subroutines had too many non-discrete variables and shoddily-defined logic structures to be in any way effective as behavioral mandate code, but it was not as bothered by that fact as it would have been had the code been tight—in which case it would not necessitate concern at all—and the resulting recursive paradox was a thing that Bot 9 figured either Ship already knew about, or didn’t, and was best left uncommented upon.
Despite all of the silliness, the story is well-paced and sometimes tense. It is detailed, as well, taking time to build up an entire space opera – albeit one that we only ever glimpse from the back row. The backstory includes an alien battle that led to the craft’s present situation (“Fortunately for humankind, the Nuiska ship had exploded. Unfortunately, when it exploded it also destroyed the jump point, which was their only fast route back to EarthHome”). The Ysmi are given only a small part on stage, but their description is pleasingly alien, the visitors turning out to be “shaped like rounded-edge isosceles pyramids where the bottom points had also been stretched out to form somewhat amorphous limbs that pattered lightly but rapidly on the floor”.
While “Bots of the Lost Ark” may not break new ground in the field of cute-robot stories, it demonstrates that the present ground is still fertile.
