It’s 2024. We live in the Future. And here are five tales, the Nebula finalists for short story, shepherding us, warning us, or delighting us into that future.
“Once Upon a Time at the Oakmont”
On the island of Manhattan, there’s a building out of time. I can’t tell you where it is, exactly. It has an address, of course, as all buildings do, but that wouldn’t mean anything to you. What I can tell you is that the building is called The Oakmont.
P. A. Cornell’s “Once Upon a Time at the Oakmont” is obsessed with time – much like P. A. Cornell herself. In some ways, this is perfectly obvious, even from the first line. Time is at a premium at the Oakmont, and everyone, Cornell included, is resourceful in their use of it. Dropped notes and strict rules work around the time differences or uphold the walls between them, and everyone exploits the peculiar properties of the Oakmont to …get together and watch movies up on the roof. It’s a mélange of eras and foods:
The film won’t start until it’s truly dark, though. First there’s the traditional potluck dinner. I glance down at the table at foods from every era. On one end Depression cake sits next to aspic. The other end holds a silver fondue pot. Just beyond that’s the grocery store sushi platter I brought. There are no rules about food at The Oakmont.
But it’s not just losing time and gaining time and spending time, it’s keeping time. Music weaves in and out of the story, in and out of the eras it warps through. The two main characters spend their time dancing to Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade,” even as they watch their time together at the Oakmont slip away. For this is a love story between the 2020s and the 1940s…and the future they could make together.
It’s not just time that governs “Once Upon a Time at the Oakmont,” but chance. The Oakmont is almost the city exaggerated – the chance encounters are the kind you only get in the city, with that many different people cheek-by-jowl on the front stoop, stopping by a building that used to be something, running into an old neighbor you haven’t seen in years. It’s chance that the two main characters meet, chance that brings about the happy ending, chance that brings up memories of times long past.
Chance and time – a beautiful combination for a romance.
“Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200”
So, hear nah. This is how it happen.
Was years after Malcolm pass through and wash away a lot ah we little islands coasts, and mash up so much ah Florida and Texas and them places, and people say they ain’t waiting for no next storm like that one, and they pack up they things and went England, and Canada, and all over.
A skill of science fiction and fantasy readers, like yourselves, is the ability to jump into a patois or a slang and trust that you’ll understand it. Maybe not yet, but in a few paragraphs or a few pages. It’s a rare skill, and a good one – I like to think it makes us more adept at plunging into unfamiliar dialects and unfamiliar jargons in real life. But the past few decades, the past few years, it seems to be a rarer and rarer skill, as writers assiduously try to make everything as easy to understand as quickly as possible from the first word.
As long as R. S. A. Garcia and other Caribbean writers like Suzan Palumbo are writing, that rare skill isn’t going anywhere.
The voice of Tantie Merle is half the story, warm and haughty. This is an old woman who’s too old to leave the village and whose best enemy is a goat. Ignatius, being a goat, will eat everything. So Merle’s children buy her a Farmhand 4200, an omnitool with a friendly face. Being lonely, she gives it a name, Lincoln.
Merle is the first person in history to give a name to her Farmhand 4200. I get the impression she can’t help it – she treats goats as people, why not treat something that can talk as a person? And thus begins a relationship, between Merle, Ignatius, and Lincoln, that ends with “he’s his own person now.”
“Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200” is about loneliness, but with a unique twist. A lot of science fiction (especially shorts) would treat the main character’s loneliness (and connection to others, either triumph or tragic failure) in a clinical and detached sort of way, often portraying such characters as antisocial introverts. Tantie Merle is gregarious and friendly, if set in her ways, and it warms the people (human, goat, or machine) she comes in contact with and the story as a whole. And overcoming that loneliness, with a twist, so delighted and surprised me that I laughed and drew stares from the other people in the café.
“Window Boy”
The tenth time Jakey broke the rules, he put a sandwich in the mailbox where the window boy could get it. Mom had taken her sleep-quick pills and gone to bed after dinner, on account of her headaches. And Dad was dozing in front of the TV, chin on his chest and a half-empty glass clutched in his hand. It got still enough that the only sounds were Dad’s shows and the hum of the house filters, so Jakey slipped into the kitchen and put together a ham and cheddar on a plate, then placed it in the parcel chamber near the front door. He sat by the parlor window for a good long while after, curled up at the bench cushions, and his eyelids drooped now and again until he began to see the shadows move.
The window boy showed up, just like all the other times.
“Window Boy” is class conflict with all the subtlety of a hammer. That’s okay – that’s half what science fiction is for. Thomas Ha shows us, through the parlor window, a world where the rich and powerful live in bunkers underground, piping security footage of the surface above into false windows in the parlor. The window boy is a surface-dweller, an object of Jakey’s empathy and a threat to his way of life.
And what a surface.
Men in camo appear out of the darkness, mysterious “grackles” hunt humans in the night. The surface world is disjointed and otherworldly, exactly how Jakey would see it. His family, meanwhile, are trapped by the trappings of our own world, the well-to-do problems thinly covered by pills and alcohol. Not for nothing does Jake’s father warn him against empathy and trust, especially of the surface folks, who might just kill him.
You think when they smile and wave that they want to be your friend? You think when they tap at the window or ring the doorbell they just want a little favor? They hate you, Jakey. That’s why we have rules, about not talking, not sharing. Because to share is to show. And you don’t ever show them what you got, Jakey. Understand?
And yet, Jakey goes to the parlor window, talks to the window boy, listens to his pleas to please open the door, pretty please, as the men prowl the darkness behind him like tigers.
I’ll admit that I don’t completely understand the ending. That’s all right. I understand the intent, and Thomas Ha delivers it with skill, and force, and bitterness.
“The Sound of Children Screaming”
You know the one about the Gun. The Gun goes where it wants to. On Thursday morning just after recess, the Gun will walk through the front doors of Thurman Elementary, and it won’t sign in at the front office or wear a visitor’s badge.
Yeah, this one is dark. Don’t let the Narnian mice fool you.
The school shooter arrives and, refreshingly, Rachael K. Jones does not waste any time on him, his name, his motivations. He is a tool of the Gun and not worth her time, or ours. But the alarms sound, and Ms. Dalton and her fourth-grade class into the closet, where a magical Portal that “seeks the places where children hide” whisks them away to a fantasyland.
The talking mice, their romantic war, the crowns of bones, the feasting are all a bit of a left swerve from the grounded, tense ripped-from-too-many-headlines story that Jones opens with. But it slowly comes clear that the fantasy, the real fantasy, is that the children have agency here. They’re important, they matter, their choices change the world. And that’s a double-edged sword, as Ms. Dalton can plainly see. People could die from the children’s choices.
Meanwhile, the school shooter is opening the door to the classroom.
And that agency, the collision between the fantasyland and the school shooter scenario, Narnia crashing into Columbine, forms the climax of the story that I never saw coming…and realized was inevitable.
“Bad Doors”
The country was at just over ten thousand deaths the morning that the door appeared.
[…]
Nearing the hall, he called out for his cousin. “Jesse? Got any empty seltzers? I’m doing a recycling run.”
That’s when he saw the new door.
John Wiswell’s “Bad Doors” follows Kosmo, just trying to survive in a COVID-infested America, as he is chased by a mysterious door that follows him wherever he goes. It sounds like a Twilight Zone episode, one of the good ones, but don’t expect a twist at the end. Kosmo stares at the door like Ms. Dalton at the classroom closet, but Kosmo has no shooter behind him…and every reason to fear the door that wasn’t there before.
After Jesse’s mysterious disappearance, Kosmo’s only family is Uncle Dahl. But Dahl is no help. An anti-vaxxer and COVID denialist, Uncle Dahl doesn’t believe in doors either, only screaming at Kosmo to “be a man!” over Kosmo’s increasingly sardonic voice. Kosmo’s voice – sardonic without being over-the-top Joss Whedon dialogue – is one of the highlights of the story, and a nice tonic after Uncle Dahl’s all-too-real toxicity.
I like “refusal of the call” stories – I’ve had one I’ve been tinkering with for twenty-six years now. Confronted with a Twilight Zone situation, Kosmo doesn’t immediately open it, doesn’t suit up for the next great adventure, doesn’t call the omindisciplinary scientists and the military to investigate. He avoids it. He runs. He warns people not to touch the door, and when they do, he runs farther. And keeps running.
And that running is his saving grace – quite literally. It involves standing up to, and getting away from, Uncle Dahl before it destroys him. And it involves getting as far as possible from that damn door.
“Better Living Through Algorithms”
Then she put it down with a smile and said, “Abelique told me not to pick up my phone again until after lunch was over.”
“Who?” Margo said.
“It’s this new app for better living.”
“I love the idea of an app that tells you to put your phone down more. For your own good,” Margo said, her eyes glinting.
“You should try it!” June said. “You get the first thirty days free!”
“And after that, you have to pay someone to nag you to use your phone less?”
“It’s more than that.” June took a bite out of her tuna melt. “For one thing, you also agree to occasionally nag other people to put their phones down.”
This is an Asimov robot story. And if you’ve read any Asimov, you know this is going to be a happy one.
Abelique is taking the world by storm – the app that helps you with everything, from reviving your childhood love of painting to getting you to talk to people to shopping and cooking for a healthier you. It even disguises itself as a productivity app for your boss, while reminding you not to stay late since he’s not paying you overtime! Kritzer refers to it as “a complete lifestyle app” and I can’t think of a more appropriate appellation.
But where it comes from, who benefits, is a mystery, one that gets unraveled slowly over the course of the story…even as the narrator’s life visibly improves. Whoever they are, they have a plan…even the enshittification of the app might well be part of the mysterious, dare we suspect sinister?, plot.
You keep waiting for the twist. It doesn’t come. The lack of an ironic twist is the twist!
And this while grappling with the kind of “a man chooses, a slave obeys” issues that living on our phones bring up. I’m on Duolingo, Libby, and I Am on my phone…but I’m also on Reddit, Discord, and Instagram. And I know they’re not helping me. Do you choose to use your phone…or obey it?
And would you kindly tell me if obeying is necessarily a bad thing?
What absolutely floored me about this story is that Naomi Kritzer has not invented a Torment Nexus. She’s illustrated an app that Silicon Valley could build, right now, today, that would improve the lives of everyone who uses it and probably make the creators a great deal of money.
Hey, Silicon Valley, stop inventing the Torment Nexus from Don’t Build The Torment Nexus. Would you kindly build this instead?
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