Dead Worlds
| Tangent Online / Christopher East / Online
The thoughtful "Dead Worlds" by Jack Skillingstead follows. The story centers on a man named Robert, an "Eye"
whose job it is to explore other planets by "perceptually inhabiting" exploratory machines over interstellar
distances. A side effect of having perceptions transmitted over such vast distances is a resulting emotional
deadness, normally regulated by medication. But Robert goes off his meds, seeking hope with another lonely soul.
It's a dark vision, perhaps stronger in metaphor than in its SF details, tying together the protagonist's stricken
condition with the growing sense of humanity's isolation in the universe--"dead worlds" both internal and external.
An effectively written, promising debut.
Best SF / Mark Watson / Online
Actually, this story reads more like a Varley classic, which is no mean praise for a budding author. Robert is an 'Eye' - someone who connects to a tachyon stream whilst in a total immersion chamber, controlling
equipment in deep, deep space, seeking life on other planets. His job is one that carries a heavy emotional and psychological price, in that he is reliant on drugs to be able
to engage with the 'real world'. He is struggling to find his true self having 'returned' from his last trip,
trying to avoid taking the drugs. Whilst out driving he meets a woman, widowed a couple of years ago, who is
similarly trying to recover her true self. The two find that between them they might be able to begin to meet their individual needs, although a final
challenge awaits them before this can happen. An excellent story. Bluejack / Online
The story opens with an awful scene: the first person narrator (Robert) runs over a dog (Buddy). It is by accident,
of course, and he does everything he can to avoid the animal, but to no avail. While he is bending over the dying
dog, the owner comes out of the woods. Already, we know something is up. "I looked on, dispassionate. Already, I was losing my sense of emotional
connection. I had deliberately neglected to take my pill that morning."
Skillingstead riffs on Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain" a bit with the premise here. The narrator
is an Eye -- he remotely explores planets by a technology that, as a side effect, breaks down his mental coherence. Without medications to keep his personality together, to provide the possibility of emotions, he disintegrates
into an unfiltered collection of sensory perceptions, devoid of volition.
Skillingstead imagines this experience through some very strong writing. The story builds as Robert and Kim,
Buddy's person, hook up. Each is dealing with death and loss in their own way. But Robert has to do one more stint
as an Eye. Those who use him as such are desperate to find life on these distant planets, but so far their
explorations have been futile. When Robert goes in for more medication, they manipulate him into abandoning Kim in
order to undertake his last mission as Eye.
The quest for life beyond our world resonates against Robert's return, and his quest for death. Specifically, Kim's. He is frightened that his abandonment of her may have lead her to kill herself.
Much was made in the forums of the cryptic last sentence. I think it is a perfect, unsettling, resolution to
the unsettling ambience of the whole story.
YBSF reviews: Booklist / Carl Hays / Online
Newcomer Jack Skillingstead contributes an electrifying tale about an astronaut exploring other worlds by robotic proxy; his emotions are stripped away in the process.
The Trades / Howard Price / Online
Exploration of new worlds your thing? Why pack men into rockets and send them out when you can project their consciousness through the ether to record the terrain without risking their life--or does it? Jack Skillingstead's Dead Worlds examines the life of one of these "eyes" in a tale that's just as much about relationships and need as it is about advanced technology. |
Rewind
| Tangent Online / Chris Markwyn / Online
Jack Skillingstead does a nice job with a familiar idea in his short "Rewind." The narrator is enjoying a beer in
a Seattle pub when a terrorist bomb explodes nearby, wounding him and killing the young woman sitting nearby.
Haunted by her sudden death, the narrator finds himself playing "the game of WHAT IF, the game of IF ONLY,"
imagining what he could have done differently, and suddenly finds himself rewound back in time to the moment just
before the explosion. This time, he saves the woman's life, but afterwards finds himself slowly moving out of step
with reality. He is faced with a terrible choice: let the woman die so he can live normally, or save her life and
lose touch with reality.
In a scant six pages, Skillingstead does a nice job sketching the characters, with just enough detail to make them
come alive. It's a familiar scenario, of course, and not just to readers of sf and fantasy. Everyone has played the "IF ONLY" game, but Skillingstead gives it that slight twist that makes the narrator's dilemma genuinely agonizing. Changing the past with only good consequences is a no-brainer, but what if the cost to yourself was
much higher?
Locus / Nick Gevers
Asimov's for February is ... home to ... three original fantasies of real merit. The best of these is "Rewind",
by Jack Skillingstead: injured in a terrorist bomb blast, a man discovers that he can replay the event mentally,
electing either to save the woman sharing his table (at considerable cost to himself), or leave her, selfishly, to
her death. The replays become physical also, winding time back; her life is in his hands; what will he choose as
the explosion's lasting iteration? Skillingstead enunciates this dilemma vividly, craftily. . . Recommended. |
Transplant
| Tangent Online / Michael Gabriel Bailey / Online
Jack Skillingstead's "Transplant" is a return to the messy-feeling post-human fiction that has become so popular these days. On a giant generation ship, a genetic freak struggles to gain his freedom from a megalomaniacal captain. Ellis, the constantly regenerating immortal, has tired of having his organs harvested to lengthen the life of the ship's ruler, Laird Ulin. During his duel of wits with Laird, Ellis rekindles a romance with a lost love, Delilah. Skillingstead's writing and concepts are strong enough to carry the story past the parts I didn't care for, like the superquantum computer environment that reads "unconscious symbolic language" to create analogs. The scenes in the computer's Matrix-like environs didn't do much for me. I felt Skillingstead's most powerful paragraphs dealt with Ellis' avoidance of the "web of human attachments," and the exploration of the pain an immortal feels while watching loved ones die. My favorite kind of writing explores the human condition, and by keeping "Transplant" anchored with Ellis' pursuit of happiness, Skillingstead kept me reading.
Locus / Nick Gevers
Asimov's for August...thrilling, disconcerting, disorienting stuff: many of the best short fictions of the month are here...Jack Skillingstead's "Transplant" is an amusing caper concerning an immortal man's desperate efforts to escape remaining a walking organ farm on a generation starship...
Locus / Rich Horton
Jack Skillingstead's first few stories have been consistently impressive, "Transplant" being the latest. The narrator is a genetic freak who may be immortal--he can regenerate any injured part. A rich man sponsoring a generation starship uses parts harvested from the narrator to maintain his life, hoping to survive the journey. The story concerns the narrator's attempt to make an independent life among the short-lived passengers--difficult both because of the other man's insistence on having him near at hand, and because of the traditional difficulty immortals have dealing with the constant losses of mortal friends. |
Scatter
| IROSF / Bluejack / Online
Difficult, complicated relationships also lie at the heart of Jack Skillingstead's return to Asimov's with Scatter, in which a man who has already been murdered by his wife is subjected to yet another assault. That is, his digital survivor is poisoned with corrupt data, and he's forced to go black and white to try to save himself from irreparable deterioration. This is an enjoyable story, both accessible and rewarding.
Locus / Nick Gevers More general truths pervade other excellent stories: ...there is Jack Skillingstead's "Scatter", which assesses marital possessiveness through the soft focus of Hollywood and a harder vision of how even love must end...
Tangent Online / Chris Markwyn / Online
I've read two stories by Jack Skillingstead now, "Scatter" in this issue and his earlier "Rewind," and I've been very impressed by both. Daniel Frye is a dead private investigator. On a vacation with his wife, Molly, he fell off a balcony, putting a final strain on their failing marriage. Now he survives as a "biolo," a swarm of nanobots and a digital personality. One day, as so often happens to private eyes, a beautiful woman sashays into his office. In Daniel's case, however, she brings him not a case, but a virus that threatens to contaminate his mind.
Being a swarm of nanobots means Daniel can appear however he wishes, and he likes to look like Robert Mitchum, or Humphrey Bogart, or other PIs from the movies. What he can't do, though, is be real, at least real in the way everyone else is. Skillingstead gives us a finely drawn sketch of a man trapped between two worlds: not only between the everyday world of humans made of meat and bone and Daniel's new digital world, but between the past and the future. |
Reunion
| SF Crowsnest / Martin Jenner / Online
Like most of the pieces in this magazine it's unconventional to say the least. Something of a redemption story as a cold-hearted businessman revisits his past in a very accurate sense of the word. The story feels somewhat padded out with over-exacting description but the characterisation is solid as a rock and the plot's clever enough to make it an absorbing read. |
Bean There
| Tangent Online / Patrick Samphire / Online
Asimov's tends to publish less humor than its main rival, Fantasy & Science Fiction, so it's nice to find such an effective example in Jack Skillingstead's "Bean There." Burt is the proprietor of Bean There, a failing java joint, and he isn't coping well. It's not just his empty cafe; it's the aliens that have arrived. They call themselves the Harbingers of Evolution, and with their coming, miracles have started to occur: a woman spontaneously teleports in Graceland; a boy levitates his bicycle, ET-style. Like much of the population, Burt is in denial. Unfortunately for Burt, his girlfriend, Aimee, is not, and her interest in these miracles and the Evolution the aliens bring is more than he can cope with.
Although humor plays a large part in this story, it is not its raison d'etre. At its core, the story is about Burt's struggle to cope with what he sees as madness in Aimee in the context of his own background of dealing with an alcoholic father and a bi-polar sister. At times, this leads the story to be slightly split in its focus. "Bean There" might, for example, have made more of how Burt is held back from accepting what Aimee believes by his family background, however that element does not come over quite strongly enough to fully convince. The ending, too, is a little predictable—after all, what other choice can Burt make, in the end?
Despite these minor reservations, I thought "Bean There" rattled along at a good pace, and there were plenty of smiles on every page.
Locus / Rich Horton
...a sweet story of a skeptical coffee shop owner in a world apparently gone mad. Strange news stories abound - levitated bicycles, teleporting people, Jerry Garcia returned from the dead. Burt refuses to believe, that his girlfriend, Aimee, a sculptor, talks of "Harbingers of Evolution." We can all see where the story is headed, and it gets there nicely.
IROSF / Bluejack / Online
Burt and Aimee run a coffee shop, but the business is in decline. Everything is in decline, with the advent of the aliens. Miracles suggesting a next-stage of evolution (à la X-Men) have disrupted everything normal. Some embrace this evolution; some fear it. Aimee with her pixie pink hair embraces; surly Burt fears.
This evolution hints at two directions. First is the spiritual dimension of change, a sort of short-form take on the issues presented in the film What the Bleep Do We Know. The aliens, who are not entirely concrete, appear to be bringing about change in order to protect humanity—and the Earth—from our worst impulses. They are a catalyst for change, and the change is as more a matter of personal revelation and transcendence of the limits imposed by established ways of thinking than it is a matter of genetic manipulation.
Secondly, however, this evolution suggests itself as externalization of personal evolution. Aimee is ready to grow; Burt just wants the comfortable routine of their domestic existence. Aimee wants to explore, to travel; Burt wants security and predictability.
Unlike most of his previous stories in Asimov's, Skillingstead takes a lighter approach with this one, and it suits him. There is perhaps more tension in the growth-versus-domestic-bliss axes of human experience than Skillingstead lets on: the reader is encouraged to side with Aimee. Or at least readers partial to pixie pink hair are. But the humorous tone and the imagery of Aimee's evolution are sufficient to defuse any accusations of authorial moralizing.
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Overlay
| Tangent Online / Dave Smeds / Online
"Overlay" by Jack Skillingstead is... successful in crafting characters that have a second layer to them. It could be categorized as cyberpunk. Certainly it includes tropes such as wetware implants and the "lifeloop"—to coin a term from a very early Orson Scott Card Analog story (so early that Ben Bova was still the magazine's editor). Skillingstead's protagonist is loaning his body out for a rich man's uses, and needs to know what that rich man has been doing while "riding." The author brings to life the gritty future-Earth setting, enlivens his main character, and nails down his two secondary characters with a few deft strokes that give the reader access to their motives (good, bad, neutral—enough that the protagonist knows who's on whose side). The plot wraps up neatly but perhaps too suddenly. This story could have benefited by being longer, and using what's already here as a launching point.
IROSF / Bluejack / Online
...This may be Skillingstead's sharpest work yet. Firmly science fictional in both sensibility and in construction, yet with the page-turning quality of a good mystery, "Overlay" gives all of the visceral thrills of a good-fun story, and yet retains all of the characteristics of Skillingstead's introspective, self-deprecating style. On top of all that, it's sexy (with an enjoyably overt, and even more enjoyably unresolved, tension) and populated by characters who don't turn out to be quite what they seem at first.
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Are You There
| Locus / Rich Horton
"Are you There" is about a parapoliceman tracking a serial killer. His best lead is the "Loved One" he finds -- a "copy" of the killer's mother's brain, preserved on a computer. It works well enough as a crime story, and it works even better as a story about the detective and his relationships with women: his ex-wife, a woman he has met in a chat room but not in person, and the electronic copy of his quarry's mother. Recommended
Nick Gevers ...Jack Skillingstead writes bleakly of solitude and solipsism in "Are You There," a trenchant story of a detective falling in love with the stored memory engrams of a serial killer's mother.
IROSF / Lois Tilton Parapolice detective Brian Deatry has problems with personal relationships, face to face. It’s easier for him to connect with people remotely, through this future’s version of the ‘net. Then he comes into possession of a responsive memory module, the interactive recording of a dead woman’s personality and memories. The module helps him find a serial killer, but Deatry is compelled to keep activating her, even after the case is closed, to maintain his contact with a person who can never demand more from him.
While Deatry’s world is not the same as our own — a dystopian future version — his problem is quite familiar, as we can see people around us retreating from the real to the virtual worlds. Skillingstead has given us a Cautionary Tale.
Tangent Online / Suzanne Church "Are You There" is a dark story with morose characters tortured by loneliness and regret. Brian Deatry is a parapolice detective, hired by constituents who choose to pay his salary and entrusted with bringing killers to justice. While chasing "The Bastard," a man who butchers the homeless, Deatry finds the killer's "Loved One," a device used to capture the essence of someone who is about to die. The procedure kills the human, but the device provides comfort, "[responding] just like the original." Relying heavily on dialogue, Skillingstead paints Deatry as a man who's lost everything from his wife to his future. Deatry blossoms with elegant despair; a walking corpse trailing the deceased like breadcrumbs. Bordering on horror, "Are You There" paints a bleak future with a black brush, incorporating a noir tone reminiscent of masterpieces like Citizen Kane.
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Life On The Preservation
| Locus / Nick Gevers
Ontological dubiety threads cogently through this issue. Jack Skillingstead's excellent "Life on the Preservation" brings a young woman traveler to a familiar Seattle, but the city turns out to be in the nature of a museum exhibit, aliens having invaded earth in November 2004 (an interesting choice of date!), devastating the planet but maintaining a few cities as they once were, cycling over and over through the same idyllic day. It's tempting to read political commentary into this, Republicans going heedlessly on as before while the world warms around them and such; but the detail of the story possesses a fine poignancy, as the suicide bomber intent on eradicating the false paradise of Seattle discovers some of its attractions and is bewitched by its supreme congeniality...Skillingstead ably map(s) the landscape of humankind's present--growing--confusion. |
| Locus / Rich Horton
"Life on the Preservation" tells of a girl from a future Earth destroyed by aliens who penetrates into into Seattle, which has been maintained in a time loop as a sort of reminder of what Earth was like. Her job is to destroy the alien time loop machinery--but this is complicated when she meets a boy.... I think this may be the best story yet by this fine new writer |
| Tangent Online / Suzanne Church
Girl In The Empty Apartment
Tangent Online / Suzanne Church The Chimera Transit |