The ED SF Project

“The Tenants” by William Tenn: An Appreciation by Nancy O. Greene

2007-04-25T09:06:00.000-07:00

"The Tenants" by William Tenn (Philip Klass) is laced with the kind of subtle horror and mental decline that comes with obsession. It starts out with the protagonist, Sydney Blake, going about things as he normally would as an employee of a Wellington Jimm & Sons, Inc., a real estate company, but the tale quickly goes from the normal to the bizarre with the introduction of two prospective tenants for the McGowan Building, Tohu and Bohu. These unusual characters are interested in renting a level of the building—the 13th floor—which doesn't exist; while Blake is not successful in swaying them from their "impossible" interest, his boss eventually rents the floor to the unusual pair.

The situation goes on to become more bizarre. Movers and cleaning crews and even the protagonist's secretary, Miss Kerstenberg, see nothing at all strange about the fact that "only those that have any business on the 13th floor" are able to reach the mysterious office. Blake's mental acuity begins to decline as he tries trick after trick to get to the 13th floor, all to no avail.

Written in 1954, it appears that this story can be related to an examination of a type of "Beaver Cleaver" mentality--everything is accepted at face value, very little is questioned. People accept what should be unacceptable and those that question are seen as, and indeed driven, insane.

On the other hand, one wonders at the end of the story, and with the fate of the character, if he should not have adhered so stringently to his world view, his standards of normalcy, and his abnormal curiosity, because this is what ultimately leads to his subsequent downfall. His lack of imagination, his inability to see beyond his own experiences trap him, literally.

As his secretary explains to him, tohuoobohu is a Hebrew word for chaos and void, and the unusual tenants themselves deal in the intangibles. What kind? "The soft kind." And they are not interested in answering questions about what they do or how they exist, the just are. Unfortunately for Sydney Blake, he wishes to know more.

But one should be careful what they wish for, as the protagonist soon finds out. By focusing on Tohu and Bohu, he is drawn into a sort of chaos and void of his own, and there is no one that can rescue him.

The well-known author and a Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University, Philip Klass—writing under his pen name of William Tenn—is primarily known as a science fiction satirist, though he also writes other types of fiction and non-fiction. "The Tenants," just one of his many celebrated tales, is an interesting story; less satire and more subtle horror, astonishing in its simplicity.

Link to story.

"Small Houses" by James P. Blaylock: An Appreciation by Amy Sterling Casil

2007-01-16T09:34:00.000-08:00

I might have overestimated Jim's sense of humor in the past. Or, it may just be that I'm older, and I see so much more clearly how immensely touching his writing is. How the words are laden with quiet emotion.

I might well be writing my first comments on a story that was reviewed previously by others online. According to one well-known SF/F reviewer, "Sci Fiction presents the wonderful and whimsical nostalgic reveries of a dying man in "Small Houses" by James P. Blaylock."

I can think of some words to describe the dying man Mr. Johnson and his reveries, but "wonderful" and "whimsical" aren't chief among them. Another reader, Jed Hartman, wrote that "'Small Houses' is a very nice, and sad, barely fantasy piece."

"Small Houses" is very nice, and it is a little sad, but not really. Maybe you have to have had a grandfather who was handy like Mr. Johnson, and also a fig tree in the back yard, in order to find a sense of order in the story, as opposed to sadness. I am not sure why Jed wanted to mention that the story was a "barely fantasy piece." I think it's fairly clear that Myrt (Mr. Johnson's deceased wife) is showing herself to her husband in the fish bowl. And, I wondered if Johnson had in fact not already died, and simply wasn't accepting it yet -- for he found the other sherry glass, and the anniversary card -- except he does sit down and "pass away" at the end of the story.

According to Flaubert, God was in the details.

The details collected in "Small Houses" pertain to Mr. Johnson's life. He has built a very small treehouse in an avocado tree in his back yard, into which he places his makeshift fish bowl and his fish, Septimus, and, if one reads carefully, himself. He has shut up his house after his wife's death -- and it's really not certain for how long, but probably a long time.

"As time passed and the foliage thickened, the natural light had dwindled, which was to be expected, since that was the way with everything."

"Small Houses" is a story about organizing one's life, the way it has to be in a small house. Today, I think people are sometimes surprised by the tiny spaces previous generations made-do with. Little 800 square foot houses with three bedrooms and a single bathroom were considered fine for families in years past. Today, a single person has trouble "making do" with that amount of space. I know how things were also precious to people as well. For forty years, Mr. Johnson has built a toolbox with compartments that he's always planned to convert to a coffin as the end draws near.

He envisioned compartments for hammers and saws and planes, for squares and levels and a set of bits and augers; cubbyholes for nails and screws and wood dough; slots and panels that could be arranged and rearranged over the passing years until, when the sun was setting at last, metaphorically speaking, he could remove the interior complications more or less altogether, leaving only a nook and a cranny for the few things, beside himself, that he wanted to take along to the afterlife.

As everyone knows, "You can't take it with you," and throughout the meditative, careful pace of Mr. Johnson's preparations, you know that he's not going to be able to take the sherry glasses, the sherry, the cribbage board, or the "Desert Island books." The story is more about his acceptance that he's dying, and how he finally comes to make his peace with his life and his death.

I knew a couple like this. More than one, actually. Sometimes when a couple has been married for many years, and one partner dies, the other one scarcely knows how to go on. I felt this about these two. The doorknob, the saved sherry label, the sherry glasses and garage sale bargain treasures. But people don't much build treehouses in avocado trees like that -- he set the redwood lumber in the tree branches themselves, putting the posts in concrete pilings. Over the years, the tree grew around the posts, shutting them in, closing down the light. And as the light dwindles, so does Mr. Johnson's life.

The details one might call "ordinary," but they are not. They are as unique as fingerprints, as the freckles on someone's nose, as the flecks in another one's eyes, as the pitch of a laugh, and the way one mother folds her daughter's t-shirts and sprinkles them with lavender.

I'll just close by saying, stories like this are their own reward. Everyone who reads it will receive it.

Link to story.

"Hula Ville" by James P. Blaylock: An Appreciation by Amy Sterling Casil

2007-01-10T08:37:00.000-08:00

Hula Ville was once a real landmark on the famous "Route 66" going to or from the High Desert in Southern California. It's not the kind of place any of my people would have been inclined to stop at when I was growing up. Although it's absolutely my kind of place, I never managed to stop there before it sank back into the desert sands.

So, I read "Hula Ville" by Jim Blaylock.

When I was 12, I woke and saw shining lights flickering at the foot of my bed and I was covered in electricity that made all my hair stand on end. For a long time I thought it was the spirits of Indians coming from their burial ground out in the wash. I have a hard time understanding why "Hula Ville" is in SCI FICTION. It's plain it's a true story. The problem is that most people don't understand what goes on out in these places. I guess they never heard that God does live in the desert. I know about those people that went out to Angel's Peak to get baptized. They all acted differently when they came back. Considering the pretty near total lack of what all went on in my town back in those days, it was a good thing.

As Jim writes about this fellow who went out to Hula Ville,

When I was twelve years old, I awoke in the night to find a strange man standing at the foot of my bed, regarding me as I slept. Moonlight through the window cast what appeared to be the shadow of wings against the wall behind him. Instead of being terrified, I was filled with a radiant joy, and as he faded from existence it came into my head that I had been visited by an angel.

Of course he was.

"Hula Ville" has some of Jim's most beautiful writing, and that's saying a lot. It's as stark and graceful as the Mojave itself, where the story is mostly-set. People might not understand that the fellow who visits Hula Ville and who made the desert trek to see what he could see, lives in a terrible place as the story begins. Not magical at all, and not much the kind of place you'd expect angels to visit. Open to wonder, the fellow journeys to Hula Ville and gets a map of the desert and all of its magical places. His journey starts and ends at the amazing Hula Ville--and the thing about places like Hula Ville, which to my knowledge you see only in the Mojave, is that they are testaments to human dreams. The dreams might not make sense to other people. They make sense to their single-minded creators. Scotty's Castle. That lady that has the Opera House in Death Valley. I saw a fellow who had surrounded his house with giant desert rocks, out by Baker.

This road that the fellow takes, where Hula Ville once was, was Route 66, and everyone knows what kind of road that was. It's I-15 now, and mostly, it's the way to Vegas. Thousands of people drive that way every day, chasing a certain kind of dream.

But real dreams are out there in the desert, hidden in crags--found by distant desert oases. Some people chased gold. Others--angels.

This is one of Jim Blaylock's most evocative stories. Do read it.

Link to story.

Amy Sterling Casil
8 January 2007
Redlands, California

"Gauging Moonlight" by E. Catherine Tobler: An Appreciation by Patrick Samphire

2007-01-09T11:33:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, you think that all that can be done in a sub-genre has been done.

Sometimes, someone comes along and proves just how wrong you were.

E. Catherine Tobler's time-travel story is a fine example of one of those times. The narrator of the story is an immensely powerful time-traveler whose job is to observe sentient life but never to interfere. Although possessing the immense power to change history, to wipe people from history's stream, he is forbidden to do so.

Yet when he encounters an English woman, Alice Oxbridge, he cannot help himself, and he violates these rules to remove from her history the man who would break her heart and ruin her life. Over and over, the time-traveler visits the same parts of Alice's life, her birth and her death, and so her life becomes entwined with his. The time-traveler who looks down at the stupidity of the time-locked life-forms discovers himself to be as fallible and as human as they are.

"Gauging Moonlight" is both a tragedy and a love story. Again and again the time-traveler touches on Alice's life, revisiting the key events but unable to stay. Their relationship is a series of poignant and brief encounters, spread across Alice’s lifetime, each one experienced again and again by the time-traveler but not remembered by Alice. Now he returns to her at the end of her life, not for the first time for him, but certainly for the last.

When this moment passes, I can follow the thread backward to her beginning, to our beginning. But I won't.

...

"How many times have you been here, in this room at the end with me? How many times have you come to my garden? I fed you honey years ago, but it was not truly your first time, was it? You came to observe, Edward."

Alice draws the sleeve of her nightgown up to expose her arm. I look at the drawn and gray flesh, withered nearly to the bone. Her wrist seems the width of a bird's leg. I don't wish to observe this. Though I try to look away, Alice claims my chin in her hand and draws my gaze back to her. She forces me to observe the changes time has wrought upon her body. She is gray and growing hollow.

"This is what happens to us, Edward. Never you, though. How many times can you travel back? Did we talk in my garden just this morning?"

"I offered you a bracelet at noon." My voice cracks, uncertain. I have never sounded so afraid.

Alice lifts her opposite wrist. The slip of marcasite I gifted her with years ago and only this noon hangs loose upon her arm.

It would be very easy to do a story like this badly. It is as delicate as the connection between the two lovers. A single wrong step could tear it apart. The great triumph of Tobler's story is that she does not take that wrong step. Her writing is subtle and clever, and the story is full of beautiful images: "the golden dust of African plains", or the lilac branch the time-traveler carries from the garden where Alice is being born to her deathbed. It is an example of form perfectly fitting function. As the narrator skims across the surface of Alice's life, touching only lightly, never staying long, so Tobler passes over the story, touching lightly in turn and never lingering too long. In this, the story's form perfectly matches its function. The reader is left to imagine deeper and thereby understand the full tragedy of their lives, and the way their love transcends.

This is a beautiful, fragile story that remains long with the reader.

Link to story.

"The Thousand Cuts" by Ian Watson: An Appreciation by Mike Allen

2007-01-08T09:06:00.000-08:00

Part comedy of manners, part apocalyptic horror story, "The Thousand Cuts" presents a perfect sample of Ian Watson's darkly puckish sensibility.

Fascination with the nature of consciousness and sentience runs throughout of Watson's work, from the hallucinatory alien encounters in early novels such as Miracle Visitors to the robots searching for identity in A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.

In "The Thousand Cuts," all of mankind begins to experience forward leaps in time, as if some powerful meta-being is cutting and splicing reality in the manner in which a film editor edits a movie. Events happen during the cuts: newspaper articles are published, treaties are signed, but no one remembers what went on; frightened members of the populace gather around radios to wait for announcers to inform what happened during the missing time.

Sometimes the results are disastrous, as people suddenly find themselves at the wheel of a speeding truck, or worse, behind the controls of a plane about to land at a strange airport; other times the results are humorous, as when television director Hugh Carpenter and colleague Alison Samuels are caught up in a hostage situation at a Russian restaurant, and then abruptly find themselves in the midst of lovemaking at Carpenter's flat, with no memory of the week that passed between.

Only one clearly positive thread results from the cuts: nuclear disarmament talks are moving along splendidly. Negotiations among the nations have progressed smoothly, but it's all happened during the cuts, the time no one consciously remembers. (The story was published in the early 1980s, when fear of a full-scale nuclear war informed daily life in a way that it doesn't today — though one could argue there's still plenty to be afraid of.)

In Watson's stories, when confronted with mind-blowing phenomena, his erudite and worldly characters strive to make sense of it. What could be dry explication masquerading as dialogue fascinates because of the complexity of the ideas explored — and in the case of "Thousand Cuts," the droll wit of Carpenter and his circle of friends. Perhaps God has finally taken an active role in shaping mankind's fate. Or perhaps these jumps in time have been happening all along, and only now are people allowed to be in on the joke.

In fact, Carpenter decides that the only way humanity can learn to cope with this strange new circumstance is to learn to look on it with humor. He directs what critics call television's finest half-hour, a comedy show that makes light of what Alison calls "the Life of a Thousand Cuts." The show circulates around the world, and Carpenter becomes a hero of sorts. Until the Creator makes it clear that higher powers have no tolerance for mockery, leaving the terrified director to desperately shout "Cut! Cut! Cut!" as his death approaches, only to learn he won't be spared the experience of his own final scene.

It's interesting to note that recent advocates of fiction that blurs genre boundaries and defies plot conventions don't seem to have discovered Watson, who has gleefully committed such transgressions since his career began in the 1970s — perhaps because he works with labyrinthine ideas rather than labyrinthine prose. Critics sometimes take him to task for wildly shifting genre gears mid-story, for example from religious satire to futuristic alien invasion ("That's how my mind works," he once told me). In "Thousand Cuts" he breaks an unspoken pact with the reader by offering no solution to the mystery. Like the Knight in Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal," the people living the Life of a Thousand Cuts learn the only answer is the final one. Our director protagonist complains to his Creator-—perhaps the author himself?--"Post-holocaust scenes now, I presume. No damn sense of continuity—-"

"The Thousand Cuts" first appeared as an original story in Ben Bova and Don Myrus's The Best of Omni Science Fiction 3 (1982). Ellen Datlow reprinted it three years later in The Fourth Omni Book of Science Fiction, then brought it to light again as a SCI FICTION Classic.

Ellen provided an invaluable service to readers everywhere by making short fiction gems from throughout the genre's history available at the click of a mouse. I regret that it ended so soon, too soon. I hope that readers will take advantage of what riches are still to be found there.

Link to story.

"Little Faces" by Vonda N. McIntyre: An Appreciation by Liz Henry

2006-12-19T11:37:00.000-08:00

"Little Faces" is about a society of women symbiotic with their living spaceships. It answers the age-old question, "How do you write an exciting romantic crime story set in a genderfucked anarchic utopia?"

The women's biology, sex, and gender is complicated. Males of the species, the "companions," are not quite sentient, and are attached to the female's bellies somehow; they are a bit like children, mates, pets, or extra limbs. They're like remora dildos with the emotional personalities of fire lizards. They're also a bit like hard drives that contain part of the memory and experiences of the other women who created them. Out of modesty, on formal occasions they are kept covered, though a thoughtful woman would use a lacy veil so that her companions can see out.

I enjoyed the trashylicious feel to the pulp style of McIntyre's writing, the echoes of romance novels I found, the melodramatic stabbed-in-the-heart emotional tone, the descriptions of omg-changing-color-hair and fashions in extruded shipsilk. Those stylistic echoes will resonate for some people as they did for me; for others they might be off-putting. For me, they make the story extra delicious, fun, and witty.

In the story, Seyyan, Yalnis' lover, and her companions murder Yalnis's primary companion, Zorargul. Her motives seem to be dual: to replace Zorargul with her own offspring, so that it will be the one to provide the sperm to create the daughter that Yalnis is planning; and to mindfuck Yalnis in a horrible power trip. Yalnis reacts with grief and anger. The murder has complicated consequences for Yalnis' plans to reproduce.

"It's our memories Seyyan killed," Zorar said. "Would you send out a daughter with only one parent's experience?"

Zorar was kind; she refrained from saying that the one parent would be Yalnis, young and relatively inexperienced. Yalnis's tears welled up again. She struggled to control them, but she failed. She fought the knowledge that Zorar was right. Zorar was mature and established, with several long and distant adventures to her credit. Her memories were an irreplaceable gift, to be conveyed to a daughter through Zorargul. The sperm packet alone could not convey those memories. "Let time pass," Zorar said. "We might see each other again, in some other millennium."

The companions are evidence of wealth in that they must be nourished by their host's own blood. But they also represent a wealth of information. When daughters and their spaceships are born, other women gather to give gifts of information, "new foods, new information, new bacteria, stories, songs, and maps of places unimaginably distant". At the moment of the daughters' birth, they are given the memories of their two female parents plus some elements from the male companion who provided the sperm for conception.

Zorar, in talking with Yalnis, makes it clear that Yalnis has been blind in dealing with her companions. She treats them more like pets or non-sentient creatures than like the irreplaceable carriers of memory and wisdom Zorar implies they are. Yalnis is surprised by the idea of conversing with her companions.

Aside from the weird biology and gender, this story explores ethical and societal issues. The companions don't seem fully sentient, but they are sentient enough that the death of one is treated as murder. Zorar, too, turns out to have suffered an attack on one of her companions from Seyyan.

The story is also positioned in a way in the genre of abuse survivor narratives. Zorar suffers from what Seyyan does to her, but does not "tell" either the larger society of anarchic, independent spacefarers or her lover Yalnis, who asks about her scars. Because of this, Yalnis decides to "tell" despite her fears of being divisive, and her fears of Seyyan's social power as an old, wise, famous adventurer. I was intrigued at the ways McIntyre used elements of abuse survivor testimonial to form a point of connection for the reader's understanding of a society structured very differently from our own.

Crime is constructed not simply as physical violence or personal selfishness or grabs for social power. It is the disrespect of individual agency. Crime is the destruction of history and the destruction of information.

"Little Faces" is a fascinating look at murder, war, sex, sentience, and memory, set in a world where every woman has a spaceship of her own.

Link to story.

"I Have No Mouth, But I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison: An Appreciation by E.C. Myers

2006-12-13T08:14:00.000-08:00

"I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" first appeared in March 1967 in IF: Worlds of Science Fiction. It won the Hugo award for best short story in 1968, subsequently was reprinted in numerous anthologies and a collection by the same name, and even spawned a video game. Its latest appearance was as a classic reprint in SCI FICTION.

Though I first encountered this story in The Essential Ellison: A 50 Year Retrospective several years ago, it's unsurprising that Ellen chose it for SCI FICTION. In many ways, it is the quintessential SCI FICTION story: dark but not devoid of hope, disturbing, well written, and not easily forgotten. It is this last criterion that is the most significant; one common feature of most SCI FICTION stories is that they are memorable. I still think of "I Have No Mouth" often, but I can't tell you exactly why. Perhaps it's because of Ellison's graphic--even obscene--imagery, or because it is some of the best writing I have encountered. Or maybe it's just because of the striking title. The mark of an excellent story is whether it stays with you long after you've read it, which may explain why editors frequently include this one in their collections.

Ellison's stories are often dark and depressing--dire warnings of the future or commentaries on the human condition--but this one is rougher on the reader than most. In an unspecified future, an artificially intelligent computer achieves sentience then turns on its creators. This has become a familiar tale since the late sixties, but here the computer, AM, destroys the entire human race, save five individuals. These survivors, four men and one woman, are at the mercy of the computer's God-like powers, which give it control over reality itself.

AM takes revenge on humanity by keeping his toys alive for 109 years, torturing them physically and psychologically. Remarkably, they stick together instead of turning against each other, as an admittedly dysfunctional group--in many ways, they end up tormenting each other as much as AM does. By detailing the perverse horrors they face, one gets the feeling that Ellison may be playing with his readers, but its their relentless suffering that allow us to sympathize with his obviously flawed characters.

Though on the surface "I Have No Mouth" may seems pessimistic and mean-spirited, it ultimately shows the triumph of an individual, of humanity, albeit at great sacrifice. It also asks the reader to accept murder as a means of salvation instead of injury, even as the protagonist wrestles with the same doubts over his actions. The story is a paradox, as hopeful as it is despairing. Despite repeated disappointment, many of the characters still hold onto hope: for survival, for escape, for their next meal. At least until the very end.

"I Have No Mouth, But I Must Scream" is no longer available in the SCI FICTION archives, though a savvy web search may still lead you to it. Arguably one of Ellison's best stories, it provides a moving experience that shouldn't be missed. SCI FICTION always brought readers the finest in original and classic fiction, and this is no exception. Ellen Datlow's commitment to finding and sharing excellent work like this with a new and appreciative audience was what made SCI FICTION such a treasure. I hope that she will have the opportunity to thrill, frighten, and challenge readers again on a regular basis.

"Aye, And Gomorrah" by Samuel R. Delany: An Appreciation by Hal Duncan

2006-10-01T19:24:00.000-07:00

And came down in DRIFTGLASS:

Where I read the opening rubric of a poem that asks the simple question--Was Sodom destroyed?--and raced through the stories of the collection, "The Star Pit", "Dog In A Fisherman's Net" and "Corona"--relishing these little intricacies of the Delany that I'd come across, somewhere between 14 and 16 years of age, in the 80s Gollancz Classics reprints of NOVA and BABEL-17, teased by the gruff gamin in the former, Mouse with his syrinx, and by the polyamorous threesome in the latter--to the story that gave me the answer: "Aye, And Gomorrah."

Which, in its clipped tumult of young neutered spacers tearing up the town on shore leave and the fetishists, the frelks, they scorn, tease, hustle and, in one brief fling of incommunication, try to understand--in short, of desires abandoned and frustrated--managed to articulate in a way I couldn't the disjunction at the zero-spot of my queer adolescent sexuality. Laid out in dynamic snapshots of an Earth of foreign cities, the Other, what it is to be it and what it is to want it. Delany riffed with his modern jazz of language, concise yet complex, and I understood something of the frelk in me, that thwarted appetence, and the spacer, the corresponding surgical disconnect, the pervert and the neuter . . . and the gap of need between them filled with energy.

Walked through those cities with Delany's unnamed narrator, recognising the refrain of tactfully expressed (but all the more alienating for it) prejudice in voices saying, "Spacer, do you not think you . . . people should leave?" I admired the subtle magnanimity of not putting a stress on people, not rendering the disquiet in crude bigotry but rather in the recurring implicities of the gap between "you" and "people":

you, here;

people, there.

The story was beyond me at the time. On the surface it's just a simple tale, easy to summarise, of a spacer's encounter with a frelk, but there's so much going on in those fractured sentences, in the stops and starts they create, and the sense of gaps they generate, that as a callow teenager I just stumbled through it, high on the vitality of the language, sensing the other energies in the tension, but without a hope in hell of establishing a rapport at the level the story invites. So I headed on through the rest of the stories in the collection, connected with them all, just not as deeply as with this one, and went to the book shelf in the library or the shop and found myself the next fling. And went up.

And came down in 2006:

Tried to put into words what this story said to me at that age, the way it and myself, like a spacer and a frelk (though I don't know which was which) met in the streets of Delany's words, how it tried to draw out of me what I wanted as I tried to understand its queer aesthetic. I tried to think of ways I could articulate the sense of . . . inarticulacy that, for me, emerges in the tumbling whirl of the story, in the still-point where the narrator and the frelk fail to connect. When this project came up, the thing is, I couldn't pass on the chance to pay the story tribute, but I find it almost as impossible now as it was then to express what the story means to me; the story itself shapes it in better words than I ever could. In the end, I put this appreciation off for months before finally making an attempt, hoping I might at least give some sense of the affect if not the meaning. Part of it lies in the need of the frelk, as any queer kid will surely recognise:

'. . . Me? I study, I read, paint, talk with my friends--' she came over to the bed, sat down on the floor '--go to the theater, look at spacers who pass me on the street, till one looks back; I am lonely too.'

But part of it lies in the less obvious and more insightful psychology of the spacers, in the alienation that goes with the casual hedonism of the neuter, striking a more complex chord than the straightforward identification with the sexual outsider.

Still, I find it hard to say much more than: "Read the story; it says this better than I ever could." Maybe it's appropriate that I wanted to be this story's . . . worshipper? . . . so bad I end up trying to express my reverence by imitating its style (". . . they were a man and woman dressed up as spacers," says one of the narrator's companions, "trying to pick up frelks!"). Maybe it's apt that I end up with a sense of desire frustrated by the story's strange energies ("The changes I put that frelk through," says another, "you should have seen him!"). Maybe it's right that I'd so dearly love to explain how this story hit me as a queer teenager, torn between the frustration of the frelks and the abandonment of the spacers, that despite the inevitable thwarting of that desire, I tried.

And gave up.

Link to story.

"When I Was Miss Dow" by Sonya Dorman Hess: An Appreciation by F. Brett Cox

2006-09-26T07:52:00.000-07:00

The first sf magazine I ever bought was the November 1970 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. From front to back, it contained stories by Keith Roberts, Robert Sheckley, Christopher Anvil, Charles E. Fritch, Richard A. Lupoff, Prosper Merimee (no kidding--a story from 1837, translated by Francis B. Shaffer), and one Sonya Dorman.

Her novelette "Alpha Bets" was the issue's cover story (artwork by Jack Gaughan) and also earned her a spot on the back cover. At that time, F&SF's back covers occasionally featured a small photo and bio blurb of an author. The photo of Dorman--a head shot by Jay Kay Klein--shows a woman of early middle age, with short dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses, looking somewhere off to the photographer's left and smiling broadly. As I look at that picture now, I have a strong sense of her smiling not at something she's seeing, but at something she's thinking.

I probably recognized her name; I'm pretty sure at that point I had already latched onto my older brother's book club edition of Harlan Ellison's original anthology Dangerous Visions and read her story therein, "Go, Go, Said the Bird," as I would later read her work in other original anthologies such as Damon Knight's Orbit and Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker's Quark. When I first came to sf, Dorman's (most of her work was published without the Hess) was one of those names that was just there, familiarly, not sticking out, just part of the scene, part of the crew: oh, yeah, her. She's good. Wonder why she doesn't publish more?

And then some time around 1980 she stopped publishing fiction altogether, and in 2005 she died, and the SFWA obituary mentioned her most famous story, "When I Was Miss Dow," and I realized, to my dismay, that I had never read it. Just slipped through the cracks, one of those Real Soon Nows that never arrived.

But there it was on my bookshelves in The Norton Anthology of Science Fiction, and online at SCI FICTION. So I read it. The timing is important: although Dorman Hess' name held fond associations with my lost skiffy youth, I came to this particular story as an adult, my critical judgment presumably unimpeded by nostalgia.

And still: wow.

On one level, the story revisits the territory of the classic sf horror flick, as a male human scientist doing research on an alien planet falls in love with an alien disguised as a human female. I'm confident there were at least a few people who read the story as exactly that when it was first published in Galaxy magazine in 1966. But from its first words, the story is much more:

Those hungry, mother-haunted people come and find us living in what they like to call crystal palaces, though really we live in glass places, some of them highly ornamented and others plain as paper. They come first as explorers, and perhaps realize we are a race of one sex only, rather amorphous beings of proteide; and we, even baby I, are Protean also, being able to take various shapes at will. One sex, one brain lobe, we lie in more or less glass bridges over the humanoid chasm, eating, recreating, attending races and playing other games like most living creatures.

Eventually, we’re all dumped into the cell banks and reproduced once more.

Imagine: a story whose opening is pure exposition--the above quotes tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the rest of the story--but moves more quickly, exudes more energy, than half a hundred in media res attempts at narrative momentum. And it's not just a matter of telling the story from the alien's point of view (although that certainly doesn't hurt); it's a matter of how the author perfectly matches the resources of her language to the resources of her imagination, as when the alien-as-human starts learning "Terran history": "When the clown tumbles into the tub, I laugh. Terran history is full of clowns and tubs; at first it seems that's all there is, but you learn to see beneath the comic costumes."

It's a story that doesn't hesitate to be sentimental, as the alien shapeshifters have pet "kootas" that are, for all intents and purposes, dogs. (According to her autobiographical comments in Dangerous Visions, Dorman Hess and her husband raised and showed Akitas.) It's a story that buys into audience expectations when the alien-as-human-female falls in love with the male scientist and utterly defies them when the alien, well, just gets over it. It's a story that is of its time and has been overtaken by history (happily, it's no longer easy to imagine an interstellar expedition whose "scientific parties . . . are 90 percent of one sex"), and it's a story that could have been written last week. In its exquisitely energetic language, drill-to-the-bone imagination, and fundamentally subversive view of the alienness of the human, "When I Was Miss Dow" may be the missing link between Alfred Bester and James Tiptree, Jr.

I am very grateful to Ellen Datlow for making this remarkable story available to a new generation of readers. I hope somebody will collect all of Sonya Dorman Hess' stories someplace, so I can see what else I missed.

Link to story.

"Ancestor Money" by Maureen McHugh: An Appreciation by Kristin Livdahl

2006-09-25T08:57:00.000-07:00

My favorite McHugh stories are about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, just like Rachel in "Ancestor Money." No, that's not right. My favorite McHugh stories are about clashes between cultures just like "Ancestor Money." You'll have to read her collection, Mothers and Other Monsters, to find your favorite type of McHugh story. I warn you though, there are not enough of them, and so the ones we have are all the more precious.

If you haven't discovered McHugh's work, the World Fantasy-nominated "Ancestor Money" is a good place to start. SCI FICTION and Ellen Datlow did the community a great service by making this and another McHugh story, "Frankenstein's Daughter," available free on the web. "Ancestor Money" is about home, what we really want from life, or in this case, the afterlife, and the joy of simple pleasures. McHugh writes place as well as anyone I know out there. In this story, she takes us barefoot from a small house in early 20th century, rural Kentucky to modern, supernatural Hong Kong. Along the way, we get geese, gods and demons, flip-flops and some very different views of where we should be going. McHugh, who taught English for a year in rural China, expertly captures the raucous, striving entity that is Hong Kong and mixes in some history and myth for good measure.

"Ancestor Money" is deceptively simple, something reinforced as soon as you try to talk to someone who has also read it. Everyone I've talked to carried something different away from it. It's not surprising since my own interpretation of the bittersweet ending has evolved with each reading. Has Rachel turned her back on transcendence, found it already, made her own heaven or just settled for peace and quiet? You'll have to decide for yourself.

Link to story.

"Auto-da-Fe" by Roger Zelazny: An Appreciation by Jason Stoddard

2006-09-12T09:16:00.000-07:00

Bullfights with intelligent cars? Coolness!

Or at least that's what I thought the first time I read "Auto-da-Fe" in a plastic-embalmed library copy of Dangerous Visions. I was probably 12 or 13 at the time. Many of the stories in the book I had a hard time with. But Zelazny's tale—no problem! I got it.

Or at least I thought I did.

In the years following, I've come back to "Auto-de-Fe," first for the story itself, then for other things. Things like the unique, lyrical voice that carries you through the tale. The choreography between Dos Muertos and the automobiles. The hints of the world outside the Plaza de Autos—a world embalmed in steel plates, where cars have existed 10 centuries, and where mechadors have three lives.

And, finally, to come back to the words of our unseen narrator:

Once I saw a blade of grass growing up between the metal sheets of the world in a place where they had become loose, and I destroyed it because I felt it must be lonesome. Often have I regretted doing this, for I took away the glory of its aloneness.

Alone like Dos Muertos, who the narrator tells us is above any machine. And then he is dead, for the third and final time. After all, this is the Auto-da-Fe, the "act of faith," the place where heretics are burned.

Zelazny accomplished incredible things in "Auto-de-Fe": a world real in texture and detail, an epic struggle, and insight into the human condition. He's delivered it in a way that's accessible to almost any reader, at virtually any level. And it's only about 2000 words long.

Thank you, Mr. Zelazny, for this story. And thank you, Ellen, for bringing it back.

Link to story.

"The Dope Fiend" by Lavie Tidhar: An Appreciation by Jason Sizemore

2006-08-21T09:00:00.000-07:00

Lavie Tidhar will tell you he's not British. No matter the Cockney that paints his voice. And I believe him.

As a writer, Lavie culls from the rich histories of the Jewish religion, African voodoo magic, and the dark secrets of London to build complex, fascinating stories that he describes as "HebrewPunk." A mixture of British Steampunk and religious mythology, HebrewPunk is quite unlike anything you'll find in the short fiction world.

Ellen Datlow introduces the concept of HebrewPunk to the masses with the story "The Dope Fiend." The work is dense with plot, arcane references to mysterious religious entities, and drugs . . . lots and lots of drugs. We're introduced to a fallen Guardian called Tzaddik, a fascinating figure who maintains a taste for the darker aspects of London. Through the machinations of a desperate man and the power of an African hougan, a dark angel is unleashed that looks to make a sinister trade
for Tzaddik's immortal life.

Though I could go into an extended review of Tidhar's tour-de-force, such reviews have already been written in multitudes. Instead, let me extoll an appreciation of Ellen Datlow's knack for recognizing the unique talents and voices of writers such as Lavie Tidhar. How many times has Ms. Datlow done this over her career? Or simply in the five and one-half years at SCI FICTION? No doubt, many others would have passed on "The Dope Fiend." Too dark, they'd say. Audiences won't connect to this.

Sadly, "The Dope Fiend" was the last story published by SCI FICTION under Ms. Datlow's editorial direction. A fine parting shot to the world.

I miss her stories. I miss her visionary influence on the short-fiction world.

I miss SCI FICTION.

Link to story

"Long Cold Day" by Elizabeth Bear: An Appreciation by Haddayr Copley-Woods

2006-08-15T08:22:00.000-07:00

When I think of Elizabeth Bear, I think of a large, ginger-colored creature waiting at the river as the salmon begin their run: muscular, determined, keenly intelligent, but also--even as she plots the deaths of the massive and brilliant fish--a little playful.

Has she ever hugged you? I only ask because she is not stingy with the hugs, and there's a good chance she has. I am a vague, dim acquaintance of hers she has seen a few times at cons, and she's hugged even me.

To be hugged by a bear is an astounding thing. A genial bear, of course--a happy bear, an all-encompassing radiant Sun Bear--one feels embraced by Wildness Herself--thrilled, happier, yet also deeply grateful to have ribs intact.

I got the feeling, all wrapped up in Bear, that her benevolence could turn at any moment, should I threaten anyone she holds dear. Bear could be very dangerous.

Which is why I found "Long Cold Day" so uniquely fascinating--her women, although equally dangerous, are anti-Bears: thin, angular, skeletal hounds with slathering fangs and talons.

As comfortable as Elizabeth Bear seems to be in her own skin, sinew, and flesh, these aliens are uncomfortable: miserable in the envelopes of meat they wear in order to hunt their quarry and serve their master: "She shuffled through the crowd, trying not to brush up against too many of the slimy-soft, grub-squirmy humans. The restroom was crowded with females fixing their makeup and inhaling narcotics. She didn't blame them for wanting to distance themselves from their flesh. Raw, greasy flesh. Meat for worms."

These are thin flesh envelopes which show their stark, thin angles: "She was small, slight to boniness, her little titties poking sharp triangles through her sweater and her jeans slung off hip bones you could cut yourself on. Her elbows and knees and shoulder blades were all angles, and her eyes--green and amber in the light over the bar--were luminescent, huge. Some trick of the dimness made her pupils look weird, lens-shaped like an alligator's."

Our hero Christian Whittaker is uncomfortable in his own body, too: ". . . jowls and a double chin that fell over his throat and collar and two thick cushions on either side of his spine below his ears, like the hams on a hog. He wore a wedding ring because his hands were spongy with retained fluid; he could never take it off." His clothes are ill-fitting, his physical discomfort in who he is so enormous that he cannot even fit behind the wheel of a car he has briefly considers stealing. He doesn't seem particularly surprised by this.

Adding to everyone's discomfort is the constant, numbing, agonizing cold that envelops everyone painfully. Each person or alien who encounters it feels slapped across the soul with the misery of cold, cold, cold. And even the reason for the damaging and unnatural cold--a son's love for and inability to let go of his mother--is a wonderful surprising contrast in itself.

Our hero: lumpy, drunk, bumbling--saves his son and saves the day, which is of course heartwarming and I'm a sucker for that sort of thing. But that's not why I chose to appreciate this particular piece. It's because it made me really wonder, which I don't often do: what was going through her head when she wrote this?

I wonder if Bear meant it--to create antagonists who were quite specifically the polar opposites of her? One thing these jutting, angular mantis-like hounds made this reader long for: a firm, happy, radiant warmth to hold on to. Much like, well, a bear.

Or a magical blanket, or even the horrible mess of a father's awkward and stumbling love for his son.

So that's why I love this story: I found the juxtapositions between Bear's being and the beings in the story utterly delicious.

As delicious as a fresh-caught, river-chilled salmon.

Link to story.

"Flowers on Their Bridles, Hooves in the Air" by Glen Hirshberg: An Appreciation by John Langan

2006-08-14T08:50:00.000-07:00

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that, until Stefan Dziemianowicz brought it to my attention, Glen Hirshberg's name had flown beneath my radar screen. Once I had Stefan's enthusiastic recommendation, I sought out Hirshberg's work, finding the astonishing "Struwwelpeter" in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. From the first paragraph, the narrator's voice seized hold of me and refused to let go; with pleasure, I realized that this was a story that would not release me until I had read every last word of it. And what a story--since Ray Bradbury, I suppose, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, and certainly since Stephen King, it's been almost de rigeur for writers of supernatural horror fiction to write about children and adolescents. Few, though, had limned the adolescent male perspective with as much skill, as much delicacy, as Hirshberg did in this story. Its ending, with its suggestion that everything we had been reading was in explanation of events even more terrible, was truly shocking.

So when I saw that there was a new story by Glen Hirshberg up at SCIFICTION (which, for the record, had published "Struwwelpeter" (which has received fine commentary here from Nathan Ballingrud)), I turned on the computer and printed it out. It was different from the earlier story; while the perspective still was male, this time the narrator was in his early thirties, married, the father of a year-old daughter. "Flowers on Their Bridles, Hooves in the Air" was about a reunion between the narrator, Eliot, and his wife, Rebecca, with Ash, their friend from college and, in Eliot's case, before. At Rebecca's suggestion, the three of them ventured to Long Beach, to a pier at the end of which was a rundown, somehow sinister arcade. The story was suffused with an air of menace, which was fulfilled by its climax, when one member of the trio was left behind at the sinister arcade, betrayed by their friends and their own worst impulses. Once again, the story ended powerfully, this time with a moving, lyric paean to the loss of hope and the death of desire.

I've re-read "Flowers on Their Bridles" over and over again since that first encounter, trying to figure out how it does what it does so well. I can't say that I've solved the riddle, but that's not a bad thing. In fact, I like the idea of stories whose full successes remain, finally, inexplicable to us. That said, I can offer a few observations about its strengths.

For one thing, there's Eliot. Hirshberg's handling of his voice is impressive. It's always clear, always advancing the narrative in some way, yet it's also a study in the subtleties of individual perception. Eliot fills in personal history for himself, his wife, and their friend; offers motivations for the three of them; and documents the various hues of his thoughts. Despite his observations and suppositions, he's not all-knowing; in fact, he readily admits the limits of his knowledge, the tentative nature of his narration. He is honest, though, to a fault. In his attention to the particularities of perception, Hirshberg reminds me--favorably--of Henry James.

If this were his only virtue, it still would be a considerable one. Yet Hirshberg's portrayal of character, of the relationships among Eliot, Rebecca, and Ash, is equally strong. The three of them are on the cusp of something, a kind of tectonic shift in attitude that I think marks your transition from early adulthood to another state, one whose name I'm leery about naming because I may be there myself. Maybe its name isn't important; what matters is that each of the characters is on the cusp. It's a time of death and disappointment. Rebecca's mother, to whom she was close, has died; the PAC for which she was working has folded; her c-section to deliver her daughter has left a scar that remains unfeeling. She and Eliot have realized, not that they don't love one another--it's more that their love has run up against the hard, recalcitrant parts of one another. Their friend's name assumes tremendous significance; he's a reminder of the way things used to be, all the thrill and excitement that has burnt out of their lives. Reconnecting with him is a chance for the three of them to touch, if not recover, their old fire.

To do so, the three of them make the drive to Long Beach. I can't remember who it was complained contemporary writers don't take enough advantage of landscape, but the complaint doesn't apply to Hirshberg. His evocation of Los Angeles, the 710, Long Beach and the pier waiting there, is deft and vivid. Like his other fiction, this story is placed, its sense of the Genius loci sure.

Once at Long Beach, Rebecca directs Eliot to drive to a pier whose far end once held a carousel. The carousel, we'll learn, was a kind of memorial, built by its creator as a tribute to his dead business partner, friend, and probably lover. Long since removed from the pier, the carousel and its horses live brightly in Rebecca’s memory; she describes it in detail. Although absent from the story's present action, the carousel haunts it, a powerful symbol for the return of the past, for our inability to leave what was--especially what has damaged us--behind. It's the culmination of a series of circle-images that lie scattered throughout the rest of the story. The carousel, the story, are deeply nostalgic--not in a high-school-reunion, "Glory Days" sense, but in the word's root meaning of the pain of returning home, the pain of memory, the pain of coming back to our origins.

Rebecca's reasons for visiting the pier are the soul of nostalgia; it was where her father, an alcoholic who abandoned her, her sister, and their mother, used to take her and her sister to ride the carousel while he played in the adjacent arcade. She directs Eliot and Ash along the pier, through enormous sheets of canvas hung from a roof shaped like a magician's hat, to that same arcade. Suddenly, we're beyond the problems of being on the cusp; suddenly the characters and the story are dealing with much more, with damage that threads its way through a life, that warps and snarls its weave. The trio are accosted by homeless men; Eliot sees a man fishing off the pier hook a small ray that makes him think of his daughter; the pier groans and creaks beneath them. Everything feels fraught with meaning. Then the trio are through to the "Lite-Your-Line" parlor, a collection of pinball machines dominated by a pair of signs, one of which invites players to "Lite Your Line Lite Yours," the other of which displays a set of six numbers. The pinball machines are linked to one another; the goal is to sink your ball in numbered slots at the top of each machine in the order dictated by the numeric sign. When a player succeeds at this, the numeric sign congratulates them on becoming "liter" and they are awarded a red chip. What the chips buy, we never learn.

It's a sinister space, one dominated by repetition. The four players Eliot, Rebecca, and Ash find stationed throughout the parlor seem by their dress to represent the last half-century or so; when Ash moves to join them, the group is brought up to date. The change girl, who glides around the floor on roller skates, knows only one word, a question: "Change?" and with each utterance, the question grows more weighty. Do you want to change, or do you want to remain here, playing games, getting lit, recovering the old fire, leaving your cares, your responsibilities, behind, shuffling them off with each win, getting liter? It's a liminal space, to be sure, a place on the margins, but I think it’s also an antechamber of hell. (We are, after all, downtown . . .)

Once the story is done, it's clear that such a description may be more than a metaphor. Eliot and Rebecca have abandoned Ash to the parlor, left him to find his way to their home, if he can. He does not, and while Eliot speaks to him briefly on the phone thereafter, it will be the last time. Eliot and Rebecca's betrayal is too much, the last bucket of ice water on what used to burn among them. In the end, Eliot is unsure that Ash actually escaped the place. The story exists, in a sense, between the carousel and the arcade, between the never-ending return of the past and its pain, and the loss of the self in mindless repetition. Its ending is beautiful, devastating:

I stepped out of the car, felt the stagnant L.A. air settle around me. The rising sun caught in my neighbor's windows, releasing tiny prisms of colored light, and somewhere down the street, wind-chimes clinked, though there was little wind. And the feeling that whispered through me then was indeed magical, terrible, and also almost sweet. Because I realized I might be underestimating the power of Rooff's last carousel, even now. We could be on it, still; Rebecca, me, the whole crazy, homogenizing coast; bobbing up and down in our prescribed places as our parents die and our friends whirl past and away again and the places we love evaporate out of the world, the way everyone's favorite people and places inevitably do. Until, finally, we are just our faces, smiles frozen bright as we can make them, hands stretching for our children because we can't help but hope they'll join us, hope they'll understand before we did that there really may be no place else to go or at least forgive us for not finding it. Then they'll smile back at us. Climb aboard. And ride.

It wasn't until I read "Dancing Men," Hirshberg's story in Ellen Datlow's ghost-story anthology, The Dark, that I was sure of it, but this closing--and that of "Struwwelpeter" before it--strongly suggested to me that Hirshberg was one of the best writers of endings currently at work. Even without that last paragraph, "Flowers on Their Bridles, Hooves in the Air," would be a memorable story; with its closing lines, it moves from the memorable to the haunting.

Glen Hirshberg was only one of the writers Ellen Datlow brought us at SCIFICTION, "Flowers on Their Bridles" only one of the stories. But I take him and his story as an index of the level of talent Ellen featured on a weekly basis. I'm grateful to Hirshberg for having written such a story; I'm grateful to Ellen for having published it. I'm grateful for it all.

Link to story.

"Water Master" by Carol Emshwiller: An Appreciation by Jack Mierzwa

2006-05-08T08:58:00.000-07:00

If Carol Emshwiller had been a painter instead of a writer, then "Water Master" would have been one of those paintings that looks like one thing from a distance and something completely different up close. Walking up to take a closer look, it dissolves into a pointillistic mass of seemingly unrelated details; back away again and it seems almost abstract, really nothing more than a few swirls of bright, empty terra cotta and silver, blue and gold. Negative space on negative space.

Even as a writer, Emshwiller is a master of negative space--of details left unseen and unsaid.

I ought to mention that "Water Master" is the story that hooked me once and for all on both Emshwiller's writing and SCI FICTION. Which might seem like an odd assertion, given that the story's narrator reminds me so much of my mother-in-law . . .

Well, she does.

So what it is about this quiet story and its two lonely, aging protagonists that's so compelling? Honestly, it's difficult to even pinpoint what makes this story a fantasy. It certainly feels like fantasy . . . but there's nothing magical or superhuman about the characters, nothing otherworldly about the setting. There's no reason why the Water Master couldn't easily be making his living in the desert, right now, just over the mountains from where I'm sitting. Even today there are places like the Gila Mountains, places that can only be reached on foot or on horseback, where bathtubs are a rarity and the only hot water comes from thermal springs. But then, by the same token, the story could just as easily be set in the Old West of a hundred years ago, or in a barren, post-apocalyptic future a hundred years in the future. There's no particular detail which definitively places the story in either time or space; the story is set in the desert, but the desert is never named. The river that flows with the Water Master's water is simply referred to as "the river." The water comes from a man-made reservoir called "The Lake of the Mountains." This eponymous ambiguity gives the story a sense of both ubiquity and isolation, and I suspect that this is what makes "Water Master" feel slightly fantastical--like something happening a great distance from the here-and-now.

In this dislocated void of information, the nameless narrator acts as a contextual lifeline. Her happenstance remarks provide the only clues about the desert community, the Water Master's status within it, and the growing, murderous resentment of the drought-stricken farmers. Oh, and did I mention that she sounds like my mother-in-law? Emshwiller's narrator has the same tendency to fill up empty spaces with a constant stream of disjoint observations:

Water is what's on his mind and rightly so. Nothing is better, how it bubbles up and sparkles, silvery in the sun, frothing, foaming as it rushes, roaring down from way up there to here. How it leaps so high over rocks. How it trembles in backwater pools. How it tastes. Cool . . . Cold . . . How dangerous it can be.

This incessant, think-out-loud commentary--which is typical of what I've seen of Emshwiller's first person voices--makes the narrator seem almost simple. Harmless. Possibly even irrelevant and dismissible.

Which is not to say that Emshwiller or her narrator--let alone my mother-in-law--are actually harmless or irrelevant. The rambling streams of consciousness distract from the formidable intelligence controlling the flow of words. In the case of Emshwiller's narrator, her internal monologue is woven out of some very pointed remarks, such as her reaction to seeing the Water Master's house for the first time:

Is nothing they told us down there true, not one single thing? It seems that what we believed was true isn't and what we believe isn't might well be.

A little later, sitting with the Water Master under a tree, she adds:

He knows how we blame everything on him. Especially anything bad. Maybe he knew that one of these days we'd hate him.

These key sentences, embedded though they are in a thread of other observations, act as thematic Rosetta stones for the rest of the story. I said earlier that "Water Master" is a quiet story, and it is, but it is also one framed by two acts of violence. The first, which happened long before the story began, installed the Water Master in his current position; the second removes him from it. Emshwiller has altered the fable of the killing of the Divine King, switching around the details to make it read:

Those who let their hate turn to violence risk becoming the thing that they hate.

In the end, however, Emshwiller isn't really out to club her readers with lessons, and "Water Master" is more concerned with the quiet interludes in between--with starkly beautiful landscapes and the budding relationship between its two weathered, self-reliant protagonists. I mentioned negative space? This is a story with a lot of negative space, in which many of the usual details have been included as omissions--as outlines in the surrounding story. Emshwiller takes her limited first-person narration very, very seriously, and any information outside of the narrator's immediate point of view is completely off limits. Instead of providing temporal, spatial, or cultural context, she focuses our attention on a scattered handful of objects: mesquite trees. Muddy ditches. Porcelain teacups and stone mugs. Blue sky reflected in water. A hillside of golden aspens. The reader never finds out where the desert is located, or when. The reader never learns out the name of the narrator. But the reader doesn't really need to be told any of those things. Trees, teacups, blue water, blue sky--and all of a sudden you know everything you need to about the narrator, the Water Master, and the world they inhabit.

Link to story.

"Floating in Lindrethool" by Jeffrey Ford: An Appreciation by Trent Hergenrader

2006-04-26T09:24:00.000-07:00

Imagine Tony Soprano as an eloquent philosophy professor.

That was my first impression of Jeff Ford when I met him in June of 2004, when he and Kelly Link taught the last two weeks of the Clarion Writers Workshop. Jeff arrived in the midst of a critique session Monday morning and wasted no time in sharing his honest, intellectual, and astute observations on our stories.

In a thick Jersey accent. Punctuated with plenty of colorful language.

That morning was the first time I'd heard "Gabriel García Márquez" and "fuck" used in the same sentence. The amazing part? He made it work. I learned a lot those last two weeks, and I laughed a lot. I hadn't read a lot Jeff's stuff back then and I think I could be forgiven for assuming that most of his stories were both unapologetically crude and hilarious.

And I would have been flat out wrong.

Because if I had to use a single word to describe Jeff's stories, that word would be "delicate." Not in sense of being weak or fragile--far from it. Rather because his stories are characterized by fine workmanship and great sensitivity. He is as exacting and precise with his words as a master surgeon is with a scalpel. When he cuts, he cuts deep. But it's for our own good. Really.

I could blather like this all day but luckily for you I'm supposed to talk about a story: Floating in Lindrethool. I couldn't have picked a better one for an aspiring writer to take a turn at the knife. So let's slice into it and study the entrails, shall we?

Perhaps you're wondering what makes it worth studying. The answer is stuff like this, taken from the story's opening:

Eight men in black rain coats, white shirts and ties, and the company issued, indicative, derbies. They fanned out across the grim industrial cityscape, the soot falling like black snow around them. Each carried a valise in one hand and a large case with a handle in the other.

Forty-nine words, three sentences, and a world is born.

Soon we meet the dispirited, pantsless Slackwell sitting in his hotel room with a bourbon and cigarette, practicing his spiel that has, as his boss describes it, "all the allure of a drooping erection." We pity the aptly-named Slackwell, but no one wants to read a story about a door-to-door salesman crying in his beer. Ford knows this all too well, and we immediately see what Slackwell is selling:

The black metal carrier bulged at the sides as if it housed an oversized bowling ball. The front panel opened on hinges, and he reached in and brought forth a large glass globe with a circular metal base. The base had dials and buttons on it, two jacks, a small speaker, and, in the back, a wound up thin electrical cord was attached. Thinktank, the name of the company was written across the metal in red letters and after it the model number 256-B. The globe above was filled with clear liquid and suspended at its center was a human brain.

Yes, that's right. A human brain.

If you're interested in the technical aspects of writing, take a look at the last sentence in the paragraph cited above. You could be a "good" writer and eliminate the use of the passive "was," rewriting the sentence as: A human brain floated in the globe, suspended by clear liquid."

Yet this sentence is clearly inferior. Look how the sentence structure--hell, the whole paragraph--draws you, like being caught in a whirlpool, to the stunning conclusion. I don't know how many times I've admired this piece of craftsmanship, but it's more than a few. A good paragraph flows into the next one; a great paragraph catapults you through the end of the story. This is a great paragraph.

Writers, it has been said, need to hook the reader early. At this point in "Floating in Lindrethool," this reader was grabbed hook, line, and sinker. We're not even 700 words into the story, yet I'm ready to follow Ford off the edge of a cliff if that's where he takes me.

And off the cliff is about where the story goes. If you thought Steve Martin had the whole "falling in love with a brain in a jar" market wrapped up with "The Man With Two Brains," think again. Despite the absurdity of the conceit, you can't help rooting for Slackwell as he fights to escape the prison of his life--and to help liberate the brain from its prison as well.

I've performed similar vivisections on some of Ford's other stories, yet "Floating in Lindrethool" remains one of my favorites, probably because of its off-the-wall weirdness from start to finish. But no matter how many pieces I break it into, no matter how closely I study the sentences and paragraphs, it remains unique, inimitable, and 100% pure Jeff Ford. And as I've found in my research, that's always worth the price of admission.

Other good news: in case you hadn't noticed, wherever Ellen Datlow pops up as editor, Jeff Ford usually shows up as a contributor. So keep a keen eye out for where Ellen pops up next, because another Jeff Ford classic won't be far behind.

With affection,
Trent Hergenrader

Link to story.

PS - "Floating in Lindrethool" can be found in Jeff's first collection, The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories. Also, check out his newest collection, The Empire of Ice Cream, now available.

"The Yellow Pill" by Rog Phillips: An Appreciation by Sheila Williams

2006-04-18T03:10:00.000-07:00

"The Yellow Pill" in Rog Phillips's classic 1958 Astounding story strengthens the user's perception of reality so that "reality practically shouts down any fantasy insertions." Clearly, anyone under the influence of the yellow pill would have a hard time trying to read, understand, enjoy, and validate science fiction and fantasy.

The school year at my high school carried on for about a week past final exams and graduation. The underclass students' work during that week wouldn't count for a grade so the school offered a number of mini pass/fail courses. One of the subjects offered my senior year was science fiction. The teacher responsible for the class invited me back after graduation to help him teach it. I found it fun and rewarding to be a "teacher" at my own school, but the experience was also enlightening.

Rog Phillips's story was included in the syllabus. To me it was a fairly traditional SF story, filled with third-class freighters and blue-scaled Venusian space pirates. To the students, it was something completely different. For all of them, and perhaps even the teacher, it was a story about a psychiatrist treating an unstable person who thought he was on a spaceship. When the psychiatrist began to think he was on a spaceship, the class was convinced the doctor had gone insane, too. Admittedly, Phillips has fun playing with the reader's perception of reality, but the story was first published in a science fiction magazine in the fifties and repeatedly anthologized in SF books. These are fairly strong clues that the story probably contains some straightforward science fiction concepts. As I recall, though, I failed to sway a single person in the room.

At the time, I assumed that the readers simply hadn't yet acquired their science fiction "legs." Like the kids I knew who'd moved north from Florida and who had had to learn how to walk on snow, I figured the students would get it once they had a little more exposure to the subject. That may have been true for most of them. They must have appreciated some aspects of SF and/or fantasy or they wouldn't have signed up for the course. But I believed that, once exposed to the "good stuff," everyone would be capable of appreciating fantastic literature. Alas, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.

In a March 3, 1996, New York Times review of an Ursula K. Le Guin collection, Francine Prose lamented that some of the fiction in Unlocking the Air and Other Stories was full of the tired ideas only a science fiction reader could love. She compared some of Ms. Le Guin's stories about aliens to the work of college freshmen, and suggested that perhaps the author would have been better served if her stories had been split into two books that would have appealed more to each of her separate audiences. Then, taking the flip side of my own position, she suggested that perhaps it was better that the book hadn't been divided up after all because science fiction readers might accidentally stumble upon "the many-layered story 'Ether, OR,'" and by encountering Ms. Le Guin's "deft tricks with narrative techniques," "light-handed sureness," and "genuinely intriguing ideas" those readers might start to take pleasure in the author's complex fiction as well. Interestingly, Ms. Prose did not seem to realize that "Ether, OR" was first published in the November 1995 issue of Asimov's. Noting this fact, though, might have undermined her apparent assumption that people who enjoyed science fiction and fantasy had to be completely ignorant. If only we'd snap out of it, she seemed to imply, and take that yellow pill, it's possible we could actually be taught how to read English, too.

Well, that was years ago, you might say, and in a fuddy-duddy old newspaper, too. And even if Ms. Prose and her ilk haven't discovered the antidote to that pill, surely younger readers are more open to the wild subjects that pervade today's SF and fantasy. After all, 2005 brought broad recognition to authors whose work has also appeared in such SF venues as SCI FICTION and Asimov's. Jonathan Lethem won the MacArthur "genius grant." Maureen McHugh's Mothers and Other Monsters was nominated for The Story Prize. The 2005 Best American Short Stories anthology included stories by Cory Doctorow, Tim Pratt, and recent Hugo- and Nebula-award-winner, Kelly Link. Both Time and Salon.com chose Ms. Link's Magic for Beginners for their top-ten lists of 2005 books. Yet a review of the same collection in the August/September issue of Bust, a magazine with a young feminist following, maintained that only those who could swallow an absurd premise would be taken with the book. Admitting her own strong preference for realistic fiction, the reviewer indicated that the author's stories had confused her and that only a writer guilty of a certain intellectual laziness would place "such absolutely human, flawed characters inside such baffling, uncanny plotlines."

So the Times reviewer and the supposedly hip Bust reviewer have had the chance to read SF and fantasy by some of the best writers of our day. Yet they still haven't acquired their science fiction legs. They're still confused by zombies and fairies and aliens. They still don't have much tolerance for stories that veer far from everyday reality, and they can't imagine why anyone professing any level of intelligence does. Well, I'll continue to read Rog Phillips and other SF and fantasy writers for fun, and maybe even for their "light-handed sureness," "intriguing ideas," and absurd premises, but I intend to keep Rog's medicine cabinet nailed shut. My sense of reality is just fine, thank you, but I don't intend to let it interfere with my sense of the fantastic.

Link to story.

"Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall" by Frank Belknap Long: An Appreciation by Nicholas Ozment

2006-04-17T07:31:00.000-07:00

"Nothing cruel about poor old Humpty Dumpty. He'd tear your heart out. A lovely goofy old egg. Where's the cruelty then? I'll tell you. The picture that devilish fantasy conjures up is the essence of cruelty. A smashed, quivering, alive egg, in torment, scattered, spilling its yolk." --from "Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall" by Frank Belknap Long.

I am here to sing the praises of Frank Belknap Long's science-fiction story "Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall" (1948). But before we praise its merits, let's be clear about one thing: the Orban boy's loop--the "loop of hollow metal, twisted into a perfect arch like a gigantic croquet wicket [. . .] riddled with holes and an eerie radiance was spilling out of it"--is what we in the storytelling biz call a MacGuffin. It functions to get the plot rolling, much like the serum that transforms Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde. As Stephen King points out in Danse Macabre (1981), Robert Louis Stevenson's serum wouldn't bear up under scrutiny, but it is not the main point of interest anyway--the reader is interested in Jekyll's transformation, and the potion Stevenson throws in merely to provide a pseudo-scientific basis, a sop to those readers who need such rationale to aid their suspension of disbelief. Much the same can be said for the Orban boy's gizmo--it's there to get our protagonists over into the blue world.

"Humpty Dumpty" does contain science-fictional elements, but they are not what the story is about. Plain and simple, "Humpty Dumpty" is a horror tale that posits a What If. What if those cruel nursery rhymes were true? What if we found ourselves inhabiting their twisted logic and demented outcomes? It is a scary story for precisely the reason one of Arthur Machen's characters in "The White People" (1899, 1922) famously argues, "What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. [. . .] And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad." In other words, fairy-tale fancies that we took for granted as children would, if we were to encounter them as sober and sane adults, put sharp blades to the tethers of our sanity. Long's story is a story about madness.

I first came across "Humpty Dumpty" as a young boy perusing my father's bookcase. It was in Robert Silverberg's anthology Strange Gifts (1975). The story was a strange gift indeed to my budding imagination, opening up whole new realms of possibility to me. It was one of the first stories that taught me to ask, "What if?" And the pursuit of that ability is why, twenty-odd (very odd) years later, I am a writer primarily of fantasy and horror. What if you looked in the mirror one day and it was not your face looking back at you? What if you bumped into a wall and instead of bouncing off, you slipped through it into another place? What if you were walking up the stair and met a man who wasn't there? Or, as Long asks in his disturbing little story, what if Humpty Dumpty really did have a great fall?

The story's pulp-era science, with its "Seral blaster," its rocketry and gadgets, is pretty dated now and didn't make much of an impression on me the first time I read it. In fact, when I revisited it years later, I had completely forgotten it was ostensibly a sci-fi story! What I remembered was that image of the broken egg-man, "completely bashed in, a flattish horror swimming in its yolk." That's what got under my skin. That, and the clockwork blue world where the headless bowmen periodically unleash death according to some unvarying, incomprehensible program . . . and the crooked man who ran a crooked mile: literally a "jigsaw giant, bent nearly double" who goes "reeling and stumbling over the plain, as if in unendurable agony" . . . and the floating "gear-and-wheel-filled spheroid" that swings down out of the sky—the only thing in the world that speaks, but merely to repeat and amplify whatever you say in "a vibrant echo that means absolutely nothing." It has no discernable purpose--one of the characters comes up with a rather elaborate hunch that "it's simply a weird regulatory mechanism that sweeps down at long intervals. A kind of cog in the clockwork setup--a stabilizing flying pendulum that's needed here to keep things moving on an even keel." Whatever it is, it, like everything in this world, has some analogue in nursery rhymes, as if this is a world glimpsed into by children--"but the author of the Mother Goose rhymes remembered his dreams of childhood more vividly than most men."

In case you have not yet read it, I will not give away the ending. I will say that Long demonstrates what can be done when one carries a "What if?" to its logical extreme. And "Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall" I submit to you as exhibit A for why asking such questions is a spellbinding pursuit. The science fiction here is, as I noted earlier, dated and pedestrian. But the dread, awe, and wonder that Long evokes is timeless.

And you'll never read Mother Goose the same way again.

Link to story.

"Boz" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch: An Appreciation by Paul Oppenheimer

2006-04-12T13:25:00.000-07:00

Rusch's "Boz" reminds of the more recent coup d'imagination of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

How does one love an autistic child (whether called "Captain" or not)? How does one delicately slip into the interstices of the hyperdeveloped, hyperconnected brain (v. "Nature via Nurture") a human, empathetic touch, such as those of us whose brains are not entirely occupied with their inner activity crave?

Softly, slowly, secretly, a discreet love slips in.

Link to story.

"At the Mouth of the River of Bees" by Kij Johnson: An Appreciation by Hannah Wolf Bowen

2006-04-10T08:12:00.000-07:00

I've been working towards this appreciation, on and off, for months. I didn't expect it to be this hard. A few paragraphs about the story that I knew, when I first heard about this project, I wanted for my own? Piece of cake!

Only not. I've been reading and rereading the story. Starting and restarting the appreciation. And here I am starting it all over again.

There are science fiction stories that work from the outside in, that tackle the entire world on some grand sweeping scale, and there are stories that have plenty to say, but it's all personal. "At the Mouth of the River of Bees" is a story about love and loyalty and loneliness, and about hope and about when to say when, and about magic sliding sideways into the world, about how something as small as a bee sting can be part of something else.

And "At the Mouth of the River of Bees" is a story about one woman and one aged dog. Part of the beauty of science fiction is not having to choose.

The western states that Linna drives through are as strange and magical as the river of bees. Linna "...drives as fast as the little Subaru will go, the purple highway drawing her east. Late sun floods the car. The honey-colored light flattens the brush and rock of the badlands into abrupt gold and violet, shapes as unreal as a hallucination. It's late May and the air is hot and dry during the day, the nights cold with the memory of winter. She hates the air-conditioner, so she doesn't use it, and the air thrumming in the open window smells like hot dust and metal and, distant as a dream, ozone and rain." It's a strange landscape, and one full of potential, and the river of bees can flow through it as naturally as a river of water might.

Despite all this, the characters know that the river of bees is impossible, and so the only ones to follow it are the ones seeking impossible things. Linna's bee sting draws her on; it's not the thing that's breaking her, but it's a hurt that she can stand to recognize. She chases down the river and her grand old dog is along for the ride. He's dying, and he may be ready, but she's not.

"Back at the car, Linna watches Sam chase something in his sleep, paws twitching in the rhythm of running. Live forever, she thinks, and wills his twisted spine and legs straight and well."

It's a story, in a way, about choice. Because in the center of all this beauty and magic, we still have one woman and her dog, and then we have another woman who can perhaps help that dog and be helped by him in turn, if Linna can bear to let him go. And we have an ending that left me infuriated on first and second read, then thoughtful, and finally a bittersweet kind of glad.

I first met "At the Mouth of the River of Bees" two years and some months ago. I've thought about it since then, read it over and over, talked about it and argued and written my own story in response. And I suppose that part of my trouble in writing this appreciation has been that a few paragraphs aren't nearly enough to explain how well the story stands up to scrutiny and how fine and deep it is.

Link to story.

"Two Weeks in August" by Frank Robinson: An Appreciation by Colleen Mondor

2006-04-05T09:23:00.000-07:00

The first thing that struck me when I was reading Frank Robinson's "Two Weeks in August" was how timeless the story appeared to be. It is about one of the most common of 20th (or 21st) century pastimes--complaining about the people you work with at a job that is slowly sucking your soul away. The story's narrator is that all-round ordinary guy, someone who enjoys his moments at the office when he has something to tell--when he gets to share a personal triumph about home and family that makes him the momentary center of attention. The bane of his existence is a guy named McCleary, the classic obnoxious coworker who always has to prove he's better--his kids are smarter, his car is newer, his house is more glorious. Basically, if you walk in to work on Monday having spent the weekend finding a cure for cancer, McCleary will have brought about world peace in the same period.

We all know a guy like McCleary.

The big moment for our narrator, for all the guys at the office, is those two annual weeks of vacation they receive every year. Of course vacation destinations are another opportunity for McCleary to play his game of one-up-manship and the narrator is sick to death of the endless cycle. The situation is all the more frustrating for him this particular year becasue financial concerns mean that he will be spending his two weeks in the backyard. It's not a bad way to see part of the summer but he knows McCleary will be endlessly annoying about his own grand plans and this time our guy just can't take it. So he comes up with a plan to cut his competition off before he has the chance to brag--he decides to announce a vacation destination that is so outlandish, so amazing, so literally out of this world, that McCleary won't be able to compete. He's finally going to shut the other man up and enjoy just a little bit of peace and quiet.

He's finally going to win because frankly, there is just no way to beat him.

But then the story takes a turn, a sweetheart of a turn, and the narrator (and all the other guys) are dumbfounded by McCleary's achievement. They all smartly decide to make the most of it though, and peace finally comes to the office. The fact that McCleary is responsible really doesn't matter because everyone wins so big (really big). And besides, without McClearly none of it ever would have happened anyway so why complain. By the end of the story, the narrator is affectionately referring to his old rival as "Mac" and has come to appreciate him on a whole new level. Every office has a guy just like him, after all, and whether or not you use his competitive nature to everyone's advantage though is up to you, and how badly you want to enjoy those two weeks in August.

But that's not the end of my appreciation. I liked "Two Weeks in August" because it was so easy for me to identify with the characters. I knew the narrator (I have been the narrator) and I certainly have endured the presence of my share of McClearys. But when I saw the copyright at the end--when I saw that Frank Robinson wrote this story in 1951, I was totally blown away. I had no idea this was a fifty year old story, no idea at all. Robinson brought such an impressive air of timelessness to the tiny world he created, such a perfectly adaptable atmosphere that transends all generational or regional assignment, that it has easily stayed with me over the past couple of weeks. So much of our world has changed since 1951 that it is hard to believe how little of the narrator's world is different. But there are still the same offices, the same cubicle games, the same longing for vacation. Some things just might never change.

In crafting his story so effectively around the unchanging aspects of jobs and work Robinson shows one of the best things about science fiction--that it can be a timeless art, a forever art, that will appeal with ease to any reader of any age. He makes it all look easy with "Two Weeks in August," but don't be fooled by that. Give the story five minutes of your time and you will be mightily impressed by Robinson's talent for understatement. I know that I was, and I still can't get this story out of my head.

Link to story.

"Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons" by Cordwainer Smith: An Appreciation by Alan Deniro

2006-03-23T13:25:00.000-08:00

"Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons" is one of the greatest science fiction horror stories of all time. It might not be readily apparent that this story is horror; other stories by Cordwainer Smith such as "A Planet Named Shayol" may play up this element more on the surface. But this is a story that seemingly does the impossible--have a sprightly, almost jovial tone; and at the same time incorporate a creeping and creepy sense of inevitability about its protagonist.

That protagonist is quite the villain. Benjamin Bozart was "sworn to rob Old North Australia [Norstrilia] or to die in the attempt, and he had no intention of dying." From Viola Siderea, a planet of thieves, he was the best of their thieves, kept alive for centuries to rob Norstrilia blind. They have gained their wealth through the refinement of "stroon." A dollop can add decades to life; Norstrilia deals in stroon by the ton. Needless to say, Norstrilia has developed unreal defenses in order to protect its investment and its people.

The story has a masterful approach to voice and pacing. Fairly early in the story, when Bozart's plans start to fall apart, it's readily apparent to the reader (though not to Bozart) how the story is going to turn out. The thief, surely, is going to die in an unpleasant way. Cordwainer Smith has given away the "secret" as such. But how, then, does Smith keep the narrative crackling, edgy, fun, and terrifying all at once?

For one, we just don't know how horrible Bozart's untimely end is going to be. He is the greatest thief on a planet of thieves, but this means nothing. He is going to fail. There is no disputing this. The devil is in the details--we know the mouse is confidently striding to his doom, but are surprised to see that the cheese is actually in the middle of a bear trap.

Secondly, it comes down to his style, which solders together these disparate elements. In the first section of the story one comes across this sentence: "One of her weapons snored. She turned it over." Again, the devil is in the details--Cordwainer Smith poses odd juxtapositions of the senses, and our sense of what technology does and how it feels to its users is depicted in an almost dreamlike fashion.

All of this would have been masterful if its sole purpose was to provide effect, to show the machinations of a kind of wind-up-toy story. But there is more. Smith is always searching for more with his stories. What the reader is left with is a sense of the Norstrilian people's own connectiveness and openness with each other; not in any political or military sense--for in that realm they cannot be assailed--but rather in their inner lives. They are both powerful and tender toward each other. But, to anyone who would threaten that--or murder a Norstrilian child, as Bozart did to attain information--they unleash the fearsome kittons, unleashing a psychic onslaught from decidedly non-cuddly "kittens" in the name of safety. The epigraph states: "Poor communications deter theft; good communications promote theft; perfect communications stop theft. --Van Braam." This is a sharp encapsulation of the issues at stake in this story, and yet also reveals the koan-like nature of the story's resolution. What constitutes "perfect communications" in the first place? Who controls these communications? There are certainly no easy answers to these questions, but with the Norstrilian's power comes a strange innocence that is both hard to understand and dislike. It's Mother Hitton, the "weapon mistress," who takes danger upon herself and allows Norstrilian lives to go on peacefully.

The story reads as fresh and timely as I imagine it did in 1961, when it first appeared in Galaxy. Issues of national (OK, galactic) security, data theft, small tragedies, and some really nasty minks all add up into an intoxicating concoction. It has remained the only story of Cordwainer Smith's available online. I couldn't think of a better gateway drug to the wild, incantatory worlds of Cordwainer Smith and the Instrumentality than this gem of a story.

Link to story.

"To Bell the Cat" by Joan Vinge: An Appreciation by Sarah Prineas

2006-03-13T07:30:00.000-08:00

Joan Vinge's novelette "To Bell the Cat" was first published in Asimov's in 1977, but I can see why Ellen Datlow chose to republish it in SCI FICTION, because it is a terrific read. On the intellectual level, the reader is confronted by uncomfortable questions about about humanity, animality, punishment and redemption, individual agency, cruelty, and, maybe, an odd kind of love.

It's also a very moving story about a lost man who manages to find himself, or perhaps the self he has become, through an act of hope in the midst of devastating hopelessness.

And this is also a skiffy story about first-contact and cute scaly aliens.

Thanks, Ellen, for giving this reader the chance to read a story she would otherwise have missed.

Link to story.

"God's Hooks!" by Howard Waldrop: An Appreciation by Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon

2006-03-10T11:33:00.000-08:00

There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who ask "Who the hell is Howard Waldrop?" And those who already love to read anything by Howard.

When I first stumbled onto Howard's work, it was "The Ugly Chickens" and I nearly cried for the main character and his doomed search for dodoes, long after the dodo was extinct. What made Howard's writing so outstanding was a combination of meticulous detail--I saw the old photograph, I saw the book of birds on that bus with the old lady, and I saw and sweated as the protag fought his way through the overgrown old farm . . .

Alas, someone else claimed "The Ugly Chickens" first. But now that we're doing seconds, I was immediately drawn to "God's Hooks", which I read on the SCI FICTION site for the first time just a few weeks ago. Amazing how many stories I've (re)discovered on SCI FICTION since this Appreciation business began.

The story "God's Hooks" concerns a number of men who meet after the Great London Fire of 1666 to reestablish their friendship, toast their fortunes and mourn their losses--and pine for getting away for some serious fishing. Then they get wind of a monstrous fish away from the city which is attacking people. That's enough to give them a mission to catch this fish. Tied up in this is some superstition and some good old fashioned Biblical end-of-the-world paranoia. So far, you might be left scratching your head as to where the spec fic element is hiding, but fear not, gentle reader--things are going to get downright weird from here. There's a sense of evil and doom where the great fish hides, and then there's the stranger. I'm not sure what really happens at the end and I don't care! This is a fish story to end all fish stories--the one that got away (and thank God for that!).

What can I say about Howard's meticulous research on The Great London Fire? It's like some lurking iceberg--no matter how many details creep into the story, you can be assured that there's ten times the detail hiding in his notes. With some writers, James Michener comes to mind, the research fills long thick novels. Howard plays his research notes as if they were a fine instrument--just the right leitmotif to perfect a short story. Star-gazey pie indeed!

High and thick, it smelled of fresh-baked dough, meat and savories. It looked like a cooked pond. In a line around the outside, halves of whole pilchards stuck out, looking up at them with wide eyes, as if they had been struggling to escape being cooked.

What better feast for a group of men obsessed with The End of the World and fishing?

Ah, the fishing . . . if Norman Maclean hadn't written "And A River Runs Through It" then Howard Waldrop might've had to. I have read that friends of Howard get wind of his various projects and so know about "the bicycle story" or "the dodo" story for months or years before he gets them written. I remember someone talking about "the fishing story" and methinks it has to be "God's Hooks." And a what a fishing story it is!

There's a brotherhood of ironmongers, of whom one of our group is a member. For a great task against a leviathan, a great fishhook is required--and the metal used once fell from the sky. There's a mysterious "prophet" who accompanies them on their quest, even though he doesn't believe in their mission. It's Modern Men (at least for 1666) up against ancient fears. It's a ghost story, a tale of a doomed quest (is there any other kind?), perhaps even a tale of unrequited love. It's a tale of salvation and damnation.

It's the damnedest story I've read in a long time--probably since I read Howard's "bicycle story."

You know, I attended Clarion in the summer of 2004--and deliberately not in 2003 when Howard taught. I didn't want to go to Clarion just to be a fan--I wanted to learn to be a better writer. But oh it was a hard decision, mediated only by the fact that I wasn't yet ready for Clarion in 2003, and didn't have the money that year either. So I've yet to meet Howard. But through his writing and stories like "God's Hooks", I am happy to know Howard. And I hope you have (or will) discovered him, too. Thanks to the efforts of Ellen Datlow and SCI FICTION--you can.

Dr. Phil

Link to story.

"The Starry Night" by Barry N. Malzberg and Jack Dann: An Appreciation by E. Sedia

2006-03-09T10:44:00.000-08:00

"The Starry Night" by Barry N. Malzberg and Jack Dann is a complex story of art and the end of the world, and is as strange and meditative as the painting that inspired it.

In the past, Vincent Van Gogh struggles with mental illness as he paints "Starry Night", one of his strangest and most haunting paintings, over and over again, unable to get away from the image of the unraveling firmament. In the present, Rachel, a little girl suffering from epilepsy, copies Van Gogh's painting, and notices things that nobody else does. In the future, a Jesuit priest inhabiting a terminal space probe watches from too-close distance as the stars explode and die. These exploding stars are the link between the three of them.

"Starry Night" is one of my favorite paintings; I am amazed that a story can do it justice. Like the painting, the essence of this tale is difficult to describe, haunting and visceral, and just as open to interpretation. I read it as a tale of a singular spectacle – exploding stars, unraveling skies, the end of the universe – passed back in time, from a witness to an artist, through means less crude than a traditional time machine that allows actual time travel. Instead, there's a meeting of minds ravaged by illness and loneliness, centered around this single image. Their interpretations of the image lend a richness of imagery and meaning to the story, and each of the three point of view characters possesses a unique voice, sensibilities, and understanding of the world.

This is not an easy story, but with each rereading something new opens up, a new meaning, a new possibility. The fractured manner of telling serves the story well, and it is worth the effort.

Link to story.

Editor's Note: A slightly different version of this appreciation appeared originally at Tangent Online.

"Q" by John Grant: An Appreciation by Martin Lewis

2006-03-07T09:25:00.000-08:00

Political fiction gets a bad rap, and political science fiction even more so. Readers hate to be preached to and are hyper- (even over-) sensitive to any sign of this most hated of authorial habits. If a story must be political then at least the writer could have the good grace to disguise it through allegory or the like. So it is always slightly brave for a writer to put forth a strident, contemporary political view and then for an editor to give that work a platform.

There is more than enough hatred for the George W. Bush administration to go round and John Grant's "Q" is not the only story to fuel itself on this anger. It might well be the best though. Although its rage is ungloved and there is no doubt about the real world targets that Grant is aiming at, there is enough ambiguity to the story to carry even the sceptical reader over the hurdle. Considering he paints the Department of Homeland Security as the Stazi this is no mean feat.

Immediately prior to the opening of the story the President of the United States of America has been assassinated. Bush is never mentioned by name, but it is clear who the president who "seemed to be heading confidently toward a fourth term of office thanks to the increasingly obvious manipulation of computer-recorded votes" is based on. In keeping with the general tone of the story he is murdered his own Vice President, although the blame is levelled at--who else?--al-Qaeda.

Dr. Cello Prestranta is the new Deputy Director of Operations for the CIA. The post became vacant when the previous DDO, Prestranta's sometime lover, was killed by same bomb as the President. His posthumous briefing to her tells her to go to visit Dr. Tim Heatherton at the Center for Neuronic Research before doing anything else.

The Center is a secure and secret CIA installation so the story takes place in a bubble of free speech in what is otherwise a police state. This is just as well because these characters don't see eye to eye with the Administration. As Heatherton puts it: "Strange times when we've come to regard the CIA as the torchbearers of liberty." Grant has clearly had an eye on the CIA's ongoing battle with the Bush Administration to try and place empiricism above ideology.

Heatherton has been researching dreams and subconscious thoughts, originally as an interrogation tool but with increasingly esoteric results. Until about half way through this still seems to be a near future SF story where the experiments will have some bearing on the political situation, but then it unexpectedly moves off in a remorselessly bleak cosmological direction. Heatherton's dream machine has uncovered deep subconscious thoughts that are common to all people and reveal humanity's origins.

Reading the story I was reminded of Terry Bison's "Dear Abbey," a pessimistic novella that suggested all human endeavour was futile. "Q" multiplies this pessimism: in Bisson's novella humanity is "a single bright idea in a dead universe," here the universe is teeming with life, however all the myriad intelligent species are isolated from each other. In fact the universe itself acts to stop them from coming into contact with each other, it is not merely implacable but hostile:

Every time the human species has looked as if it might break its current bounds, might not just approach the limit but possibly, just possibly, be able to peer beyond it, there's been a Hell-bringer waiting ready to bring an iron-soled boot stamping down to crush the groping fingers of the venture . . . . For all of the universe's countless species, there will always be that stamping boot.

Hell-bringers like Bush are an inevitability; they are the universe's jailers, necessary to enforce a strict regime of solitary confinement. The reason for this is that life is not native to the universe but was brought here by Q, a God-like being who is explicitly not God and who is unable to integrate its creations. (It is a little unfortunate that Q itself cannot help but conjure up images of the irritating Loki-figure from "Star Trek," but what can you do?) It's a great piece of radical philosophical cosmology of the type Greg Egan likes to spring on his readers.

Perstranta decides this knowledge is too dangerous and must be violently suppressed for the greater good. Again this sort of consequentialism ties in with the current political climate. Increasingly we are being told that the end justifies the means and that there are classes of knowledge that by their nature are more important than people's basic rights. Obviously this is by no means a new development, but we do live in a time where such things are increasingly common and even extreme thought experiments, along the lines of "would you torture a terrorist to stop a nuclear bomb going off?" are part of the general discourse.

As befits a story about free speech and ideas it is very dialogue heavy. The majority is a sustained conversation between Prestranta and Heatherton and since Heatherton is explicitly cast in the role of teacher it can be a little like a Socratic dialogue. Cutting against this is the filter of Prestranta's viewpoint, the subtle reminders that she has her own agenda. Likewise the intrusion of sexual desire for Heatherton breaks up the lecture-like feeling this sort of exposition heavy story can engender.

It is possible to see the story as a pointless exercise in nihilism but its success lies in its execution. It is an elegant cry of despair that saves one final dagger for its closing sentence.

Link to story.

"Shipbreaker" by Paul Di Filippo: An Appreciation by Jack Mierzwa

2006-03-07T07:27:00.000-08:00

I admit it; I choose to read stories based on their titles. I pick up books based on the cover art.

Not always, of course. More often I read things because I know I like a particular author, or because people have been raving about a particular story or novel online. It's just sometimes, sometimes . . .

Sometimes you just gotta have spaceships. You know?

This impulse has inevitably led to disappointment. After all, there's a reason why choosing a book based on its cover art has gotten such a bad rap--just like there's a reason why choosing a mate based on their physical appearance is considered shallow. But sometimes it's not enough to hear the cliché; sometimes you have to learn the lesson firsthand for yourself. Sometimes you have to make the same mistake over and over and over and over . . .

Like those glossy color prints they always have on the covers of Asimov's and Analog? They always seem to pick pictures of spaceships orbiting distant worlds, battling in the cold depths of space . . . inevitably, the magazine itself contains plenty of fine stories, but the spaceships are few and far between. And typically disappointing.

I know this, but I still do it anyway. I did it with SCI FICTION . . . I did it a lot. Rockets, airships, pyramids, minotaurs! Mad scientists with pulp-fiction names! Vampires, aliens, ice cream! Hey, I like ice cream. Who doesn't like ice cream?

But you know, that was the weird, wonderful thing about SCI FICTION . . . I could choose a story any way I wanted, and it didn't matter. There were disappointments, of course: when I tried reading stories sequentially, I began noticing months where everything was fantastic, followed by months where I didn't really like anything. But all those stories I picked out based on their titles? All those rockets, pyramids, minotaurs, and ice cream shops? Worth the price of admission, every last one of them. Or they would have been, and I would have gladly paid, but it turned out that admission was free.

I wanted, I really wanted, to say something deep and . . . thoughtful about Di Fillipo's "Shipbreaker". For me, this story has come to represent an entire idea, a type of story that might be dying out now--a type of space opera that there was never enough of to go around in the first place. But every time I try to find the words to talk about this story, I seem to end up embarrassing myself. I start gesticulating a little too wildly, I start talking a little too loudly . . . then I
find I'm grabbing the person I'm talking to, shaking them by the shoulders and shouting in their face, something along the lines of:

"DUDE! This story is SO AWESOME! SHIPBREAKER! THEY BREAK SHIPS! SPACESHIPS! THEY BREAK APART SPACESHIPS FOR SCRAP! And these are big spaceships! Really, really big spaceships! Think BIG! No, bigger than that! Big, BIG, all-of-Manhattan-plus-most-of-the-Bronx BIG! They take these monster, luxury-starliner spaceships to this planet, THEY THROW THEM INTO THE OCEAN, and they have a BIG party. Then they all go out in boats, swarm up onto and over and into the starliner, and then they START RIPPING THE THING APART! It takes MONTHS! YEARS! It powers the entire economy of the planet! These ships are THAT BIG! Oh, and there are these super-intelligent god-like beings with floating clouds of super-intelligent nano-servants, and they have this complex caste system, and members of the higher castes often kill members of the lower castes like they're swatting at so many flies, and the ships are filled with mysterious alien artifacts, and you can pick up exotic diseases from working in them, like the protagonist has this silicate eczema that's constantly flaking off his hands . . . . Oh, and did I mention that THEY BREAK APART ENORMOUS SPACESHIPS AND TURN THEM INTO SCRAP?"

*ahem*

Sorry. I'm, uh, I'm doing it again, aren't I? Sorry about that.

Anyway, if spaceships are the medicine you think you need to cure whatever ails you today, then go read "Shipbreaker." You won't be disappointed.

Link to story.

"Unsportsmanlike Conduct" by Scott Westerfeld: An Appreciation by Grace Dugan

2006-02-20T09:40:00.000-08:00

Power is not just about winning, it's about making the rules.

An American-led group of colonists establish themselves on a planet to extract its oil (and beam it home via teleport). Every day they play a game of baseball, and one day the aliens, the Taus, decide they want to play, too. They venture out onto the field, and begin a game, and are thrashed. While discussing this game afterwards, the team's xenolinguist says ". . . only one animal organises play-fighting into complex contests of skill. The conflict in sport, the victory and vanquishment, is carefully hiddden under dozens of rules and accomodations. We cannot assume the Tau understand that this is a fight . . . perhaps they have no concept of mock conquest, which is what winning a game is."

This story is all about conquest.

At first the Americans are worried about the bad PR of thrashing the Taus every day, and then when the Taus figure out a way to beat them, they're worried about the bad PR of being thrashed themselves. Exporting their national pastime to the aliens looks great, getting a royal arse-kicking at the same time doesn't.

My team's inability to get an out became the current metaphor for America's outdated infrastructure, our dependence on old paradigms and fossil fuels, our preference for force over finesse . . . . How was our little colony supposed to save the American economy if we couldn't throw a strike?

There's also an irritating English guy called Ashley who's always going on about the superiority of cricket (the "mother game") to baseball, and a mysterious Scot called Iain Claymore.

I won't spoil the ending for you, but let's just say that the gentle satire on golden-agey American culture turns satisfyingly sharp at the conclusion.

Go read this one if you haven't already.

Link to story.

"Clownette," by Terry Dowling: An Appreciation by Laird Barron

2006-02-20T09:25:00.000-08:00

Terry Dowling knows the heart of fear hasn't strayed far from the caves and he understands the raw, ineluctable fascination of a campfire tale. He is conversant with its rules and rituals-—Did you hear the one about the guy, this salesman, who couldn't get a room at his regular hotel? So the clerk says, "Hey, you could stay in this one room we got in back. We'll give you our special rate . . ."

A proper campfire tale imparts a moral, a lesson, some bit of unhappy wisdom often gained at prohibitive expense. A proper campfire tale never concerns anybody special; it's always about a couple of kids necking on Blueberry Hill, or the guy who ignores his fuel gauge until his car dies on a bleak stretch of country road at night, or, as in this piece, the hapless salesman who settles for the only room at the inn. The protagonist could've been one of us. Next time he might be.

In "Clownette," Bob Jackson, harried businessman and routine traveler, discovers there are no vacancies at his regular hotel, the Macklin, except for 516-—the room employees half-jokingly refer to as the Clownette:

And this time, for maybe the eighteenth, nineteenth time in six years, it was a full house and the Clownette or nothing.

516 is an overflow room, a room few want because of the "rush of weird" that greets one at the threshold, an electric charge, a brief, ominous sensation impelling the visitor to flee. But-—the Clownette or nothing? No other hotel in the entire city? Surely Jackson's predicament is an exaggeration, a contrivance. Not so; Dowling has deftly and elegantly foreshadowed the compulsion of morbid curiosity as it afflicts the human mind and how it drives poor, foolish Bob Jackson to tamper with things best left undisturbed.

The "rush of weird" isn't the main attraction, however. No, that would fall to the bizarre stain on the wall, a large discoloration that bleeds through any paint job. They say covering it up with furniture is equally fruitless, because . . . because the stain moves, you see. It creeps and seeps and reaffirms itself upon the surface of the dresser, the painting, or whatever has been artfully placed to block its unsightly presence from the clientele. And it gets worse. At night the stain transforms in a most peculiar and disturbing fashion:

"You get to see the face, the 'Motley,' the Macklin Hotel's very own Shroud of Turin right there in the wall."

The Motley. Ah, and now we come to Mr. Jackson's motive for accepting these "lesser" accommodations: here is an infrequent opportunity to rendezvous with his friendly nemesis, the leering Motley. He's heard the legends regarding its mysterious manifestations and decided to test them for himself. This time around he's determined to play a little game with the Man in the Wall. God help him. Jackson is a bug trapped in the honeyed embrace of a sundew, drawn to doom by his own design.

Most powerfully, Dowling in his light-as-air characterization of anonymous Bob Jackson has drawn a perfect cipher for the reader to experience the inexplicable and utterly sinister phenomena in room 516—-for this story isn't about Jackson, it's about any of us who have ever been tempted to go against better judgment, to accept a dare, or delve into the secret and dark places that exist in the gaps of our everyday lives. It is and has ever been contrary to human nature to leave well enough alone. Dowling quite obviously understands this fact and employs it to devastating effect.

"Clownette" is a brief, suffocating paean to fear. Terry Dowling has given us a dose of horror in its purest form-—at once cautionary and dreadful. Curiosity is the death of cats, as they say. However, death is the least of what curiosity can inflict upon the unwary and the unwise, and by the time Bob Jackson's stay-—our stay-—in the Macklin Hotel has ended, that bitter lesson will be all too clear.

Link to story.

A Note on Progress

2006-01-30T07:49:00.000-08:00

As those of you who visit us regularly will have noticed, the pace at which new pieces are appearing here has slowed considerably. (We're still waiting to hear from some of you: hint, hint.) We are also still at around the halfway point for sign-ups. With that in mind, and with the hope of completing the Project as it was conceived, we're opening things up a bit. If you've already done (or signed on to do) an appreciation, you're now welcome to sign on for another. Several of you had previously expressed interest in doing multiple appreciations before; now's your chance. As before, leave a comment on the List or send an email to me at snurri2000 @ yahoo.com. Thanks for all your help, everyone!

"Guys Day Out" by Ellen Klages: An Appreciation by Robert Cook

2006-01-30T07:35:00.000-08:00

Guys Day Out is a simple story, beautifully written, well-intended and heartfelt, sentimental, timely, potentially controversial, predictable, outrageous and yet deeply touching, quite enjoyable while being extremely disappointing, a mainstream realist horror story with a morally repugnant ending, and quite definitely not science fiction, fantasy, or speculation in any way, shape or fashion whatsoever . . . . Or so, at least, according to a variety of reviews and opinions excerpted from a quick Google. Disagreement! Provocation! Controversy indeed. All the symptoms of a first-rate story then.

Which, indeed, it is. "Guys Day Out" is a powerful story full of truth--fictional truth about what lives can mean, and so one of the few truths left, or ever, that really resonates--and in that sense belongs exactly with the rest of the SCI FICTION archive. But--horrors!--it doesn't have spaceships, or ray-guns, or talking squid piloting spaceships while toting ray-guns, and so it can't be science fiction, it just can't! And no dragons/elves/wizards/magic/royalty/vampires/swords either. "No genre content" said Best SF, rather huffily and reductively. Long live the ghetto.

The fact that it's a "contemporary realist" fairy tale seems to have either passed its critics entirely by or just not been enough, somehow, to justify branding it with FantasyTM or HorrorTM or any kind of GenreTM label at all.* Too real. Not enough disbelief generated to bother willingly suspending it. Alas, poor reader (and we'll come back to that).

"Guys Day Out" is about a man who can see fairies, told from the point of view of a man who can't. (In that respect it's a bit like Iain M. Banks' Inversions, a Culture novel told from the point of view of people who've never heard of the Culture and spend the entire novel continuing to not hear of it.) Tommy Clemens (and that surname is no accident) is born with Downs Syndrome. The doctor wants to put him in a home before his mother, Helen, has even recovered from the anaesthetic ("They're fine places, really. It's 1960, not the dark ages."). Tommy's father, Andrew, doesn't even pause to think about it, though. He takes his family home.

We jump forward: Tommy is ten years old and going fishing with his dad for the first time--not their first Guys Day Out, we infer, but their first time on the water with hooks and worms and flies and everything else. Tommy wants to bring along some of his friends--his "invisible" friends according to Andrew--of whom there are twenty-six, from Amy to Zelda. Only Tommy can see them, as he explains, because he is special: "Like special ed, you know." The boat rental guy doesn't want Tommy rowing. Andrew bites his lip.

On that first fishing trip, the cognitive aspects of Tommy's condition are teased out to us, mostly through dialogue between father and son. Tommy is pedantic, fussy, squeamish: he insists that lunch is at twelve noon, that people cannot make flies, that worms are icky. He is eminently realistic in his interaction with the world. And then--unrealistically, from our point of view, and therefore surprising--he lets his invisible friends have a swim in the lake, to try to catch a real fairy, and then helps them back into the boat:

The boy reached over the side and rapped his knuckles on the bobber, jiggling it. He cupped his hands below the surface, as if waiting for underwater communion, then brought them up, thumbs tight together. He breathed gently into the hollow.

"They are dry now. Can you open my backsack for me?"

So careful with those imaginary friends, so pragmatic and detailed. Realistic, even.

Forward again: fishing every summer, sometimes with Helen, though usually not. Through Tommy's teens and twenties the Guys Days Out continue--and then somewhere in the middle of that long run, Helen dies. Not suddenly, we infer, but quickly dealt with in story time:

The year Helen got sick, he went to work at the McDonald's on Archer Avenue, twenty minutes on the bus. His red nametag said TOM in white letters, his grown-up name. He smiled at every customer, filled the ketchup-packet bin, and wiped tables with green disinfectant that smelled like the hospital he was afraid to visit again.

"Just us now, Buddy," Andrew said after the funeral.

This was a little too quick for some readers (Bewildering Stories, for example, "certainly would have asked the author why she concentrates exclusively on the boy and his father without having the courtesy to kill off the boy's mother"). But what a marvellous, efficiently dense paragraph: a year of pain in the first five words, that short last line with Andrew's terrible, yearning understatement, and in the middle Tommy--Tom, grown up, which is what happens when you watch death at work for the first time--wiping the tables "with green disinfectant that smelled like the hospital he was afraid to visit again." Horror in a beautiful line.

Between his mother's death and his early forties where Tommy runs suddenly into the wall of Alzheimer's, the Guys Days Out have dried up. The Alzheimer's quickly takes control of both Tommy's and Andrew's life. Again, the doctor offers a home placement. Again, Andrew declines.

After a solid week of changing diapers, Andrew, now seventy-six, takes forty-three year old Tommy on a final fishing trip, a last Guys Day Out. He finds an isolated shore, drops sleeping tablets in Tommy's beer, and gets Tommy to count fireflies until his head begins to droop. Then:

"Oh." Tommy's eyes opened wide, his face creased into a wide grin. He cupped both hands around a secret, fragile cargo for just a moment [hear the echo: He cupped his hands below the surface, as if waiting for underwater communion], then slid boneless down the willow.

This is the "morally repugnant" ending (for given definitions of "moral" and "repugnant"). Except it's not:

Andrew settled next to him, hugged him tight, and drank the second bitter beer . . .

"Sweet dreams," he whispered, and he closed his eyes.

Bitter, that second beer.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote:

Something that seems quite new, or that seems insolently false or very dangerous, is the test of a reader. If he tries to see what it means, what truth excuses it, he has the gift, and let him read. If he is merely hurt, or offended, or exclaims upon his author's folly, he had better take to the daily papers; he will never be a reader.

Ellen Klages is a very careful writer--which is to say that she is full of care for her craft, and allows her readers the intelligence to take care of themselves. To take care, for instance, of the differences and resonances and contingencies between reality and fantasy, between real life and fairy tale; and to take care of what one can say to and about the other.

* Not that I would wish it to be so branded, just that not being able to so brand it seemed to be what pissed off so many people about this story. Which is a whole other essay . . .

Link to story.

"Cordle to Onion to Carrot" by Robert Sheckley: An Appreciation by Georgiana Lee

2006-01-18T08:08:00.000-08:00

Do you ever find yourself wondering why people like to fight online? Do you ask why the argumentative threads get the most hit counts? Have you ever been in a flame war and been baffled by the fact that you just couldn't stop with the witty insults even though you knew your mother would frown on your behavior? Although it was written in 1955, well before the internet became popular and takes place in meat space, Robert Sheckley's Cordle To Onion To Carrot does an excellent job explaining the motivation behind the art of the snark.

It's the story of the thrill that comes to Howard Cordle who learns to be obnoxious and aggressive after years of "being pushed around by Fuller Brush men, fund solicitors, headwaiters, and other imposing figures of authority." The hyperbole used to describe his encounters is wonderful and makes this story even more of a pleasure to read. I particularly enjoyed the escalating pressure brought to bear on a Milanese businessman who makes the mistake of honking at Cordle because he isn't stepping on the gas fast enough at a traffic light in Rome. "Traffic was now backed up as far south as Naples. A crowd of ten thousand had gathered. Carabinieri units in Viterbo and Genoa had been called into a state of alert." And moments later, "There was a thundering sound to the east: Thousands of Soviet tanks were moving into battle formation across the plains of Hungary, ready to resist the long-expected NATO thrust into Transylvania. The water supply was cut off in Foggia, Brindisi, Bari. The Swiss closed their frontiers and stood ready to dynamite the passes." It's beautiful stuff.

But my family's all time favorite line, oft repeated when we want to make a ludicrous point about how manly (and womanly) we are, comes when Cordle dons his girlfriend's raincoat in an effort to circumvent a butler who won't let them into an exhibition unless he's wearing a coat and tie. When the butler points out that the new attire isn't quite up to snuff, saying "You are wearing a woman's waterproof and a soiled handkerchief . . . I think there is no more to say." Cordle responds by saying, "A woman's coat, you say? Hombre, when I wear a coat, it becomes a man's coat." And who can argue with that?

Link to story.

"Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death" by James Tiptree, Jr.: An Appreciation by Alex Saltman

2006-01-18T07:57:00.000-08:00

It may seem to be taking the easy way out to write an appreciation of a story that everyone already appreciates. But the best stories mean something different to each reader, so by sharing my perspective, perhaps I can add to another's enjoyment.

When I read Tiptree, I am overwhelmed by her virtuosity, by the way things that should be hard to write about seem perfectly natural in her hands. As a general principle, most of us like to feel comfortable when we read. While we expect more oddity in our science fiction than in other literature, and sometimes we read it to make ourselves uncomfortable, we still need some familiar things to hold onto. As a corollary, it is exceptionally hard to write a story from the viewpoint of an alien. If the mind of the alien is too alien, cognitive dissonance overwhelms us, but if the mind of the alien is unremarkable, we feel like a man in a rubber suit. Luckily, Tiptree showed future generations of writers how to walk that tightrope. She was fascinated by the alien point of view and wrote several stories with memorable aliens—-"Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death" is one of the best. It begins:

Remembering—-

Do you hear, my little red? Hold me softly. The cold grows.

I remember:

-—I am hugely black and hopeful, I bounce on six legs along the mountains in the new warm! . . . Sing the changer, Sing the stranger! Will the changes change forever? . . . All my hums have words now. Another change!

Eagerly I bound sunward following the tiny thrill in the air. The forests have been shrinking again. Then I see. It is me! Me--Myself, MOGGADEET—-I have grown bigger more in the winter cold! I astonish myself, Moggadeet-the-small!

Already we have a strange and somewhat insectile character with an immediately appealing voice. Moggadeet is excitable and inarticulate in a way that is reminiscent of a child; that similarity quickly engages our sympathy. Throughout the rest of the story, we remain remarkably comfortable with Moggadeet's voice, partly because Tiptree has respected our need for the familiar and made Moggadeet's story a coming-of-age tale. Even though Moggadeet's species does not get much of an adulthood, and his short life is dominated by biological imperatives, there is enough of the human condition here to empathize with. By the end, Tiptree has convinced us that this is precisely how it is to be him, to be something so strange that it walks on six legs, wraps it lovers up in silk, and sleeps the winter away. In understanding Moggadeet, we not only understand what it would be like to be different, but because of our rapport with him, we gain insight into how the conflict between self-awareness and biological determinism plays out in our own lives.

The writers who have tried and failed to communicate an alien perspective are legion (even Tiptree, in other works), but this story is a tour de force. I can only feel grateful that SCI FICTION gave us such triumphs weekly for more than five years.

(NOTE: This story is no longer archived at SCI FICTION, but it can be found in the collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever)

"The Pottawatomie Giant" by Andy Duncan: An Appreciation by Jason Erik Lundberg

2006-01-18T07:29:00.000-08:00

I first met Andy Duncan in the spring of 1995, just about ten years ago now. I was taking an undergraduate fiction-writing class at North Carolina State University under novelist Angela Davis-Gardner, and Andy happened to be there in graduate school at the time. One afternoon, Angela's son was sick and she had to take him to the doctor; she asked if Andy might cover her class that afternoon, and, being the Southern gentleman that he is, he said sure. At the beginning of class, he had all of us students gather our desks in a circle, Clarion-style, and after plunking down in his own chair, he grinned and said, "So, what have y'all been learning lately?" I don't remember any of the rest of that class, what we covered or what Andy might have taught us, but that unforgettable entrance has never left my mind.

In the years since, I've been delighted to see Andy gain the success he's seen, and as I struggled to become a published author myself, he always had a kind word at conventions and conferences (while surrounded by admirers), and a way of talking as if he were imparting some secret knowledge, layered over with his immense storyteller's charm. I was there, at a small North Carolina science fiction convention, the weekend his collection Beluthahatchie and Other Stories was released.

One thing that you know right away upon reading one of Andy's stories is what a history nut the guy is. Many of his tales take place in the American South, though certainly not all, and his love of place is evident; any setting, whether in South Carolina, Paris, a suburb of Hell, or the Soviet Union, is fully realized under Andy's controlled pen. He writes with self-assurance that comes from someone comfortable with his own style and a wealth of historical research.

In November 2000, Ellen Datlow published "The Pottawatomie Giant" at SCI FICTION. I remember reading the story while on my lunch break at work, and I was amazed that he could invoke not only Jess Willard, the 1915 heavyweight boxing champion of the world, but also master illusionist Ehrich Weiss (aka Harry Houdini). It was a story that really spoke to me, a tale of missed opportunities, of racial tensions, of second chances. A few months afterward, Andy drove up from his home in Tuscaloosa to give a reading at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, one of the best (if not the best) independent bookstores in the country, a place that was and is a frequent hangout of mine, a place that had employed Andy while he was finishing his M.A. at NCSU. The reading was to promote the publication of Beluthahatchie, and afterward, I had him sign my copy of "The Pottawatomie Giant," which I had printed out from the website. He laughed at this strange juxtaposition, and signed it anyway, adding a doodle of a snake wearing a hat. Later that year, both "The Pottawatomie Giant" and Beluthahatchie and Other Stories won the World Fantasy Award.

The defining incident in "The Pottawatomie Giant," Andy explains in the afterword to the story, is a true one. Jess Willard, the "Great White Hope," did indeed have words with Harry Houdini in the Los Angeles Orpheum in November 1915, and nearly caused a riot through his unwillingness to join Houdini on the stage. In fact, the first half of the story, up until Willard dies in his Los Angeles home in 1968, can be read as an embroidered biographical account of the former heavyweight. A speculative one to be sure, with specific dialogue that Andy could not have been privy to in his research, but a credible one all the same. The words may have been different, but it certainly could have happened in the way Andy describes.

But the story doesn't end with Willard's death. He opens his eyes to find himself back in that famous theater, with some vague memory that this has happened before, but instead of haranguing Houdini and calling him a phoney, this time he agrees to Houdini's request and joins the other volunteers on stage. He takes the other path, and earns admiration instead of scorn. Willard is offered a chance at redemption, and he takes it.

There are some wonderful paired opposites here: the hugeness of Jess Willard's frame versus Houdini's small stature; Willard's discomfort with his fame versus Houdini's revelry in his; Willard's reliance on his physical strength versus Houdini's reliance on sleight of hand and misdirection. And, as with Andy's other stories, he sprinkles in just the right details to give that lived-in feel to his 1915 Los Angeles: the derby hats, the cuspidors, peanuts sold in paper sacks, the combined "reek of horseshit and automobiles."

It's unclear whether Willard's second chance is a version of the afterlife or a form of time travel, but that's really beside the point. Just as with the fiction of Kelly Link or Aimee Bender, the fantastical element is unexplained, and is not the focus of the story anyway; it's what Willard does with that second chance that matters. And in this, Andy has proved to be a bit of an illusionist himself, first through the medium of written communication, and then through the slight alteration of events.

Andy's superb vision, combined with Ellen Datlow's uncompromising desire for literary excellence, has made this such a wonderful and lasting tale of the fantastic. This story most likely would have been published anyway, but without Ellen's careful editorial style, it may not have had the impact it did, or won the World Fantasy Award. Oh, what a horrible world that would be . . .

Link to story.

"This Tragic Glass" by Elizabeth Bear: An Appreciation by Heather K Ward

2006-01-10T08:01:00.000-08:00

Over the years, SCI FICTION has provided us with much in the way of quality stories. I came to the wonders of this online magazine somewhat late, and yet I have come to treasure each of the stories in its archives for very different reasons. One of my favourites is "This Tragic Glass", by Elizabeth Bear.

"This Tragic Glass" is something of a dream for this science fiction-loving English Major. In the story, Bear imagines a world of our own, a world of the future, where the great minds and writers of yesterday are retrieved, before their premature deaths, via time travel. One such is John Keats, now continuing his work and chairman of the Poet Emeritus project in Las Vegas, where Dr Satyavati Brahmaptura has just written a software program.

Dr Brahmaptura's software identifies "the biological gender of the writer of a given passage of text". Here, it is used to analyse the prose of Elizabethan poets and thus makes the conclusion that Christopher (Kit) Marlowe was, in fact, a woman. In order to prove that her software works, Dr Brahmaptura acquires permission to retrieve Marlowe.

"This Tragic Glass" juxtaposes the lyrical and evocative world of the Elizabethan era and the cold, cultural shock of the modern world. In doing so, Bear places the reader in the same position as Marlowe herself--jolted between two separate times, two very different worlds, never fully belonging to either. It's a clever effect, and one which works well.

The action alternates between the last moments of Marlowe's life and the events leading up to--and beyond--her extraction. We witness the arguments and prevailing theories for and against Marlowe's influence upon (and contribution to) much of Shakespeare's works; the ethics of temporal relocation and, of course, the impact of Marlowe's revealed gender on the contemporary world. It makes for enlightening reading for the English Major, for those who enjoy Elizabethan poetry and prose, or for those who bonded with Virginia Woolf's Orlando.

The language is expansive and expressive, the theme--that of the social pressure to be who we're not--is handled deftly and with compassionate care. This comes skilfully, toward the end of the piece, in Dr Brahmaptura's comment, "You are what you are . . . Someone will have to appreciate that."

Perhaps, indeed, that is all each of us can ever hope for.

Link to story

"Bulldozer" by Laird Barron: An Appreciation by John Langan

2006-01-10T07:44:00.000-08:00

Laird Barron keeps me honest. There are other writers whose work I admire: Elizabeth Hand, Lucius Shepard, Peter Straub. But if a story I'm working on fails to clear the bar they've set, I can rationalize its shortcomings by telling myself that Hand, Shepard, and Straub have years, even decades more experience than I have. With Laird, I can make no such claims. His first story in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, "Shiva, Open Your Eye," appeared the month after my first appearance in the magazine. What's more, we're roughly the same age. Since that story in F&SF, Laird's fiction has continued to improve. Every time I read one of his stories, it reminds me how much a writer of our generation (whichever one that is) can accomplish.

I wasn't prepared for "Bulldozer," Laird's first story for SCI FICTION. Gordon Van Gelder had called my attention to "Shiva, Open Your Eye," which I had found lyrical and ominous. It had placed Laird Barron in my "To Read" column. "Old Virginia," his next appearance in F&SF, was taut and suspenseful, the story of CIA agents encountering a terrifying creature. I was struck by its narrator's voice, hard-edged and compelling, and by the fact that this horror story actually was frightening. When I learned that Laird's third story was up at SCI FICTION, (which, for reasons of exposure, prestige, and, yes, money had become a personal grail), I printed it out.

Here's the beginning of "Bulldozer":

Then he bites off my shooting hand.

Christ on a pony, here's a new dimension of pain.

The universe flares white. A storm of dandelion seeds, a cyclone of fire. That's the Coliseum on its feet, a full-blown German orchestra, a cannon blast inside my skull, the top of my skull coming off.

I better suck it up or I'm done for.

I'm a Pinkerton man. That means something. I've got the gun, a cold blue Colt, and a card with my name engraved beneath the unblinking eye. I'm a dead shot, a deadeye Dick. I was on the mark in Baltimore when assassins went for Honest Abe. I skinned my iron and plugged them varmints. Abe should've treated me to the theater. Might still be here. Might be in a rocker scribbling how the South was won.

The more I consider this opening, the more I find to admire in it. The first sentence, for example. Don't begin a sentence with "then": at what point in grade school was that maxim hammered into me? Laird cheerfully disregards it, and in doing so announces his story's concern with varieties of time. But there's more to that sentence than adverbial daring. We come into the story not just in the middle of the action, but at its height. Really, we begin with the as-yet-unnamed narrator's defeat. Who/whatever he is facing has disarmed him (sorry), and in doing so dealt him a potentially fatal wound.

From there, the story gallops along, carrying us full-tilt into its narrator's interior monologue. After the colloquial oath of its second line, we careen into its first full paragraph, a constellation of images, sounds, and tactile sensations designed to convey the explosive agony of having your hand bitten off. They do more, as well; there's a good deal to unpack in them. The white that bursts across the narrator’s consciousness is visualized first as a plethora of dandelion seeds—small, natural, suggestive of rebirth—-then a storm of fire—-large, inventive, suggestive of destruction. Though both drawn from nature, the images oppose one another, as do the pair of sounds that follow. The roar of the Coliseum's audience, (presumably on its feet to watch the climax of a mortal combat), and the thunder of a German orchestra, (playing Beethoven? Wagner?), originate in European culture, yet the one invokes bloodsport and the bloodlust of the crowd, the other music and aesthetic experience. The paragraph's final pairing is of tactile sensations: the first of a cannon firing inside the narrator's head, the second of the top of his head blowing off. Migraine meets gun-wound, both presage the story's concern with the disintegration of the self.

(And, in the interest of my own obsessive-compulsive tendencies, may I point out the pair of allusions to nineteenth century American literature I read in this paragraph? The first is to Melville and Moby Dick; I find it in the paragraph's concern with whiteness. The second is to Dickinson's poetry; I find it in the phrase, "the top of my skull coming off," which echoes her famous description of poetry as that which makes her feel as if the top of her head were being taken off. Given the story's setting in the late eighteen hundreds American west, the allusions are at least historically accurate—-and since we'll learn that the narrator is a Harvard graduate, they're psychologically plausible-—but they add to the story's thematic concerns in ways it would take a short paper to map out.)

The story's next line highlights the immediacy and desperation of the narrator's plight, and then we're plunged into a brief precis of his personal history. Interestingly, we still don't know his name; instead, he identifies himself by his profession, that of Pinkerton man. He's a detective, albeit of the corporate, as opposed to the individual, variety. His markers are his gun and his card, with its "unblinking eye." Unhesitating violence and unwavering vision distinguish him. Yes, this is a mystery story, but less it the sense of whodunnit and more in the sense of whatdunnit, and what that hints of larger matters. While such adjectives as "Lovecraftian" and "cosmic" have become so overused they tend to obscure rather than clarify, they are not out of place here. This is not the faux-cosmicism of Lovecraft-derived role playing games; what Laird accomplishes shares more with the work of such writers as Caitlin Kiernan.

Before we lose ourselves in unutterable unspeakableness, however, there's the end of this paragraph to consider. Through its reference to Lincoln and its slang, it places the story historically. This is another of "Bulldozer's" strengths, and perhaps the most unexpected: its firm grasp of the historical milieu in which it occurs. The narrator's voice is so convincing, so of its time and place, that my first time through, there was only one turn of phrase whose historical accuracy I questioned; given how accurate the rest of the story was, I gave Laird the benefit of the doubt.

I suppose I could have condensed all of the above discussion into the statement that Laird Barron is a poet. The problem with such a description is that, all too often, it indicates a style that's vague, cliched, flowery as bad wallpaper. What it should point to is an attention to language that's condensed, nuanced, and allusive. The jagged edges of the narrator's voice unfold into phrases of startlingly beautiful geometry.

If I say I could go on and on discussing "Bulldozer," this look at its opening lines offers some explanation why. Of course, my first encounter with the story, I didn't engage in any of this analysis, (not consciously, anyway). I was too caught up in the relentless forward drive of its narrative, in the complexities of its narrator, (Jonah Koenig, just for the record), and in the monstrousness of the man he has pursued to a California mining town that might have been imagined by Gustave Dore. I was busy following the story's leaps back and forth in Koenig's personal history, in the connections it was drawing among a multitude of late-nineteenth century figures and events. I was caught in the way the plot unfolded, to quote the story's end, like "a terrible flower." I won't say I had no appreciation of its accomplishments before I re-read it; it was more a case of my re-reading expanding that appreciation in ways I wouldn't have guessed.

I'm tempted to say that "Bulldozer" kicked off the story-cycle that would include "Proboscis" (my favorite of Laird's stories) and "The Imago Sequence" (a brilliant, condensed novel). That isn't true, though; the cycle had started with "Shiva, Open Your Eye." What "Bulldozer" did was announce, more dramatically than either of its predecessors, that this writer was upping the stakes, that his ambitions were larger than we thought, and that he owned the talent to make good on them.

Like everyone else who's heard the news of SCI FICTION's demise, I've railed at the crass ignorance of the decision. In some ways, my consideration of a story like "Bulldozer" makes me feel the loss of such a venue-—and of Ellen Datlow's fine, perceptive editing-—even more acutely. However sharp that loss may be, however, there's no denying the magnitude of what Ellen has been able to accomplish on the site. Laird Barron's story is only one example of the quality of fiction we have been privileged to read. There's no doubting Ellen has a bright future, any more than there is for Laird Barron. All the same, it's nice to be able to recognize both their accomplishments, and thank them for them.

Link to story.

"The Golem" by Avram Davidson: An Appreciation by E.C. Myers

2006-01-10T07:34:00.000-08:00

I didn't frequent SCI FICTION until it had already been around for a few years. I had poked around the site idly on occasion, but I never committed myself to reading a full story because I wasn't accustomed to reading stories online. After repeated recommendations from friends I was determined to give SCI FICTION a try, so I visited it on my lunch break one day to see what it had to offer.

"The Golem" was the classic reprint of that week. The title caught my eye because of my growing interest in Jewish literature (via my then-girlfriend, who was a graduate student studying Yiddish), and the opening line promptly drew me in:

"The grey-faced person came along the street where old Mr. and Mrs. Gumbeiner lived."

I flew through the rest of the story. When I reached "The End," all too soon, I was actually shocked at how deeply it had engaged me in so few pages. I immediately read it again.

As a beginning writer, I was in awe of Davidson's brevity, his vivid descriptions, and his skillful use of language. I also was charmed by the simple but clever plot, and envious of the witty dialogue and characterization. In his introduction to "The Golem" in The Avram Davidson Treasury, Damon Knight calls it "a perfect story"; I'm inclined to agree.

To me "The Golem" is a model for everything that can go right in fiction; it demonstrates the power of the short story to provide a full emotional and literary experience despite a limited word count. By extension, this is the function that SCI FICTION fulfilled for many of us. It offered the very best of short fiction every week, stories that succeed or surpass the early success of "The Golem"--stories that regularly challenged us as readers and writers. Through the classics and originals Ellen shared with us, she gave new readers like myself a valuable glimpse of the origins of sf and fantasy, while also driving the future of our genre.

When I read Avram Davidson's biographical notes on SCI FICTION, it seemed impossible that I hadn't heard of him before, given how prolific and influential he was in his career as a writer and later as an editor at F&SF. (I was surprised and pleased to discover that Davidson grew up in my hometown; as silly as it may sound, that connection encouraged me in my own writing.) This is something else SCI FICTION accomplished: it provided an entry point into the work of authors we likely would not have encountered otherwise. It allowed us to expand our interests and sample a variety of new voices in a truly diverse field.

I'll always be grateful to SCI FICTION for introducing me to the work of Avram Davidson, along with the countless other authors I have discovered since, but I owe "The Golem" for introducing me to SCI FICTION, because that was the story that kept me coming back week after week for more.

Link to story.

"Bad Medicine" by Robert Sheckley: An Appreciation by Jason Boog

2006-01-06T14:52:00.000-08:00

I heard my first Robert Sheckley story on the old-time radio drama, X Minus One. Even though it was recorded twenty-five years before I was born, Sheckley's exuberant adjectives, alliterative phrases and deadpan delivery inspired my Star Wars-saturated imagination. Re-reading "Bad Medicine" this week, I could still hear Sheckley's radio voice booming:

Caswell was a choleric little man with fierce red eyes, bulldog jowls and ginger-red hair. He was the sort you would expect to find perched on a detergent box, orating to a crowd of lunching businessmen and amused students, shouting, "Mars for the Martians, Venus for the Venusians!"

But in truth, Caswell was uninterested in the deplorable social conditions of extraterrestrials. He was a jetbus conductor for the New York Rapid Transit Corporation. He minded his own business. And he was quite mad.

With pulp-fiction syntax and brassy vocabulary, "Bad Medicine" tells the story of a homicidal maniac named Caswell who ends up seeing a robot psychiatrist-—a special Martian "mechanotherapist" he bought from a hapless computer store employee. In this story, corporations like General Motors and IBM rule the world, paying a separate police department to enforce brand loyalty. Instead of Orwell's 1984, Sheckley sketches a hyper-consumerist, more familiar nightmare: a place where bad publicity can land employees in the dreaded "General Motors Reformatory" and consumers are addicted to fashionable machines that cure psychological defects.

In the science fiction pantheon, Sheckley's stories strike an odd balance between Philip K. Dick's paranoia and Ray Bradbury's sermonizing. Only Sheckley was cynical enough to imagine the science of psychological recovery commanded by robots; but conversely, only Sheckley was naive enough to imagine that Martian society could exist without a word for "murder."

Sheckley died last December, and was memorialized in quiet tributes. He never enjoyed the cult following (nor the cinematic success) of Phillip K. Dick, even though his stories counterpoint psychological fantasies like "Minority Report" or A Scanner Darkly. Even on X Minus One, the producers smothered his social satire with zany music and slapstick sound effects.

Still, Sheckley's stories beg to be re-read in this age of reality television and digital consumers, as John Kessel pointed out here. If you don't believe Kessel, just substitute the word "I-Pod" for "machine" in this passage. This crazy world will be emptier without Robert Sheckley . . .

The search for the missing customer had been brief and useless. He was nowhere to be found on the teeming New York streets and no one could remember seeing a red-haired, red-eyed little man lugging a black therapeutic machine.

It was all too common a sight.

Link to story.

Jason Boog is a
writer living in Brooklyn.

"Charlie's Angels" by Terry Bisson: An Appreciation by John Borneman

2006-01-06T14:31:00.000-08:00

I am not always a fan of Terry Bisson's work--many of his stories tend to use the "smack the reader upside the head with a message" school of writing. However, no one can deny the impact he has had on the world of the speculative fiction short story. After all, "Bears Discover Fire" managed, in 1990/1991, to win the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon and World Fantasy Awards.

Fortunately, Ellen Datlow obviously enjoys Terry's work. She has given us many opportunities to read Bisson's stories on the virtual pages of SCI FICTION. Five
stories, if my count is correct.

But "Charlie's Angels" is my favorite. It not only appeals to my love of the 'hard boiled detective story' but it also appeals to me as a writer. Simply stated, Charlie's Angels is Writing 101.

Looking for hints on writing tight snappy dialogue? How can you miss with phrases like:

"The moon doesn't come up until after midnight," I said. "If I'm staying the night, you're paying expenses. And I don't eat pizza plain."

"Make it pepperoni on one side and mushrooms on the other," said Prang, as she tore open a new pack of Camels with her teeth. "I'm a vegetarian."

I love the juxtaposition of a name like "Prang," ripping open cigarettes with her teeth, while asserting herself as a vegetarian. Priceless!

Or are you wondering about how to create pacing and carry the reader from scene to scene to scene? No problem. Professor Bisson instructs:

"Two uniformed cops wearing rubber gloves were standing over a crumpled wad of clothing and flesh by the door. Two forensics in white coats were taking pictures and making notes on handheld computers.

I joined them, curiosity and nausea fighting within me. As a private eye you see a lot of things, but rarely a man with his head pinched off.

Nausea won.

#

"Our former Security Exec," said Prang, nodding toward the headless body on the floor as I returned from throwing up in the men's room. . . "

But maybe your style tends toward the subtle. In that case, maybe this scene transition appeals to you more:

She closed her purse and walked out the door without answering, but not before handing me two reasons to follow her. Each was printed with a picture of a President I had never had the good fortune to encounter before.

#

"Now that I'm on retainer," I said, folding the bills as I followed her out onto Bourbon Street, "perhaps you can tell me what this is all about."

But seriously, "Charlie's Angels" propels the reader through the story, fast and furiously, without sacrificing understanding or enjoyment. This is not a story
that slowly and gently unfolds. It is not a story to savor, but devour. Unless, that is, you want to linger over phrases such as: "We parked in front of Starbucks where the BMW wouldn't be so conspicuous"

The finish slows the reader down, artfully and without notice. Terry begins to get to the point--and not in an aggressive or in your face way--he develops the reasons for the story and mankind's dilemma elegantly and without unneeded drama.

This story opened my eyes to what writing could be. It was written in a style I enjoyed and gave me a goal in my journey toward personal writing success.

If you haven't read this one yet, go read it now. But wear your seatbelt, it's a wild ride.

Link to Story

"More Adventures on Other Planets" by Michael Cassutt: An Appreciation by Rich Horton

2006-01-03T09:47:00.000-08:00

Ellen Datlow has published a tremendous variety of wonderful short fiction at the site, and elsewhere, including perhaps my favorite story of the 21st Century, Ian MacLeod's "New Light on the Drake Equation", and other delights such as Christopher Rowe's "The Voluntary State", Jeffrey Ford's "The Empire of Ice Cream", Karen Joy Fowler's "What I Didn't See", Linda Nagata's "Goddesses", and many more great original stories. I'm also inordinately proud of having discovered Chan Davis's "It Walks in Beauty" in the only issue of Star Science Fiction magazine (January 1958) and of having brought the story to Ellen's attention--a reminder of a sometimes neglected aspect of SCI FICTION: the biweekly "classics" that brought many outstanding old SF stories, some well-known, some obscure, to a wider audience.

But for this project in celebration of SCI FICTION, I thought to write about a story that has gotten less notice than some of my other favorites. Michael Cassutt is a successful television writer who has published a moderate amount of print SF, always interesting, and, it seems to me, not quite as well known as it might be. He published two fine stories at SCI FICTION, "Beyond the End of Time" (6/20/2001) and "More Adventures on Other Planets" (1/10/2001), one of my favorite SCI FICTION stories.

I'm a sucker for stories that seamlessly combine wonder-inducing science-fictional ideas with affectingly realized characters whose personal stories would fit in any "mainstream" character study. This is one such. It's set in 2026. Space exploration is conducted by remotely-controlled robots: manned space travel has proven to be simply too difficult, too hard on astronauts. The robot controllers interact via a much-faster-than-light virtual link. Each controller tends to handle only one robot, and it is rumored (though the techies deny it) that the robots take on the personality of their controllers.

The main characters are two somewhat battered late middle-age folks. Earl Nolan is a former aerospace engineer for Lockheed Martin, spending his last few working years (he's in his late 50s) controlling a robot on Jupiter's moon Europa. Rebecca Marceau is a French-Canadian woman who joins the program to control a robot intended to help in the search for life on Europa. Both the robotic Earl and Rebecca and the organic Earl and Rebecca "meet cute". And so the story follows the rocky but mostly sweet path of both relationships, and their inevitable bittersweet endings.

The heart of the story, really, is the careful portrayal of Earl. He's a crusty old man, used to always being right, which has often been true in an engineering sense, but not in a personal sense. He's been through two marriages, and he has three children, only one of whom tolerates him. Rebecca is somewhat similarly built, it would seem, so it is natural that they first meet unpromisingly. And it is mostly contingence--or perhaps the "intervention" of their robotic other selves--that leads them to a closer relationship. Which then plays out against the backdrop of Earl's discovery that he has cancer and won't likely live long.

But perhaps the heart of the story is the depiction of Europa's landscape, and the hard work and danger encountered by the robots and their controllers. And the ambiguous hope of discovering some hint of another sort of life on this distant moon.

And, in the end, the final journey of the robot Earl . . .

Link to story.

"The Voluntary State" by Christopher Rowe: An Appreciation by Susan Marie Groppi

2006-01-03T09:33:00.000-08:00

A couple of years ago, I heard Christopher Rowe do a reading at a convention. He started off by explaining to us that the piece he was going to read was a work-in-progress, the prologue to a novel he was working on. He also mentioned that the novel was set in the same world as "The Voluntary State", a novella that had been published at SCI FICTION. After setting all that up for us, he launched into reading the prologue, which was this incredible piece of writing, two kids riding bicycles in this hostile landscape full of semi-sentient semi-animate objects, and half the time I wasn't sure what was going on but I was fascinated anyway, and I swear to god I've never in my life found bicycles as interesting as I did that day. I left the reading with this near-desperate wish that he'd write the damn novel already so that I could read it.

After the convention was over, my curiosity about the novel and that setting led me to find the other story, "The Voluntary State." I pulled up the story from the SCI FICTION website, figuring that I'd just find it and bookmark it and come back to it later, but the first paragraph was kind of intriguing, and I told myself I'd just read a little bit, and instead I found it too compelling to stop, I had to keep reading. And then when I got to the end, I didn't want it to be over, so I stayed at the computer and read it again, and by the end of the second reading I realized almost in a daze that I was late for a meeting.

I'm starting to realize that I may not be up to the challenge of explaining why "The Voluntary State" is one of the most brilliant stories I've ever read. I'll try, but mostly you just need to read it for yourself, because all I'm doing here is trying to attach some kind of articulate explanation to a huge overwhelming feeling of "Oh, wow. This is . . . this is just perfect."

In the early parts of the story, I was pulled in by the strangeness of the world. The idea that these people live in a place where everything around them is alive to some degree, manifested artificial policement who fly in on bicycles, public works projects conducted by cranes (with "acres-broad leaves" that change color with the seasons) that are grown for special projects and go dormant in the winter, predators in the ocean shallows who grow prey lures that look like drowning children. Those kinds of things keep happening throughout the story--that lovely weirdness never lets up--but that's not all that's going on. If that were the extent of the appeal, then it would be a great one-time read, a single flashy thought experiment. But this isn't that kind of story. It's the kind of story that you can read and keep reading, because it's so deep and rich and tangled. It's the kind of story that makes me remember why I love science fiction in the first place.

Link to story.

"The Serial Murders" by Kim Newman: An Appreciation by Tansy Rayner Roberts

2006-01-03T09:16:00.000-08:00

The first time I read a Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, I discovered a Diogenes Club story featuring professional psychic Richard Jeperson. I loved it because it was a spooky horror-fantasy piece that felt (and looked) very much like an episode of The New Avengers. Or, if not that, then an episode of a very cool British 1970's show that I had mysteriously never heard of, featuring supernatural crime. Imagine if "The X-Files" was actually done twenty-five years earlier, in Britain. With Carnaby Street fashions, a charismatic older leading man with a Shakespearean background, a young male co-star who went on to star in cop shows or cheesy eighties sit-coms, and a young female co-star who went on to be a Bond girl.

Every now and then, a Diogenes Club story appeared before me, mysteriously, in an anthology here or there. I always noted them and enjoyed them--but, strangely, never noticed the name of the author (of course I'd heard of Kim Newman, but somehow didn't identify him with these particular stories).

Then, a few weeks ago, I wandered past SCI FICTION and found "The Serial Murders." Not only a Diogenes Club story, but a whole novella, divided into three episodes. I read it voraciously, savouring every bit of witty dialogue and glam fashion. There's something joyously strange about these stories--in this case, a story about soap opera and voodoo, complete with hypertext "footnotes" that explain all the Seventies Britisms of the language. The plot starts out with absurdity and descends into stylish weirdness and yet it works. It doesn't have anything overly significant to say, but it's an entertaining romp and one of my favourite stories of the year. One of the rare short stories I come across that I would happily re-read just for sheer reading pleasure.

And here's the thing: in the early days of stunned shock and disappointment as the news of the death of SCI FICTION filtered through the blogosphere, I kept hearing people talk about the stories that wouldn't be published if not for SCI FICTION. My first reaction was impatience--surely if they're good enough to earn 20¢ a word, then they would pick up publication somewhere else? (I know, I know, I've since come to my senses.) But it's hard to imagine "The Serial Murders" finding a home somewhere else. It's a quirky, oddball novella–-and it's very rare for a print magazine to allow a novella-sized chunk of real estate to be filled by quirky and oddball. That's why SCI FICTION was special–-not only for the brave and challenging and downright strange stories that found its way onto those well-presented pages, but particularly for the novelettes and novellas that found a home there. The number of high quality pieces of long fiction that we get to read every year has just been drastically slashed, and it's hard not to feel seriously depressed about that.

Too late to add this to my list for Santa, but what I really want for the New Year is for someone to give Ellen Datlow a job, a budget and a publishing outlet. It doesn't even have to be free to readers. I'll pay my way.

Sigh. In the meantime, I can take heart from the fact that Monkeybrain Books are publishing a collection of Richard Jeperson stories (The Man from the Diogenes Club) in 2006. Cue the 1970's soundtrack, and grab your knee-high vinyl boots . . .

Link to story.

"Freeing the Angels" by Pat Cadigan and Chris Fowler: An Appreciation by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz

2005-12-30T11:51:00.000-08:00

What a body misses while absent from the Net. I came back online after seven years to discover SCI FICTION and to hear about this place closing down. When I heard of the ED SF Project, I decided to visit and found myself clicking on story after story, reading and regretting those years of not knowing about this treasure trove online.

Going through the list, my eye was caught by a story written by Pat Cadigan and Chris Fowler.

"Freeing the Angels" starts with these lines:

He was standing on the sidewalk, idly flexing his brand-new arm while he waited to cross with the rest of the blowfish, when he heard his mother's voice in his mind. Unbidden, unwished-for, apropos of nothing, it came to him: Carry on the way you have been, Danny-boy, you be seein' angels a lot sooner than you want to. Or maybe devils. You sure got some bad in you, boy. Watch it don't catch you out and take you down. When you go, you want to see them angels waiting to take you in.

Captivated by these lines, I found myself following Danny, a guy revelling in the experience of walking down the street, equipped with a new prosthetic arm. But what an arm! No ordinary bionic arm for Danny. This one comes with its own instruction manual and a quantum state generator. It also opens the doorway to an incredible partnership with Trader Vic, a woman who is gifted in making all the right deals, and whose deals in the story, provide for the fast paced adventure that follows.

This to me was the ultimate mix--science fiction embracing the unexplainable. Just like the story title promises, it is a fantastic blend of mystical and futuristic elements, science and the supernatural joined together in perfect harmony. Filled with action and unexpected twists, I found myself literally sitting on the edge of my seat, waiting for what would happen next.

What stays with me from reading "Freeing the Angels" is a sense of wonder at how the mind is limitless in its possibilities and its imaginations. What causes man to push his imagination beyond what exists--what pushes him to see and create stories like this is a reflection of the divinity in man that science will never truly be able to explain away.

Thank you, Pat and Chris, and thank you, SCI FICTION.

Link to story.

"Frankenstein's Daughter" by Maureen McHugh: An Appreciation by Ted Chiang

2005-12-30T11:39:00.000-08:00

I first read "Frankenstein's Daughter" in workshop, and found myself taking a minority position on it. Not with regard to liking it, but regarding the question of whether it's science fiction or not. Many of the other people at the workshop said that it wasn't really science fiction, that the cloning element could be removed without changing the story significantly, that it could easily be a mainstream story about living with a mentally handicapped child.

Now that the story's been published online and in print, I notice that some reviewers have expressed similar opinions, saying that its SFnal trope is under-utilized. This is certainly a response I've had to many, many stories I've read, including stories with far more futuristic settings than "Frankenstein's Daughter." But let me suggest that, upon examination, this is a story that couldn't be told without its SFnal component. The reason can be summed up in one word: blame.

The word "blame" doesn't actually appear anywhere in the story, but it permeates the lives of its characters. If six-year-old Cara's mental and physical handicaps were the result of random chance, no one would blame her mother; she might blame herself, but no one else would. But Cara's condition is a direct result of her mother's decision to use cloning, and everyone knows it. Whether they say it aloud or not, whether they are right to do so or not, people blame her.

This is clearest in the scene where Cara's mother takes her to the emergency room for an asthma attack. "The doctor wants to punish me," she thinks. "I can imagine what he would like to ask. Why the hell did you do it? How do you justify it?" These are not questions that the mothers of ordinary handicapped children are ever asked; this is not a scene that would appear in a mainstream story. And even if nowhere else in the story are such accusations as visible, it's clear that this is something that Cara's mother has had to deal with ever since Cara was born.

And let's be clear: Cara's mother did make a bad decision. Partly because she chose to use cloning when the technology hadn't been perfected yet, but also because she was trying to recreate her dead child Kelsey, when recreating the dead is not what cloning does. Even if Cara had been born healthy, she would not have been Kelsey. By thinking of a new baby as a duplicate of someone else instead of as an individual in her own right, Cara's mother made a terrible mistake.

Maybe it's not fair to blame her for this. In response to the doctor's censure, Cara's mother thinks, "How do I tell him, tell them, that when Cara was conceived, I wasn't sane? Nothing prepares you for the death of a child. Nothing teaches you how to live with it." She's right. There's no way to know how you'd react after the death of a child, and maybe it's not reasonable to hold someone responsible for their decisions under that kind of stress. But that doesn't mean all decisions are good ones. Cara's mother made a bad decision, and she knows it.

And her awareness of her own responsibility is what makes the story's ending so resonant. Cara's parents have just picked up their son Robert from the police station after he was arrested for vandalism, and Robert tries to avoid his parents' punishment by running down the street. Robert's not just trying to escape bad luck, a lousy hand of cards he was dealt; he's trying to escape responsibility for his own ill-considered actions. And though escape may be impossible, that's an impulse his mother can identify with.

To me, "Frankenstein's Daughter" says more about the actual consequences of cloning than any story filled with tank-grown armies of identical workers. It may make its point quietly, but it's saying something that a mainstream story can't, and that's the mark of real SF.

Link to story.

"Heads Down, Thumbs Up" by Gavin J. Grant: An Appreciation by Jeff VanderMeer

2005-12-28T09:18:00.000-08:00

A story can reward on a first or second reading and then either expand in the mind or become an inert object. Or, a story can be difficult on a first reading and only reveal its true nature upon multiple readings. And sometimes the deceptively simple can have hidden depth. Such is the case with Gavin J. Grant's "Heads Down, Thumbs Up," a story that uses simple syntax to express a vastly complex idea: the shifting of metaphysical, cultural, and social boundaries, anchored by the metaphor of the physical shifting of countries. At least, that's how the general populace in the world inhabited by the child narrator has come to see the changes that occur. The brilliance of the story lies in taking what would usually be an underlying theme and making it a literal, concrete fact: gender identities, cultural norms, and much else literally change as the physical country borders change. And by doing this, the concrete fact itself takes on further metaphorical resonance, so that the setting could be our own world seen symbolically.

Grant uses hints of folktale, very specific detail, and the clear-eyed but limited viewpoint of a child to ground his story. Without the specific detail in particular, the story would fly away like a badly moored tent in torrential winds. The magic of the story for me lies in these simple moments. For example, "And then I knew what she meant, the other language coming over me like the dirty water spreading across the painting table when I knocked over my paint cup." Or when Grant describes the aftermath of violence: "She had tied a khaki shirt around her calf, and as we walked it slowly turned red, brown, black."

I've read "Heads Down, Thumbs Up" three or four times and I don't feel fully comfortable parsing its meaning. In a sense, it's the kind of story where the meaning exists in the reading of each sentence. We're not really traveling toward a destination—instead, we are leaving and arriving within each paragraph or set of paragraphs. This gives the story its power and adds a sense of reader confusion at the same time. We pass over the shifting boundaries with the narrator. We lose our confidence in our own telling of the story because of this shifting, then regain it, then lose it. We want the story to be a rigid beast, something that sits still and lets us parse it. But the genius of "Heads Down, Thumbs Up" is that it rejects this kind of reading.

Link to story.

"The Man Who Never Forgot" by Robert Silverberg: An Appreciation by Scott M. Sandridge

2005-12-28T09:08:00.000-08:00

Silverberg's tale is about the life of a man who remembers everything, every single detail from the memory of his birth, to everything he's read and every conversation he's heard. I never had a memory as good as the protagonist, Niles, but much of what Niles felt and went through struck a painfully familiar chord in me.

"I could have been something special, he brooded, one of the wonders of the world. Instead I'm a skulking freak who lives in dingy third-floor back rooms, and I don't dare let the world know what I can do."

When I first read this story at SCI FICTION, these sentences jumped off the page and smacked me across the forehead. It was one of those epiphanies you often recieve while reading fiction, that little voice in the back of your mind that says, "Here is truth."

It may never be the "Grand Truth," but the personal truths are no less potent to the one it hits. It may not be a truth you want to hear, but it is always what you need to hear.

"I could have been something special . . ." How often did I tell myself that as I grew older? How often do people older than me tell themselves that? How often have I heard people say it during a moment of confiding?

So few of us ever allow ourselves to reach our full potential.

"He had a gift, a great gift, an awesome gift. It had been too big for him until now. Self-pitying, self-tormented, he had refused to allow for the shortcomings of the forgetful people about him and had paid the price of their hatred. But he couldn't keep running away forever. The time would have to come for him to grow big enough to contain his gift, to learn to live with it instead of moaning in dramatic
self-inflicted anguish."

Silverberg, through Niles' self-realization in this story, speaks to all of us. So throw away your self-pity and let your gifts shine through. You'll make the world a better place for it.

And thank you, SCI FICTION, for publishing a story that contains such an important truth.

Link to story.

"The Dragons of Summer Gulch" by Robert Reed: An Appreciation by Sarah Prineas

2005-12-28T08:46:00.000-08:00

Robert Reed's "The Dragons of Summer Gulch"

Okay, I admit it. I hadn't read this story before choosing it for the ED project, and I chose it because it had the word 'dragons' in the title. Because fantasy's all about the dragons; for me, dragons represent the awesome, airborne, sense-of-wonder possible-impossibility of the fantastic. How do they manage to fly, anyway?

Here's what I liked about this story: the happy camels on leashes. The moron-genius Manmark who says, "And then my father died, and I took my inheritance, deciding to apply my wealth and genius in the pursuit of great things." The Wild West setting turned askew. The best locomotive available on short notice. The sly aboriginal girl's story-within-a-story. The eighth dragon. Everything else dragon: the fossils, the eggs, the gold-silver-platinum spleens, the Claws of God.

So obviously, this is not a review or a critique, but an appreciation of the sheer fantastical wonderfulness of this story. It's big, it's not very aerodynamic, but holy cow, it flies.

Link to story.

"The Sea Was Wet as Wet Can Be" by Gahan Wilson: An Appreciation by Lynda E. Rucker

2005-12-23T13:27:00.000-08:00

Like Gahan Wilson, I never trusted the Alice books. There was something terrifying, in particular, about the ways in which Sir John Tenniel realized The World According to Lewis Carroll. I remember being particularly frightened, even repulsed, by an illustration of Alice who, in following the cake's instructions to eat me, had grown so that her neck was horrifically elongated till she looked more like a monster than a little girl. So it's no surprise that someone of Gahan Wilson's sensibilities finally concocted such a nasty little tribute to one of Carroll's crueler poems.

Wilson's succeeded here in doing something many beginning writers in the horror genre wrongheadedly attempt (or that many unfamiliar with the genre mistakenly think is appropriate): he's populated his story with a cast of thoroughly unpleasant characters who seem bound to get their comeuppance by the story's end. Here, of course, it works, first of all because he's Gahan Wilson, but also because the motley partiers at this fateful picnic seem no more shrill and unpleasant than the attendees of a mad tea party or croquet match in Carroll's Wonderland. As the story progresses, of course, the little party the narrator describes as "a contamination" and "a crowd of bored and boring drunks" begin to seem not so much revolting as simply pathetic; but by then, of course, it's too late. They've made the acquaintance of the charming, even lovable, walrus and his sidekick the carpenter, and as is the case in much of Carroll's universe, what seems so whimsical on the surface of things disguises something much more menacing.

Though "The Sea Was Wet as Wet Can Be" made its debut in a 1967 issue of Playboy, I first discovered it in Ellen Datlow's 1989 anthology Blood is Not Enough, probably the same year the anthology was published. The story never left me, but I couldn't remember who had written it, what the title was, or where I'd read it--only Carroll's avuncular walrus and carpenter, every bit as sinister as I'd always suspected they were. I searched in a desultory way for the story once in a while (though I thought the title was something like "The Walrus and the Carpenter") but it wasn't until a friend of mind coincidentally mentioned having read it this past year that I got the title and author again (but of course! I should have realized that only Gahan Wilson could have written such a perfectly macabre take on Lewis Carroll!), and I found the story online at SCI FICTION.

Reuniting with old favorites has been only one of many pleasures the site has given me, and I intend to spend the final year of its life reading or rereading 300+ of the best short stories writers in the field of speculative fiction have produced, not just since the site's inception in 2000, but over more than fifty years. You should do the same.

Link to story.

"A Walk in the Garden" by Lucius Shepard: An Appreciation by David Moles

2005-12-23T13:12:00.000-08:00

Wilson loves his helmet forever and happily ever after. It looks dangerous-robot slick with the tiger stripes he painted on the sides. It has a TV mounted above the visor so he can watch his favorite shows. It feeds him, dopes him, keeps him cool, plays his tunes, tells him when to fire, where to hide. An hour before, it reminded him to record messages for family and friends. He sent love to his parents, talked dirty to his girlfriend, Laura Witherspoon, and to his best friend back in Greeley, he said, "Yo, Mackie! I am the magic! My boots store energy — I can jump twenty-five feet straight fucking up, dude! Tomorrow we're gonna kick some brutal ass! Talk to ya later!" Now he's in a more reflective mood. The thought of invading Paradise is fresh, but he's not too sure, you know.

I must have been thirteen when Lucius Shepard first blew my mind. The story was called "R&R," and if you haven't read it you might have read Life During Wartime, the novel it grew into, or grew out of. I was a kid in love with the war toys my folks wouldn’t let me have, in love with Starship Troopers and Hammer's Slammers, in love with brotherhood and sacrifice and most of all in love with the unutterable coolness of kicking ass. And then along comes Lucius Shepard, with this story that's like the Deer Hunter to those other stories' Hogan's Heroes, and rips the lid off of all that, shines a light down into it like the harsh illumination of a parachute flare, revealing a landscape of beauty and terror and sex and drugs and madness and humor and despair.

I won't say I got it. How the hell could I? I was thirteen. But it stayed with me for years. Some of the first pieces I wrote (let's hope no copies of the manuscripts survive) were, I only realized later, fumbling Shepard pastiches: stories about high-tech soldiers in love with their gear, coming to a bad end at the hand of forces they couldn't understand. At the time I had no idea what I was doing, but what I was doing was trying to come to terms with "R&R" and the sharp break it made in the way I understood the world.

Which brings us to August, 2003, and "A Walk in the Garden."

"Maybe you can reach Paradise from here, but I figure we might hafta pass through somewhere bad to get there. And even if we find it, what the fuck we supposed to do then? We're infidels, man. We're unbelievers."

"You may be taking this all too literally."

"Taking it metaphorically just makes you confused."

Maybe that's what "A Walk in the Garden" is really about: finding the truth by literalizing the metaphor of literalizing the metaphor.

The story's been called half-baked and it's been called dated. I prefer to think of it as a raw and angry and courageous expression of its time: six months and two hundred American casualties into a war built on ignorance and lies. In a broader sense it's the time we're still living in, a time when the world's Thomas "Lexus and the Olive Tree" Friedmans and Samuel "Clash of Civilizations" Huntingtons (not to mention its Ahmadinejads and bin Ladens) can blithely explain away the world's problems in terms of a monolithic West and monolithic Islam. "A Walk in the Garden" both encapsulates that world-view and skewers it, savagely.

And it doesn't hurt that it's a fuckin' riot to read. From the opening scene with Charlie and his helmet to the list of "10 Things Specialist Charles N. Wilson Wants You To Know" that ends the story, "A Walk in the Garden" is laced with black humor and dark insight. In many ways "A Walk in the Garden" is the story I was trying to write all through the late Eighties, but immeasurably better, and not only because it's written by an immeasurably better writer than Teenage Me could possibly have been. It's better because it's true, true in the sense that "R&R" was true, true in the sense that all the best fiction is true.

I hope that somewhere out there is a kid for whom "A Walk in the Garden" has done what "R&R" did for me, back when; some Fox News-watching kid who's had his eyes opened or some passionate Cassandra who's had her faith in the future restored.

Like the anonymous Marine put it in another mind-blowing war story, Dispatches: "Don't worry, baby, God'll think of something."

Till then all we can do is keep moving, like Charlie Wilson: keep crawling through shadow, looking for shade.

Link to story.

"The War of the Worlds" by James P. Blaylock: An Appreciation by Robert Burke Richardson

2005-12-23T13:08:00.000-08:00

The first SCI FICTION story I read--and one of the first short stories I ever read, period (not counting the terrible ones they force you to read in school)--was James Blaylock's "The War of the Worlds." Not only did this story introduce me to the world of SCI FICTION (itself a brand new entity at the time) and all that it would eventually entail, but it also introduced me to Mr. Blaylock's fiction, a door I am very happy to have opened.

I read "The War of the Worlds" before developing a critical vocabulary for discussing fiction, and the unexpressed joy I find in it may be part of why it still lives so vividly in my mind after all these years--it's not a story I think about or remember, but one which I relive. I haven't so much as glanced at the story again, but I can watch pretty much the whole thing in my head (Blaylock's cinematic writing probably helps a lot here, too). I'm especially fond of the scene where the couple is loading the car for a desperate escape and, once it gets full, each starts dumping the other's things on the sidewalk to make room for their own.

The ending was something I absolutely did not expect, and I've had a certain fondness ever since for stories that are perhaps mainstream in nature, but told with a sensibility very much in tune with genre expectations. Inexperienced reader that I was, I didn't know that was something you could even do, and Blaylock opened
my eyes to it.

"War of the Worlds" was the first of many SCI FICTION stories to expand the horizons for me of what a story could be, and the first of many to introduce me to an author I might not otherwise have met. Many, many thanks!

Link to story

"When It Changed" by Joanna Russ: An Appreciation by Kameron Hurley

2005-12-21T23:44:00.000-08:00

There is a world where women measure their lives in duels, where the only thing to fear on a dark night are the beasts women can kill with their own hands, where the solace one finds is in the arms of another woman. It's a world where women's words on history, science, theology, agriculture, astronomy, politics, aren't dismissed out of hand as being from the mind of a person whose biological destiny has already predetermined their lack of intellectual merit.

It's a world where things can be really different.

It's a world that belongs to Joanna Russ.

I grew up being told that I lived in a world where women are equal in every way to that standard default of humanity, men. I had to be told this, in case it wasn't clear. I was told I could grow up to be President. I could drive as fast, run as hard, as anybody else.

And when I was eighteen years old I broke out and down and found that I was supposed to be smaller and eat less, because I was a woman. And against all reason, I had gotten so tangled up in the idea that I was supposed to become the nurturing, submissive half of a happy hetero pair that I rewrote the abused woman script all by myself.

Why was the world I found so different from the one I grew up believing in? Why was I measured by the status of my boyfriend (and whether or not I was straight?)? Why did I have to fight over the rights to my own reproduction? Why was I still being told that my woman's brain was too weak for math and science? Why were so many of society's ills blamed on "single" mothers who'd seemingly procreated all by themselves?

I read Joanna Russ's "When It Changed" in one of those coveted courses in "Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature" at my local community college. I read:

Katy drives like a maniac; we must have been doing over 120 km/hr on those turns. She's good, though, extremely good, and I've seen her take the whole car apart and put it together again in a day. My birthplace on Whileaway was largely given to farm machinery and I refuse to wrestle with a five-gear shift at unholy speeds, not having been brought up to it, but even on those turns in the middle of the night, on a country road as bad as only our district can make them, Katy's driving didn't scare me. The funny thing about my wife, though: she will not handle guns. She has even gone hiking in the forests above the 48th parallel without firearms, for days at a time. And that does scare me.

In Whileaway, women were people. They weren't "equal" to anyone but each other. They were strong. They could take apart their cars and put them back together again. They could love each other without fear of reproach. And no one told them they were weak or stupid for having been born a woman.

Things could be really different.

What I always appreciated about Russ as a writer was her fearlessness in challenging the happy-hetero status quo and assumptions of social gender equality. A writer like Ursula LeGuin will build you a world where men and women are the default pair, where even in the most radical of social arrangements, the man narrates, pairs up with a willing woman, loves monogamously, and all is happy in the end.

Russ peels back all those assumptions and looks underneath them. She'll tell you a story about those who assume their superiority, about men who assume a woman lacks the core humanity that men are born with, a story about how women view men entering what is a woman's world, and how men will look to change that world into one that suits men. She'll tell you what she's seen of what men expect, what women will give.

Then Russ will tell you to shove it up your ass.

And I love her for that.

Thirty years after Russ wrote that story, I'd like to say a lot has changed, that I live in that world I grew up believing in. But that's not quite so.

I'm lucky to live in a city where I can shack up with a lesbian couple and have sex outside of wedlock with a younger man from another city and nobody's been by to burn my house down. I can support myself on my own salary, defend myself in a fight, and I hold three degrees. In some circles, that's acceptable.

In many circles, it's not.

Because for all that I'm still living in a country nearly as fearful of single, financially secure women who can change their own tires as the one Russ was writing in, and I'm not sure when that will change. I want to live in a world where my strength and character and worth isn't measured in my ability to fake the submissive feminine ideal. I won't pretend I'm stupider than my male boss (or my female boss, for that matter). I won't be anybody's office eye-candy. I won't lie about what I think. I won't pretend I don't think anything at all.

I want to measure my life in duels.

"Where are all the people?" said the monomaniac.

I realized then that he did not mean people, he meant men, and he was giving the word the meaning it had not had on Whileaway for six centuries.

"They died," I said. "Thirty generations ago."

And I don't want Russ's solution to be ours, either.

It's stories like this that challenge our assumptions about our own world, about the way we think, about the way we treat one another. And it's stories like this that ask us how we would make things really different.

If not Russ's way, then how?

Link to story.

"Articles of a Personal Nature" by Deborah Coates: An Appreciation by Stephanie Burgis

2005-12-21T10:00:00.000-08:00

Deborah Coates's Articles of a Personal Nature is a story about the hidden gaps of alienation lurking within even the closest relationships. It's also a story that uses the canine-human tracking partnership as a powerful metaphor for the search for personal connection.

When I volunteered to write an appreciation of this story, I did so based on the warmth I felt when I remembered it, even though many of the details of the plot and characters had faded from my mind since first reading it. What I remembered was the beauty of the final scene--not exactly who said or did what, but that perfect evocation of transcendence, that fleeting but amazing feeling of having established a connection of total intimacy. When I sat down to re-read the story, I found myself teary-eyed at the end again . . . and so grateful that I'd had the motivation and opportunity to re-experience this piece, one of my favorites that SCI FICTION published.

Tommy and his partner Sarah were always very different people, but their relationship somehow managed to work anyway. Then one day, after being experimented on by her company, Sarah disappeared, sucked into what Tommy thinks must have been an alternate universe or black hole. Now, seven years later, she's suddenly reappeared . . . and deeply unfamiliar. But did he ever really know her?

Just as Sarah and her dogs work to track hidden scents across difficult, confusing landscapes, Tommy must work to trace the remnants of their broken relationship, searching for any way to put it back together. The truths exposed in his search are brutally honest...which makes the ending, with its tentative, fragile offer of hope, all the more emotionally rewarding.

A beautiful, beautifully written story. I’m so glad to have read it again.

Link to story.

"Refugees from Nulongwe" by M. Shayne Bell: An Appreciation by Rhonda S. Garcia

2005-12-21T09:30:00.000-08:00

When you decide to write, when you sit down and start writing (which is the only sure-fire way to learn how), when you take that plunge and decide to put words to paper for someone other than yourself to read, you start changing. You see things differently; you ask yourself "Is that sound dripping water makes really drip or plonk? Or is it something else?" You start trying to describe things to yourself the way they really are, not the way someone else wrote them in your favourite novel. You start listening to the way people talk, watching the way they act, so you can build realistic characters out of them later.

And you change the way you read. No, that's wrong. You don't really change the way you read--the way you read changes. Before you could read just for the pleasure of it. You could lose yourself in the perfect story, regardless of the imperfect structure. You could recommend something purely because you enjoyed it. But once you start writing, there's a voice in your mind that you can't shut off ever again. A voice that compares your skills to the writer you're reading, a voice that scoffs at the overuse of adverbs and "was." This seems to be true for all writers, no matter what genre they write.

In short, to paraphrase John D. Macdonald, you start reading everything with weary contempt or grinding envy.

What I talked about before was the weary contempt part. "Refugees from Nulongwe" . . . well, that's all about the grinding envy for me.

I call myself a writer because that's what I do when I'm being myself--truly myself. I've got jobs, dependants, lots of chores--the usual. I have yet to see my name in print in something other than a contest also-ran list. But I've been in this world of words since I was two, and I've been writing novels since I was ten, and I think that qualifies me to judge what works for me when it comes to writing.

This story worked for me. Worked like a dream that you're really enjoying, so much so that when you come out of it, it's a slow waking, a soft wondrous letting go that, nevertheless, stays with you as you return to the real world. I read "Refugees from Nulongwe" years ago, when it was first posted to the SCI FICTION site. When I was done, I sent a note to my sister (another struggling writer) asking her to take a look at it. She did.

It's that simple. If you love something, you pass it on. If you love a story, it's impossible for you to find the flaws or to critique from an unbiased place. You lose yourself in it, and when it's time to stop, you do so with some reluctance, but also with jubilation. You've found a story that didn't make you grind to a halt over an ill-chosen phrase or a cliché. You've found a writer that didn't make you roll your eyes over their pursuit of flowery prose.

When I told my sister I was going to do an appreciation, the first thing she said was "do that elephant story." I laughed. I thought she would have forgotten it by now. I should have known I would be wrong.

I remember quite a few stories from SCI FICTION, but none stuck in my gut all this time the way "Refugees" did. In M. Shayne Bell's story, the refugees are elephants, wise creatures that we can finally communicate with due to the technological advancements. The elephants, led by an amazingly graceful animal called Elizabeth, are running from the threat of genocide. Yes, despite the advancements, despite the clear evidence that elephants are intelligent creatures, there are still those who will not share the Earth with another intelligent species--even if they are no less human than…well, humans. Some things never change.

Bell managed to imbue the elephants with a dignity and wisdom all their own, yet we recognize their suffering and their courage, because it is the suffering of all displaced peoples. The courage of those that have no choice but to be courageous or die.

I won't spoil the rest of the story for those who haven't read it yet (this is an appreciation, not a review, so I get to be greedy and just gush), but I will say that at the end of the story, what really stuck it to me was the footnote. The footnote that pointed out that the work to protect and rescue orphans in the story was actually being done at that very moment.

That was amazing for me. The idea that I was not just reading a story, I was reading a real science fiction story. Because it was all about possibilities . . . and truth.

Good stories do more than tell a story - they open our eyes to new possibilities, new ideas. New truths. "Refugees from Nulongwe" is a story that tells the truth about our nature, our society and they way we see them both. How that one thing--that ability to finally talk to a being we never could before--can so completely change us and the world around us. If we let it. If we can overcome the flaws that sometimes, regrettably, make us so human.

"Refugees from Nulongwe" did all this without one useless line. With the perfect prose that made you see the beauty of what was being talked about without the fussiness. Beautiful prose that never drew attention to itself until you really, really read it, and then it made you sigh at the simplicity of it--the rightness.

Easy. That's the word. The whole story felt easy, like it had been written, from beginning to end, with no effort at all--and it was no effort to read either. For a writer, and readers as well, that's one way to recognize that the story is more than good. It's special.

I can't remember if "Refugees from Nulongwe" won any awards. It should have, in my humble opinion. If it didn't, though, it wouldn't matter. To this day, I still recommend it. This story lit me on fire, made me push to be a better writer. I knew then that I couldn't do something like this--I probably can't even now. Maybe I never will. But, oh, the sweet jealousy that made me say, "I want to do that. I want to write a story that sticks in the gut and doesn't let go. That never fails to impress you no matter how many angles you look at it from." I still want to write a story that makes people gush about it the way I gushed about M. Shayne Bell's "Refugees." It's the goal that keeps me going.

So I guess what I want to say is, thanks. Thank you, M. Shayne Bell, for sharing this amazing story, for touching the lives of at least two writers--and lifelong readers--in a way they'll never forget.

Thank you, most of all, for introducing me to the concept of grinding envy.

Link to story.

"Hell Notes" by M.K. Hobson: An Appreciation by Eugie Foster

2005-12-21T09:15:00.000-08:00

One of the defining characteristics of SCI FICTION has always been the variety of consistently high quality fiction that it publishes--a testament both to the extraordinary caliber of writers that have graced its webpages, as well as the keen, discerning, and eclectic editorial eye of Ellen Datlow. The stories published in the Originals section of SCI FICTION are all brand new reading adventures, never before seen by fan or fowl. On any given week, it was possible to find a postmodern fantasy, or a gritty fright fest, or a futuristic alien-and-ray-guns saga, or even a postmodern gritty ray-gun parable: virtually anything from within the realm of "speculative fiction."

Discovering these fresh, weekly offerings has been an unfailingly satisfying experience for me, whether the tale is thoughtful, tearful, inspiring, poignant, or funny. However, I've been particularly fond of the funny stories. Comedy can be so many things--intelligent, witty, charming, painful, whimsical, foolish, guilty--and by its nature, it is never ostentatious . . . when done well. And that's the rub; good funny is difficult to write and hence rare. I don't get to laugh as often as I'd like to (then again, perhaps I've got a reluctant sense of humor). My recalcitrant funny bone aside, humor is subjective. So when I find something as broadly appealing as M.K. Hobson's "Hell Notes" that can make me giggle with unabashed glee, I know I've found a gem.

In this story, a marketing consultant wanders into a shoddy Chinese buffet for lunch, gorges himself on the most exquisite twice-cooked pork he's ever eaten, gets mistaken as a walking undead by the lovely chef, and discovers that the path to his heart really is through his stomach. With lines like "The pork was of melting tenderness in a perfectly balanced garlic sauce, with impetuous slices of water chestnut and insouciant threads of onion" to tempt the palate, and "Dishes three, four, and five held, respectively: chunks of clove-spiked raw liver drenched in a bloody sauce; lacy webs of pearl-colored tripe fanned out like exotic sea flora; and a phlegmy stew of cancerous tubers" to repel it, this is a supremely enjoyable blend of droll wit and understated horror. But "Hell Notes" is more than just a gratifying giggle. This story has a bit of everything--danger, romance, incomparable Chinese food, ghosts, the afterlife, and even a dash of philosophy to provide depth--in a context both unusual and striking. Hobson's descriptions are evocative and visceral, her punch lines are agile and witty, and her sense of whimsy and the absurd is nothing short of genius. It's funny horror! You just gotta love funny horror.

My thanks to M.K. Hobson for writing this delightful tale, and to Ellen Datlow and the Sci Fi Channel for bringing it and hundreds of other marvelous stories to the public, free of charge.

Link to story.

"The Three Unknowns" by Severna Park: An Appreciation by Merrie Haskell

2005-12-20T09:45:00.000-08:00

She had me at the word "archaeology."

Of course, my little geek niche isn't a fair way to judge a hook, but I bet she had the rest of you by "Mars" at the latest.

And if archaeology and Mars aren't enough, Severna Park gives us (in no particular order): academic infighting, smarmy-lusty ship captains, twelve flavors of protein supplements, the first extraterrestrial McDonald's, exile, betrayal, revenge, forgeries, middens, obelisks and Alpha Centauri.

And she gives us wonderful bits about archaeology that point to both the truth and inherent humor of the profession, like:

"On Earth, the first things Althea would have looked for were the town dump and the cemetery. The wealth of civilizations eventually ended up in one place or the other."

"The Three Unknowns" hits so many of my brain-buttons on what makes for good story that reading it for the first time was like mainlining chocolate espresso beans. The fact that SCI FICTION managed to find these chocolate espresso beans and share them regularly still amazes me. I will miss the weekly jolt.

Link to story.

"Neutrino Drag" by Paul Di Filippo: An Appreciation by Claude Lalumière

2005-12-20T09:30:00.000-08:00

"Neutrino Drag" is a campy gonzo historical mythic hard-SF drag-race comedy of Americana. It beautifully and mirthfully captures a specific time and place, a low-culture moment of twentieth-century American mythology. It's fun as all hell. It's funny as all hell. It's sorta sexy, in a high-kitsch 1950s kind of way. It plays amusing linguistic games, and its exuberant language is inseparable from the story being told. The speculative science is mind-bending. The characters are beyond peculiar. The plot is totally ridiculous, yet we joyfully fall into "Neutrino Drag"'s expertly created universe.

It's fun.

Short stories can be fun.

Paul Di Filippo stories often remind us to chill out and have fun. And that includes having fun reading Paul Di Filippo stories.

Link to story.

"All the Sounds of Fear" by Harlan Ellison: An Appreciation by CJ Hurtt

2005-12-20T09:15:00.000-08:00

Ellison's "All The Sounds of Fear" reads not so much as a short story, but rather as a type of sermon. This shotgun blast of words and passion is aimed straight at the reader. This is Ellison doing what he does best; calling it as he sees it.

While not the strongest piece In Harlan Ellison's body of work, this story is definitely one of the most raw and terrifying. We are shown a mirror of humanity in protagonist Richard Becker. We get a peek at the life of someone who absorbs the world's madness and shows it to us, all while the audience applauds. His destruction is the result of life imitating art imitating life. He is a reflection of us at our worst and he dies without redemption, an Oedipus screaming for some light.

Link to story.

"Zora and the Zombie" by Andy Duncan: An Appreciation by Andy Wolverton

2005-12-19T07:59:00.000-08:00

"What is the truth?"

Those are the perfect words to open Andy Duncan's "Zora and the Zombie." Truth is exactly what writer Zora Neale Hurston is looking for in 1936 Haiti, any type of truth she can use as potential story material. When she learns of a woman thirty years dead wandering a local road, Hurston knows she's found her material. (Along the way, of course, she'll find a whole lot more.)

The stunning thing about the story is that it could all be true. We know from her non-fiction book Tell My Horse that Hurston did visit Haiti, did meet "zombie" Felicia Felix-Mentor, and did become the first person to photograph one of the living dead. As for the rest of the story, if it didn't happen the way Andy Duncan writes it, it sure feels like it did.

It feels true because Andy knows his setting and characters so well. Sure, all good writers know how to make setting and character come alive, but Duncan's stories don't feel researched, they feel lived in. For all I know, Andy Duncan has observed a drum-frenzied truth ceremony, has ridden in a crowded tap-tap bumping along a dusty, pothole-ridden highway, and has probably met a coven of red-robed cannibals on an abandoned moonlit road.

Duncan latches onto historical details, savors them, and sprinkles them in exactly the right places. Even if you can't find Haiti on a map, as you read the story, you know exactly what it feels like to be there. If Andy had been around in the 1940's, I Walked with a Zombie producer Val Lewton would have no doubt hired him as a consultant.

Duncan also understands the essential relationship between setting and character. The arrogant doctor, the frightened housekeeper, the temptress Erzulie-–they're all perfect extensions of the Haitian setting. But it's Zora who's the stranger, and the story's most fascinating character. With masterful strokes, Duncan shows us Hurston's brazen confidence in the presence of the arrogant Dr. Legros, her boldness in standing toe-to-toe with a goddess, and her subtle use of sexuality to get what she wants. By the end of the story, you know this character.

Writing historical figures into fiction can be dangerous, but Duncan has previously done so in expert fashion with Abraham Lincoln ("Lincoln in Frogmore"), General George S. Patton "Fortitude"), and several others. With Zora Neale Hurston, the results are just as impressive. In the introduction to "Zora and the Zombie" in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Eighteenth Annual Collection, Duncan states, "If this story inspires others to seek out her work, I'm happy."

Anytime a historical figure appears in a work of fiction and leaves the reader hungering to learn more, the writer has done his job. Duncan has done that and told a great story in the process. Thanks, Andy. And thanks, Ellen, for sharing it with us.

Link to story

"Light of Other Days" by Bob Shaw: An Appreciation by Graham Sleight

2005-12-19T07:50:00.000-08:00

Dr. Manhattan, looking up at the Martian sky in Alan Moore's Watchmen (1987) reflects that all we ever see of stars are their old photographs. All sight is nostalgia; everything you know about the world is old news. You wonder if Moore, when he wrote that, was thinking of Bob Shaw's "Light of Other Days", first published in 1966, and republished on SCI FICTION after the author's death in 1996.

Many writers' work disappears from view after their death, but the speed and extent to which this has happened to Bob Shaw is particularly unjust. Shaw was a Northern Irish author whose sf career was firmly traditional; he was never drawn by the stylistic experiments of the New Wave. But he produced some of the most memorable images that modern sf has to offer: the ghostly neutrino planet within our own in A Wreath of Stars (1976), the immensities of Orbitsville (1975), and the extraordinary balloon flight between planets in The Ragged Astronauts (1986). Perhaps most famous is the opening line of "Light of Other Days": "Leaving the village behind, we followed the heady sweeps of the road up into a land of slow glass."

In a sense, this is a story that could have appeared in Galaxy a decade or two earlier. A single innovation is posited, explored, and its effects on a small group of people are described. The extrapolation-on-all-fronts that one associates with cyberpunk is not present-–and, given the story's isolated setting, nor does it need to be. The narrator and his wife are on holiday, driving through rural Scotland. The arrays of slow glass they see are there for commercial purposes. Slow glass is, simply, glass which light takes months or years to pass through. A sheet set up in the Scottish Highlands can therefore be sold to a city-dweller and provide them with years of beautiful views.

The implications of this are fascinating enough in the abstract. Would having a slow glass window in a city home be a life-enhancing piece of beauty, or a retreat from what's really outside the window? What does it mean that society commoditises the beauty of its landscapes in this way? But Shaw deals with them in the specific through the narrator, his newly-pregnant wife, and Hagan, the man who tries to sell them some slow glass. We're told, to start with, that the pregnancy has caused tension for the narrator and his wife Selina: "We, who had thought ourselves so unique, had fallen into the same biological trap as every mindless rutting creature which had ever existed." They cannot afford a child, and nor do they want one. By contrast, looking in through Hagan's cottage window, they see his wife and son playing happily. But when Selina opens the door to the living-room, she finds it "a sickening clutter of shabby furniture, old newspapers, cast-off clothing and smeared dishes. It was damp, stinking, and utterly deserted." The window was slow glass; Hagan's wife and child died in a car accident six years ago; all he has of them is the old photographs in slow glass. Shaw leaves understated at the end the obvious conclusion: that the narrator and his wife have some perspective on their future child from someone who has lost his future. "Light of Other Days" is so restrained, perfectly constructed, and so devastatingly economical (a little over three thousand words long) that moralising would be clangingly unnecessary.

Shaw later used the story as the basis for a novel, Other Days, Other Eyes (1972), pushing the implications of slow glass further--for, say, murder investigations or surveillance. But the short story is perfect in itself, a character study that could only be achieved in SF. By making a metaphor concrete, by creating a device that captures nostalgia, he has done what all writers want to: he has made the ephemeral last.

Link to story.

"The Ugly Chickens" by Howard Waldrop: An Appreciation by Rose Fox

2005-12-19T07:40:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, I acquired and read my first speculative fiction anthology. I have no idea, at this point, which one it was. All I remember is that it was breathtaking, world-opening, awe-inspiring. After I finally, slowly put it down, I went out to every bookstore I could find and scoured the shelves for more. Somewhere in that binge or another soon after, I came across Terry Carr's The Best Science Fiction of the Year #10 and "The Ugly Chickens" by Howard Waldrop.

When I heard about the ED SF Project, I leaped to secure the "appreciation rights" for this story, which I remembered so vividly even though I hadn't read it in years; indeed, I hadn't read it in years because I remembered it so vividly. Then I sat around for a while, trying to put into words what made it so deeply special to me. It's hard. I have to think back to a time when I didn't have fifty or so cubic feet of anthologies, because "The Ugly Chickens" was one of the four tales that pulled me in to my glorious lifelong love affair with the short story. (The other three are John Varley's "Press Enter[]" and Charles Harness's "Summer Solstice" via Carr's Best SF of the Year #14, which is still the first book I would grab if my house was on fire, and Tom Reamy's "San Diego Lightfoot Sue" in Edward Ferman's Best of F&SF #22. Most of my hopes for an afterlife center around the chance to spend an eternity at the Harp 'n' Halo Bar 'n' Grill buying drinks for these fine gentlemen, and when describing writers and editors I do not use such a term lightly.)

It sneaks up on you, that story. I reread it, and even knowing the first line and the last line and all the major points in between, it still snuck up on me. You want to say, this isn't speculative fiction; this is biographical, this is history. This is what really happened. What's this doing in a science fiction collection? There's science in it, sure, but where's the fiction? And then you read it a few more times and slowly it sinks in that it is fiction and those huge grotesque birds that he writes about with such demented love never actually pecked their way across rural America, and you find yourself mad and upset because they should have, dammit. It almost doesn't matter that the dodos are still dead. What matters is that, as stupid and absurd as they were, they never got the chance to live.

It took me a long time to understand why "The Ugly Chickens" pulled me in so strongly because I usually read for fun and I wouldn't say that my first few reads through it were fun. I had to work hard at reading it. A lot of good stories make you work for it, but usually you have some sense of what you're working for. With this one I didn't know why it was so important to keep coming back to it, but I did anyway, because something in me said that I needed to. I was, I don't know, thirteen or fourteen or something, plowing through piles of fluffy juvies and giving no thought at all to challenging myself, and "The Ugly Chickens" came along and grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and shook me until I became a better reader. I didn't even know it until I started writing this essay, but there it is.

I'm deeply grateful to Ellen Datlow for making this amazing story available to a wider audience (and to me, when I didn't feel like digging through those triple-stacked shelves for my battered old copy of Best SF of the Year #10) and to Mr. Waldrop for giving permission to do so. I had to work hard for this too, and it was worth it.

Link to story.

- Rose Fox

"Come On, Wagon" by Zenna Henderson: An Appreciation by Suzette Haden Elgin

2005-12-16T10:35:00.000-08:00

Suppose your family includes a child with a talent that's not one of the standard culture-approved set--a talent that's inevitably going to get that child labeled with the dread word "different." Are you going to notice? If you do notice, are you going to understand that what you're perceving is a talent? Suppose you do understand; then what? What, if anything, should be done about it?

"Come On, Wagon" is a story that explores those questions. The narrator claims that he doesn't like children, but he pays enough attention to them to notice that one child--Thaddeus--is different. When Thaddeus walks away from his little toy wagon saying, "Come on, Wagon," the wagon does as it's told.

As happens all too often in this world, the other people in the story not only don't value and nurture this talent Thaddeus is gifted with, they all work together to make sure he "outgrows" it and turns out just like all the other kids. Which means that on the day years later when that talent is the one thing that could have prevented a tragedy, Thaddeus either doesn't remember how to use it, or has so thoroughly accepted the idea that what he does is impossible that he is no longer able to use it.

Unlike the narrator of "Come On, Wagon," I like children very much. And I have always valued Zenna Henderson's stories for their portrayal of the world of children (tweaked just a science-fictional tad) and of the children that inhabit that world.

It's easy to say that we human beings would like to have psibilities--talents that would let us manipulate the physical world without machines and tools. "If only I could just wiggle my fingertips and heal a broken leg . . . mend a broken chair or window . . . send a message to my friend and get one back . . . persuade a tornado to pass my household by." Those talents have a seductive allure, and we think how wonderful it would be to have them. But Zenna Henderson's stories show us clearly and vividly that with those talents would come new responsibilities and burdens and unpredictable consequences, and that perhaps our tendency to stamp out any signs of them in children is only another way of trying to protect the little ones.

"Come on, Wagon" drives home an important point: We can't arrange for those talents to be available only on the rare occasions when we suddenly perceive them as desirable. If we want them, we have to let them be there all the time, to be practiced and fine-tuned.

Many thanks to Zenna Henderson and to Ellen Datlow for this wonderful story.

Link to story.

"The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World" by Philip José Farmer: An Appreciation by Danny Adams

2005-12-16T09:57:00.000-08:00

"The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World" is a simple story about . . .

Wait, this is a Philip José Farmer story we're talking about. There's nothing simple about it.

A Farmer story like this one may appear simple because there's no flashy cutting-edge-science notion(s) the narrative is built around (though it is built around a unique solution to the problem of an overcrowded population). There's no space opera, no convoluted multiple storylines requiring ten books to bring to a fireworks-filled conclusion. What it does give us is an interweave of human emotions and desires so primal we often try to pretend we are too sophisticated to have them any longer; but as we read they come just close enough to the surface for the story to grip our attention and refuse to let go.

Tom Pym lives in Tuesday. That is, he lives in a world so overcrowded that it created the need for "stoners," suspended animation chambers where you live six days out of seven so others can use your physical space during those days. Once you're set in a day, you're set. Almost. As the story's opening line says, "Getting into Wednesday was almost impossible." But it could be done—-one time only.

Tom is perfectly content with being a Tuesday until he meets the woman of his dreams-—"meets" being a relative term, considering that black-haired long-legged Jennie Marlowe is a Wednesday. Unattainable. Which, of course, makes Tom want to attain her that much more. Good sense, the restrictions of his society, having a lover already, the Brobdingnagian difficulties in having her-—even a message she leaves him saying any kind of communication between them is foolishly pointless—-make no difference to Tom. His mind is set and he will not give up on his quest.

Whether Phil Farmer intended this or not—-and I find it hard to believe he didn't, as he was too skilled a writer to place anything in his stories by accident—-several primal themes innate to humanity flow through this story like a swollen river. Lust is the most obvious—-no less for the fact that Tom knows little about Jennie save that she's an actress-—but his motivations go even more deeply than this.

There is the matter of territory. Tom has a whole planet to wander through, but only one day out of every week; and suddenly what he has, broad though it may be, is no longer big enough or good enough. He wants what is just beyond an iron veil, and the fact that he has no clue what awaits him not only is no obstacle, but a further enticement. Lust is only the first step; the next is his desire for conquest of a
forbidden land.

His desire blinds him and makes him unmindful. He has a lover he could be perfectly happy with—-or at least content—-but great heroes, for good or ill, are never content. And Tom is the archetype of the great hero in his desire for conquest, for exploration, for facing seemingly insurmountable challenges. He becomes a twisted Odysseus figure, seeking a home he has never had or known, seeking a mate who cannot be faithful to him for she was never bound to him in the first place. Tom further cripples himself when he succeeds in convincing his psycher, Doctor Sigmund Traurig, that Jennie is superior to all other women. Dr. Traurig becomes the catalyst for the undoing of Tom's designs.

Ultimately, what gives Tom the materials for being a hero—-strength, determination, perseverance—-also prove to be his tragic flaws. He succeeds in changing his life irrevocably but allows his world to be yanked out from under him. And in the end Farmer deals with the bitter theme of permanent exile, as Tom finds himself in a world that resembles his own almost exactly, yet is totally alien.

Anyone who has ever been lucky enough to enjoy a long conversation with Phil Farmer knows he will start his end with deceptive simplicity, then build onto it layer by layer-—but with practiced, almost hidden ease—-until you not only find yourself led by the skilled hand of a grand master, but also diving in far deeper waters than you ever imagined. This story, like most if not all of Farmer's other works, is the same way. When you are finished reading you realize you have experienced a great deal more of an adventure than the words on the surface of the pages initially revealed.

And of course, "The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World" is the prequel for the Dayworld trilogy, set some thirteen-hundred (normal, not divided by seven) years later, a series that was one of my earliest and best exposures to Farmer's works . . . but that's another appreciation.

So thank you, Phil Farmer, for decades of wonderful storytelling that found something to grip in each and every one of us. And thanks to Ellen Datlow and the Sci Fi Channel for their years of bringing us the masters through SCI FICTION!

Link to story.

"Boys" by Carol Emshwiller: An Appreciation by Jenn Reese

2005-12-15T10:43:00.000-08:00

When we're learning to write, many of our teachers tell us to imbue our stories with details. It's not a car, it's a beat-up Civic. They're not pants, they're a pair of paint-stained Levi's with a rip in the back left pocket and a guacamole stain on the right knee. Details, we are told, will allow our readers to connect more with our stories, will anchor them, will give them substance.

How does Carol Emshwiller do it, then? "Boys" contains only a few details, only a few names, only the barest hints about time and place. We can't tell if it's science fiction or fantasy. If anything, it's timeless and placeless, capable of existing anywhere and anywhen. But instead of distancing the reader, this absence of detail serves to magnify the themes that Emshwiller is exploring. Nothing distracts, dilutes, or distances the reader from the story and its lessons.

Two armies of men exist in the mountains on either side of a valley. The women live in villages between them and bear sons and daughters for both sides, though their sons are always stolen to join the war effort. The men have been fighting so long, no one even knows how it started. The women, however, have decided to end it--no matter what the price.

The story reminds me of the Dar Williams song "When I Was a Boy." Both deal with gender roles, and what humanity loses when we deny ourselves the full range of experiences. Emshwiller's story takes this idea to extremes, but they're terrifyingly believable extremes. Every time I see a little boy playing with a GI Joe action figure, I think of "Boys."

I want to thank Ellen Datlow and all the folks at SCI FICTION for making Carol Emshwiller's work accessible to the world for free. I've never read an Emshwiller story that hasn't made me think, that hasn't enriched my life in some way. In this, I'm sure I'm not alone.

Link to story.

"The Stare" by John Wyndham: An Appreciation by Gavin J. Grant

2005-12-14T08:33:00.000-08:00

Reviewers have to review. Editors have to fill their pages (paper or otherwise). Writers (apparently) have to write. And the profusion of books shops happily supplying their addicted customers perfectly illustrates that readers have to read.

But no one, reviewer, editor, writer, or reader had to go back, dig into the archives, find a loved or admired story (or one that nagged, or a new story, fresh, still sparkling, or...) and take the time out of their busy lives to write about it.

SCI FICTION and this project embody what to me is one of the best parts of the internet: the continued availability of these works (although I hadn't realized quite so many of the older stories had been taken down); the community of readers and writers and the equalization of same; and the ability to look backward into the archive and forward into the future--every week when a new story was posted.

Many of my favorite writers have stories on SCI FICTION. So many that I thought I wouldn't be able to choose. If I were to write about Ray Vukcevich, what about Carol Emshwiller? If Jeff Ford what about Suzy McKee Charnas? Terry Bisson? C.M. Kornbluth, Ursula Le Guin, Maureen McHugh, Octavia E. Butler? Kessel. Rowe? Butner? Duncan, Waldrop, Tiptree, Fowler, Rickert? Ad (almost) infinitum. No matter, there are many readers and many writers and the fun is in the choosing of something, not necessarily a personal best, but something enjoyed, something worth pointing to.

So to John Wyndham's "The Stare" a brief, satisfying club tale with a tiny unexpected bump at the end. Wyndham was a teenage favorite. (I'd love to add his novel The Chrysalids to our Peapod Classics reprint line.) The only problem I had was that he published under so many variations of his name (John Beynon Harris, sometimes with a Lucas thrown in) and that some of his books were published under more than one title so that I could never quite be sure if I had read all of them. What I would have done then for the SCI FICTION Author Biography and Bibliography!

Though slight, "The Stare" embodies much of what is wonderful in Wyndham's writing. He instantly establishes the tenor of his characters--passing time at the club, half-bored but ready to listen--and then takes us off into another story. His writing is full of great descriptions--although this one is more familiar now than it may have been to readers when the story was first published in The Daily Express in 1932:

"By day the subway is a mass of men and women all apparently ten minutes behind time, but late at night it echoes with a dreary desolation, and the trains seem to rattle and crash indecently through a world more than half dead."

Ellen Datlow's SCI FICTION was an invaluable resource for readers. Not only could readers explore the work of new writers, SCI FICTION also worked as a filter through which piles of ancient paperbacks, pulps, and magazines passed through and delightful stories such as "The Stare" emerged to be enjoyed by new readers. I hope that SCI FICTION will relaunch with Ellen at the helm (I hope for world peace first, though) or that she can find another venue to do the same wonderful job.

Should the SCI FICTION archives ever disappear, "The Stare" may still be available here.

Link to story.

"Abimagique" by Lucius Shepard: An Appreciation by Sue Lange

2005-12-13T10:30:00.000-08:00

There is never any reason not to read Lucius Shepard.

Take "Abimagique" for instance. If this had been written by anybody else, about a sixth of the way through the story, I would have been saying: okay, it's a male fantasy story that stars a hypnotizing seductress that is just impossible to resist and that eats him in the end. Yeah, like I've never seen this before. And I would read no further. Why would I bother? But it was Lucius Shepard this time and since his endings are never predictable, I stuck it out. And you know what? I was right; his endings are never predictable. As much as I'd like to tell what happened this time, I can't. Why not? Because I'm a thoughtful citizen that knows it's not nice to spoil? No, I'm not nice, in fact. It's because as usual with Lucius Shepard, I don't exactly know what happened in the end. And by the time I figure it out, I will have forgotten the URL for this project and so won't be able to ruin it for everyone else.

Suffice it to say, Mr. Shepard's writing is as great here as it always is. I read some writers' work to get the gist or the plot or the moral. I read Shepard's work just because it's so wonderful. The stuff flows and once I get into it I can't step out, I can't turn and go upstream, I can only go with it. His work is like the hypnotizing seductress that even as you watch yourself falling further and further under her spell, you can't resist. And in the end you'll be eaten. Well, maybe not that, but you do sort of get knocked for a loop.

Fabulous story.

Link to story.

"Wetlands Preserve" by Nancy Kress: An Appreciation by David B. Coe

2005-12-13T10:15:00.000-08:00

I didn't exactly go out on a limb in choosing to comment on Nancy Kress's wonderful short story, "Wetlands Preserve." Nancy has been, deservedly, a legend in speculative fiction since well before I published my first novel. I won't presume to critique this story, except to say that it exemplifies all that is compelling and admirable about science fiction. It presents, eloquently and with powerful understatement, a simple tale of first contact. A vessel from another world has crashed in the middle of an Upstate New York nature preserve, and it falls to a cadre of scientists, including graduate student Lisa Jackson, to learn what they can about the new life form that has established itself in the wetlands.

This isn't a story of invasion in the usual sense of the word. There are no battles, no technologically advanced weapons, no blood-thirsty aliens intent on taking control of our world. There's a place for such stories, of course. But Nancy is trying to do something different here; this story is smaller than that, and at the same time grander. This is about one woman's attempt to make sense of the incomprehensible, to bring morality to the unconscionable, to impose order on the ever-growing chaos of what passes for normal human existence.

The details of Lisa's troubled personal life--her daily struggle to care for a severely disabled child, the increasing pressures of her research position, the sudden reappearance of her charismatic but dangerous ex-lover--are far more than a backdrop for the rest of the story. In Nancy Kress's hands, Lisa's trials and the fate of the creatures who have come to inhabit the Kenton Wetlands merge into a quiet, desperate tale that finds coherence without falling into cliché.

I could go on, but I won't. Do yourself a favor and read the story for yourself. As I said earlier, no one will be surprised that I've found so much to admire in Nancy's story. Indeed, the only thing less surprising than the quality of "Wetlands Preserve," is the fact that it was Ellen Datlow who found it for us, who made it available to the world. That is Ellen's gift; it's the reason why so many of us find the end of SCI FICTION so disturbing. We depend upon Ellen to find us great stories. Perhaps we'd even taken for granted the notion that she'd always have a forum for doing so. No doubt she will again, and soon. But SCI FICTION was Ellen's through and through. The quality of the fiction she published there, the professionalism of the site, the privilege afforded to those of us fortunate enough to work with her--those things will be difficult to replace.

The decision to end SCI FICTION should give pause to all of us in the industry. If Ellen Datlow's site isn't safe, can any site or publication be? If stories as good as "Wetlands Preserve" can't convince the suits to choose literature over profit, what can? Difficult, troubling questions, but ones we have to answer, not simply for Ellen's sake, as she herself would be the first to point out, but for the sake of all who love speculative fiction.

Link to story.

"The View from Endless Scarp" by Marta Randall: An Appreciation by Pat Lundrigan

2005-12-13T10:00:00.000-08:00

It starts off simply enough: the last human spaceship is taking off from a dead world. But wait! Someone's been left behind. Her reactions are what you'd expect, but it turns out she planned on staying behind, and only when the ship took off did she have her moment of doubt. Why Markowitz stayed behind, and what happens to her, left on a world that is nothing more than a failed terraforming project, is the story.

I read this story when it originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The late 70's was my "golden age" of science fiction. I had started by reading I, Robot and other books by Asimov. Then I found out that those wonderful Science Fiction magazines as described in The Early Asimov still existed, and could be found for sale at newsstands, drugstores, and even supermarkets. I started buying them, and in a Christmas gift to rival a Daisy Red Rider BB gun with a compass in the stock, my sister gave me a one-year subscription to F&SF. That was my yearly gift for a few years, until my interest in SF waned. I still kept all those magazines, though.

Flash forward several years, past college, past work, past several apartments. Clutter had finally caught up with me, and I was throwing out junk with reckless abandon to make more room. In the hall closet was a box, full of those magazines from the late 70's. I was on the verge of chucking the entire lot into the dumpster when I picked out the June 1978 issue of F&SF and looked at the table of contents. "The View from Endless Scarp" was in that issue. And I remembered it. Remembered Markowitz's journey down Endless Scarp across the desert to search for Thompson, and her struggles with the native, Kre'e. "Wow!" I thought, "can't throw this out!" A few more looks through the pile revealed more gems, more stories that I remembered almost 20 years after reading them. I kept that box of old SF magazines. And I'm glad I did, because when my interest in SF was rekindled a few years ago, and I went right to the stories that got hooked in the first place.

And that's what SCI FICTION has been for me. A place where I could not only read the latest SF, but also a source of the good old stuff (classics, in other words)--stories from a few or more years ago, but still good stories.

"The View from Endless Scarp" stands the test of time. It is an example of good SF not because it has groundbreaking ideas or prose crammed full of eyeball kicks, but because it is a character story, about character that is memorable, and one who we can know and feel for.

I'll miss the "Classics" section of SCI FICTION. Ellen Datlow has chosen some of her favorite stories, and brought to the forefront stories that might otherwise never have been read. But don't despair. You might have a box of old magazines or books in your closet. And there's always used bookstores. But, for a brief while, it was nice to able to find some of the good old stuff right on your computer.

Link to story.

"New Light on the Drake Equation" by Ian R. Macleod: an appreciation by Niall Harrison

2005-12-12T12:00:00.000-08:00

A couple of my friends have a t-shirt that says:

they lied to us
this was supposed to be the future
where is my jetpack
where is my robotic companion
where is my dinner in pill form
where is my hydrogen fueled automobile
where is my nuclear powered levitating house

where is my cure for this disease

It's funny because it's true. You could add moonbases and teleporters to the list, and a dozen other things that science fiction made us believe were just around the corner. But it lied to us; that future will never happen. Ian R. Macleod's beautiful novella 'New Light on the Drake Equation', first published at SCI FICTION in May 2001, takes that truth of modern life and makes it hurt. It is an elegy for a genre that believed in its dreams.

Tom Kelly is an old man, living in a shabby hut on the side of a mountain in France, listening to the sky, in a twenty-first century where twentysomethings twist their bodies with genetic engineering, growing scales or wings, becoming 'bright alien insects'. He's the last and forgotten advocate of SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, waiting for a message from the stars, trapped behind the bars of his life's choices, alcoholic and alone. He grew up a science fiction fan, and lives in a world where sf is as archaic as fairytale, extinguished by 'the real and often quite hard to believe present'. He listens. He waits. He longs. He is, it is hard not to think, one of us.

Every first Wednesday of the month, he rattles down his mountain into St Hilaire, to collect his post. On this particular Wednesday--actually a Thursday; he's got his days mixed up--his first piece of mail is from Sally Normanton, at the University of Aston in Birmingham, telling him the University is withdrawing its funding for his project. It's no use trying to argue; Sally grew up on Clarke and Asimov too, she understands. It's just policy. Nobody believes in anything but the most pessimistic interpretation of the Drake Equation, that calculation to estimate the number of intelligent and communicating species in our galaxy, any more. If they're out there, we should have heard from them by now.

Out of the corner of his eye, across the market, he catches a glimpse of a memory; and later, back up on the mountain, above the bustle of the French town, the memory comes to visit him. Terr, a woman he once made a leap to love. Tom pulls out the bottle of Santernay le Chenay 2058 he's been saving for First Contact, and they sit outside, and look upwards, and Tom remembers: decades earlier, back in Birmingham, when he was an American scientist abroad, and she was desperately in love with the world and everything in it. "How can two people be so different, and so right for each other?" Tom wonders. So right, but perhaps not right enough. After a time they drift apart, Tom's innate conservatism at odds with Terr's addiction to experience. She grows wings and, later, goes to the moon; he, ironically, would never do either.

'New Light on the Drake Equation' is a lovingly crafted story. Sentence by sentence, Macleod is as good at layering mood as any writer I can think of, and his future is subdued but enthralling. The story is, as I said, an elegy, so the predominant tone is one of melancholy and regret, but the glimpses of hope and possibility are as carefully portrayed, and as moving. It is also a story about what happens when nothing happens; about how it feels to wait through 'a slowly roaring beat of city silence', or any silence; about how it feels to have the future wash over you while you're still lost in the past. And, as you may be able to tell, it is the sort of story that lends itself to grand poetic statements about its achievements. Every time I re-read it, I'm left a little dazed, a little dazzled--which sounds, for a story that is in an up-front and important sense, about that thing we call science fiction and about its relationship to the world, a little ridiculous. Who mourns for a jetpack?

But it's not ridiculous, not at all, because what the story uses the subject of science fiction to question is how dreams drive us, and how we cope when we lose them. It's something that almost everyone has to face. It's the question raised in The Great Gatsby, except that where F. Scott Fitzgerald would persuade us there is something admirable about Gatsby's obsession, Macleod presents Tom Kelly as neutral. Gatsby attempts to make his dream come true; Tom doesn't have that option, but he does everything in his power to make sure he'll be listening when the message comes in. Tom is Gatsby, facing forwards but pulled backwards, forty years older rather than gunned down in a blaze of melodrama, not longing any less but perhaps admitting to himself, somewhere deep down, that his dream is dead. More than that, perhaps fearing that it wasn't worth spending the best part of his life on for no return; maybe even suspecting that it did more harm than good, left him less prepared for the future, not more. They are, these two, both particularly American dreamers. (And of course, a lot of science fiction is a particularly American dream.)

And then Terr comes to visit. It seems too convenient, and it is. Tom and Terr drink all night, remembering and arguing together, but as the dawn comes, Terr fades. The stars shine through her, and she's gone.

Oh, we want to believe. We want to believe this is science fiction, not just a dream--no. It is science fiction; there are men on Mars, and flying over the Lake District. What we want is hope. To believe again in the science fiction we've lost, which is to say that we want to believe what every person wants to believe: that we are not alone. We want to believe that Tom Kelly drank his Santernay le Chenay on the night of First Contact, not for the sake of a drunken dream. Not that dreaming made him drink.

Tom lets himself believe, perhaps, for a moment. Watching Terr leave, 'all he felt was a glorious, exquisite sense of wonder' (and never has that phrase had such a sharp edge). The day comes and the wonder recedes, but that moment sustains him, for a while at least. He cleans himself up, starts selling SETI merchandise--including t-shirts--at the market in St Hilaire. It's an ambiguous ending at best, leaving us considering whether it's a turning point or a hollow reprieve, but:

He's Tom Kelly, after all.
And this might be the night.
He's still listening, waiting.

As are we.

Link to story.

"Rocket Fall" by David Prill: An Appreciation by David Herter

2005-12-12T11:45:00.000-08:00

1. The Fall of the Painships

Rocket Fall by David Prill. . .
Rocket Fall by David Prill. . .
Rocket Fall by David Prill. . .

Welcome children of the night to the darkest hour of "Rocket Fall" by David Prill. "Rocket Fall" by David Prill, where David Prill clocks Bradbury on the back of the head (with reel six of Roger Corman's Fall of the House of Usher, no less), and the concussion rings with dark and terrible delights. "Rocket Fall" by David Prill, where the pathos of The Marquis De Sade meets the dramaturgy of The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. "Rocket Fall" by David Prill, where David Prill pours us a cocktail of dandelion wine laced with pure bang-up psilocybin--

. . . . .

Obsequious adulation shunted into venting port?

Check.

Canny valuation monitors set to proper post-Bradbury slash post-Ballard slash post-post-Lovecraft mode?

Check.

Vaporous internet text saved to local hard drive?

Check.

. . . . .

"Good evening, folks, and Praise Madeline. We're broadcasting live at the burial of "Rocket Fall" by David Prill near the shores of Lake Tenebrae. Mere moments from now, an aetheric cartridge holding its remains will be laid atop this kerosene-soaked wooden raft, nudged into the ebon serene waters and there set ablaze by our own Mike Sanders, who is standing by in the Madeline-Live-at-Five news copter. Mike, can you hear me?"

"I certainly can, Ger-- I--"

"Mike? Hello, Mike, your signal dropped out there."

"Yeah, Gerald. We're experiencing some interference from the various manifestations in the Lake waters this afternoon. I'm sending you live-feed now of the gathering. Do you--"

"Yes, yes, Mike, we're receiving it. Would you look at that."

"On a normal commute day we never see anything like this, of course. The manifestations rarely rise near the surface. And now--yeah, right there, Jim, point it at one o'clock. Gerald, you can see a flock of Demon-Jacknapes breaching the waves, just a mile or so off-shore."

"Wow, quite a sight. Mike, are those tentacles?"

"Yeah, the orifices have opened up, and yes, those are tentacles. As I think we all learned--whoa, hold on, Jim--uh, as I think we all learned in elementary pain school, one doesn't see those tentacles and escape with one's mind intact. I don't have the quote entirely, um, praise Madeline."

"Mike? I'm being told by Deborah, our producer, that it's 'look upon. . .' Yes, I'll have Deb say it--"

"Hi, Mike. It goes 'Look upon the dread Chtonic visage and feel the weight of countless loathsome universes shatter the very fabric of your mind.' That's why I don't swim in Lake Tenebrae."

"Thanks, Deb."

"Gerald, as you can see, those tentacles are snapping at the air, trying to get at my copter. What they really want, of course, is the aetheric cartridge . . ."

"And that's as good a segue as any, Mike. Thanks. So now we'll go out to Dee Pegs, who's spent the day with the short story in question as it was being prepared. Dee?"

"Thanks, Gerald. This is Dee Pegs standing beside the aetheric cartridge. Or, rather, standing as close as I can get without breaching its aetheric field, which has now been turned on, Gerald."

"Ah, that's an important milestone, Dee. We've been waiting for it."

"And I . . . if I could get Dr. Dark from the Roderick Institute to say a word or two. Dr. Dark, are you somewhere in the procedure where you could talk to the Madeline-Live-at-Five viewers?"

"Oh. Hello. Uh, no, not really."

"Very briefly, Dr. Dark. Turning on the aetheric field is a big step in preparing the story for burial, isn't it?"

"Indeed. The story has been put to rest. It is now for all intents and purposes dormant, and at peace."

"Doctor, we’ve had reports that Demon-Jacknapes have surfaced in Lake Tenebrae. What problems do they pose for the proper burial of the aetheric cartridge?"

"They should pose no problem. They'll have plenty of competition in devouring it."

"I'm being. . . yes, I understand, I'm being told by your assistant that you have to return to the task. Let me just get one last point in, Doctor: Now that the story is being 'put to rest,' as you call it, there will in fact be little rest for it? Is that the case?"

"Absolutely, my dear. It will most certainly be digested in many dimensions for countless millennia, fueling the very aetheric Nature that surrounds us."

"Doctor, did you have a favorite line from the story?"

"I simply cannot offer a comment. Thank you. Farewell."

"Thank you, Doctor. Gerald, I think everything's ready over here. I see that the band is about to strike up, and, wow, that Sousaphone player seems super-thrilled at the prospect, doesn't he?"

"Yes, he certainly does. Do you have a favorite line you'd like to mention, Dee?"

"I do, Gerald. I hurt inside."

"That's a good one, Dee. I think we all hurt inside, ever since losing Baron Armstrong and his beloved Madeline. What about you, Deb? Oh--wait--yes, they're now levitating the story onto the burial raft. Mike, how close are those Jacknapes to shore?"

"They seem a bit timid, Gerald. They're not lovers of band music, of course, and I think they sense what's coming. They shouldn't interfere with the actual launching of the raft, at least."

"Well, don't take any chances. Deb, favorite line? Favorite moment?"

"Any mention of lee–-"

"Your, uh. Wait. Did you catch that, folks? Deb's microphone cut out. She says, 'Any mention of lederhosen.' The interference, the aetheric interference, is rising as the moment approaches. As you can all see, the aetheric cartridge has been settled onto the raft, and yes, they've begun nudging the raft down toward the water. And yes, there's the music. Wow. A beautiful yet sad sight, praise Madeline. I must admit, I never read the story myself, but others have told me--Mike, you read it, didn't you?"

"I waited too long, Gerald. I regret that, now. When I get home from work I find myself sticking to TV. And I've never enjoyed reading on a computer screen. Too hard on the eyes. Anyway, Jim's read it. Jim, you loved it, right? Yep, Gerald, he's giving me the thumbs up, he absolutely loved it, and says that he will miss it desperately. And he agrees with Dee on that line. It's a plum."

"Well, folks, why don't we just watch, and listen, and take in all that this day has to offer. I see the sun is setting over the lake, casting a blood-red band of brilliance over those ebon waters. I'm going to stop jabbering now, and spend a moment experiencing this truly wonderful and terribly sad event along with you at home."

Link to story.

David Herter is the author of Ceres Storm and Evening's Empire. Forthcoming is On the Overgrown Path, from PS Publishing.

"Periodic Table of Science Fiction" by Michael Swanwick: An Appreciation by Greg van Eekhout

2005-12-12T11:30:00.000-08:00

In the Periodic Table of Science Fiction, Michael Swanwick gives us 118 very short stories, each based on different element. He pulls off these flash pieces like a street magician flinging scarves and rabbits from his sleeves. He makes it look effortless, as though he could do this all day, dispensing an endless store of heavy metals and halogens and alkalis with spark and energy and mordant humor.

He gives us a punk barbarian princess, the Devil in Las Vegas, a Superman reluctant to face the consequences of knocking up Lois Lane, a sentient starship, a radioactive basement monster . . . and these are just the noble gases. Swanwick's table is a dazzling performance, a pyrotechnic display from a nimble imagination.

Since their appearance at SCI FICTION, these stories have appeared in an attractive print volume, but I prefer them in their original online format. Ellen Datlow presents to us a kind of interactive story device, and it's simply fun to click on the familiar-looking table, not knowing if what shows up in the little pop-up window will be a story about a reincarnated talking mule, an insidious toothpaste conspiracy, or a chilling account of the real reason the Hindenburg exploded. Online, the table becomes more than an accumulation of stories. It becomes a new thing, one that engages the reader in a new way, and short of shipping to each reader a box with 118 compartments, it's hard to think of a way the presentation could be duplicated, let alone improved upon.

Michael Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction is an innovative marriage of form and fiction. It's a fabulous toy to play with. Ellen Datlow is owed thanks for bringing it to us.

Link to story.

"The Mouse" by Fredric Brown: An Appreciation by Gary Alan Wassner

2005-12-08T10:15:00.000-08:00

Timelessness. The timelessness of the fantastic is what strikes me so profoundly. The mind can only bridge certain gaps, and those are so narrow in the scope of things that it's really quite scary. So what do we do when we can't make that leap from mystery to comprehension? We write science fiction and fantasy.

This story could have been written yesterday. We haven't come any closer today to understanding what form an extraterrestrial might take than we were in 1949 when Fredric Brown wrote this. But that's what so marvelous about this kind of writing. The imagination has to govern the way a story is shaped, not facts. And where do we get the food for these thoughts? We tap into what mystifies us all; how small we are. Writing about aliens reminds us of just how little we do know and it humbles us. Presidents and scientists, Prime Ministers and Generals, ordinary people, all blend into one another, lose their independence, their distinguishing characteristics, when juxtaposed against the unknown, the limitlessness of what we don't know. Stories like this one, simple, well told, personal stories just like this, serve as the great equalizers, the most effective means of leveling the playing field, egalitarian in all respects. In the face of the unknown, we are merely human. In the face of the unknown, we are tiny, tiny creatures, struggling to make sense out of a limitless universe that we can never truly embrace with our minds. In the face of the unknown we can only dance and sing . . . and write fantastic fiction.

Link to story.

Gary Alan Wassner

"You Go Where It Takes You" by Nathan Ballingrud: An Appreciation by Lucius Shepard

2005-12-08T10:00:00.000-08:00

"He did not look like a man who would change her life. He was big, roped with muscles from working on offshore oil rigs, and tending to fat. His face was broad and inoffensively ugly, as though he had spent a lifetime taking blows and delivering them. He wore a brown raincoat against the light morning drizzle and against the threat of something more powerful held in abeyance. He breathed heavily, moved slowly, found a booth by the window overlooking the water, and collapsed into it. He picked up a syrup-smeared menu and studied it with his whole attention, like a student deciphering Middle English. He was like every man who ever walked into that little diner. He did not look like a beginning or an end."

This, the opening of "You Go Where It Takes You," is handled with such deft economy and elegance, it's easy to go right past it and not notice everything it achieves. Which is how things should be. You read a story, you don't analyze it. Nevertheless, for anyone interested in writing, the mechanics and structure of this superb paragraph merit some brief analysis.

As with many great openings, it is a story unto itself and has a circularity that mimicks and presages the circle drawn by the larger story. It is packed with information. It tells us who this man and woman are by describing the woman's observance of the man and her estimation of his worth in her eyes. We know at once that these are working people, people who have risen or sunk to, or were born into the working class; they have both been worn down by their experience of the world. We know the woman has a jaundiced view of men--the negative, distant manner with which she sums him up tells us that. They don't expect much of one another, yet we have the idea that their lack of expectation will lead to trouble, because they're the kind of people for whom trouble is an inevitablity, a break in the monotony, no more to be feared than the passage of another empty day.

The prose reads easily and we don't register that we know these things, but the knowledge is there, embedded in the words, released from them by the passage of our eyes across the page. It's there in the noirish tone and the sentences used to generate it. All the sentences but one begin with the word, "He"; the single anomalous sentence begins with "His." This gives unusual weight to the subjective pronouns and lends the sentences a rhythm and a punch they might not have without that repetition. It's as if the reader is being cautioned, as if the author, beneath the surface of the words, is warning through the medium of the stressed pronouns that, "You better beware. You better hang on, because this isn't going to be a smooth ride. You might just hear something you won't like, and learn something you don't want to." The sentences, their aggressive rhythms, have the effect of probing blows, like the jabs a fighter uses to set up his right hand. Indeed, the whole story is a big; it turns on an actual blow. And you, the reader, are being set up for the ending, which will--like a shot to the bundle of nerves in the solar plexus--leave you sagging and helpless, painfully aware.

Wonderfully observed, concisely narrated, the story tells of Toni, a single mom, a waitress, and Alex, an ex-oil rig worker, now a drifter, who come together in a small Gulf Coast town in Louisiana. They meet, they become casual lovers, and then Alex shows Toni something that smacks of insanity, something to do with masks, with identity. Witnessing it sets a lit match to Toni's own desperation and craziness, and drives her to an almost unthinkable act. Beneath the honest, authentic, straightforward craft of the story's surface lies a scrambled circuitry of derangement and indifference . . . the fundamental indifference that permits us to live while around us, whether close at hand or far away, horrible crimes are perpetrated and terrible sins are being committed. Alex's crime, which seems at first to be implausible, an element in a horror movie, is given plausibility by the real horror and utter human-ness of Toni's sin, her indifference. The story ends abruptly. Too abruptly, you think. It's like listening to jukebox that gets accidentally unplugged before the song ends. There should be a fade, a crescendo, something. But then, as you think more about it--and you will continue to think about it--you realize that nothing meaningful can happen to Alex and Toni past the moment the story ends, and the ending, jagged, truncated, is dead-on perfect.

Nathan Ballingrud worked as a bartender in New Orleans, a platform that's a great vantage from which to view desperation and derangement, and he has used his experience to good end. I don't know how long it took him to write the story or, for that matter, the opening, Sometimes these things come as gifts to a writer and seem to flow from the brain fully formed; sometimes what appears effortless is the product of a month's grinding. Whichever, it was well worth the trouble. Reading "You Go Where It Takes You" reminded me of something I had lost track of in my own writing, and I'm grateful for that. But more pertinently, it's tremendous story and I'm priviledged to celebrate Nathan and his work. That he has written such an impressive piece so early in his career announces the arrival of a significant talent.

Link to story.

"Song of the Black Dog" by Kit Reed: An Appreciation by Gregory Frost

2005-12-08T09:45:00.000-08:00

This is such an exemplary Kit Reed story, written in a kind of helix around the core idea, which shares certain characteristics with Philip K. Dick stories--in particular that man who doesn't know why he knows what he knows, doesn't know how to find out, and so becomes a displaced film-noir character who never manages to get ahead of the plot he's caught up in, and who is, in effect, always wrong.

"If the wonder dog is just a dog, then the police department are money-grubbing charlatans and the exposé will move him from unemployed to famous."

I had a character in a story a few years ago who approached things similarly—-with delusions of how he could expose something and make a big name for himself. He was likewise out of his depth. Perhaps that's part of the appeal for me.

Here, as she often does, Kit approaches the story obliquely, edge-on, in a kind of literary anamorphosis, in which you have to find the perspective, view it from the right vantage, and assemble the mosaic yourself, the final picture is greater, always greater, than the sum of the parts. It's all there but significant pieces are left out, selectively, and in such a way that the story will go on threading its pathway through your brain long after you reach the end. It's why I still seek out Kit Reed stories decades after I encountered my first one. How lovely is that?

It's also science fiction in a wrapper of mythological inference: a future not far from now but with hints, images and notions of Hades, of Cerberus, of Death personified. The dog that can identify who will live and who will die is Death; by pointing out the living, he defines the dead. Dog and man meet underground, in a labyrinth beneath a theater. The story, so invested, invites me, as engaged reader, to bring something to it--in this case, from a reading awhile back, a recollection of Ephyra in Greece, a place considered in antiquity to be one of the gateways to the realm of the dead, where archaeologists have uncovered a substantial subterranean labyrinth that conforms with Homer's description, in the Odyssey, of the Halls of Hades.

Siefert, the man, and the supernatural dog meet in the underworld, and become thus two figures out of myth—the one charged with knowing the dead, the other unaware that this power, like a torch, will pass to him, because he's too busy dreaming of fame and fortune to see what's really there. It's a wonderful encounter. The world assumes the dog is some genetic fluke, a mutation; it can’t imagine the truth of the animal that the author presents anymore than Siefert can.

"You're not the agent I would have chosen," the dog tells the man, understanding his power, his purpose, his fate; the human, on the cusp of inheriting all, still doesn't get it right up till the last paragraph. The epiphany in the story belongs to the dog. The man, in the end, has fallen into his fate but seems none the wiser for it.

"Siefert understands. Grimacing with unspeakable pain, he turns. Goes inside. Sits down in front of a network vice president."

In this one final paragraph, Kit delivers the killer blow. What the dog has known as its existence the man recognizes as almost unbearable. The death of his predecessor is added to his knowledge along with the power itself. Now, if we can just get him to sit in front of Rupert Murdoch . . . .

Link to story.

Gregory Frost is the author of the short story collection Attack of the Jazz Giants & Other Stories from Golden Gryphon Press.

"Over Yonder" by Lucius Shepard: An Appreciation by Tim Pratt

2005-12-07T09:45:00.000-08:00

One of the greatest things about SCI FICTION was the certain knowledge that, probably sooner rather than later, there would be another major story by Lucius Shepard published there, something beautiful and brutal and wrenching and strange. When I look over the remarkable number of stories he published at Sci Fiction during the magazine's life, I'm seized with the desire to re-read them all--"A Walk in the Garden," "Jailwise," "Abimaguique," "AZTECHS," all the others. But my prime favorite among this clutch of favorites is "Over Yonder," the tale of Billy Long Gone, who hopped a train out of Klamath Falls and found himself in a strange new world, a hobo jungle beyond the limits of the rational world. It's as if Shepard considered the notion of the "Big Rock Candy Mountain"--that free-booze-and-stew paradise for tramps and hobos--and, finding it too sugar-coated by half, imagined instead a different sort of complicated haven for the citizens of the road. The story explores the knotted contradictions of the wanderer's spirit, the desire to travel as something distinct from the desire to reach a destination. Even once the rail-riding Billy Long Gone reaches the fabled land Over Yonder, and learns to navigate its more obvious dangers and begins to discover its deeper strangeness, his desire to see the next new thing becomes overwhelming, and he lights out again, for the land beyond the land beyond. He isn't satisfied with mere transcendent experience--he wants to transcend the transcendent. This is a story of willful trains, once-human monsters, uplifted intelligence, and dirty complicated love. It's weird, ambiguous, flat-out beautifully written, and it refuses the false consolation of uncomplicated happy endings (as Shepard always does). Ellen Datlow did us all a service by bringing this story, and Shepard's others, to the public, and for paying him a decent rate for his words. I hope he continues to find good homes for his fine long stories, and I'll seek them out wherever they appear, but I'll miss the comfort of knowing that, if I just wait a little longer, there will be another Shepard novella appearing at SCI FICTION. It was a little like watching the sky for shooting stars--you don't know when they'll come, but you know they'll be along eventually, and burn brightly, and be beautiful. Farewell, SCI FICTION. Thanks for taking me Over Yonder and elsewhere all these years.

Link to story.

“Struwwelpeter” by Glen Hirshberg: An Appreciation by Nathan Ballingrud

2005-12-07T09:30:00.000-08:00

The original "Struwwelpeter" is a poem by the nineteenth century German writer Heinrich Hoffmann. It is one of a series of cautionary verses meant to frighten children into proper behavior; other titles in the collection include "The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches," in which a young girl plays with matches and is burned to death, and "The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb," a particularly frightening poem about the "tall tailor" who comes to slice off the thumbs of little children who cannot keep them out of their mouths. "Struwwelpeter" is actually one of the mildest poems in the collection. It's about a boy with terrible hygiene: he refuses to wash his face or comb his hair, and his nails grow to grotesque lengths. He is an awful little boy, we are told, and everybody hates him. Little basis, it would seem, for a ghost story.

And so we come to Glen Hirshberg's "Struwwelpeter." It's about an awful boy, too, but it's easy to get distracted from that by the wonderful creepiness of the setting. There are many elements of the traditional ghost story to be found here: a windy Halloween night; a haunted house; a disagreeable old man who surrounds himself with strange symbols and objects, who speaks darkly of raising the dead. The story is laden with images all ghost story aficionados are familiar with: mysterious, half-glimpsed lights; a stray article of clothing lying, abandoned, in an empty room where a person ought to be; the doomful tolling of a bell. We become so caught up in the spooky trappings of the tale that we run the risk of forgetting the title, and the title's heritage. Hirshberg is intimately familiar with the tropes of the ghost story, and uses them here to brilliant effect. Like Shirley Jackson, he only drops suggestions, letting the reader's imagination do the heavy lifting. And while we are occupied with the immediate threat of the haunted house, the real story is uncoiling underneath, infinitely more dangerous. Because this story, like all of Hirshberg's stories, is about human pain. How it manifests, and how it steers us.

Here's the opening paragraph:

This was before we knew about Peter, or at least before we understood what we knew, and my mother says it's impossible to know a thing like that, anyway. She's wrong, though, and she doesn't need me to tell her she is, either, as she sits there clutching her knees and crying in the television light.

It is a wonderfully complete paragraph. We are presented with a mystery, and the engine of the plot: this Peter, and the thing about him which everyone should have known, but didn't. To me, though, the strength of this paragraph--and its principal beauty--comes from that last image: "as she sits there clutching her knees and crying in the television light." It's one of the most powerful, most economically precise depictions of loneliness and despair that I've read in a long time. It just about breaks your heart. And it sets the mood for this story perfectly.

This is a story about isolation, alienation, the hope of fathers and the trust between friends. Like Hoffmann's "Struwwelpeter," it is a story of the despised boy. The supernatural trappings are window dressing for the real horror at its heart. Horror writers should read it, along with other stories by Hirshberg (particularly "The Two Sams"), and learn from him. This is the scary stuff.

I can't end this, though, without calling further attention to the language. There's so much joy to be found on the sentence level alone. Take, for example:

We wandered toward the locks, into the park. The avenue between the pine trees was empty except for a scatter of solitary bums on benches, wrapping themselves in shredded jackets and newspapers as the night nailed itself down and the dark billowed around us in the gusts of wind like the sides of a tent. In the roiling trees, black birds perched on the branches, silent as gargoyles.

If that doesn't do it for you, I just don't know what you're doing here.

Link to story.

"A Man of Light" by Jeffrey Ford: An Appreciation by Bob Urell

2005-12-07T09:15:00.000-08:00

Every time I come across a Jeff Ford story, two competing ideas occur to me: I wish I'd thought of that; thank God I didn't think of that. There's a coolness-quotient to any of Jeff's stories that makes riffing off him so very, very tempting. Along with that so very artistic urging to theft, however, is the acknowledgement that everything Jeff writes requires more than the ordinary equation of talent and perseverance. Jeff writes difficult stories. A Man of Light is, of course, no different than any of Ford's work, which is to say, it is very different from anyone else's.

I guess I should talk about Ford's liquid, mercurial style, perhaps about the weird combination of formality and colloquialism in his syntactical constructions, about the patience with which he addresses himself to story, about the inertia that builds from dead-stop to full downhill tilt. It's the endings that always get me. Jeff Ford stories are like a Randy Johnson fastball. If you haven't seen the Big Unit pitch, imagine a lanky, scraggly man, incredibly tall, closer to seven feet than six, who looks like he should be farsighted and bedridden with mouth cancer. His entire approach to the pitch embodies a synthesis of languor and brutality; he is only graceful in motion. That is, in the middle of the pitch, his left knee coming up impossibly high, all the way to his chest then jerking down, whipping his entire body like a willow branch, back then forward, slashing an implacable path through the air, the ball coming along for the ride and then free and ballistic. That left foot winds up halfway down the pitcher's mound, Johnson stumbles, splayed out like a newborn colt, all knees and elbows and awkwardness. But the ball, she sails bright and wicked fast and straight as physics allows. Randy Johnson's pitching is like a Jeff Ford short story, brutal and beautiful and, oh so very effective.

The problem with the analogy, of course, is that one might infer that we are the catcher, the ball is the story and Jeff is the pitcher. In truth, we're all the ball, there is no catcher, and we’re headed at a brick wall going 109 MPH. I don't even think Jeff knows who the pitcher is.

Segue, stage left. Jeff isn't tall, nor is he scraggly nor lanky, though he can appear so at any number of late night/early morning after-after-after parties at the World Fantasy Convention of your choice. That's the booze talking. In fact, he's urbane and profane hard to spot now that he's shaved off the beard. And then there was the time we held hands on the National Mall and watched the sunburnt leaves shower down along the walking path. He turned to me, plaintive. "It can't be over, Bob. It just can't." He radiated vulnerability and strength then, but we were young and times, they've changed . . . . But let's get back to the story, shall we?

Of late I've been working through concepts that had never troubled me before. They're the same hoary old questions that plague everyone at whatever point in their lives they determine to stop evading them. Num quam desisto, a friend of mine says. I find my answers, or better still, my fellow questers, in the oddest of places. Such was my experience with "A Man of Light." This, more than anything, is why venues like SCI FICTION are hard to form and harder still to maintain. Places of light and beauty rarely last as long as we might wish them to.

This appreciation is, nominally at the least, supposed to be about the story I chose to write on. Well, it is, in its own way. It's about the experience of my reading, rather than about the events and import of the story itself. This is because a brief synopsis of the story would go something like: A young reporter receives permission to interview a noted recluse whose work with light is famous all over the world. Our
reporter discovers disturbing information in the process. The end. Anything else I told you would spoil the experience. Each of the revelations in the story are so tightly wound together that to prematurely unravel one is to undo the entire thing. So, this appreciation is utterly incomplete, and this I know. The other half is actually the entirety of it. That is, go read the story. Hurry, before it disappears as thoroughly as the Man of Light himself. I think you will agree, it was time well spent and that we owe Jeff and Ellen and SciFi.Com a great deal for the gift of these past five or so years filled with fiction like this and writers like that. Whatever else can be said, no matter how bitter or angry we might be over this abrupt and final closure, remember that this Darkness is only the lesser half of the story.

Link to story.

"Different Flesh" by Claude Lalumière : An Appreciation by Anna Tambour

2005-12-06T09:45:00.000-08:00

A poem of a story but more, a story-teller's story. I mean that to the last syllable, understated detail and nuance of personality. Only the best stories, I think, marry sound with meaning, and this one does. And only gems like "Different Flesh" have more facets than the story as read, without flashing into your eyes.

Who else would have published "Different Flesh," which doesn't taste a bit like chicken?

Link to story.

"His Own Back Yard," by James P. Blaylock: An Appreciation by Michael Jasper

2005-12-06T09:30:00.000-08:00

I don't like to tell people this (so here I am, doing just that), but I'm a big softie at heart. A mushy old romantic, really. I blame my wife, first of all, for making me fall in love with her the moment I met her, as well as my almost-one-year-old son, who's made me learn all over again what it's like to love someone, and learn for the first time what it's like to be a father.

Yes, this is going to be that kind of essay. Move along if you must (I would've done the same a year or two ago). But I will be talking about the writing of James P. Blaylock, so I hope that will redeem my indulgences.

Blaylock's story "His Own Back Yard" was the first piece of fiction I thought of when I heard of this excellent project. I won't claim to have read every piece of excellent fiction at the groundbreaking SCI FICTION site, but I've rarely been disappointed by those I have read. Great fiction, and all of it free? It was too good to last, I guess. Finding out what new story and new reprint would be posted was something to look forward to every Wednesday. I guess my time's running out for that, now.

Time is one of the key factors in Blaylock's story: how it passes and how we spend it, and who we spend that time with in our lives. His protagonist, Alan, returns to his boyhood home days before the house is to be razed. He wanders through the old shed, digs up some hidden treasures he and his father had buried, and even enters the condemned house. His trip down memory lane magically turns into a big step back through the years, as he slip-slides through time to glimpse himself at ten and encounter his father in his mid-thirties.

Blaylock knows the secrets about life we're afraid to say out loud. Secrets like the knowledge that if we're lucky, we find love in our lives to make each second worthwhile. Or the fact that with love comes a fear of losing it and the lingering sense that the one we love will one day move on without us.

Sort of like the feeling a new parent has while his baby son is still sleeping in the early morning, half-hoping the baby will stay asleep and get some rest, but half-hoping the baby will wake up so Dad can spend more time with the little guy before the baby grows up and doesn't want to hang out with Dad so much any more.

We get to experience this secret knowledge when Blaylock's protagonist is left alone as his wife takes their son off to college, and the empty nest echoes:

Alan had stayed home looking forward to the peace and quiet, a commodity that had grown scarce over the years. But somewhere along the line he had lost his talent for solitude, and the days of empty stillness had filled him with a sense of loss that was almost irrational, as if Susan and Tyler been gone months instead of days, or as if, like the old house in front of him now, he was coming to the end of something.

It's a reminder that life is short, and we can't go home again. Clichés, yes, but Blaylock is able to take this material to the edge of sentimentality without going over the edge. The story itself takes some interesting twists and turns without ever leaving the house and back yard of the title. The magic element is very understated and subtle, which I loved--it isn't a puzzle story. It is a bit of a wish-fulfillment story--I mean, who wouldn't want to go back and meet your parents when they were the same age as us? What would you say to them after you've all recovered from the shock and weirdness (which Blaylock handles masterfully)? And what questions would they have for you?

Since I've already admitted that I'm such a softie, I'm not afraid to admit that one of the questions the young version of Alan's dad asks his returned-from-the-future son made me tear up. It's a question I'd want to ask my son in thirty years, hoping the answer would be an unhesitant "Yes."

I won't tell you what the line is; you should read this fine story to discover it for yourself. But I will tell you this--it's a line on par with the question Kevin Costner's character in "Field of Dreams" asks his returned-from-the-past father: "Hey, Dad, you wanna have a catch?"

And yeah, that movie made me bawl like a baby too when I watched it this past year, thinking of my own father, me as a new father, and, most of all, my young son and our shared future together. It's rare that a piece of fiction affects me in such an emotional way, and for that I owe James Blaylock my gratitude.

Link to story.

"Space-time for Springers" by Fritz Leiber: An Appreciation by E. Sedia

2005-12-06T09:15:00.000-08:00

WARNING: Spoilers.

This is a cat story. However, I wouldn't love it so much if it were only a cat story. It starts as a humorous, cute tale of a genius kitten named Gummitch, his mind full of theories of space-time, and material for many books he would write, but soon things turn very deep and very dark. Mr. Leiber writes from the point of view of a cat with stunning confidence, and after reading this story for the first time I was convinced that this is how kittens really think.

One of the main themes of this story is metamorphosis. Gummitch is convinced that when he grows up he will become a man, while human children (stupid and defenseless Baby and feral, developmentally abnormal Sissy) will become cats:

If you just rid your mind of preconceived notions, Gummitch told himself, it was all very logical. Babies were stupid, fumbling, vindictive creatures without reason or speech. What could be more natural than that they should grow up into mute, sullen, selfish beasts bent only on rapine and reproduction? While kittens were quick, sensitive, subtle, supremely alive. What other destiny were they possibly fitted for except to become the deft, word-speaking, book-writing, music-making, meat-getting-and-dispensing masters of the world?

Another manifestation of metamorphosis comes from the theme of mirrors – a classic trope, but employed with great imagination. Gummitch learns that mirror worlds, harmless for the most part, are quite conducive to spirit transfer, and fears that the mirror Gummitch "who touched paws with him so softly yet so coldly" might one day decide to take Gummitch's place. The spirit transfer, conceived by Gummitch as a wild speculation, soon becomes frightening reality.

The darkness in the story comes from Sissy, a scary child who is fond of tormenting the cats and Baby. Gummitch, out of the loyalty to his "parents," appoints himself as the guardian of Baby, and he is the one who is privy to the depth of Sissy's pathology. "Gummitch found increasing horror in this mute vampirish being inhabiting the body of a rapidly growing girl, though inwardly equipped to be nothing but a most bloodthirsty she-cat."

Sissy's nighttime attack of Baby forces Gummitch into his ultimate sacrifice – and this is what makes this story great. The utter selflessness of his decision, the fact that he knows his fate and yet trades spirits with Sissy to save his human family makes it perhaps the saddest and the most moving story ever written. The terror of his life afterwards, smothered by Sissy's black and diseased spirit, is only hinted at, but we can picture it fully: "In a last intuition, before the animal blackness closed in utterly, Gummitch realized that the spirit, alas, is not the same thing as the consciousness, and that one may lose—-sacrifice—-the first and still be burdened with the second."

The contrast between the playful beginning and the terrible end makes this story heart-wrenching, much in the same way as the contrast between the care-free kitten and the great weight of his sacrifice. We expect sacrifice from the strong and from the able; forcing it on the small and the weak, those we mean to protect, seems unthinkable. And yet when the smallest accept their responsibilities, the price they pay is the greatest. The great tragedy of this story is that Gummitch had to give up his glorious metamorphosis into a man for mirror-magic, trading spirits with Sissy: "[A]s Gummitch knew very well, bitterly well indeed, his fate was to be the only kitten in the world that did not grow up to be a man."

Even if you don't like cats, I strongly recommend this story. Daring to write a kitten as completely and with as much sympathy and understanding as a human protagonist, allowing him the full share of tragedy is the sign of impressive authorial courage. Many thanks are due to Ms. Datlow for letting me read this story–-easily the funniest and the saddest short story ever written. For this, I am forever grateful.

("Space-time for Springers": First publication in Star Science Fiction Stories #4, ed. Frederik Pohl, Ballantine, 1958.)

Link to story.

"A Flock of Birds" by James Van Pelt: An Appreciation by Alex Wilson

2005-12-05T11:30:00.000-08:00

James Van Pelt cares about people. From his generosity as a teacher--both in the classroom as an instructor, and on online fora where he frequently dispenses writing advice--to his stories concerned less with grand universe-shattering ideas than with the even grander human experience, Van Pelt's is a person-centered science fiction.

His SCI FICTION story "A Flock of Birds" is a post-apocalyptic tale which on the surface seems focused on the materialistic survival of the characters. How does one find food and shelter after civilization collapses? How does one treat or even properly diagnose illness without trained medical professionals among the survivors? All in all, it's a good, well-told yarn.

But the more intricate story--the story Van Pelt is really telling here--is concerned with just-as-necessary, more personal survival needs. Companionship. Hope. Hobbies (Are they important tools to prevent mental stagnation or irresponsible escapist luxuries?). Community support systems after community itself has all but failed.

I first read Van Pelt's debut story collection Strangers and Beggars a few years back. I remember most how he he set loose in those stories outlandish metaphoric creatures or situations into familiar settings like the classroom or the office. But always I could believe the people in his stories were real, with real reactions and frustrations in response to crises, and with real determination to endure as both physical and emotional beings.

Which in the end makes for inspiring literature, and about everything you can ask for in science fiction story.

Link to story.

"The Baum Plan for Financial Independence" by John Kessel: An Appreciation by Mike Bailey and Chris Dodson

2005-12-05T11:15:00.000-08:00

(Note: The following exchange took place on the Nightshade Books bulletin board.)

By Chris Dodson on Wednesday, March 24, 2004 - 02:42 pm:

In regard to John Kessel's "The Baum Plan for Financial Independence" . . .

First of all, I'd like to say that line by line, this was one of the most well-written SCIFICTION stories I've ever read. Some of the sentences and turns of phrase here are classic--

"calm as a Christian holding four aces"

"The softness of Dot's breast or the shit smell of the crapper in the Highway 28 Texaco, how can there be anything more real than that?"

"I had some time to contemplate the ways in which I was a fool, number one being the way I let an ex lap-dancer from Mebane lead me around by my imagination for the last ten years."

These lines have a folksy Southern charm that is quite endearing.

Being a Southerner myself, I've always enjoyed SF/F in the literary tradition of the American South--this has always been a specialty of Kessel, Michael Bishop, Andy Duncan, Dale Bailey, and others. Along with the references to T-Birds, Texaco, Willie Nelson, gravel roads, and broken down houses with "a battered pickup in the dirt driveway and a rust spotted propane tank outside in the yard," there's a certain wistfulness and nostalgia inherent in this story that places it firmly in the Southern tradition. There's a pervasive sense here that Things Were Better Once--before Sid's old man went bust, before he and Dot turned to a life of crime. Everything in Sid and Dot's world seems to be fucked up and broken down, a sharp contrast to the later Emerald City scenes (which I'll get to in a minute).

Sid is an interesting, extremely conflicted character. He seems to have a desperate need for control (as evinced by the line, "That's the story of my life: me trying to save the rest of you—and the rest of you ignoring me" and the fact that he won't give Dot a match even though he has them), and yet he falls in line with everything Dot says and does, rather like a lapdog. Is Sid meant to be the Toto to Dot's Dorothy?

I wonder if all the Emerald City stuff is supposed to be going on only in Sid's mind. Early in the story, Sid says: "Radioactive Roy and the people like him are just looking for an exit door. I can understand that. Everybody dreams of an exit door sometimes." Is the last part of the story supposed to be Sid's dream of an exit door, a way out of his pathetic life?

The most important parts of the story are the references to and resonances with THE WIZARD OF OZ. The main references I found are as follows:

1. The title, of course, is a reference to L. Frank Baum, writer of THE WIZARD OF OZ.
2. Dot's full name is Dorothy Gale, and she's wearing red sneakers.
3. The city that Dot and Sid end up in is clearly meant to be Emerald City.
4. Miss Goode = Glenda the Good Witch
5. There is a picture on the wall of the house, a woodcut print of a woman holding a fish. In the background, outside a window, a tornado is tearing up a dirt road.

The original WIZARD OF OZ was an allegorical fable about the Populist party's fight for financial independence from the gold standard (more on that can be found here). The title of Kessel's story leads me to believe that this story is about a similar fight for independence, but from what? From Dot? From Sid's pathetic life? From the entropy of Sid's world? That's just one of many intriguing questions Kessel's story left floating around in my head.

This was truly a wonderful story. If "The Three Unknowns" is my favorite SF story of the year so far, then "The Baum Plan for Financial Independence" is my favorite fantasy.

Oh, and one other question: What is the significance of the name Sidney Xavier Dubose? It's such an odd name -- surely it means something.

By Mike Bailey on Thursday, March 25, 2004 - 06:52 am:

Wow, way to go Chris! … I was about to ask what the Baum reference was all about, so thanks for answering that. You picked up on some great Easter eggs that I missed.

My interpretation of the theme, or single effect of the story, is likely to be a bit controversial . . .

By Mike Bailey on Thursday, March 25, 2004 - 08:33 am:

Criticism of "The Baum Plan for Financial Independence" by John Kessel

I was very impressed with Kessel's "Baum Plan," and after glancing at his bio (and seeing his monster credentials) I wondered whether I should have the audacity to criticize the tale. Then I figured, Kessel puts his pants on one leg at a time, too, so what the heck, I'll criticize his story. Then I thought, uh oh, maybe he doesn't put them on one leg at a time. Maybe he lies on the floor or bed and does both legs at once. Then I thought, too much thinking about Kessel's pants is weird. Better start writing the critique.

I feel that Kessel does a great job with this story, in so many ways, that it is hard for me to know where to begin. A casual reader might have read this story: Two trashy people ride in a strange subway to an even stranger terminal where they are given tons of cash. That casual reader would, in my opinion, really miss out on some great layers of this deceptively simple story.

In my opinion, Kessel begins strongly, following the advice I'm sure he gives his creative writing students, by tilting the reader into the story with the first sentence:

"When I picked her up at the Stop 'n Shop on Route 28, Dot was wearing a short black skirt and red sneakers just like the ones she had taken from the bargain rack the night we broke into the Sears in Hendersonville five years earlier."

This sentence, a bit of a mouthful, not only piqued my interest, but also immediately began showing me the character traits of Dot and Sid. That's doing a lot with the first sentence!

Like Chris Dodson, I felt Kessel loaded up "Baum Plan" with tons of yummy sentences that were a joy to read. Chris quoted some of my favorites, and here is another (about cigarettes):

"Whenever my old man came in to clear her untouched lunch he asked her if he could have one, and mother would smile at him, eyes big, and pull two more coffin nails out of the red-and-white pack with her nicotine-stained fingers."

For me, though, a strong theme is what makes a great story, and I felt Kessel really delivered on theme. Whether the following was intentional on Kessel's part, I do not know, but I thought he put a lot of effort into character building in order to drive home a powerful point later in the story. Since I think Sid communicated to me what some critics call "the moment of epiphany" late in the story, I will start by focusing on Kessel's characterization of Sid.

Kessel starts showing us that Sid is basically an imperfect but good-hearted person in the second paragraph, which is critical for us to believe if we are to "get" the moral of this tale. Sid didn't kill the Sears night watchman during the lark in the store, only gave him a concussion, and Sid admits that "a man has to take responsibility for his own actions" while also admitting that he has a weakness for Dot. We see Sid's belief in accountability reinforced in the way he discards Roy's notion of an exit door from reality, while admitting that "everyone dreams of an exit door sometimes." Kessel continues to show Sid's good nature by the way Sid fiercely confronts his father in a effort to protect his mother from the ravages of lung disease brought on by smoking:

"As he bent over to put the tray on the counter, I snatched the cigarettes from his breast pocket and crushed them into bits over the plate of pears and cottage cheese . . . . That's the story of my life: me trying to save the rest of you—and the rest of you ignoring me."

Since Kessel so carefully establishes Sid's character, we can imagine the effect on him when he looks out the window and sees that the luxuries of jade city are bought with the lives of the common folk:

"The sun beat down pitilessly on citizens who went from street to street between the fine buildings with bowed heads and plodding steps. I saw a team of four men in purple shirts pulling a cart; I saw other men with sticks herd children down to a park; I saw vehicles rumble past tired street workers, kicking up clouds of yellow dust so thick that I could taste it."

We can imagine Sid identifying with the downtrodden, since he is one of the dregs of our own society, having come recently from prison. We can also picture Sid struggling with the idea of taking what he surely considers to be dirty money, his notions of accountability battling with his opportunity to take advantage of a honest-to-goodness exit door.

This all leads to the moment of epiphany at the end of the story:

"'One person's dream come true is somebody else's nightmare,' I said. 'Somebody always has to pay.' I had never thought that before, but as I spoke it I realized it was true."

I can imagine how taking the money might bother Sid for the rest of his life. I can see that as an ex bottom-rung-dweller Sid might always feel nagging guilt that his luxury was purchased at such steep cost to others. The fact that I can feel that way about Sid shows that Kessel really nailed the character. But alas, Sid did not make the noble choice. He says goodbye to Dot along with his scruples when he burns his clothes, an attempt to eradicate his history along with his guilt. It seems to me that the attempt does not quite succeed.

Now for the possible controversy: I think Kessel may have written an allegory here. Chris Dodson saw references to the Wizard of Oz, and since he pointed them out, now I see them too. But I think the more powerful message is a condemnation of how powerful western nations, and America in particular, live in relative luxury while the third world suffers.

My support for this thesis can be found in characterization. Sid is the tough yet caring, slightly homophobic, sucker-for-the-ladies everyman that represents the American male. Dot represents America as well. Muslim nations often express the sentiment that America is "the great whore," and Dot, with her curvy hips, her "bright red lipstick and breath smelling of cigarettes," her games on the Sear's bed, and her ex lap-dancer history certainly fits the mold. Sid cares enough to be curious about how the jade city is run, and to feel bad about it, but doesn't care enough to do the right thing. In the same way, Kessel may be implying that he feels Americans know that our concentration of wealth is not fair, and that we live on the backs of poor nations, but that even if we do care, we don't care enough to take action--to make a difference.

I also think that the high technology, arrogance, and implied decadence of the jade city residents is supposed to be symbolic of America, or at least the world view of America.

I could go on about a few of the ways Kessel creates tension in this story (I think he shows some masterful touches there), but I'll leave that as a topic for someone else . . .

By Chris Dodson on Thursday, March 25, 2004 - 12:34 pm:

Great post, Mike! Your theory about the story's condemnation of Western nations is quite intriguing. Now I have to go back and re-read it.

I'm not sure I would have picked up on those WIZARD OF OZ references if not for the fact that I watched the movie a day or two before Ellen posted the title of the story back on March 2. When I saw "Baum", THE WIZARD OF OZ was the first thing that popped into my head. That's what made me ask if it was one of his Hollywood stories.

By Ellen on Thursday, March 25, 2004 - 07:39 pm:

Mike and Chris,

Thanks for your thoughtful posts. I'm going to get John to post here (I hope ) although he's currently at the Conf with me here. Or at least I'll try to get him to lurk.

By John Kessel on Sunday, March 28, 2004 - 12:12 pm:

Thanks Chris and Mike for some of the most cogent comments I have ever had on a story I have written. I can't imagine anything more gratifying for a writer than to have two such intelligent readers sucking the marrow out of the conscious and unconscious meanings of his work.

I'll respond to a couple of things, though I don't want to say too much since I believe that, once the story is out of the writer's hands, it should speak for itself.

I definitely had all the Oz references in mind. I'm a big fan of all the Oz books. The Third World reading Mike gives pleases me a great deal, since in my mind the story is about class, about those who have and those who don't and how those things can warp even the best hearted among us, though I did not have an allegory in mind.

Thanks for your sympathetic readings of my characters. I really like both Dot and Sid though I don't think they are paragons by any means. And they're a lot different from most of my characters. I had fun trying to assume Sid's voice and come up with colorful turns of phrase.

Mike identifies exactly the sentence that I intend to be the climax of the story, though I did not know Sid was going to say that until the moment he said it.

A lot of this story comes out of my unconscious--probably more than most of my stories--but I believe that writing is a matter of your conscious collaborating with your unconscious. I can be scary what lurks down there.

I just read the story at the ICFA where Ellen and I were for the last four days, and it seemed to go over very well. It was in a session where James Patrick Kelly read a new story that is also going to appear at SciFiction, and the two stories seemed to go together nicely, though we did not plan it that way. It was a treat to read to such a good audience, and it has made my month to come home to your comments.

Best,
John

Link to story.

"Threads" by Jessica Reisman: An Appreciation by Bradley Denton

2005-12-05T11:00:00.000-08:00

It's a terrific story, deserving not only of its SESFA nomination but of other award-nomination-type attention, too.

The three things I like best about it:

1) It's an honest-to-god science-fiction story. So many things with that label are either science fiction with no real story, or a story with no real science fiction . . . or, even more often, neither. But "Threads" is a real story (a really good story, at that) that depends on some real gosh-wow SF to make it work.

2) It does something different with the science-fictional-artist sub-sub-genre. There've been a lot of stories about artists who use science-fictional technology to produce works of art--but almost all of these stories feature the artists themselves as protagonists. "Threads," in contrast, features a protagonist who isn't an artist herself, but who is profoundly affected when she experiences an artist's creation. And that puts "Threads" above most of the other tales in the sub-sub-genre . . . because it acknowledges the fact that the reactions of people who didn't create the art is the whole point of art in the first place. After all, creating a work of art is often deadly-dull drudgery (and should be). But encountering the completed work should be transcendent. And "Threads" does a great job of illuminating that.

3) The protagonist of "Threads" at first appears to be an easily recognized sf archetype--the future bounty hunter who carries a high-tech weapon and Always Gets Her Target, yet somehow finds a soft spot in her heart for her latest target and switches her allegiance in order to protect him/her. But Reisman puts an important twist on that archetype: It's not her target, per se, that Grit decides she has to save: It's his skill. His art. In other words, it's not who he is that matters to her--it's what he can do. After all, if she can save that, then other artists will ultimately be able to create similar works of art. So more and more transcendence-inducing threads will be replicated and saved . . . and eventually, everyone everywhere will have access to a greater measure of freedom and wonder. (Plus, this way, Grit can still fulfill her contract and get paid!)

Bottom line: Very cool story.

And the wonderful thing about fiction writing, as an art, is that even two years after a story appears, someone can read it for the first time and finish it thinking, "That was very cool indeed . . . "

Link to story.

"The Other Celia" by Theodore Sturgeon: An Appreciation by John Joseph Adams

2005-11-30T00:30:00.000-08:00

If there's anything positive to take away from the closing of SCI FICTION, it's that it gave me an excuse to re-read "The Other Celia" by Theodore Sturgeon.

I chose to appreciate this story because it's one of the first stories I remember reading on SCI FICTION, and it made me slap myself upside the head for not having read more Sturgeon (this was quickly thereafter remedied).

If I recall correctly, when I read "The Other Celia," SCI FICTION wasn't the must-read magazine for me that it has since become. I was aware of it, sure; I think the only other story I'd read was "Cucumber Gravy" by Susan Palwick. I'd really enjoyed the Palwick, but for some reason I never got around to checking in every week. All that changed after I read "The Other Celia."

Sure, it's a reprint of a classic, by one of the undeniable masters of short SF, but still, it really opened my eyes to what Ellen was trying to do with the site, and made me keep coming back week after week after that.

Another reason reading "The Other Celia" on SCI FICTION stuck in my mind, is because when I read it, I hadn't actually planned to sit and read a whole story. I had just idly clicked on the link to see the first few lines, intending to perhaps read it later. But that's all I needed to be utterly hooked.

Here's how it begins:

If you live in a cheap enough rooming house and the doors are made of cheap enough pine, and the locks are old-fashioned single-action jobs and the hinges are loose, and if you have a hundred and ninety lean pounds to operate with, you can grasp the knob, press the door sidewise against its hinges, and slip the latch. Further, you can lock the door the same way when you come out.

Slim Walsh lived in, and was, and had, and did these things partly because he was bored.

The poetry of Sturgeon's language is what really captured me from the get go. "Slim Walsh lived in, and was, and had, and did these things . . ." That line right there is what did it.

But these opening paragraphs also paint this compelling character portrait of our hero, and then the story moves on into this really strange but undeniably compelling fantasy--as Slim becomes obsessed with Celia, so does the reader.

Robert Charles Wilson has said that "The Other Celia" is "in its way as perfect a science-fiction story as The Time Machine." I agree completely, and it's hard to say it any better than that.

“There’s a Hole in the City” by Rick Bowes: An Appreciation by M. Rickert

2005-11-30T00:15:00.000-08:00

After September eleventh, after the great bullhorn speech, and the raising of flags everywhere, bitterness set in. Solemn silence settled over the date. This was mourning and this was patriotism. Many who had something to say said they would move to other countries to say it. The dead were silenced, and the country was silenced, except for the singing of the national anthem.

Writers don't have to write about war, terrorism or brutality. They don't have to do it, and not all should. Writers, most of all, must find their voices. That is the covenant they make with the word. But for those writers who are given the material, the passion, the voice to speak of things that make us sad to be human, it must be said; truth is not lost, until it is silenced.

The first time I read Rick Bowe's story, "There's a Hole in the City" I caught on fire. My hands burned and my eyes teared up from the smoke. My breath shortened. I walked away and left the fire where it started, in the story on the computer. I thought of peaches.

The Sunday before September eleventh one of the woman in my Tai Chi group brought peaches to share. I live in upstate New York and hadn't had a good peach since I was a kid. Peaches in the supermarket were hard and dry. I had given up eating them. But these peaches, locally grown, were incredibly sweet and juicy, so much so that after Tai Chi that day, my husband and I drove to the farmstand to buy our own. It was a tenderly beautiful day, the sky, true blue, the way a kindergartner might paint it, dotted with fat, white Georgia O'Keefe clouds. I remember how light I felt, as if the light of that day, combined with the sun- infused peaches was something I had ingested or become a part of. That was September ninth. I don't remember if I ate a peach the next morning, or the one after that, but for some reason the flavor of peaches is, for me, the flavor of September eleventh. I am sure I will never eat another peach without tasting ash.

After the fire went out, the story lingered on my tongue with the taste of peaches and death.

The large story of loss here is composed of the individual stories of loss. If, like me, you burn from memory and fear when you read this the first time (that's how perfect the writing is) read it again, because the story is essentially one of solace. There is suffering. There is death. There is love. (Ashes, peaches, sweet flavor of life.) You will find more solace in rereading this story than you ever will by watching the towers fall again.

What can we learn from the dead? Why look at such bleak faces when we can be making love, eating chocolate, smelling the apple blossom scent of snow? Why walk with the dead when there will be enough time for that eventually? Read this story. The dead walk with us. They have things to say.

Link to story

"And He Built a Crooked House" by Robert A. Heinlein: An Appreciation by Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon

2005-11-30T00:00:00.000-08:00

The first book of "real" SF short stories I ever bought with my own money was Heinlein's collection The Green Hills of Earth (1951). There are many Heinleins, I would discover, and this was the innocent storyteller of the 40s and 50s. Very suitable for a boy of 10 or 11 in the world of 1969. And I remember every story in that collection, almost as if I read them yesterday. I'm usually happy if I truly love 20% of a collection or SF magazine, but 7 out of 10 stories in The Green Hills of Earth make the grade in my book. Whether through starry-eyed innocence or blind luck, I'd stumbled across a winner early in my SF readings and then proceeded to read every one of what we might call today Heinlein's YA novels in my junior high library.

I don't remember when or in whose collection I first read "And He Built a Crooked House" (1940). But I do know that I had already discovered tesseracts and the idea of a four-dimensional object, along with the intriguing mysteries of the Möbius strip and the Klein bottle, and I'd read Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott, so I took to "And He Built a Crooked House" in a flash.

D&D players know about portable holes, Dr. Who fans know that the Tardis is larger than a London call box and the latest Harry Potter movie includes spacious quarters housed inside a modest pup tent. But those of us who read Heinlein's story knew how to make a house bigger on the inside than the outside -- build perpendicular to the usual three dimensions.

It's an engineer's house, full of quirks and disturbing realities as one can watch oneself disappearing into a room down the hall. And while the views from the windows are a wee bit unusual, they're certainly conversation starters. There's just one small technical problem with the place.

This story appeared some sixty-five years ago and yet the opening sentiments are still fresh:

Americans are considered crazy anywhere in the world.

They will usually concede a basis for the accusation but point to California as the focus of the infection. Californians stoutly maintain that their bad reputation is derived solely from the acts of the inhabitants of Los Angeles County. Angelenos will, when pressed, admit the charge but explain hastily, "It's Hollywood. It's not our fault--we didn't ask for it; Hollywood just grew."

The people in Hollywood don't care; they glory in it. If you are interested, they will drive you up Laurel Canyon "--where we keep the violent cases." The Canyonites--the brown-legged women, the trunks-clad men constantly busy building and rebuilding their slap-happy unfinished houses--regard with faint contempt the dull creatures who live down in the flats, and treasure in their hearts the secret knowledge that they, and only they, know how to live.

Lookout Mountain Avenue is the name of a side canyon which twists up from Laurel Canyon. The other Canyonites don't like to have it mentioned; after all, one must draw the line somewhere!

Hard to imagine that this 1940s California was just a shadow of what it would become today. Yet the iconic imagery of carving subdivisions and mansions out of what should've been left desert is buried deep in our collective unconscious--Hollywood TV and movies have seen to that. Perry Mason himself could've driven his car up to Heinlein's tesseract house to investigate what happened. So we're well grounded right at the beginning of the story, even nodding at how crazy we Americans really are. And Heinlein's characters are straight from his box of tricks--part optimist, part charlatan-cum-make-a-buck, part progressive, part conservative--and his sense of timing perfected. And it's not only culture which requires this story to be embedded in California . . .

Okay, so the characters are a bit dated and woefully politically incorrect by today's standards. And you'd never get anything built so quickly today without dealing with zoning boards, etc. It's an old short story, I'll willingly make allowances.

But the real reason I wanted to write this appreciation was that a few years ago I stumbled onto one of the greatest accolades I've ever seen for a story: Bob Seitz's 1997 tribute to "And He Built a Crooked House".

Preamble: The plot and the title for this story belongs to Robert Heinlein. I read it in a science fiction anthology decades ago and thought it was pretty amusing. Unfortunately, I don't know where to find it. I have rewritten it from scratch to go with my paper on relativity.

To tell the truth, I was using Google to try to find Heinlein's story and found Seitz's first. And while it is really intriguing to look at his story in comparison to Heinlein's, this helps illustrate why SciFiction was so important. So someone could find a story like this online. So that we don't have pull a Bob Seitz and write our own versions when we can't find a remembered work online or in print.

See, I'm not so sure we're ready for the Phil Kaldon version of a Time Enough For Love, which thankfully is still in print. But that's a different, later, longer Heinlein than this one and for another time and place.

Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon

Link to story

"The Girl Who Ate Garbage" by Jessica Reisman & A.M. Dellamonica: An Appreciation by Deborah Biancotti

2005-11-29T01:30:00.000-08:00

Mite found the girl just before dawn. She was eating a shopping cart in a dead-end alley.

She what?

Mite had been born a sorcerer, carrying within him a bright core of magic as solidly his as an appendix. It was called a fetish, and he had thought it would protect him from anything.

Poor Mite, poor, poor Mite.

Zoli'd wanted wings, a spell that called for the ribcage of a girl . . .

Dear god, a ribcage? But why? That's so awful. Maybe he'll even turn the ribcage itself into wings which, when you think about it (and I'm thinking about it now), would be kinda pretty. 'Magine it, ivory wings with tattered bits of skin flapping brown. Wouldn't hold, though. Like Icarus, Zoli'd fall. Zoli wouldn't be solid, see, in his ill-gotten wings. Unsolid Zoli. See?

Zoli got angrier and angrier, shaking Mite from sleep every morning like a dog. The daily demand came harder and faster. "Eat this, honeybee," Zoli would snarl, shoving something at Mite. Turnips or melons if he was lucky, but sometimes a quart of olives, pickled rattlesnake, or raw tripe. Force-fed until his throat bled, Zoli laughed as Mite vomited diamonds and glow-globes, dragon spores and beauty potions.

Aw, man, all kinds of weirdness, & this whole freakish bulimia is worthy of a great, big Freudian interpretation. If I had one. Which I don't.

A girl, bound and gagged, lay on the hotel's crimson carpet. Scared blue eyes stared up at Mite from under spiky dark hair.

"Eat that, honeybee."

Morbid curiosity, that's what I got. It's awful, but I can't look away & when I reach that last honeybee, there, well, I find I have to pause. Just pause & wait. Eat that, honeybee. I'm waiting. Waiting for the ugly.

Gal screeched, hopping behind Mite, clinging to his shoulders as he pivoted to face the shadows. Her breath came in hot bursts behind his ear, and he could feel her pulse—light and rapid—in the warm patch of contact where her throat stretched over his shoulder to peek. "Ghost," she moaned, as if Mite couldn't see that for himself.

Gal is something else, isn't she? I mean, she's way out there. And she also is, more literally, something else. Not the simple gal her name implies.

By the way, these excerpts are in order, but not contiguous, see, don't get confused. It's only that I'm pulling out bits of the story that should make you want to find the bits in-between. Yeah? I'm doing this, some might say, because I'm lazy, or others, because I don't really know how to do a story appreciation. For a start, I'm probably not meant to use the 'I' so much. But, man, can't you feel Gal's throat on your shoulder? Can't you see her kinda floppy & cat-like & crazy, can't you, honeybee? She is disgusting, but compelling. Don't you want to see what goes on around and inside?

It's beautiful-ugly.

My favourite thing.

"Solace is just a wrist-slash away, man. I'm sure you could find a blade in this slop."

"Pass for now, Jonas." Mite's gaze turned from the dark and hazardous bore of the westward tunnel to the wider pit encompassed by Jonas's gesture.

Pass for now, pass on that, Mite, pass on suggestions from the ghost with the suicide fetish. Pass away, pass it on. If Jonas had found solace in the afterlife, would he really be so keen for you to join? But Mite knows that already, he's not at risk of suicide, though you could argue he's suicidal, even if it is for the Goodly Cause. Self-sacrifice, though noble, doesn't always pay off. Mite might find this path a test of his er, might. Poor little mite.

Zoli let go and Mite doubled over to hands and knees. He spit out broken glass and coughed as a shudder of fire shot through his bowels. Retching, he spit up clots and gouts of blood, shreds of flesh. Another hollowing pain shuddered and echoed through his belly. He hacked up a deep, dark clot, nearly blacking out; the tooth and the marble spit out on ropes of bloody bile.

Oh geez, oh God, oh man, oh ho ho, poor Mite, poor, poor Mite, oh.

Now. Oh. I think you should just see this for yourself.

Link to story.

"The Prize of Peril," by Robert Sheckley: An Appreciation by John Kessel

2005-11-29T01:15:00.000-08:00

This one I remember reading as a kid, probably twelve or thirteen, a few years after it was first published in Fantasy and Science Fiction. At the time it seemed an outrageous satire: a TV show where an ordinary guy volunteers to be chased down by gangland killers? Camera crews following him through the streets? Helicopters and Good Samaritans? It seemed an impossibly dystopian America where big media has grown like a cancer to destroy any sense of reality or civic decency. Remember, this was at a time when there were three broadcast networks--more like two and a half, with ABC a fledgling--and the limit of TV risk was The $64,000 Question.

But looking back from the age of Survivor and The Amazing Race and Fear Factor, Sheckley's preposterous exaggeration seems like cool prescience. "The Prize of Peril" has it all-—the unctuous TV host "Mike Terry", the real-life contestant chosen because he's handsome and not too smart, the engaged and participating audience, the vicarious thrills edging toward obscenity. A populace glued to their televisions, whose lives are so hollow, whose prospects are so limited, whose dazzlement by the celebrity culture is so complete that the chance to be famous is worth any risk. Jim's truck driver friend clues him in on the chance he has to make it big:

"In the old days you had to be a professional boxer or footballer or hockey player if you wanted your brains beaten out legally for money. But now that opportunity is open to ordinary people like you, Jim."

"I see," Raeder said again.

"It's a marvelous opportunity."

Sheckley's cynicism about the public is complete. The moral posturing of Mike Terry and his flattery of the audience's concern for Jim is a thin veil over excited voyeurism and complicity. For every Good Samaritan ready to help Jim escape there is an informer eager to see him die.

Jim Raeder is an average man. Like a Frank Capra hero, like Gary Cooper in Meet John Doe, Jim is the people. He's good looking (an ugly person can't be the people), and in no way intimidating (neither can a smart one). But this story is a slap in the face of Capracorn: the average man is a moron, and the engaged citizenry has become a passive audience. Democracy has turned into sublimation, torture, and vicarious thrills.

Sometimes, reaching for outrage, the satirist hits closer to home than the writer who confines himself to the probable. Here's a quote I just copied from a TV listing for next week:

Teams of two compete in extreme stunts for keys to unlock a submerged car containing one million dollars. Stunts include a helicopter stunt and crawling through a ventalation [sic] system with rats, spiders, and flames. Also, [the show] travels to Phoenix, Arizona for an all new Home Invasion segment.

Link to story.

John Kessel teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at North Carolina State University. He has published three novel and more than fifty short stories, two of which were published on SCI FICTION.

"Jane" by Marc Laidlaw: An appreciation by Brian Overton

2005-11-29T01:00:00.000-08:00

SCI FICTION was always available, always there waiting to be read. Over time, maybe I took it for granted. There would always be a new story the next week, there would always be wonderful stories in the archives. All of it free.

Now it's on the way out, and I am deeply saddened.

That easy access to great fiction was what led me to Marc Laidlaw. I'd seen his name around. He was that guy that had written the videogame "Half-Life." I knew he had written a novel called "The 37th Mandala." But that was it. Then I started to see his name at BoingBoing when he was a guest blogger, and at the Night Shade Books message boards, where he'd always have a witty comment or he would be expounding on some writer I should know.

I could have bought one of his books or sought out an anthology with one of his stories, but a combination of laziness and forgetfulness kept me from it. Instead, it was when SCI FICTION put up "Jane" that I thought it's about time I checked this writer out.

And I was well served. "Jane" is a wonderful story that straddles the lines between fantasy and horror. Jane is the middle child of a family that lives out in the wilderness. When two travelers come, she learns things about her father she had never known or imagined.

Mystery is a constant theme of the story. We never see beyond the outlines of what Jane herself can see. Therefore, we can have no true image of the world around her, the one she has just begun to discover.

Her family has filtered everything Jane knows and sees. For much of her childhood, Jane, like the falcon her father keeps, was hooded. Her sister still wears the hood. After the father's history comes to call, the family escapes into the jungle. There, Jane considers her sister under the hood:

Anna was hooded against the fearful shapes of the night, and it fell to me to take her hand; and I remembered when I had been much younger myself and how it felt to be led along through darkness, trusting completely in the hand that guided me; and the smell of the hood; and I almost wished for that same security now. But I was a girlchild no longer; I had left the years of hooding behind when our Father felt I was too old for it, so the sheltering blindness was Anna's luxury and not mine.

The story is filled with falcon imagery. The falcon carries a symbol of immense importance to Jane's father as well as the city the family escapes from. Jane dreams at night of flying like the falcon:

That night I dreamt I was an angel, flying in the clear night air, and around my neck I wore a tinkling silver bell, and around my ankles leather cuffs with silver rings that bore my name.

Even in her dreams she still wears a bell, cuffs and rings, the things that attach her to her father.

Without her hood, Jane is forced to see the horrible things that are done to her brother and the rest of her family. She also sees what her father does, how he is broken under the strain of escape.

In the process, Laidlaw gives us some powerfully horrifying imagery. We see the torture Jane's brother Ash is put through. Her father acts to save him by sending out his falcon. What comes back is not her brother:

He held out his right hand so I could see the quarry. It was fleshy and clear, like yellowed glass with milky green shapes inside. It was veined and buzzing with botflies. And it screamed and screamed with my brother's voice until our Father set it on a granite slab and crushed it under his heel.

Scenes like this hint at the horrible reality of the city and Jane's father's past. It's a reality she will come to see and accept as her own.

The story explores the idea of opening your eyes to one's history and responsibilities and to your parents. Jane must take a hard look at her father and decide what she will take from him. While her father's answers seem wrong, Jane's own choices don't seem much better. The last paragraphs of the story sting with the decisions she has made about her future.

Link to story.

"High Weir" by Samuel R. Delany: An Appreciation by Matthew Cheney

2005-11-28T01:15:00.000-08:00

Having spent my childhood reading battered anthologies bought in bulk at used bookstores, I was surprised later to discover how many people I knew who were well-versed in science fiction's history and lore didn't know a lot of the same stories I did, because they had spent most of their time reading novels.

This is one of the reasons why the archive of classic stories reprinted by Ellen Datlow at SCI FICTION is one of my favorite things on the internet: it lets me point people to the stories that shaped my entire view of what fiction is and could be. I spend a lot of time recklessly tossing opinions around, and it's helpful to be able to point people toward the raw material that influenced those opinions. (Then they can form their own, and leave me to chew on some dust.)

For instance, "High Weir". It's not "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" or "Aye, and Gomorrah", so it's generally considered an obscure Delany story. It doesn't represent Delany's best writing, or even his major themes, so it's not likely to have a large place in the critical literature about one of the most singular authors in the world. But I am tremendously grateful to Ellen for reprinting it, because every time I read it, even though I know all the turns and twists, the last few pages remain surprising and, more impressively, moving.

"High Weir" was first published in the October 1968 issue of If, when Delany was 26 years old. I first read it when I was about 16, in the Signet edition of Delany's collection Driftglass, and I almost skipped to the next story, because "High Weir" seemed like little more than a cross between the early stories of Ursula LeGuin and the better stories of H. Beam Piper--a linguistic-anthropological adventure story, likely to end up with some big revelation at the end, but ultimately little more than a diverting way to pass the time. I had read Delany's most famous stories by that point, though, and so I wanted more--I wanted transcendence. Thankfully, something kept me reading.

Teachers of playwrighting and screenwriting often tell their students that dialogue should "not be about what it's about"; "High Weir" is a story that's not about what it's about. The plot, which at first seems so important, by the end has become nearly irrelevant, and the characters, who at first seemed so interchangeable, by the end have become the entire focus. The story is a trick. It knows what sort of tale the reader expects, and goes a long way toward offering it, then digs deeper, takes a U-turn, jumps the rails, and splits town like a thief with a truckload of absinthe and a direct line to somebody else's god.

What we end up with is a Romantic vision of madness and a fun idea of the brain as a hologram. When I first read those last pages of the story at age 16, madness seemed artistic and alluring, and holograms were cool. Holograms are still cool, but I've experienced enough now to find madness both banal and terrifying, but there's something about the Romanticism of "High Weir" at the end that is powerful rather than grotesque. Perhaps it is the infusion of such a view into a story that is otherwise so matter-of-fact, so dry, so procedural--the two extremes balance each other, with rationality and irrationality tied together in a dance of form and meaning.

And now we do our own dance, partnering gratitude to Ellen Datlow and SCI FICTION with sadness at the demise of such a fine endeavor. Joyful appreciation entwines with anger for lost possibilities.

Let's dance all night, kids, because mourning hurts like hell.

Link to story

"The Discharge" by Christopher Priest: An Appreciation by Paul Kincaid

2005-11-28T01:10:00.000-08:00

Sometime in the mid-1970s there was a change in Christopher Priest's writing. It was signalled by a pair of short stories, "An Infinite Summer" (1976) and "Palely Loitering" (1979), atmospheric tales whose emphasis on psychology and strangeness was a move away from the overtly science fictional pieces that had preceded them. His novel of that period, A Dream of Wessex (1977), in retrospect, can be seen as a harbinger of the themes and manners of his later work. But it was the stories set in the Dream Archipelago that really trumpeted the fact that here was something disturbing, challenging and new. There were only five stories, the first appearing in 1978, the last in 1980, but they must loom large in any appreciation of Priest's subsequent writing.

The Dream Archipelago stories are set in a world in which the large continent in the north is home to sophisticated nations whose technology and culture are roughly on a par with our own. The two largest of these nations are engaged in a seemingly endless war, which is fought out in the barren and largely uninhabited southern continent. The sea between the two continents is dotted with a string of islands so profuse that there is no island from which it is impossible to see several others. The islands of the Dream Archipelago have maintained a strict neutrality, though the terms differ from island to island. Some allow no outsiders to land, others allow no outsiders to leave once they have landed, still others allow troopships to visit for the purposes of rest and recreation. There are many whores in the Dream Archipelago.

Overtly based on the Greek islands, just becoming a popular but still exotic package holiday destination at the time the stories were being written, the islands of the Dream Archipelago are presented as warm and alluring. But for the visitors we follow in four of the five original stories (in "The Negation" (1978), the Dream Archipelago is an aspiration that is never achieved), it is a place where sexual dreams become nightmares, where the desirable becomes a trap, and where perverse psycho-sexual dramas are played out to a generally fatal conclusion. The Dream Archipelago sequence reached its climax with The Affirmation (1981), which revealed our world to be a psychotic echo of the Dream Archipelago, and vice versa, a self-deluding mobius strip of realities which drained the setting of all further figurative and psychological value. After that stunning tour de force of a novel, it seemed, there was nothing more that could possibly be said about the Dream Archipelago.

Then, in 1999, twenty years after his first visit to the islands, Priest gathered the Dream Archipelago stories (all revised to some extent) into one volume, with a linking thread of narrative. The enterprise clearly reawakened the narrative energy that the setting had once provided, and he followed the collection with a new Dream Archipelago story, "The Discharge." With such a genesis there is one inevitable question: has the Dream Archipelago emerged intact from its twenty-year hiatus? To which the answer has to be: yes. The sheer nastiness of the fate that awaited visitors--the islands can feel like a sort of Venus fly trap, tempting their victims in to a sweet and sticky end--is no more. Indeed the story ends, if not with a note of redemption, then at least with a sense of continuity, of survival, possibly even of some sort of achievement. But if that is different, the casual cruelty of the islands along the way is the same as ever, and the perverse, unsettling, psycho-sexual overtones remain dark and foreboding.

"The Discharge"--as in so many of Priest's fictions, the title is a simple declarative that yet hides a dizzying multiplicity of interpretations: electrical discharge, military discharge, ejaculation, pus, among others--is a story of lost identity, of the uncertainty of our place within the world. One of the things that the Dream Archipelago allowed was the displacement of the individual, the cutting loose from context. When, in The Affirmation, that displacement became possible within our contemporary reality, it opened up the road that Priest's fictions have followed ever since. As our unnamed narrator "emerge(s) into my memories" in the very first line of the story, it places him immediately in the company of Peter Sinclair in The Affirmation, Richard Grey in The Glamour (1984, revised 1996), and J.L. Sawyer in The Separation (2002), all characters whose memory is unreliable, hence weakening their grip on who they are.

Our narrator is, we discover, a new recruit in a northern army marching down to the troopship that will take him away to the battlefields of the southern continent. But as the troopship carries him past the mysterious islands of the Dream Archipelago, the litany of their names found on an illicit map (maps have been a recurring feature of Priest's work since at least the one found in Inverted World (1974)) reawakens something in our narrator's fragmented memory. It seems he was an artist, or at least had an interest in art, or at least in the works of one particular painter, Rascar Acizzone, from the Dream Archipelago island of Muriseay. Acizzone was a leading exponent of an art style known as "tactilism," which employed a new technology, "ultrasound microcircuity." Like the scintilla in "The Watched" (1978), this new technology is used within the Dream Archipelago to lay bare the sexual self and then entrap the user within that sexuality. In this instance, Acizzone's paintings are layerings of colour that more than anything seem to resemble the work of Rothko, but when anyone touches the paintings the ultrasound reveals a representation of their deepest sexual imagining. Over time, we discover later in the story, the ultrasound can also destroy one's memory, which probably explains what happened to our narrator (and almost certainly explains why Acizzone's paintings have now fallen out of fashion and are all but forgotten).

Then the troops are given shore time in Muriseay. The narrator goes in search of Acizzone (and, implicitly, his own memory), but without success, and in the end finds himself drawn to a nightclub already crowded with soldiers. He is targeted by the whores in the club and led away into a dark labyrinth of rooms and corridors where, inexplicably, he finds himself witness to sexual tableaux which recreate two of the most charged images he had found in Acizzone's paintings. Then, abruptly, he escapes and returns to the troopship which takes him on to the war zone. During the years he spends in the army in the freezing wastelands of the southern continent, he experiences an almost constant diet of fear and boredom, but no actual fighting. The war itself seems to be always somewhere else. But as the three-thousandth anniversary of the start of the war approaches, the troops become convinced that a major push is about to happen. On the eve of the campaign, the narrator deserts. By giving over all his accumulated army pay, he persuades a group of whores to smuggle him across to the Dream Archipelago, only to discover he is just one of a very large number making the same journey.

Since the Dream Archipelago is so clearly identified with sex, at its most alluring and its most threatening, it is inevitable that it is a network of whores who provide his safe refuge on island after island as he makes his way across the Dream Archipelago. He discovers, or rediscovers, an artistic talent of his own, and funds his journey by painting for tourists along the way. His destination, inevitably, is Muriseay, where he starts to experiment with ultrasound. Eventually he produces a series of pictures whose hidden sexual imagery is overlaid with images drawn from the fear and isolation he experienced in the army. To store his pictures he rents an abandoned building which contains a curious labyrinth of corridors and rooms, and which is surely the same night club where he experienced the strange sexual visions on his journey to the war. Then military policemen catch up with him at the store house. They are here to give him his discharge--a euphemism for beating him up and perhaps killing him--but though injured, the narrator escapes because the policemen accidentally touch the paintings, and the images they contain prove too powerful for them. A fire starts, caused by the use of their electric batons against the paintings; but even if they were not killed in the fire we might safely assume that they had been destroyed by the images in the pictures.

And our narrator flees to another island, to face more mysteries of the Dream Archipelago. For once, the islands have not killed the one caught in their sexual trap, but for all that they remain as potent and disturbing as ever. "The Discharge" is a measure of how far Priest has come in the last quarter century. The evocation of islands with a beautiful surface but which are considerably less beautiful underneath, is perhaps more subtle. These are real, working places, as contradictory as anywhere else we might visit. But what is really interesting is how the familiar setting proves so adept at staging a story of fragmentary identity, uncertainty of self, the sort of theme that has become more and more central in novels such as The Prestige (1996), The Extremes (1998) and The Separation (2002). In the early stories the exotic landscape of the Dream Archipelago was a place where the sexual imaginings of the characters could be made visible and then turned against them. In "The Discharge" these same sexual imaginings serve a more subtle purpose, not to establish an identity--the narrator remains as unknown and unknowable at the end of the story as he is at the beginning, even to himself--but to make a damaged personality whole enough to survive. It is more positive than we are used to in the Dream Archipelago, but it forms a fascinating development in the way Priest is exploring how our sense of identity shapes our understanding of and our engagement with the world about us.

Link to story.

"A Cold Dish" by Lisa Tuttle: An Appreciation by Melanie Fazi

2005-11-28T01:00:00.000-08:00

Quiet horror would be a way to describe this story, and Lisa Tuttle's writings in general. In this tale of unusual revenge, horror never lies in what is described, but in what is hinted, what the reader is led to guess before it happens. The tension lies in the tiniest details. The first sentence grabs you immediately and then it's too late, you're caught in the web.

This is about ordinary people and simple themes anyone can relate to. Pregnancy. Punishment. Revenge. With just a hint of Greek tragedy. The unnamed narrator could be any woman, any of the female readers of this story. The only thing that strays a little from our reality is this concept of "sentence pregnancy". What a creepy idea. A woman carrying other people's baby, seeking revenge, haunted by echoes from an old myth . . . . This is as simple as it's disturbing.

And the voice that tells the story remains so quiet the whole time. This particular detail makes the tale even more chilling. Especially during that confrontation scene between the narrator and Judge Arnold Jason towards the end. How can it be that you should identify with this woman and yet feel disturbed by her, share her feelings and yet dread what she might be able to do? Might be, that's the key. The most scary aspect of the story is that you never know what will happen--what could happen.

And what does happen, of course, is not what you expected. Somehow, you almost saw it coming. But still, you wonder until the end. What if...?

Link to story.

"The Transcendent Tigers" by R.A. Lafferty: An Appreciation by Mike Morrow

2005-11-23T09:30:00.000-08:00

In 2003 I discovered a yellowing Daw edition of R.A. Lafferty’s collection Strange Doings in a used bookshop in Madison, Wisconsin. My wife and I were celebrating our wedding anniversary, and that night while I waited for her to get ready for dinner, I dove in and read a short piece called "The Transcendent Tigers."

Big mistake.

"The Transcendent Tigers," like most of Lafferty's fiction, is a fast drug with a slow fuse. It deceives you with instant gratification, even while it changes your body chemistry so that you can never be the same reader again. The quick highs come right after one another: Lafferty was the best character-namer in history and a master of the deadpan, devastating sentence that can render the entire previous paragraph ironic with a single noun-verb pair.

But Lafferty leaves you thinking, thank God, he never reveals too much. So that you'll be enjoying a fine anniversary meal with your spouse and still thinking about how wonderful it would be if Armageddon did finally come at the hands of a seven-year-old with a red hat.

This will, in its own devious way, ruin your evening.

Your spouse will likely not want to discuss rhyming couplets that invoke devastation on the cities named within. Nor will she likely care to join you in speculating on whether or not Homoeoteleutic is really a word (it is).

But when she was ready, if she was ready, you knew you could point her to any number of Lafferty stories on the SCI FICTION site, "The Transcendent Tigers" among them, and you could grow old together basking in The Homoeoteleutic Power of a Lafferty story.

“Saddened benediction—

SCIFICTION.”

Link to story.

"Jury Service" by Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow: An Appreciation by Chris Nakashima-Brown

2005-11-23T09:14:00.000-08:00

A collaboration! It doesn’t get any more sci-fi than that. This is better than a Marvel Team-Up circa 1974! Dr. Strange and Brother Voodoo! Black Panther and the Vision! Ka-Zar and Ghost Rider! Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross! The hot Asimov's wonder boys of the new century, romping their way through a 21,000-word novella edited by Grandmaster ED. Try to find something like that in the genteel literary establishment--the authorial equivalent of free jazz, detonating the idea of the author and the conventions of storytelling with improvised explosive memes.

This thing is a case study in why SF writers--and readers--have more fun. Two brightly burning young Turk authors body-slamming in cyberspace like a virtual WWF tag-team. A mano-a-mano ¿Quien es Mas Macho? for people whose stock-in-trade is post-cyberpunk eyeball kicks. Every page another bite of Gonzo Marzipan as the boys pile it on:

- Libyan Goth ninjettes!

- A hungover protagonist "trapped in a mutating bathroom by a transgendered atheist role-playing critic."

- Biohazard burkas! Anti-nanophage underwear!

- The world reimagined post-Singularity as "a matrioshka brain, nested Dyson orbitals built from dismantled moons and planets."

- Mile-long catamaran airships to North Africa crewed by uplifted Islamic gibbons!

- A feral privatized blood bank with a thing for Welsh T-helper lymphocytes.

- Visual spam filtered with adbuster proxy services!

- A chimera engineered with Koranic genome from drosophila, mus musculus, and twentieth century situationist Dan Quayle.

- Doc Björk and the People's Magical Libyan Jamahirya!

The plot? Twenty-first century party people thrown into the tech jury service: "defending the Earth from the scum of the post-Singularity patent office." A solid frame for a story that reads more like a really good Worldcon panel than a conventional narrative. After all, it's the literature of ideas.

The brain bombs pop out of the screen here, each page a contest between the authors to outdo each other with imaginative pyrotechnics. Politics, technology, fashion, food, physics (real and meta-), geography, travel, architecture, religions, genetics, you name it. Fun, and funny, infused with a warm and welcoming nerd whimsy--the spirit of Douglas Adams channeling Greg Egan through an Ono-Sendai translator. Snap, crackle, pop, chortle and boing!

Link to story.