Salon Fantastique: A Gray and Soundless Tide

Is there a canonical selkie story? I don’t just mean a list of common characteristics of selkies and selkie stories — human/seal shapeshifting, shedding of skin, seduction, general air of romantic tragedy, yadda yadda — I mean a single, archetypal, root story. A couple of moments in Catherynne M. Valente’s tale make me think that there is — “This is the only story selkies have”, her selkie tells her narrator, “it is all they know: how to be kept, how to be found, how to escape” — but if that’s the case, I’m not familiar with it. I was left feeling much the same way I feel about some of Sonya Taaffe’s stories (such as 2004’s “A Maid on the Shore”, another selkie story featuring a redhead), that I was missing a level, that I didn’t quite get it.

But I can tell you what I thought of the story’s naked self. It is, I think, the shortest piece of prose I’ve read by Valente — although since (a) the longer pieces of prose I’ve read have tended to be broken up into multiple short segments, often telling their own stories, and (b) this story, too, contains another story within itself, it is perhaps not a departure for her. It also happens to be the shortest story in Salon Fantastique (the next shortest, if I’ve counted pages correctly, is “My Travels with Al-Qaeda”), and that does make a noticeable difference. Of the stories I’ve read from this book, Valente’s is the least elaborate, the most focused on one central situation. The story’s narrator, Dyveke, encounters a selkie in the form of a woman, carrying her skin on the street; she takes the skin, which “stuck to [her] hands in a moment, mottled and rubbery, sliding over [her] wrists as though looking for a way in”; she takes the selkie home with her (Dyveke’s unnamed husband sighs, and asks his wife, “Didn’t you ever read a book?”); the selkie sleeps between them, and eventually tells Dyveke her name, Silja, and her story; and that done, she leaves.

“A Gray and Soundless Tide” is not as stuffed with imagery as some of Valente’s other work, but it’s still told in language that you notice. Silja’s stride is “like a prayer”; the selkie “was beautiful, like a scrubbed length of sun-bleached wood”; the moon is “like a wound in the sky”; and so on. Every detail is a bit brighter, a bit more intense than in the real world. It works for the story in some ways, and against it in others. On the plus side, it is easy to believe that a mythical creature would speak in such a register — when Silja tells her story to Dyveke, she does so with a sort of exhausted lyricism, as though the words are just tumbling out of her. Similarly, the story’s world feels like a world in which magical things are possible.

On the minus side, Silja’s voice is perhaps not adequately differentiated from Dyveke’s framing narrative. The first two of the three examples I gave above are spoken by Dyveke, for instance, and such language doesn’t feel as natural in her mouth as it does in Silja’s. Moreover, the two speakers share the same verbal tics, most notably a penchant for dramatic repetition: “in the night, in the sweat-ridden night,” says Silja, “I felt sick, so sick, somewhere deep in the center of me”; “She leaned her head against the walls,” Dyveke tells us, “as if listening, always listening.” It is a sufficiently distinctive pattern, and crops up frequently enough in the story’s ten pages, that it starts to grate; and every so often, you notice that a story which aspires to be folkloric, an iteration of an old, old truth, is instead modern, carefully beautiful artifice.

Salon Fantastique: Yours, Etc.

“Yours, Etc.” is the story of a man walking around the outside of his house to ward off ghosts, while remembering people he has known who died. It is full of paragraphs like this:

He’d never found out how. He was surprised how upset he was. His wife told him again about her stand-in theory and he had said sure, maybe there was something in that. Both of them knew she didn’t mean it. She was just talking, helping him fill the empty space until he got used to the girl’s death. He thought about the girl a lot and realized that she had been alive to him, she’d encapsulated a universe in a way that he felt many of the people he knew didn’t. He’d believed in her in a way he didn’t believe in other people.

The use of so many sentences starting with pronouns has, I think, two effects, both of which interact with the effect of the story’s fantastic component. The first effect is that the pronouns personalise the story; almost everything that happens is defined in terms of how it affects either the protagonist’s emotions or his actions. In fact, the story has almost no context beyond the personal. We never learn much about where the protagonist lives, for instance. The second effect is that the repetition (which reflects the repetitiveness of the protagonist’s actions, walking around and around his house) becomes numbing, and contributes to the affectless tone of most of the story. It is a very interior story, but almost every emotion is held at arm’s length from us; we are not invited in to share them.

And both these effects tend to damp down our reaction to anything external to the protagonist — the characters feel (to me) quite clearly contemporary in their thoughts and reactions, but the landscape they exist in is vague — but in particular, they damp down our reaction to the story’s fantastic component. The ghosts the protagonist sees are a regular feature of his life; just another part of the landscape. Or, to put it another way, the fantastic in “Yours, Etc” is not handled in the way that it is handled in a story like “The Guardian of the Egg”. In Grant’s story, reality is more dreamlike than ours to start with; the everyday concerns never arise. The protagonist wears a pair of antlers to work for a day and nobody notices. But the story’s style enables it to retain a connection to human experience nonetheless.

So far so good. The construction of the story is neat on other levels, as well: the protagonist is specifically aiming to ward ghosts away from his wife, who is inside the house writing letters (to ghosts). The reflection of the emotional separation of the two characters in their physical separation is effective — there are a couple of remembered conversations, but the two don’t come together in the present tense of the story until the very end. And there is a neat shift in tone as this happens; those personal statements shift from what the protagonist doesn’t know or isn’t certain about to what he does know and is certain about — “He would not disappear. This was his wife. This was his life. This was his path around his house. His home.”

It’s satisfying, but not a story I have any urge to re-read; I don’t feel there’s more to be mined from a repeat visit. Which is odd, because the style and tone of the story is reminiscent of Gavin J. Grant’s earlier “Heads Down, Thumbs Up“. That story (which is excellent, and which you should read right now ~~because as far as I know the SciFiction archive is still due to be taken down at the end of the year~~ [see comments, again]) felt as though it was written with deliberate gaps: answers and understanding open to our interpretation, which of course will be different for every person every time the story is read. “Yours, Etc.” feels to start with as though it’s intended in the same way, but the ambiguity doesn’t matter in the way that it matters to “Heads Down, Thumbs Up”, it doesn’t offer the same interpretive richness; the protagonist asserts himself, he is led into the house by his wife, and the story is over.

Salon Fantastique: The Guardian of the Egg

As one of the three people on the internet who didn’t much care for Christopher Barzak’s 2005 story “The Language of Moths” — it was the combination of a magic autistic girl and lashings of sentiment that did it for me — I approached his entry in Salon Fantastique with a certain amount of wariness. There are a couple of superficial similarities between the two stories, in that both are about families, and in particular about a brother watching something magical happen to a sister, and both feel like they come from the soil of America. But “The Guardian of the Egg” is a bit more restrained, and a good bit more peculiar, and both of those things work in its favour.

The brother in question is Stephen, and the peculiarity is one of those daft premises that are easy to think up but much harder to make into satisfying stories. In its up-front matter-of-factness, “The Guardian of the Egg” reminded me slightly of Joe Hill’s wonderful “Pop Art”, whose opening sentences introduce us to the inflateable Art Roth with an almost completely straight face in much the same way that Barzak here introduces us to Stephen’s sister Hester: a girl neither popular nor remarkable, who becomes somewhat more remarkable and somewhat less popular when a tree starts growing out of her head.

To make this work, the story has to walk a fine line between seriousness and wonder. If, for example, we started laughing at the story when Hester’s doctor tells her parents that “She’s coping quite well”; or if the absurdity of the clothes Hester’s mother makes her rapidly-growing daughter outweighed the pathos of the situation; or if we ever thought too hard about the fact that apparently the whole story has been made into a TV movie called Wild Things; then it would all fall apart. On the other hand, if the story ignored such practical considerations as doctors and clothes (the TV movie is clearly more optional) then the magic of the situation, the ongoing transformation of Hester, would be too untethered from human experience, and would likely fall flat. Or, as Stephen puts it, when it becomes apparent that his sister’s transformation is starting to affect the family house:

Ferns should not be growing in bedrooms, unless they are potted. Vines should not grow over mailboxes, unless the mailbox is in a jungle outpost. Tiger lilies should not grow in place of a girl’s eyelashes. There are rules in this world.

Sometimes you just have to go with it: Hester’s schoolfriends teasing her in exactly the same way (you sense) that they teased her for getting braces stretches credulity somewhat. But there are rules in this world, and they hold — not our rules, but internally consistent ones. So even though we know, on some level, that it wouldn’t really happen this way, we never quite admit it to ourselves. Instead we are seduced: by the gentle warmth of the catalysed sibling friendship, and the rush as their whole town succumbs to spring, becoming a riot of nature rediscovered. And we leave the story smiling.

Salon Fantastique: My Travels with Al-Qaeda

It’s a sneaky trick, this book: an unthemed anthology prettied up to look like a themed one. [EDIT: But see the comments] Why such fancy-dress should be necessary is unclear to me, but apparently it is (at least, with a couple of small-press exceptions, unthemed anthologies seem to be few and far between at the moment), and if that’s what it takes to give me the kind of enjoyable whiplash that going from “Concealment Shoes” to “My Travels with Al-Qaeda” gave me then, well, that’s what it takes. That said, the jump between Youmans’ story and this is only an exaggerated version of the jump between Shepard’s and di Filippo’s, or di Filippo’s and Youmans’. Theme anthologies are all very well, but they don’t tend to give you the sense of possibility, or the shock of the unexpected, that Salon Fantastique is giving me.

Not that the fragmented style, insistent tone, or serious subject of Lavie Tidhar’s story were, in themselves, surprises. Reading “My Travels with Al-Qaeda” after an extremely conventional story like “Concealment Shoes” made those aspects stand out, but in the last twelve months, Tidhar has published a bunch of stories, in venues like SCIFICTION, Clarkesworld Magazine and Strange Horizons; and most of them have been, in one sense or another, bold. They may not have been entirely successful (“My Travels with Al-Qaeda” isn’t quite a home run, either), but they almost always feel like Tidhar has something to say, and is trying to find the best way to say it.

This time around, “something to say” is a meditation on the aftershocks of terrorism, and “the best way” is fragmentation. “My Travels with Al-Qaeda” contains more subsections than pages, and despite its brevity includes two poems (both by Israeli writer Lior Tirosh who, if Google and the law of conservation of initials are anything to go by, is fictional) and two brief statements, by Martin Ayub and Khalid Saleh, taken from real FBI transcripts made in the wake of the 1998 US Embassy bombings. The fictional meat of the story focuses on a couple, a woman called Alyson and the unnamed (male?) narrator, and is stitched out of vignettes set in, primarily, Dar-es-Salaam in 1998, Tel Aviv in 2004, and London in 2005.

What is actually happening is unclear — one senses that Tidhar knows but, either deliberately or inadvertently, has not left quite enough textual clues for the reader to be able to piece together the backstory with certainty. “I keep going back to the disaster areas”, the narrator tells us at the start of the story; one interpretation of the last sentence is that this is literally true, that the 1998 bombings caused the narrator to come unstuck in time, Billy Pilgrim style, and that some attractive force exerted brings them back into the world at or near similar events. Another interpretation is that events are simply being told out of sequence: we also told “Perhaps it starts, if it starts at all, in July 2005”. Those appear to be the two poles of the story, at any rate. “Somehow,” the narrator says, “we are caught between these two summers, and the seasons freeze”; later, he likens their experience to a videotape played over and over again, looped with no resolution. A third interpretation is that the story is a dream, a jumbled up mash of recollection and imagination. This would suit the narrator’s omniscience, and their apparent ability to know what the other characters in the story are thinking, are dreaming.

To a large extent, it doesn’t matter which is the case. The power of the story — which is considerable — is in its effect on the reader. “Just another collapsed dream” is how one of the poems describes the ruins of the American Embassy in Nairobi, and whether the phrase is original to Tidhar or borrowed from Tirosh, the feelings of helplessness and resignation that it implies saturate the story. The world itself becomes oppressive — “August heat squats over low buildings” and “Night covers the tarmac as if trying […] to hide the city’s flaws” — and for a dozen pages or so, we are trapped in the loop with the narrator. But even when we’ve turn the page and escaped, the effect of the story lingers: we remember the urgency and economy of the telling, and the sharp sudden pains that are told.

Salon Fantastique: Concealment Shoes

I don’t think I’ve previously encountered any of Marly Youmans’ work; but going by her website, at least some of her fantasy has been young-adult-oriented, and on the evidence of “Concealment Shoes” that doesn’t come as a surprise, for several reasons. First, it is a story about a sister (Beatrice, 14) and a brother (James, unspecified-but-younger), settling into their new home, their family having moved from the South to the North of the US. (The setting, I think, is roughly contemporary, although the titular tradition dates from the 18th century). Second, the stakes feel lower than in the other stories I’ve read so far; these are characters too young to have anything to atone for, and equally their innocence is never seriously threatened.

And third, Beatrice and James have more agency than any of the other characters I’ve encountered so far. In “The Night Whiskey” and “The Lepidopterist”, the protagonists were apprentices. They were involved in the story, but more by having things happen to them than doing things. Similarly, in “Femaville 29”, Parrish reacts more than he acts, and when he does act, it is usually in ways peripheral to the true story. In “Concealment Shoes”, on the other hand, Beatrice and James cause the problem — during a game of hide-and-seek in their rambling new cottage, stuffed with packing crates and boxes, James discovers two shoes, one small one large, stuck up a chimney. Beatrice helps him take them down, only for the two to discover that by so doing they’ve broken a ward that lay on the house, admitting a demon. So then, inevitably, the two children set about fixing the problem, by collecting one shoe for every member of their family and replacing the set that were in the chimney. There is still an element of distance between the reader and the action — Beatrice is the main viewpoint character, but it’s James who experiences “the signal moment” of his childhood — but it’s much less than in the Ford, the Shepard, or the di Filippo.

It has the feel of a thoroughly professional piece of writing that achieves what it sets out to do. The exciting bits are, mostly, exciting; the creepy bits are, mostly, creepy (particularly when the smoke demon is menacing Beatrice and James’ sleeping older brother); and the charming bits are, mostly, charming, although I could have done without the cat, or at least without the cat’s too-precious-for-words name, “Princess Owl”. It’s an adventure, and it zips along, and ends neatly. But when it’s done, it’s done. It doesn’t haunt; it evaporates: and so I find myself with little more to say.

Salon Fantastique: Femaville 29

If I tell you that on the second page of this story a tsunami is described as looking “like a liquid mountain mounted on a rocket sled”, it probably sounds like I’m saying “Femaville 29” is typical Paul di Filippo: slightly parodic, slightly manic, with some big boffo concept at its core. And to an extent that’s true, since it’s a story where plot is king, and characters hook up with an almost charming disregard for anything so prosaic as motivation, and the protagonist does have the rather daft name of Parrish Hedges. But, as it turns out, that tsunami is headed west across the Atlantic. It smashes into an unnamed city on the Eastern seaboard of the US, Parrish’s home, and the rest of the story takes place in the titular refugee camp (FEMA being the Federal Emergency Management Agency). The political sentiment is clear, if somewhat self-flagellating.

But that’s not the core of the story, either. Lip-service is paid to the sense of trauma such a catastrophe must cause, but if anything, for the survivors it turns out to have been a boon, by clearing away the detritus of their world. “The first week after the disaster”, we learn, felt like “an open-ended New Year’s Eve, the portal to some as-yet undefined millennium where all our good resolutions would come to pass.” When Parrish is interviewed by the FEMA reallocation officials, he rejects the placements they offer him, explicitly because he doesn’t want to leave the “interzone of infinite possibility” that the camp represents. And it’s not just him; nobody in the camp, it seems, wants to move on. Parrish’s explanation for why nobody wants to go somewhere secure and sensible is that everyone “wants to be reborn as phoenixes” because that’s what it would take to justify the loss they’ve suffered.

Written down so plainly, such a scenario looks crass and juvenile, because it is; yet in di Filippo’s hands, it somehow becomes breezy and infectious. It’s a gift that can sometimes make di Filippo seem an old-fashioned writer, and something of a big kid. You sense that, for him, sf is, genuinely and largely unironically, a toybox — that being an sf writer is, to borrow the phrase Bruce Sterling used in the introduction to his most recent collection, “a golden opportunity to get up to most any mischief imaginable”. And he’s good enough at it that we keep turning the pages, and while we do we don’t notice that the plot is running on convenience (Parrish hooks up with a woman called Nia, but said hooking is entirely irrelevant except that it brings him into the orbit of Nia’s daughter Izzy). Or if we notice we don’t care. In most Paul di Filippo stories, we’re on first-name terms with all the characters, and we like it that way.

If “Femaville 29” is a kind of wish-fulfillment, though, it’s not an entirely uncomplicated one. The members of the camp get restless; their enthusiasm for limitless possibility turns to dissatisfaction with their very limited present. Fights and arguments break out — at least, so we are told. We stay with Parrish, who by this time is too busy watching the children of the camp create a new city out of stones and twigs and leaves. Izzy is one of the “designers, engineers, imagineers” running the show, and it quickly becomes clear that the last of those categories is the most important. The children are filling the space left in the world with something better than the world (perhaps a polder). Inevitably, when FEMA loses patience, and decides to forcibly relocate the refugees, the city is ready and willing to take them instead — with the caveat that they have to let go of their past enough to cross the threshold. Parrish (I’m about to give the ending away) doesn’t make it (if he did, the story really would be too generous to like), but he accepts his lot without rancour. It’s enough for him to know that he might be able to get there someday. For a few moments, it’s enough for us, too.

Salon Fantastique: The Lepidopterist

When I think of Lucius Shepard’s writing, I think first of a voice. It’s a voice filled with experience and confidence, speaking in long, fluid sentences, knowing that it’s telling me a story I need to hear. It’s the voice of stories like “Barnacle Bill the Spacer” or “Jailwise“. Of course, Shepard modulates this voice according to the character using it (Senor Volto, for instance, uses almost as many long words as the narrator of either story above, but clearly to somewhat different effect), and on occasion he uses other, more colloquial voices as well. But it’s that rich, mellifluous tone I think of first when I think of Shepard, to the point where it comes as a bit of a shock to start reading “The Lepidopterist” and encounter (after a brief opening paragraph that frames the story as a transcript of a recording made thirty years ago, and the narrator we’re about to hear as “short, in his sixties, as wizened and brown as an apricot seed, and […] very drunk”) this:

I’m goin to tell you bout a storm, cause it please me to do so. You cotch me in the tellin mood, and when John Anderson McCrae get in the tellin mood, ain’t nobody on this little island better suited for the job. I been foolin with storms one way or the other since time first came to town, and this storm I goin to speak of, it ain’t the biggest, it don’t have the stiffest winds, but it bring a strange cargo to our shores.

It’s different, but well-executed. There’s still poetry here, albeit of a rougher kind than is usual for Shepard — “I been foolin with storms one way or the other since time first came to town” is a lovely, clever expression, and there are lines like it throughout the story. But while McCrae is clearly still a Shepardian storyteller, experienced and confident, to me at least he never rang as true as someone like Tommy Penhaligon or Billy Long Gone. That’s partly because I never quite got the hang of the dialect — as with any writing so stylised, you expect it to take a few pages to get acclimated, but I found myself re-reading passages even up to the end — but also, I think, a function of the relative brevity of the tale. Shepard always seems most comfortable to me with some elbow-room in his stories, but he doesn’t (arguably can’t allow himself to) have any here, and beyond being a storyteller, it’s never really clear who McCrae is. A voice is an indication of character, but also a vehicle; which is to say that what the voice says matters.

So my problem with McCrae is compounded by the fact that the plot is nothing to write home about. Indeed, if the voice is something of a departure for Shepard, the story it tells verges on being overly familiar. The trajectory is one we’ve followed before, a tale of an encounter with the fantastic: the protagonist is drawn by stages away from the consensus reality we know, is confronted by a hallucinatory vision, and dazedly withdraws into normality. This is the basic shape of Shepard stories such as “Eternity and Afterward”, “The Park Sweeper”, and “Crocodile Rock”, and even “Only Partly Here” (probably the best thing Shepard has written in the past five years, though “Over Yonder” runs it close). In “The Lepidopterist” McCrae tells how, as a youth, he worked with his father as a wrecker, drawing storm-lashed ships astray onto rocks; how on one such job they encountered Arthur Jessup, an American transporting some unusual butterflies (“Whether they the Devil’s work or one of God’s miracles, I cannot tell you,” McCrae says. “But it for certain they unusual butterflies”); how the butterflies wove silken cocoons large enough to hatch a person; and what happened next.

But at no point does “The Lepidopterist” have the astonishing intensity of a story like “Eternity and Afterward”, or, at the other end of the scale, the delicacy of a story like “Only Partly Here”. What’s left? There’s a nod to the politics of the situation in the fact that Jessup engineers McCrae’s encounter with one of the butterfly-creatures as a gift, saying that he wants to take away some of the boy’s courage for his own good. But McCrae’s subsequent assessment — “So if Mister Jessup make me a present, it were like most Yankee presents and take away more than it give” — feels oddly half-hearted. As allegory it doesn’t catch, and the sense that McCrae hasn’t lived the life he was meant for doesn’t sting as it should. So while my presumptuous guess would be that it’s the voice for which David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have picked the story up for their year’s best fantasy, I can also see why some reviews haven’t mentioned the story at all. It’s strange: McCrae’s voice is classic Shepard in a number of ways, but seems to be missing the one thing that can usually be taken for granted: a burning need to tell. I enjoyed “The Lepidopterist”, but I don’t know why it had to be told.

Salon Fantastique: The Night Whiskey

I got my hands on a copy of Salon Fantastique, the latest Ellen Datlow/Terri Windling anthology, a couple of days ago, and the probably-foolish idea of reading at least a story a day from the book, and writing short blog posts about them, has germinated in my head. “Short” being the operative word; if these start ballooning into 1500-word essays I’m going to start running out of time. I might write about every story in the book, I might just write about a handful, or just this one. We’ll see how it goes.

First up (but not the first story in the book) is Jeffrey Ford’s entry, “The Night Whiskey”, which Nic singled out as one of the best stories in the book in her review, and which Jonathan Strahan has picked up for his year’s best. It’s certainly a strong story, although for me I think not quite first-rank Ford — which should be taken as praising the story with a faint damn, since Ford is so reliably good. It’s also quite interesting as “a Jeffrey Ford story”. In a (slightly rushed) piece for the LBC when Ford’s novel The Girl in the Glass was under discussion earlier this year, I tried dividing Ford’s stories into two types, loud (exuberantly fantastic) and quiet (liminal). In those terms, “The Night Whiskey” is one of the stories that don’t really fit into either category; a quiet story about someone on the edge of a loud one.

The story is set in a small American town called Gatchfield, which would be like any other such town (“one of those places you pass but never stop in while on vacation to some National Park”) except for a unique local flora, the deathberry. Deathberry plants grow only out of dead bodies: once a year some of the townsfolk harvest them and distill the berries into the titular whiskey. There’s only enough in each harvest to produce eight shots of night whiskey, so a lottery is held to determine who gets to drink them. Winning tickets are prized, because in addition to being sufficiently intoxicating that just the one shot gets the person who consumes it blind drunk, the whiskey transports the drinker to a fugue state, or possibly an actual alternate dimension, in which they can talk with dead relatives. The protagonist, Ernest, doesn’t win the lottery, and isn’t involved in the production of the whiskey. Instead, he’s an apprentice for the drunk harvest, helping to round up the whiskey-drinkers the morning after the night before — not the easiest feat in the world, given that for some unknown reason drinkers always climb a tree before they pass out.

Tonally, the first part of the story is surreal, even lighthearted. But there is, inevitably, a shift: a darker side to the drink is revealed. To borrow a phrase that Graham used when reviewing 20th Century Ghosts, “The Night Whiskey” is a masterclass in the rhetoric of endings. (It may not be a coincidence that, like most of Joe Hill’s work, “The Night Whiskey” is ultimately a horrific story; endings are always important, but arguably they’re essential for horror stories to work.) Details from the first part of the story are picked up and paid off; the reader’s understanding of what’s happening is stage-managed so precisely that recognition arrives barely a sentence or two ahead of the explanation (at least, that was the effect for me); and the shift in the positioning of the fantastic, with Ernest never drawn all the way into the wildest happenings at the centre of the tale, but drawn in further than we think he will be, and dealt a sort of glancing blow that reorients his life, is beautifully handled.

My main reservation is the pacing of the opening pages, which seemed to take just a little too long to get to where they were going, without ever quite making Gatchfield either real enough or Twin Peaks enough to compensate. Thinking about it, I would also have liked, just this once, the articulation of the story’s theme to carry a bit more force. The idea — that Gatchfield is a town in unnatural stasis, and the deathberry and its consequences are a sort of re-assertion of a natural law of change — resonates strongly with me, and forms the basis of the ending. Ernest and his girlfriend escape to “the biggest brightest city” they can find, where “Every day there was change and progress and crazy news on the television”. That seems to me a neat inversion of a common fantasy arc, and it deserved to stand on slightly more solid ground, to have more to balance it than the theorising of an eccentric doctor.

The Color of Neanderthal Eyes

Everyone knows what they say about the work of James Tiptree, Jr: that the longer his stories, and the later written, the weaker. So that is what was in my mind when I started reading Tiptree’s penultimate story, “The Color of Neanderthal Eyes” (written 1986, published in the May 1988 F&SF; page numbers here come from 2000’s this-and-that book Meet Me At Infinity). It was, they say, the revelation of his true identity that marked the change. After all, only a few stories written after made it into Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, and though one of them (“Slow Music”) is a favourite of mine, another is perhaps the least satisfactory Tiptree I’ve read, being a story that does indeed seem to be weaker because it is longer. The pace of “With Delicate Mad Hands” is uneven, sagging in the middle, and the content seems stretched thin over the page count. They say that Tiptree’s stories are intense, but “With Delicate Mad Hands” is not.

And neither, by and large, is “The Color of Neanderthal Eyes”, although it is much more evenly constructed. It starts as, more or less, an idyll. A telepath by the name of Tom Jared, whose job is (for obvious reasons) alien contact missions, is enjoying (for obvious reasons) the solitude of shore leave on a nearly empty waterworld called Wet. He encounters one of Wet’s inhabitants, Kamir, who seems entirely too good to be true: a natural telepath, friendly, childlike in her innocence, and beautiful. As in “And I Awoke And Found Me Here On The Cold Hill’s Side”, Tiptree’s evocation of alien beauty is skillful; there is no doubt that Kamir, with her green skin and flat, non-mammalian body, is alien, but there is no doubt either that Tom is entranced by her. And so they end up on an island together, in a storm, and Tom breaks Rule One of alien contact: “There is a feeling of clasping. […] It isn’t Human, but exciting beyond words, and finally, somehow, fulfilling” (116).

But although the story is told with present-tense uncertainty, we know that something has gone wrong. A note at the start warns us that “It’s my fault, all of it and Kamir is dead. […] I am too torn up and tired to make a formal report. I am simply talking out what happened so you will see that something must be done” (112). And though Tom and Kamir spend some happy days together, travelling between various islands — indeed, Tom tells us they are the happiest days of his life — before too long Tiptree starts unweaving her paradise. The first shadow to fall over the map is Kamir’s prediction for the future: “When you love, you die,” she says. “The woman dies. The man lives, to feed the babies” (129). (Because this is a Tiptree story, we take her entirely literally.) The second shadow is Tom’s growing suspicion that Kamir has, in fact, miraculously, become pregnant: and that he has therefore caused her death. The third — after Kamir’s brother catches up with the couple, and leads them back to their peoples’ nearest camp — is the revelation that there is another people on Wet, golden-skinned, who have attacked others of Kamir’s kind. “A dreadful parallel” comes into Tom’s mind. Thanks to the story’s title, we already know what it is, and we watch as Tom resolves first to explain the situation to the Mnerrin (they are a people with no word for “peace”, because they do not know war), and then to help them.

“The point is this. You and your people are very different from the great majority of races. In my life of traveling and learning of travels, I have never encountered a race who so hated killing. You have not even the words for what is the daily occupation of many peoples — war, aggression, fighting, invasion, attack. Here, let me show you.” And I send out horrible images, to him and the other men who were leaning to hear. I saw their faces change. (143)

This is all, more or less, Tiptree stuff. But it’s true that there is something different about it, and I think it’s in the languid landscape of Wet. With the possible exception of “Slow Music”, I don’t think any of the stories in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever take place in such a peaceful environment; Wet seems independent from the convulsions of the story taking place on its surface in a way that Earth (or what we see of it) is explicitly not in stories like “The Last Flight of Doctor Ain” and “On The Last Afternoon”. Or to put it another way, Tiptree’s earlier stories feel more intense because either everything hangs in the balance, or the things that hang in the balance are made to feel as big as the world. “The Color of Neanderthal Eyes” steps back a little. It has, perhaps, more room for detail — and for tenderness. You suspect that the early Tiptree would have spent much less time establishing Tom and Kamir’s contentment. According to the endnotes in Meet Me At Infinity there is actually an earlier draft which is somewhat compressed along these lines.

Which is not to say that the story as it currently exists is bad. The ending, which makes the Neanderthal comparison explicit, is massively unnecessary (like the awkward final sentence of “The Screwfly Solution” to the nth degree), but the journey is memorable. Tom succeeds in arming and leading the Mnerrin; and if Tom never quite seems to feel the qualms about involving himself in the struggles of aliens that we are told (and feel) he ought to, the unease that comes from watching his deliberate removal of the Mnerrin’s innocence is some compensation. Most striking of all is the scene where Kamir gives birth, in which the full alienness of Mnerrin physiology is revealed:

Kamir puts her hands with mine up on her great belly. It is hot, hot. Then she pushes at it again.

Suddenly, with a dreadful caving-in feeling, her whole belly, containing the fetuses, starts to separate from the rest of her body! It tips forward, away from her, as the scarlike “lips” open. Agna is furiously working at this line, pushing his hands under her. She whimpers again. I see that the lips are actually a deep separation line, circling her whole belly, from ribs to pelvis. Oh gods, what is happening here?

[…]

But I have a horrifying look at the shell of her body left after the fetal mass tore loose. From diaphragm to hips it is empty, covered by a rapidly thickening gel membrane. Through it I can see, under her ribs, a dark mass pulsing: her heart. Below that, by her spine, I can see the great cords of nerve and blood vessel running along her backbone, inside her empty flanks, to her hips and pelvis. Nothing more. (166)

It is, to put it mildly, a contrast to the initial romanticised descriptions of Kamir. It’s not really surprising that the one mention of “The Color of Neanderthal Eyes” in Julie Phillips’ biography highlights this scene, putting it in a context of Alice Sheldon’s ongoing engagement with the concept of motherhood: “In it a mother dies happily in childbirth, knowing that her children will go on. This time Alli seemed almost wiling to accept instinct as an explanation” (390). And perhaps the scene is, in fact, the scene my hypothetical early Tiptree would have structured the story around, because it seems to me the sort of unflinching image we associate with Tiptree. But in the story as written it’s part of a larger whole, a more general exploration of the limits of biology, the in-built frameworks of weakness and strength that shape a culture.

“The Color of Neanderthal Eyes” isn’t unique in the way that early Tiptree is, there isn’t the sense that only Tiptree could have written it — but it is a good story, and makes me interested in seeking out that final collection, Crown of Stars. The value of the story, I think, is in that step back, in the way it portrays a broader situation. It ends with death, but not with the death of hope. One of the Mnerrin puts it best, as Tom is preparing to leave, to return to the Federation and petition for the people he has fallen in love with to be saved from their attackers. “It has been for you a happy time, out of your real life, which we cannot imagine,” he says. “But for us this is real life, with all its good and evil.”

A Billion Eves

There are three obvious things to say about Robert Reed, and they get said all the time. One: he is prolific. Two: he writes (mostly) traditional science fiction stories. Three: his work is highly competent. In isolation, none of these qualities is particularly remarkable, but the combination marks him out.

To take the question of productivity first, for instance, there are plenty of sf writers who produce a book a year, and more than a few who seem to manage a book every nine months or so; and of that cohort, there’s a depressing number I can’t help wishing would slow down a little. Not because it’s hard work trying to keep up, although it can be, but because there is often a sense that such productivity—whether driven by the market or by the writer’s own need to get their stories told—comes somewhat at the expense of the final product. There are a lot of sf books (to be fair, probably a lot of books in general) that feel as though they have escaped from their writers’ desk just a little too early, that seem to have needed just one more draft, just that extra bit of care. But that’s almost never the case with Reed’s work. He is, admittedly, most visible a writer of short stories. In twenty years or so of writing, he’s produced eleven novels, but more noticeable is the fact that it seems barely a month goes by without him cropping up in some magazine or other (“The Cure”, in the December 2005 F&SF, was his fiftieth story for that venue), not infrequently with substantial novellas. The stories I’ve encountered have been, almost without exception, smart, tidy, well-put-together—competent—work.

And to my mind, at least, the most interesting of them have been science fiction. I was recently involved in a discussion about what current sf it would be best to recommend to someone who used to read in the genre, drifted away a decade or two ago, and now wanted to try it again. One immediate problem with the question, of course, that a lot of the high-profile writers at the moment (China Mieville, Kelly Link) are best-known for recombinative, border-case work, which may not be the most effective starting point. Reed’s work was suggested as one way in, which makes sense to me: although the settings and themes of his stories vary widely, they tend to work like traditional sf, being usually either idea-driven, or on a grand scale, or both. In 2004, to pick a year more-or-less at random, Reed stories included “A Plague of Life” (Asimov’s, March), which is essentially a family saga, but set in a world where humans are vastly longer-lived than us; “Hexagons” (Asimov’s, June, later Hugo-nominated), which reveals an alternate history through its depiction of a strategy game and real political machinations; and several entries in his “Marrow” sequence (“River of the Queen”, F&SF, February; Mere; and The Well of Stars), which relates the story of a Great Ship, an environment so vast it contains a planet at its centre.

“A Billion Eves”, in the October/November issue of Asimov’s this year, is one of the aforementioned substantial novellas. It works in a similar way to “A Plague of Life”, which is to say that it opens on a recognisable, even familiar scene (a family preparing to go on holiday, their daughter sceptical, expecting things to go wrong) with a few odd details (character names like Kala, the daughter, and Sandor, her brother; place names like the Mother Ocean), and then pulls back by stages to reveal how drastically the story’s world differs from our own. In the foreground, though, sure enough trouble strikes the holiday: they leave on Friday, but the family car soon breaks down. Luckily, it’s not too far to the nearest garage.

Despite its being the Sabbath, the traffic was heavy—freight trucks and tiny cars and everything between. Traveling men and a few women bought fuel and sweet drinks. The women were always quick to pay and eager to leave; most were nearly as old as Mom, but where was the point in taking chances? The male customers lingered, and the fix-it man seemed to relish their company, discussing every possible subject with each of them. The weather was a vital topic, as were sports teams and the boring district news. A glum little truck driver argued that the world was already too crowded and cluttered for his tastes, and the old gentleman couldn’t agree more. Yet the next customer was a happy salesman, and, in front of him, the fix-it man couldn’t stop praising their wise government and the rapid expansion of the population.

As prose, this paragraph is not particularly special, but what’s nice about it is that it raises questions and provokes assumptions through its choice of details, without stepping outside the scene. Friday is widely accepted as the Sabbath; there is either a specific or general situation that’s putting women in danger; population growth is encouraged by the government; and sports and local news continue as usual. Before too long, a repurposed school bus pulls in for fuel. Sandor interrogates the driver about his intentions. It is a tense scene, but we don’t quite know why—in fact, it’s a tense scene because we don’t quite know what’s going on, and its resolution evokes a complex mix of relief that the family are ok, and horror as the implications of what’s just happened become clearer. The driver is a member of something called the Church of Eden, and planning to leave (where to, we don’t know). When Sandor asks him how he’s going to maintain his gene pool, the man replies, “You think I should take along another? Just to be safe?” Kala starts to wonder who else is on the man’s bus, and whether they’re there voluntarily. But though it’s clearly a fate to be avoided, it also appears to be business as usual. It may not be a practice officially endorsed by the government, but the abduction of women isn’t very actively policed against, either.

For a while after this, the story devotes itself to making such a situation plausible, and exploring how things got this way. We learn that, despite the apparently twentieth-century levels of technology, we’re a long way in the future: at least 20,000 years. We learn that we may not be on Old Earth, but we’re certainly on An Earth: humanity has been expanding sideways, into parallel Earths uninhabited by humans or other intelligent species, using machines known as “rippers”. We learn that the man from the Church of Eden was on his way to finding a new Earth of his own, using a stolen ripper only powerful enough to relocate the bus and a few surrounding metres; bigger rippers can move whole city blocks. And we learn how it started: a young man named Owen, from our Earth, stole one of the larger rippers, loaded up three trucks with essential supplies, and transported them, himself, and a local sorority house to another world. Kala and Sandor’s world is just one of hundreds of worlds downstream of that initial shift, and Owen’s story—the story of the First Father—has long since become myth, forming the basis of a whole spectrum of religions.

The most devoted wives left behind written accounts of their adventures on the new world—the seven essential books in the First Father’s Testament. Quite a few churches also included the two Sarah diaries, while the more progressive faiths, such as the one Kala’s family belonged to, made room for the Six Angry Wives. Adding to the confusion were the dozens if not hundreds of texts and fragmentary accounts let behind by lesser-known voices, as well as those infamous documents generally regarded to be fictions at best and, at worst, pure heresies.

The worst of those heresies is The First Mother’s Tale, which relates the story of Claire, the fifty-something widow who had overseen the sorority house. No major church recognises Claire’s existence, but we are given every indication that her testament is, in fact, the closest to the truth. In the aftermath of the shift from Old Earth, Claire confronts Owen. In every official testament, Owen unlocks the supplies in the trucks he’d brought through, and his new wives give themselves to him willingly; in The First Mother’s Tale, Claire rejects Owen’s demand of three women out of hand, offering only herself instead, and pointing out that “You don’t know us […] Everyone here is going to realize that you’re just a very ignorant creature. If they don’t know it already, that is. And if you think you’ve got power over us … well, let’s just say you have some very strange illusions that need to die.” But despite the fact that she gets her way—and in fact seems to be instrumental in the survival of the colony, and its establishment as a functioning society—history has swept her under the rug. Owen has a tomb; Claire does not.

Relating all of this takes time, during which Kala is growing up. But it’s the former rather than the latter that drives the story. We don’t turn the pages to find out what happens to Kala (which is just as well, because Reed’s characterisation of her is only serviceable); we turn them to find out what has already happened to her world, and how. The answer to that second question is that a sort of memetic Founder Effect holds sway: uprooting civilisation and starting from scratch every couple of thousand years doesn’t just restrict genetic diversity, in Reed’s model of history, it restricts the ideologies that people carry with them. This is clearly an arguable premise, at best, but much like the conservation of the path of progress in a book like Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt, it makes for an interesting story. There is progress, but of a limited kind, and heavily dependent on starting assumptions. So by Kala’s time, establishing new colonies is part of religious practice, and the founders are equal numbers men and women, who undergo formal group marriages the day before they depart; but it’s still accepted that some men will kidnap some women, because that’s the way things are. When Sandor saves his younger sister from just such an abduction, and castrates the would-be kidnapper to boot, the reaction of the family’s friends and colleagues is incomprehension: Kala’s friends can’t understand why she would stand by her brother, when he’s committed such a horrible act.

At about the half-way mark, then, the story seems to be headed for the neat ending, to wit that Kala and her brother will find a way to Do It Right. There would be nothing wrong with this, as such, but it wouldn’t be doing anything we haven’t seen before; and given Reed’s commitment elsewhere in the story to the logic of his premise, it would have the mark of contrivance. To have Kala go all the way, by herself, would seem (I think) too much. So Reed throws another idea into the mix, with the result that what we more-or-less expect is more-or-less what happens, but it doesn’t happen entirely for the reasons we think it’s going to happen. Kala is concerned about the oppression of women in her world, but she’s even more concerned about something else: the fact that her world is dying.

“Computer models point to the possibility,” she explained. “Low diversity means fragile ecosystems. And it’s more than just having too few species. It’s the nature of these species. Wherever we go, we bring weed species. Biological thugs, essentially.
[…]
Do you ever wonder why so many earths don’t have decent air for us? Do you?” Kala gave [Sandor] a rough pat on the shoulder, asking, “What if a lot of pioneers have been moving across the multiverse? Humans and things that aren’t human, too. And what if most of these intrepid pioneers eventually kick their worlds out of equlibrium, killing them as a consequence?”

It’s a theme that could easily become heavy-handed, but Reed balances it against the already-established conservative nature of the story’s setting. Both the social and the environmental elements of the story underscore Reed’s basic argument—that human nature really doesn’t change, even across thousands of years; that thinking outside your immediate world really is hard, even when you know for certain that your world is only one of an infinite number of possible worlds. The scale of the story exposes the bleakness of the sentiment.

Kala’s world, like all the other worlds descended from the First Father’s colony, is inherently out of balance. So, not unlike the early garage scene, the end of “A Billion Eves” plays two emotions—what we feel, and what we know the characters feel—against each other. The joyous release provided by the fact that Kala and her brother eventually do escape from history (perhaps) is tempered by the knowledge that they are not really doing it for (what to us are) the obvious reasons, even if they’re doing it for perfectly good reasons. “I don’t want virility and stupidity,” says Kala. “I want wisdom and youth.” There is something comfortable in this, too, because all the strategies Reed has used in getting to this point—the initial use of strangeness as a hook, the narrative emphasis on uncovering history, the clean but unadventurous prose, the viewpoint character who grows to understand the world at the same pace as the reader, the generation of story through the collision of two different speculations—are classic science fiction strategies. But in the end, they still work. Robert Reed knows how to make them work.