Category: short fiction

Mundanezone

iz216coverIn Elisabeth Vonarburg’s “The Invisibles” (translated in collaboration with Howard Scott), ecotastrophe has become a story to be faithfully retold every Christmas. Told for most of its length as an utterly absorbing second-person narration, it describes a future in which extreme climate change has driven humanity into domed cities, and is one of those rare short stories that fully creates the future as another country. The technological innovations, such as “integrated circuits” grafted into peoples’ hands, are sufficiently worked-through that they are explained almost entirely by the ways in which they are used, such as built-in Oyster cards. It’s groundwork that frees Vonarburg to delve into the characters she (or her narrator: the story eventually resolves into the first person, told by an observer) wishes to imagine, and the sights they see. Or the things they hear, since “The Invisibles” is a story in which sound, or its absence, plays as much of a role as more visual stimuli; early on we’re told that “silence, nowadays, is the rule”, and there’s a sense in which it’s the wheezing of the public transport or the bubbling of a fountain that grab the attention, not the sight of the dome above. The story itself, which imagines the journeys of two individuals “unmoored by circumstances” from familiar to unfamiliar regions of the domes, is a convincing portrait of loneliness, uncertainty and alienation. For my money, it’s the standout story in Interzone 216. The only problem with it — and you may be ahead of me here — is that Interzone 216 is a special issue devoted to mundane sf, and the strengths of “The Invisibles” are largely incidental to its mundanity.

“The idea,” says Geoff Ryman, in his introduction, referring to the prohibitive tone of the original mundane manifesto, “was that Mundanity would work like the Dogme school of film-making to create a space for different kinds of sf. It was about what we didn’t want. Here’s what we do.” A cynic might point to his statement later in the introduction that “if [mundane sf] gives itself some slack on the science, it does so to open up a new possibility” as a cleverly-inserted get-out clause (aha! We’re not as dogmatic as you thought!), but perhaps it would be fairer not to hold mundane sf’s advocates to their past words too strongly, and just take this as what the publicity splurge obviously positions it as: a relaunch. The adversarial tone of the manifesto — which, tellingly, is no longer online, although you can find traces of it in discussions scattered across the sf blogosphere and beyond, or a complete copy in Vector 245 — ensured that the original launch of mundane sf as a concept, way back in 2004, was comprehensively bungled; much hot air later, from both pro- and anti- camps, and you can’t blame anyone if their first reaction to a whole issue of Interzone devoted to the stuff is hostile, and about the only good thing you can say is that the “movement” outlived expectations. But it remains, to my mind, a perfectly reasonable ideological position about sf, for two reasons that Ryman articulates: one, that stories about the future should make “an effort in good faith to show a future” (i.e., and not be fantasy in drag), and two, that a lot of sf’s strength derives from originality (i.e., and tropes that are “tired” can end up being, among other things, inadvertently consolatory, rather than the challenging literature that sf, I think many would be comfortable saying, should aspire to be). Whether or not it’s actually the “best possible” sf is basically irrelevant: taking the idea that it might be as a provocation isn’t the worst thing a writer could do.

What it comes down to, I guess, is whether you agree with the mundanes’ implicit argument that in the contemporary field the pendulum has swung too far away from sf that focuses on the probable, and too far towards wild speculation. There’s evidence either way. You could look, for example, at awards shortlists. Certainly, on this year’s Hugo shortlist for Best Novel, only one nominee — Charles Stross’ Halting State — is unarguably mundane, having explicitly been written to meet mundane constraints. (Alien communications buzz out Rollback, while parallel worlds see off Brasyl and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.) On the other hand, arguably only one nominee — John Scalzi’s The Last Colony — is meaningfully anti-mundane, in its cheerful use of many familiar tropes from sf’s history; and this year’s Clarke Award shortlist drew some fire for, among other things, basically being too mundane. Another way to approach the question, though, would be to look at content. It would be fair, for instance, to ask where the climate change stories are. Stross once charmingly described the singularity as the unavoidable turd in the punchbowl of sf, but you could easily argue the the turd should be climate change, or at least the confluence of climate change and peak oil. But, with a few exceptions — Kim Stanley Robinson is the obvious one — the stories aren’t there, certainly not in the numbers that post-singularity tales now are. A reasonable number of works have climate change as a backdrop, but very few engage with it as an issue that could define our next fifty years.

And of those that do engage with it, plenty take the same approach as “The Invisibles”, and lose sight of any connection with our world. I’ve already said Vonarburg’s story is fine work, but there’s not a thing about it that couldn’t have been achieved equally well using a domed city on another planet. This is, if you like, a problem of affect, and it rears its head again in IZ216’s other major climate change story, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s “Endra — From Memory”, except that this time it’s actively to the tale’s detriment. We’re a bit further into the future this time (I think), and the tale is mostly told through the memoirs of one Melizan kem Gishcar-Shwy. He — sex is never specified, but the name sounds male to my ears — is a “Trading Monitor” for Lavrant City, which means his job is to arrange inspections of ships’ cargo when they arrive and leave, and he’s fascinated by one particular arrival, the charismatic Captain Endra YuiduJin. (I’m not actually convinced Endra is portrayed as charismatic so much as she is repeatedly described by Melizan as charismatic; but I’ll let that lie, because my main issue with the story is elsewhere.) Through Malazin’s recollections, we learn a bunch of stuff: that this Earth has become a waterworld; that the waters are still rising; that the population of Earth is now estimated to be half a billion, and declining; and that Endra is in search of a lost city, where the legends have it that “all the treasures lost to the rising waters remain pristine and perfect; where all men love knowledge and peace; where there is no hunger, no injustice, no cruelty, and sadness has been forgotten”. She sails away in search; she returns briefly, two years later; and then is never seen again. It’s a perfectly reasonable story of its type, but I can’t treat it as a good-faith attempt to engage with the future of our planet because it does absolutely nothing that couldn’t have been accomplished in a secondary-world fantasy setting, and a pretty cosily romanticised one at that. There isn’t much injustice or cruelty visible in Lavrant City, so Endra’s search seems a little pointless. In his introduction, Ryman notes that many of the stories that ended up in the issue were surprisingly hopeful, “at a time when the future looks so dark”; but to my mind, the future of “Endra — From Memory” isn’t so much hopeful as thoroughly domesticated.

Two stories which aspire to be a bit more thorny are both set in near-future America. R. R. Angell’s “Remote Control” is narrated by a US army private stationed on the Mexico/US border; his assignment is to monitor the “Atco-Johnson Perimeter Stations” that keep the border clear. They’re solar-powered gun turrets with webcams, essentially, and any patriotic American citizen can pay five dollars to log on and take control of one for a ten-minute stint. If they’re lucky, they’ll get to pop off some shots at illegal immigrants. This is, or should be, harsh stuff, and certainly has some nice touches — “Like the training says, if someone breaks into your house and you kill them it is self-defense; a homeowner has the right to do that. They call it the Castle Precedent, and it changed the way we do everything. Only Americans patrol our borders. It would be illegal otherwise” — but the military banter that drives the story is tiresome (even if deliberately parodic), and the ending, in which the system is effectively subverted, feels like a cop-out. You’re left thinking of the much better, because more committed to the logic of its premise, version of the same story that someone like Paolo Bacigalupi would write. More ambitious is Billie Aul’s “The Hour is Getting Late”, in which a critic provides commentary on “Woodstock 2044”, a VR-enhanced tribute to the spirit of the sixties (or, more accurately, what people in 2044 imagine the spirit of the sixties to be), while trying to avoid being manipulated back into marriage by her artist ex. Aul’s problem, in a sense, is the opposite to Angell’s. She does follow the logic of her concepts, for the most part — there’s the simple cynicism with which relationships are treated, for instance, or the glimpses of the lives of “Fare folk” living behind the “Manhattan wall” that keep popping up on news bulletins:

Jessica was amused by how much the hippies resembled the Fare folk. Hopefully the Fare folk were only looking for “three days of peace, love, and music”. Whatever they wanted, they were going to end up back on their farms. They should know how lucky they were to have that. There were countries where people like them were just locked up in camps to starve to death. If you couldn’t do work a robot couldn’t do, why should you be allowed to put your carbon footprint on the planet at all?

The suggestion of complexity here is, to my mind, very efficient; you get the issue, what people think about the issue, and an idea of where the issue comes from, all in one paragraph. (Similarly, though pop culture is a notoriously treacherous area for sf, Aul manages to make the scene of 2044 feel like it has a little depth, that it’s not just about aping the stuff we’re familiar with.) But the telling doesn’t have the vigour that it needs to make these concepts really bite; it’s just sentence after straightforward, unadventurous sentence. I suspect it’s intended to embody Jessica’s lack of interest in and understanding of the world beyond her horizon — in the story’s final paragraph, the Fare folk attack the Wall, and she wonders, deadpan, “what in the world they thought they could accomplish by doing that”. But, unfortunately, for the most part it is simply leaden. The story is worth reading — something I’m not sure I can say about Angell’s effort — but it’s in spite of this blankness of attitude, not because of it.

And, despite the implicit argument that mundane sf should be a way for sf to renew itself, I can’t say that either Aul’s story or Angell’s really recharges my imagination of an American future. More interesting is Anil Menon’s “Into the Night”, in which an Indian father travels to visit his daughter, and finds that he can cope with changes in the world but not changes in the people he knows — although the father’s resistance to genetics and evolutionary biology comes across as arrogant ignorance on his part, when I suspect we’re meant to read it as a failure of communication on hers. But the most provocative stories in the issue, from a mundane standpoint, are those that top and tail it, by Lavie Tidhar and Geoff Ryman, respectively.

Ryman’s “Talk is Cheap” offers a richer world than anything else in the issue; or perhaps just denser. In its few pages, it packs in cultural comment, weak AI, social recategorisation, water shortages, photosynthetic skin, self-heating paint, and much more, a world where “Reality is a tiny white stable dot in the middle of all this info,” and “Everything else, all the talk, is piled up sky high, prioritised, processed and offered back.” It’s not a new conception of the future, but the seriousness with which it is treated is enough to make the story stand out. Indeed, there’s a sense in which the technical aspects of the story — the way Ryman filters all this information through the present-tense perspective of one cranky old guy, whose job it is to go places in the real world and check their environmental qualities against records — are more interesting than the emotional aspects, or the world itself. It’s more of a good-faith attempt to portray the experience of living in a highly textured future than it is a good-faith attempt to portray that future for its own sake; but it’s so effective at that portrayal that it feels churlish to complain. (As it would be to question whether all the ideas that Ryman works in are, strictly, mundane.)

Tidhar’s “How to Make Paper Airplanes”, meanwhile, is a brief piece set on islands in the Republic of Vanuatu. The first half of the story is pure tour-guide, a series of facts and figures about the islands that establish their separateness to the lives of us rich Westerners, despite being on the same planet; the second half introduces us to four Americans (I think) working at a small base on one of the islands, three of whom are carrying out various kinds of research, and one of whom (the narrator) is a shop-keeper. I like Lavie Tidhar’s short fiction, and this has the precision of setting and emotion that I’ve come to expect; but neither half of “How to Make Paper Airplanes” is science fiction. The story’s place in the magazine is justified, presumably, by the story that one of the researchers is writing, and the comments the others make about it:

“I’m writing a science fiction story about us,” Sam Friedman says. “It has no aliens in it, no commercial space travel, no telepathy.”

“You’re a fucking alien,” Jimmy Morgan says.

“I can tell you how the story ends,” Sam says, ignoring him.

I say, “How?”

“One night,” Sam says, and the candle makes his eyes twinkle, “one night we get drunk and mix up all the experiments together. Ben uses my self-fermenting coconuts for his kava-pop experiment. Jimmy hooks up a generator to power things up –”

“It’s not that simple–” Jimmy starts.

“And then,” Sam says, again ignoring him, “the whole thing explodes. It’s a huge fireball. It makes a crater the size of Sola. But we all survive anyway, I’m not quite sure how yet.”

Sounds more like infernokrusher than mundane sf, right? And the proposed story doesn’t get any more plausible: it turns out that the source of the explosion is “a revolutionary new fuel”, which launches a Vanuatu space programme. This despite the fact that Sam later argues that sf isn’t a license to make up anything you want. The story-within-a-story is a striking contrast to what we actually see of the islands, and the comments made about which technologies are actually useful for their situation, and how contact with the West has really affected the islanders. (One particularly effective exchange reports the remarks of an islander, untranslated but dotted with words such as “virus”. The point is painfully obvious.) Sam is, in other words, the sort of sf writer that mundane sf wants to get through to: the sort who don’t see the world around them as a rich enough prompt for stories.

Which brings us back to the central question raised by this issue of Interzone. It’s not a bad issue — Vonarburg’s story is very good, and the stories by Ryman, Tidhar and Aul all have something to recommend them — but does it, as a whole, make a convincing case for mundane sf? Ironically, it’s probably Tidhar’s story — which isn’t sf at all — that best articulates the value of what something like mundane sf could offer, which is the value of extrapolating from the world as it is, and not as we imagine it to be, or would like it to be. Too many of the others don’t engage with their futures with the specificity that I’d hope for; with the exception of Ryman’s story, and possibly Aul’s, it’s not hard to see how the same points could have been made by translating the stories into, say, space opera. But perhaps the most telling indication of the failure of these stories to reinvigorate our thinking about the future is to look at who they’re about. In terms of where they’re from, the protagonists are a fairly varied bunch; in terms of how long they’ve lived, not so much. Yarbro’s story is written by an old man recalling his youth; Menon and Ryman deal with old men trying to live with the future they find themselves in; and while technically the narrator of Vonaburg’s story is relatively young, the two subjects of the narrator’s imagining are both elderly. Which means that mundane sf, on the evidence of Interzone 216, isn’t so much about looking forwards and thinking about change as it is about coming to terms; a stance which to my mind harnesses neither the best, nor the most challenging, aspects of sf.

The Surfer

If you want to write fiction with an agenda, this is how to do it. Kelly Link’s “The Surfer”, like all the stories in The Starry Rift, was written to meet Jonathan Strahan’s editorial challenge to write “stories that would offer today’s readers the same kind of thrill enjoyed by the pulp readers of over fifty years ago”; or, if you believe the version of the remit given on Wikipedia, which chimes with what I’ve actually read of the book, it was to write science fiction stories “aimed at young people, reminiscent of the type of 1950s science fiction stories that are considered to be classic SF juveniles, but that would resonate better with young people of today.” To avoid confusion, according to the book’s publicity information the target age range is that version of “young adult” that means “ages 12 and up” (or to judge by the introduction, it means anyone young enough to need a footnote explaining what the Cold War was). If you think about it for a minute, this is a mission that makes certain assumptions – notably, that not only will the science fiction of the fifties not grab contemporary young readers, but that much of the science fiction of today won’t grab them, either. (Or else why would the anthology be needed?) I have to admit I’m skeptical of this line of thinking, not least because I suspect that if you’d given me a copy of The Starry Rift when I was twelve, I’d have turned my nose up at it. I didn’t turn to science fiction because I wanted to read about “young adults” like me having extraordinary adventures; that was actually just about the last thing I was looking for. I turned to sf because I wanted to read about grown-ups having grown-up adventures, and about the world I could expect to grow up into. (In Strahan’s defence, his introduction does also say that he asked for “tales […] that ask serious questions about the world we are living in and the world we might face”. But the kid protagonists outnumber the adults.) Maybe I’m typical of sf readers and maybe I’m not, but the received wisdom, which I have no reason to doubt, is that “young adults” tend to be both sensitive and resistant to attempts to sell them something and, at least on the basis of the introduction and the four stories I’ve read so far, The Starry Rift does look an awful lot like an attempt to sell them science fiction.

But I don’t want to hold the book’s agenda against it, because it also has a pretty cover and a pretty stellar table of contents – in addition to stories by established YA authors, not all noted for their sf output, like Garth Nix and Margo Lanagan, you get offerings from established sf writers not noted for their YA output, such as Ian McDonald, Alastair Reynolds, Tricia Sullivan, and Greg Egan (!). If anyone can sell a mission, these should be the writers to do it. And it has this Kelly Link science fiction story – which, despite what looks like a conventional Kelly Link first paragraph, if I can be permitted such an oxymoron (“In the dream I was being kidnapped by aliens. I was dreaming, and then I woke up”), is science fiction, by anyone’s definition. Not “can be read as sf” like “Most of my Friends are Two-Thirds Water”, not “sf trope treated as fantasy” like “Lull”, not “future fantasy” like “Light”; in fact, for most of its length “The Surfer” is mundane science fiction. Obviously it’s not a complete departure – Link has a good few YA stories under her belt by now, and in some ways “The Surfer” is of a piece with them. I don’t think it’s a secret that in general I’ve found most of these stories less satisfying than her earlier work; there does seem to be, at least for me as an adult reader, a difference between a Link story that can be published as YA, such as “The Specialist’s Hat”, and a Link story written for a YA context, such as “The Wizards of Perfil”. The latter seems to sacrifice some weirdness, some strangeness (what you could go so far as to call Link-ness), without a compensating change in other areas.

“The Surfer” suffers from this problem a bit, too, and as science fiction, with the stronger fidelity to realism that that usually implies, is perhaps even hit a bit harder by the loss of Link-ness. Certainly there are some distinctively Linkian sentences (“It was kind of like the bats. They were there, and after a while you noticed them. Only it wasn’t like the bats at all and I don’t mean to say that it was”), and there’s a charming riff about an empty bottle that is alleged to have a genie trapped in it (guessing an author’s mood from their prose is a mug’s game, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I felt Link was more comfortable writing this section than some of the rest of the story), but there isn’t the same sense of freedom or play that comes through in the stories in Stranger Things Happen or Magic for Beginners. Put another way, if you gave me a copy of the manuscript without a name attached, I think I would guess that “The Surfer” is a Kelly Link story, but Kelly Link probably wouldn’t be my first guess. But it would be churlish to suggest that being less Linkian — or rather, that Link trying new things — is a bad thing per se, and crucially “The Surfer” has more compensations than a story like “The Wizards of Perfil”, such that learning how to read it is worth the time.

One major compensation is getting to see how Link thinks about the future. Not too long from now (my guess would be 2020, plus or minus five years) the US is falling apart: various bits of it have seceded to form alliances with Mexico and Canada, and what’s left is in a mess, with a healthcare system that can’t cope with outbreaks of lethal flu variants and an economy that can’t offer much in the way of prospects for anyone. Yet when his father takes our 14 year-old narrator away from all this to more prosperous Costa Rica, it’s against Dorn (Adorno)’s wishes. What Dorn wants is to stay and practice his football (here actually meaning soccer) skills (about which he is more than a little arrogant), with the aim of one day being picked up by one of the major international leagues – Italy or Japan for preference; he’s learning Japanese as a second language. When they land in Costa Rica, reports of another flu outbreak lead to them being quarantined in a hangar (a state which persists for most of the story’s sixty-odd pages and allows Link to report on the world outside without needing to provide much direct description of it), where among other people Dorn meets Naomi, a (self-described) fat computer nerd who’s come down hoping to find a job in the booming Costa Rican software industry, and Lara, a native Costa Rican who’s studying hard so that she can grow up to be an astronaut in the equally booming Costa Rican space program.

What all this looks like is an argument that’s been popping up with increasing frequency over the past few years: the future, having been American for so long, now belongs to the rest of the world. But this isn’t what the story’s about; what it’s about is how a number of the travelers, including Dorn’s father and Lara’s mother, are traveling to join a commune run by one Hans Bliss, a hippyish German surfer who was abducted by aliens several years earlier, and claims to have guidance for humanity that will encourage the aliens to return. The twist is that Bliss isn’t just another nut: his abduction was verified, albeit during a hurricane, which means that people take his claims seriously, although not always in the way he might hope. He says the aliens want humanity to disarm; human governments find this mighty suspicious, and are now stockpiling weapons as fast as they can.

Here’s the bit that’s liable to make you groan: Dorn’s dad is a science fiction reader. Bearing in mind what I said about The Starry Rift’s goal of selling sf to a YA audience, at first it’s hard not to view this revelation as cynical. We learn that he’s traveling to Bliss’ commune not because he believes the peace and love rhetoric, but because he wants to see aliens. And to cap it all, he’s traveling with a bag stuffed with old sf paperbacks, which during the quarantine get passed around and read (and discussed) by everyone, including Naomi and Lara.

If Dorn’s dad had been the protagonist of “The Surfer”, I’d probably have been unable to stop rolling my eyes. In the last year I’ve read several novels featuring protagonists, invariably middle-aged or older men, who despite reasonable expectations to the contrary get to enjoy the sort of future that science fiction promised them – which from one point of view is exactly what happens at the end of “The Surfer”. At the story’s end, the aliens do come back, and the sort of future that science fiction long promised us does seem to be arriving. To be clear, I’ve no problem with stories that address the gap between what science fiction promised and what we have, which is on one level what “The Surfer” is doing; but it has to be said that the sentiment is now a ready commodity. You can buy it on a t-shirt from threadless (in fact, I have). And I do have a problem with stories that uncritically manipulate their futures to fulfill a wish – that gift their characters with experiences that the author and readers may want, by proxy, for themselves. If Dorn’s dad had been the protagonist, that’s more or less the sort of story “The Surfer” would be.

But Dorn’s dad isn’t the protagonist, and “The Surfer”, quite literally, isn’t his story, which means Link isn’t being uncritical of either him or his wish. More important still, while Dorn reads science fiction, sure he does – he knows enough to recommend Octavia Butler or Connie Willis – he’s not a fan of the stuff in the way that his Dad is. More importantly, he doesn’t believe in it. To Dorn, sf is good for escapism, but not really relevant to him or his world. His future is football. When Lara tells him of her dream of traveling to Mars, his reaction is more cutting than scorn; he’s simply baffled.

I shrugged. It wasn’t really anything I was interested in. “What’s the point,” I said. “I mean, the aliens showed up and then they left again. Not even Hans Bliss is saying that we ought to go around chasing after them. He says that they’ll come back when the time is right. Costa Rica getting all involved in a space program is, I don’t know, it’s like my father deciding to leave everything behind, our whole life, just to come down here, even though Hans Bilss is just some surfer who started a cult. I don’t see the point.”

“The point is to go to space,” Lara said. She looked at Naomi, not at me, as if I were too stupid to understand. “To go to space. It was a good thing when the aliens came to Costa Rica. They made us think about the universe, about what might be out there. Not everybody wants to sit on a beach and wait with your Hans Bliss to see if the aliens will come back.”

He is, in other words, exactly the sort of reader that you have to suspect Strahan had in mind when he sent out the invitation to contribute to The Starry Rift, and Lara has exactly the sort of belief in the future that The Starry Rift seems to want to inspire. Link’s afterword to the story (all the stories, save Egan’s, have afterwords from their authors) very nearly makes this explicit, explaining how Dorn’s father’s love of books is her own, and how she’s jealous of her characters for having had the chance to read books she hasn’t heard of yet; and then she wonders whether some of them will be written by readers of The Starry Rift.

So ultimately, “The Surfer” is neither a story about how the future has left America and gone elsewhere, nor a story about how science fiction lied to its readers, though it raises both those issues. Ultimately, and in hindsight inevitably, “The Surfer” does come back to The Starry Rift’s mission, and becomes a story about Dorn – about an American Young Adult – learning that the future can after all be his, too. (Disguised as a story about Dorn starting to grow up, about Dorn learning a little humility and a little empathy.) The very end makes this explicit. Not long after the quarantine is lifted, as I mentioned, the aliens return, in numbers, all over the world. Everyone but Dorn goes outside to greet them; our hero, despite knowing that “outside the hangar were the aliens and the future”, initially can’t make himself leave. He wants to stay inside, to stay in goal, to make another save, to be doing something he can control, even if small, rather than face something big and uncontrollable. But go out, in the end, he does, and it’s really very hard to escape the conclusion that Link is trying to persuade her readers that they want to go out with him. “The Surfer” seems much more like a deliberate work of advocacy than anything else I’ve read by her; and as I implied, in another’s hands I think it could very easily have been nothing more than a cynical exercise. (I want to like The Starry Rift, but I fear that cynical is exactly what some of its stories will be.) But it is redeemed by wit and love – Link’s love, I think, for her characters, and not just her genre. The dialogue, as you would expect, sparkles; and there are moments of uncomfortable, for Dorn, insight that do him a world of good. He starts with the half-formed nature that seems to be so common in YA, and doesn’t quite have time to become a fully-defined adult, but when he goes out I do want to go out with him.

(Of course, I’m already a science fiction reader.)

BSFA Awards: Short Fiction

I was hoping to write up some thoughts on my favourite stories of last year, but time is moving on and I don’t seem to be getting around to it. So I’m just going to do what Martin did, and list the stories I’m planning to nominate for the BSFA Awards. You can also see what other members have nominated so far, and the tables of contents for Gardner Dozois‘ and Rich Horton‘s Year’s Best SF books.

So, my nominations:

“The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang (F&SF, September)
“Dead Horse Point” by Daryl Gregory (Asimov’s, August)
“Light” by Kelly Link (Tin House 34)
“The Master Miller’s Tale” by Ian R MacLeod (F&SF, May)
Sulphuric Acid by Amelie Nothomb (Faber & Faber)
“Three Days of Rain” by Holly Phillips (Asimov’s, June)
Of Love and Other Monsters by Vandana Singh (Aqueduct Press)
“Dispersed by the Sun, Melting in the Wind” by Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean, Summer)

I read much less short fiction in 2007 than usual, but I read some good stuff. The notable omission from the list, perhaps, is Greg Egan, but although I read three good stories by him (“Glory”, “Dark Integers” and “Steve Fever”), I didn’t think any of them were quite first-rank.

Remember: if you’re a member, the deadline for your nominations is this Saturday.

Eclipse 1

I’ll get the basics done quick. Eclipse 1 is the start (and hopefully not the entirity) of a new, unthemed, original anthology series from Night Shade Books, edited by the not-quite-ubiquitous-yet Jonathan Strahan. It contains fifteen stories, two of which (by Bruce Sterling and Maureen F. McHugh) are excellent, three of which (by Garth Nix, Ellen Klages, and Paul Brandon & Jack Dann) are terrible, and the rest of which fall somewhere in the middle ground. Enough of the pack are on the good side of okay to make the anthology worth reading if you like short stories. In his introduction, Strahan says we’re living in an “extraordinary” time for genre short stories, artistically speaking; for my money there isn’t quite enough weight in Eclipse‘s fiction to support that claim, but what does lend it some credibility is the realisation that it’s trivially easy to sketch out equally impressive hypothetical contents for at least two more volumes before you have to consider repeating yourself.

Or, indeed, the realisation that Eclipse is just one among many. Unthemed anthology series have been popping up everywhere, at least if by “everywhere” you accept that I mean “from smaller publishers, predominantly those based in the US.” Earlier this year Pyr launched Fast Foward, and Solaris has its Best New [Science Fiction|Fantasy]; I’m sure Prime’s offering is on its way. And all the indications are that Eclipse should be most reliably to my taste, given that in general I like Strahan’s choices as an editor. What struck me about Eclipse, though — and this is where the post stops being a review and turns into “thoughts inspired by”; if you want more detail, you could try one of the three (count ’em) reviews in the November Locus — was not the quality of the stories so much as the content. Here’s some more from Strahan’s introduction:

This is not a science fiction anthology. Nor is it a fantasy anthology. It’s both and it’s more. It’s a space where you can encounter rocket ships and ray guns, and zombies and zeppelins: pretty much anything you can imagine. Most of all, it’s somewhere you will find great stories. It does not have an agenda or plan. There is no test of genre purity that it can pass or fail. There’s only the test that every reader applies to any work that they encounter — is it good fiction or not? — and I hope we’ll pass that one every time.

As if to underscore the point, the anthology opens with Andy Duncan’s “Unique Chicken Goes In Reverse”, a historical story which is probably not fantastical at all, and ends with Lucius Shepard’s “Larissa Miusov”, a contemporary story which probably is fantasy, except that we’re not given any proof. In between, despite Strahan’s comment, there is not a single rocket ship, ray gun, or zeppelin; nor are there any scientists or robots or dragons. You could call this the Doctor Who problem: the promise is that the Doctor and his companion could go anywhere and see anything; the reality is that they mostly hang around present-day London. (On the other hand, thank the lord, there aren’t any retold fairytales or myths in Eclipse; or if there were, they were retold inventively enough that I didn’t notice.) There’s a single, solitary zombie, but he doesn’t want brains so much as he wants a drink. Moreover the fantasy stories outnumber the stories that can be read as science fiction two-to-one and, as that phrasing suggests, a reader with a less flexible definition of sf than me could easily make a case for a more unbalanced ratio. Whatever it may have been intended as, what Eclipse actually is is an anthology of mostly contemporary, mostly low-key fantasy, with a sprinkling of near-future sf, and one dose of real, wonderful weirdness.

The dose of weirdness Bruce Sterling’s offering, “The Lustration”. It is set on a planet that is: (1) encompassed by a possibly-sentient computer made out of living wood; (2) part of a solar system, ejected from a galaxy about the size of ours some eighty million years previously, that contains 512 other planets and moons; and (3) inhabited by scaly creatures that call themselves humans. You see the problem in trying to classify it. You can’t, without making a lot of assumptions, position the story as part of our future; you might just as well say it’s set in an alternate dimension where physics happens to be broadly the same as our own. (I’d love to read a fantasy story where it turns out the galactic- or larger-scale cosmology of the universe is radically different to that of ours, though.) I counted it as one of my five above because in subject, if not in setting, it tackles traditional sf matter, because it does so in a traditionally sfnal manner, which is to say through blissfully unnatural interrogative exposition (“You think you’re evil becasue you think humanity matters in this universe!”, says one character), and because it finishes with a good old-fashioned conceptual breakthrough. Similarly, I counted Gwyneth Jones’ future-Fairyland as sf because an sfnal explanation is provided at the end, but the tone of the story is pure fantasy; and I counted McHugh’s “The Lost Boy: A Reporter At Large” as sf despite the fact that the difference between the story’s world and ours is one bomb, and a bomb that turns out to be background at that, which in extrapolative terms makes the story rather less sfnal than the most recent season of 24. (Or makes it a case of SF as affect, if ever I saw one.) When you get right down to it, if you wanted to be really purist, the only story in the book that confronts the reader with an even half-way plausible novum is Kathleen Ann Goonan’s “Electric Rains”; another way of describing the book would be to say that although the reading pleasures specific to fantasy are well-served, the pleasures of science fiction are sparse.

“So what?” many will say. Indeed, I’m tempted to say it, too. I cheered the launch of the Strahan-edited Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, not so much for ideological reasons (there is certainly plenty of unclassifiable fantastic fantastic material, as it were, but equally certainly there are distinct literary forms called “science fiction” and “fantasy”) as for practical ones (aside from the high level of conservation of writers between the two forms, they are so often published by the same companies, advertised in the same places and shelved together that it seems artificial to treat them as separate communities). Nor does it bother me that the two volumes of that Year’s Best so far skew fantasy in a 60/40ish ratio. In principle, I’m all for Eclipse‘s mission; and even in practice, as I say, I think it’s a decent book. But the “so what”, for me, is that the book Eclipse is in practice is not the book Eclipse claims to be.

It claims to contain “new science fiction and fantasy”, and to be “in the spirit of classic science fiction anthologies”. The sf is put first, in other words. There’s a clue to the reality in the names on the front cover; these were apparently chosen for being the biggest name authors in the book, but it’s still noticeable that only one of them (Bruce Sterling) is an sf writer, while the other four are fantasy writers (Garth Nix, Peter S Beagle, Jeffrey Ford and Lucius Shepard — not that the last two, at least, haven’t written sf, but they’re better known as fantasists, in the same way that Sterling has written fantasy but is better known as an sf writer; and they contribute fantasy to this book). But the names are somewhat overwhelmed by the other indicators. The cover illustration, for instance, could be for a fantasy story, but the rubble, with its concrete and rust stains and reinforcing metal rods, looks to my eyes more like it belongs in an sf setting. (Moreover, four of the five could-be-read-as-sf stories are by women, compared to only three of the ten fantasy stories; so while the cover names give some idea of the content, they don’t give an accurate idea of the breadth of the writers included. Even with the complete author listing on the back cover, it’s another way in which the book you look at on the table is not the book you sit down to read.) Now, Eclipse didn’t mislead me, but that’s because I’m obsessive and tracked down the full contents before I ordered a copy, and moreover I recognise and have previously read work by every author in the book — my purchase was mostly on the strength of McHugh’s name, as it happens. I was a little disappointed by the preponderance of fantasy — when I buy a book that says “science fiction and fantasy” on the cover, I would prefer to read science fiction and fantasy — but not surprised. But I can’t help thinking that the presentation of Eclipse isn’t doing it any favours in terms of getting the book into the hands of those who will enjoy it most. I can imagine readers looking for sf and fantasy disappointed when they discover only fantasy, or readers who dismiss the collection as a same-old, based on the names on the cover, and miss out on some good and interesting work. And most of all I can imagine readers whose expectations, raised by Strahan’s introduction, colour their reaction when they read the fourth contemporary fantasy in a row, and start to wonder where the rocket ships are. Maybe in Eclipse 2?

Subterranean 7

Subterranean magazine is a plain Jane. It has a straightforward and unfussy layout — not for Subterranean the glamour stylings of an Interzone. Issue 7 has an introduction by guest editor Ellen Datlow, but it’s brief, to-the-point, and assumes the reader already knows what they’re reading. It doesn’t tell you what Subterranean is, or why it is. It does tell you what Datlow’s remit for the issue was, but since that’s “anything you want”, it’s less helpful than it might otherwise be. (“Anything” turns out to be, as you may expect, a novella and six stories that are all, to some extent, engaged with both fantasy and darkness.) Moreover, and unlike the magazine’s online incarnation, there’s no other non-fiction content: no columns, no reviews. So there are just the stories — which, given the rather abstract recent brouhaha about the triumph of competence, makes the magazine an interesting test case. (I wish people would get down to specifics more, when this debate rolls around.) An Interzone could be bought by someone solely for the non-fiction content. (I know, because if it wasn’t for the non-fiction content I’d have stopped buying Interzone a couple of years ago.) Subterranean doesn’t have that get-out. It stands or falls on the stories.

So anchoring the issue with a novella by Lucius Shepard is a smart move, even if it was a last-minute substitution, since Shepard is regularly more than competent and rarely, if ever, less. The competition for “best Shepard story of the year” may not be as stiff now as it was a few years ago, but it’s still a tough race — which is to say that although “Vacancy” isn’t going to take the crown, it’s still worth your time. The tale of Cliff Coria, fifty-something ex-small time actor, having now carved out “the most satisfying of dissatisfying lives” as a used car salesman, is big, solid stuff, and similar in a couple of interesting ways to “Stars Seen Through Stone”, another Shepard story published earlier this year in F&SF. In both stories, the protagonist is a knowledgeable guide to some of the low-rent districts of a relentlessly capitalist entertainment industry, both stories are bedded in a particularly American kind of grubby existence (is it my imagination, or is Shepard writing more directly about America than he used to?), and in both stories there is some of Shepard’s most heartening writing about the ways men can relate to women. The protagonists of both “Vacancy” and “Stars Seen Through Stone” — and, indeed, the women with whom they form relationships — are people who have lived lives, and arrived at some measure of self-awareness. Enough, at least, for them to fumble towards an accommodation that we as readers can actually believe in, which is not always a given in Shepard’s stories.

There’s also an interesting inversion: in “Stars Seen Through Stone”, the protagonist introduces his tale by assuring us that there are strange things happening every day that people don’t notice, while in “Vacancy” Cliff is somehow sensitised to anything out of the ordinary. In the opening pages of the story, mysteries and coincidences dog his steps. What, for instance, is the deal with the multiple checkins to Bungalow 11 at the Celeste motel (across the road from his car dealership) — normal, if illicit, liaisons, or something more sinister? What of the striking similarity between the daughter of the Celeste’s owner, and an actress Cliff worked with (and slept with) years ago, in a low-budget fantasy action film? And what of the disappearance of Marley, the woman Cliff might be falling in love with? The latter two questions have, or appear to have, rational answers that don’t take too long to surface; the first question is the one that haunts the novella, and ultimately provides its horrific (in the bluntest sense) climax. But although it would be too strong to say that the supernatural elements of the story feel tacked-on, “Vacancy” is first a character study. The tentative deepening of the relationship between Cliff and Marley is deeply believable; when Cliff confides in (the much younger) Marley that “it’s like I’m empty, and growing emptier. That’s what I’m scared of” it’s such a startlingly unlikely thing for a Shepard Guy to say out loud, yet so clearly the right thing for him to say, that you nearly want to cheer.

But that quote also points up the main problem with “Vacancy” which is, oddly, that it’s too neat. Shepard has used the fantastic as a backdrop, rather than a subject, before, but this time around the titular absence insinuates itself too smoothly into every aspect of the story: into the disappearances and unsolved mysteries, into the commentary on how what seems to be innocence can be mere superficiality (and vice versa) for which a Hollywood career is the perfect supporting metaphor, and into the hollowness that Cliff feels inside his life. When I first read “Stars Seen Through Stone”, I thought it was less than a complete success for precisely the opposite reason: the elements didn’t fit so neatly. But scenes and images from that story have stayed with me in a way that scenes and images from “Vacancy” just haven’t, and I think it’s something to do with the fact that “Stars” is a messier tale. Put another way, “Vacancy” has both the strengths and the pitfalls of competence. (It also has a separate problem, which is that its portrayal of the Malaysian family that owns the Celeste Motel flirts with both exoticisation and stereotyping, and unfortunately makes it less easy than you’d hope to be confident that Shepard is deliberately pointing out the superficiality of such an approach to immigrant culture.) By the time the climax rolls around, the theme has become almost stifling, and an entire paragraph about Cliff’s uncertainty (“Cliff is astonished by how thoroughly the circumstance has neutralized him. He knows nothing for certain … it’s the very nebulousness of the situation that persuades him that his life has gone and is going horribly wrong”, 76) just seems excessive.

Still, “Vacancy” is not a story that isn’t reaching for something. The same can’t be said of all the stories in Subterranean 7, and in particular it can’t be said of “City of Night”, by Joel Lane and John Pelan, which is a triumph of competence exclusively in the worst sense of the phrase. Our protagonist this time around is Paul, a man who finds himself travelling to the titular city in his dreams, until the dreams become more real than his daily life. His story is filled with paragraphs like this:

Here and there, he thought he could see traces of recent human activity. A blanket had been nailed over a window-frame; the entry to a basement had been swept free of rubble; there were some empty food cartons and bottles in the remains of a bus shelter. But he couldn’t see any people, and knocking and calling met with no response. Sometimes he could see pale jointed creatures crawling among the broken stones like thoughts he couldn’t face; but the only human being he found in hours of searching was a bald man who poked his head out of a window and screamed at Paul until he ran away. (28)

It’s a functional paragraph, in that the sentences are coherent and reading it creates an image in my head (or rather, adds to the image that previous paragraphs have started to create). But nothing in it evokes any feeling beyond boredom. The details — the blanket, the food cartons, the bus shelter — feel borrowed in the worst way, too familiar to evoke the desolation they so schematically describe. The same is true of the “pale jointed creatures”, or the later description of a larger creature as “a figure from a madman’s delirium” (29). And “like thoughts he couldn’t face”, coming at a point where the reader and Paul both believe he’s in a particularly vivid dream, seems too obvious. Only the screaming bald man is really incongruous enough to make you notice him.

All of which would be permissable in another story with a different focus. But for most of its length “City of Night” seems to be trying hard to be scary, or at least unsettling, and blank description like that above doesn’t cut it. It’s not bad so much as bland; too much light, not enough shadow. Strangely enough, the story works much better when it’s talking about sex, which is fairly often: the protagonist’s sexuality is questioned and answered in a nicely underplayed manner, and the ending has the sort of post-coital glow of understanding more usually associated with science fiction. But it’s a desperate plod to get there.

Terry Bisson’s contribution, “Pirates of the Somali Coast”, is preferable; although it struggles to reach competence, at least it keeps you awake. If there was a fantastic element in the story I blinked and missed it, but that’s not to say the story doesn’t engage with the idea of fantasy, and it’s certainly eager to be about human darkness. The narrator and protagonist is a boy of unspecified age, but probably early teens, on board the South African cruise ship African Princess with his aunt and uncle. He tells his story not to us, but to his mom and his best friend, Bug, through a series of emails; the parallax between the two accounts is interesting, and occasionally amusing, but (warning bell) not an essential part of the story’s construction. The most notable characteristic of both versions of the story is the narrator’s utter inability to distinguish reality from fantasy. When the Princess is attacked and captured by “pirates” — Arab terrorists of some unspecified kind, whose motives may have something to do with diverting the liner from its planned passage through the Suez Canal; I couldn’t tell you how closely this matches up to the real-world pirates of the region — our hero is thrilled. He thinks the whole thing is a staged entertainment. Here’s how he describes part of the aftermath of the capture:

Ali [the “Pirate captain”] let me help with the Pillaging. He likes my hat. They lined up all the ladies and took their rings and jewels. Sometimes they just cut their fingers right off. I helped pick them up like little wurms. They were all begging for mercy, not the Pirates of course, they were laughing. Then they raped some. Ugh. That was like sex fighting. Pirates like the fat ones best. Theres lots of blood, xspecially on the stairs and they dont clean it up. It makes it more realistic. Yo ho ho (47)

Predictably, the attack turns out to be real — the Navy eventually retake the ship and send the narrator to a “greaf countsler”, thus preventing what would have been to me the most disturbing interpretation of the story, that it is some kind of simulation, an utterly debased entertainment. (You could argue that such an interpretation is prevented from the get-go, by the fact that the narrator’s emails are dated between July 20 and August 9 this year; but there are easy ways Bisson could have got round that, so I’d reserved judgment.) What we’re left with is the story of a boy who believes that he’s in the middle of some elaborate, not to mention gratuitously savage, stage show. This belief is strangely innocent — probably the best line in the story comes after the pirates leave, when he tells his mom that “it was kind of sad after all the Plundering and Pillaging, like at the movie when the show is over and everybody stands up” — but never takes on the chilling cast of true indifference because it’s never quite believable.

The narrator’s capacity for delusion seems too extreme: would any child, no matter how desensitized by contemporary film and video games, fail to notice that severed fingers were the real thing? Or be that blasé about rape? Perhaps such a character could be created, but the flatness of Bisson’s faux-teenage typos prevents this teenager from coming alive in the way that he needs to. (Admittedly, I have basically no communication with teenagers, beyond what I occasionally see on message boards, but the style of “Pirates” reeks to me of trying too hard.) He is an absence of character, rather than a character with an absence. And once you stop believing in the narrator, the rest of the story is too flimsy to stand. A bit of handwaving at the start, for instance, tells us that the email service on board the African Princess is “send only”, which sounds deeply improbable, and the excuses for the pirates to leave the narrator alive are increasingly tenuous, even allowing for the fact that what we’re reading is probably not what actually happened. Moreover, I can’t shake the feeling that a more interesting story would have challenged the narrator’s obliviousness somehow. As it is, “Pirates of the Somali Coast” ends with the narrator heading for the airport to be reunited with his parents, still firm in the belief that he’ll see his murdered aunt and uncle and friends again.

A more complete triumph of voice, but an equally complete failure of story, is Anna Tambour’s “The Jeweller of Second-Hand Roe”, in which a self-described garrulous narrator dribbles incidents at us in the hope that they’ll eventually add up to a whole. They don’t; but the story is short enough that any impatience with this is outweighed by the fact that the incidents are worth the time it takes to read them. Better all around is Lisa Tuttle’s “Mr Boudreaux”, which looks at first to be as traditional as the Lane/Pelan story, but ends up in far more interesting places. The protagonist, returning to her childhood home of Houston, has death on her mind — specifically, the death of her mother, although the two have not been particularly close for some time, a distance imparted (the protagonist feels) by how selfish her own life choices seem compared to those of her parent. Tuttle’s evocation of Houston-that-is and Houston-as-the-protagonist-remembers-it is skilful, and the shifts between the two — such as when the protagonist goes for a walk in the woods, and reflects that, as an adult, she is too aware of the dangers of an insect bite or a poisonous plant to experience wonder, only for something wondrous to intrude on the story — are affecting, but you wonder if the story will ever escape convention (or competence). A deathbed promise to “take care of” the titular character, despite the fact that the protagonist is pretty sure he’s been dead for some time, leaves us expecting a ghost at the family home. What is actually waiting is something stranger; the end of the story is handled with great tenderness, and demonstrates a touching belief in the power of (metaphorically) connecting with another soul, bound up with the protagonist’s acceptance of Houston — somewhere she feels she does not belong “by choice, sensibility, and heritage” — as home.

Equally good at integrating voice, place and story is Richard Bowes’ “The King of the Big Night Hours”, in which the fantastic hovers around an occurrence that might be, as the narrator puts it, “more uncanny than coincidental”. The tale is another of Bowes’ meditations on New York and gay life and past decades (here the seventies), and person and memory are mingled as effectively as ever. The titular King was a Jamaican security guard at the university where the narrator works, and the titular Hours were nine pm to midnight, the shift the King wangled for himself at the university gym. In the story’s present, both are gone, but recalled by a train of thought started by a student suicide. Bowes’ narrator is a working-ish-class guy, having drifted into a library admin job many years earlier. Through his skin we feel the aftershocks of the suicide. We are understanding, and yet are sickened, when, after a second, nearly-identical suicide, the campus response is more coordinated and slick — “an etiquette was being worked out”, he notes — and we think more about the tragedy of memory, what people remember about each other and (more significantly, the story suggests), what they don’t, or what they can’t because they never knew each other in the first place. Like “Pirates of the Somali Coast”, I can’t tell how closely Bowes’ story tracks real events here; but unlike Bisson, Bowes shows he can create fiction around fact that is more than polemic. The memory that the narrator’s recollection eventually uncovers is exactly the combination of place and person that it needs to be, and worth savouring.

Two stories remain, both a cut above the rest. M. Rickert is a writer whose ability to involve the reader is second to none; and in “Holiday”, her penchant for dissecting the darker things in life is as front-and-centre has ever been. The combination makes for a deeply disconcerting experience, as Rickert makes you judge the character she’s created, and then doubt that judgement, and yourself. “Holiday” is the first-person, present-tense story of a man, working-class from his idiom (though I’ll come back to that), who is writing a book about the conviction of his father for child abuse that he didn’t commit — except that actually, the narrator knows full well, probably from personal experience, that his father did commit the crimes he was accused of. The young girl who turns up to haunt him on the first page of the story could, therefore, be an expression of the guilt the narrator feels for not telling the truth. But since she’s a famous, instantly recognisable victim of abuse herself (though she will say only that her name is “Holiday”; if there’s a real headline here, it’s even more buried than in Bowes and Bisson’s stories), she could also be a bona fide restless spirit; or she could be an expression of a more personal guilt for the narrator, which is the oppressive possibility that intensifies as the story develops. Reading the story a second time you can spot all the moments that do double-service, creating either sympathy or horror depending on how you read them. Take this, for instance, when the narrator goes to a park:

They are so young. So perfect, with their perfect skin and little teeth and they are dirty, and bratty, and crying, and laughing and completely absorbed by the sand in the sandbox, or the need to traverse the bars, dangling above the dangerous ground, holding tight, and it’s obvious it hurts, but they are determined, stubborn, wild, beautiful. I could watch them for hours, but instead I just watch for a little while, I know too well what the grownups will think about someone like me, a young man, all alone, watching children play. I turn away, hunched against the sudden cold, walking slowly, soon no longer able to hear the laughter and the sound of their voices, shouting names, or shouting nonsense.
God, how I envy them. (36)

Notice, first, how much more effective this is at creating atmosphere than the Lane/Pelan paragraph quoted above, and how much more a coherent voice it is than the Bisson. And the first time you read it, it might easily strike you (it struck me) as sympathetic. Here is a man, it seems, stuck on the outside, who sees in playing children the emptiness of his own life and who — worse – is too aware of how that emptiness will be perceived by others. We might even take a moment to reflect on the climate our society has created, in which it is not possible to express, or even to hold, an honest appreciation for the joy that children can inspire. But read again. In the context of the rest of his narrative, his eloquence here, particularly in that long second sentence, stands out; and is it just by chance that the children’s appearance — their “perfect skin” — is the first thing he notices? Why does he know “too well” what the grownups (not the other grownups) will think of his observation? And is it ultimately their community he envies, or something else?

It’s not that the narrator doesn’t deserve our sympathy, necessarily. When his brother calls him a pervert, saying that he’s grown up to be just like their father, it stings; and when he utterly fumbles an exchange with a checkout assistant, while buying party supplies for Holiday and her friends, we feel a pang because we believe in his sincerity. This is how he describes the party to Holiday: “It’ll be a holiday party, an every holiday, and I don’t say this part, but you know, for all the ones they’ve missed” (38). We want to believe in his innocence in part because it seems so unfair that he should be guilty. He is not a monster. He is — and it’s the possibility that’s chilling, the combination of a very human darkness with a supernatural one — a man who may have done monstrous things.

Rickert’s story is fine indeed, and the most complete expression of several themes (innocence, emptiness, complicity) that, in one of those coincidences of publication, circle through most of the issue’s other stories like sharks. It is not more challenging, or “edgier” than a story like “Pirates of the Somali Coast”, not in any meaningful sense; nor does it have less of a point to make. But it is better expressed in just about every way. Even so, it’s not the most technically accomplished story in Subterranean 7; for my money, that would be Jeffrey Ford’s offering, which strikes out on a separate trail entirely. “Under the Bottom of the Lake” is not a long story — my guesstimate is a little over 5,000 words — and it’s mostly told simply, without great flights of description or pangs of emotion. But it’s an extraordinary feat of narrative construction, one that grips because of its evident but undistracting complexity. It opens with an instantly evocative glimpse of an artefact in the titular location, “a bubble of rose colored glass, within which swirls a secret story, told once but never heard”. The problem is that the teller of the tale — whose identity remains a mystery until the final sentence, though the clues are laid out in plain sight — can’t himself get any closer to the bubble. “What’s called for,” he tells us, “is someone to discover it”, by which he means a character who can reveal more of the story than the narrator can see. Throughout its length, “Under the Bottom of the Lake” embellishes this idea of the limitations of narration — when describing one of his characters, for instance, he dodges the responsibility of judgement: “I’m no judge of looks” — and the sense is one of revealing what is already there, rather than creating something out of whole cloth, which is a nice trick if you can manage it, and often part of the trick, I think, of effective horror.

Moreover the story being seen (the story within “Under the Bottom of the Lake”) itself contains more stories, accessed through rings or bubbles: of glass, of light, of gum, of smoke. In addition to the initial characters, Emily and Vincent, whose path takes them down under the bottom of the lake and towards the secret, we get glimpses of Vincent’s old man, and of Cassius Cake, patriarch of a local (wealthy) family. At times the stories collide, seeming to be taking place at the same moment (which of course, on the page, they are): “Vincent’s old man turns and runs across the moonlit lawn, Cake wakes in his canopied bed and clutches his chest, Emily calls over her shoulder, “look at this”, and points ahead to a grotto surrounded by stalactites and stalagmites; a dragon’s mouth inviting entry.” Eventually, of course, the glass bubble is broken, revealing the secret story, which folds all the others snugly together. It seems that the story will end in the same way as Tuttle’s, with a moment of strange grace, a new generation redeeming the past: but then that final sentence sneaks up and reveals that the whole story is a trap, another secret to be spirited away. It is, of course, more than competent; it is a triumph.

Hand in hand with the latest iteration of angst about story quality has come the latest iteration of angst about the survival of sf magazines. Warren Ellis posted the 2006 subscription numbers for the “big three” magazines, Analog, Asimov’s and F&SF: they’re down again, sharply. Cory Doctorow suggested some possible publicity strategies, and once again various people have commented. (It’s actually through a publicity strategy of the sort that Doctorow suggested that I ended up with a copy of Subterranean 7, although it was the editor who decided to do a blogger giveaway, rather than the publisher.) For Subterranean that ship has sailed — the next print issue, I believe, will be the last — and I can’t say I’m hugely bothered as long as the online incarnation continues. I would prefer that the Rickert and Ford stories, in particular, were online, because then you could go and read them. But I can see the arguments for print magazines. Where things get a bit hazy for me is when I see people accusing magazines of printing filler, or big names for the sake of it, or whatever. This is largely because I can’t bring myself to expect to like all the stories in every issue of a magazine, or even, necessarily, most of the stories, since the truth is that the only person who’s going to like every story a magazine publishes is the editor.

Maybe I read short fiction magazines in a different way to most people. What I don’t do is read magazines — or, in fact, any anthology of short stories — with the expectation of constant satisfaction. I read magazines in part to keep up with new material by authors whose work I know I enjoy, and in part for the undiscovered, the unpredictable, the unexpected. I’m not saying the magazines we have are well-adapted to the market we have, because that’s clearly not the case. I’d be as happy as anyone if the physical incarnation of Asimov’s wasn’t so ugly as to be bordering on the offensive, and I’d prefer Fantasy to have covers that don’t make people on the tube think I’m reading porn. (True story, although a bit of a moot point, since Fantasy, like Subterranean, is heading online.) Nor am I saying we should expect bad stories, or that we should ignore bad stories. Quite the opposite: as I said way back at the start, I think specifics are vital in any discussion of this kind. But if we have to talk about “value for money”, which is what one strand of the discussion seems to come down to, I don’t need to like that high a proportion of stories to justify my subscription; what’s good about a subscription is that I get many more stories to sample for my pound than I would buying the equivalent value of no-more-reliable (although admittedly more durable) anthologies. In fact, if I liked everything I’d be worried, because it would suggest to me that the magazine was in a rut, not trying new things or trying to reach different audiences. So I expect variability; embrace it, even. It seems to me it goes with the terrain. Satisfaction isn’t measured in page count, and stories like “Holiday” and “Under the Bottom of the Lake” make everything worth it.

Swirsky Stories

You may well have already noticed Rachel Swirsky’s name. If her fiction hasn’t caught your eye — and she’s published several interesting stories already this year, with three months still to go — then her posts at Alas, A Blog or the Aqueduct Press blog may have done. It was one of the latter that snagged me, and then I backtracked to discover, with pleasure, the same passion and directness in the former. Which is what I’m going to talk about here.

In an interview, Swirsky suggested she writes short stories because they are “close to poems. They can have a certain impressionism which approximates thought or sensation — bursts of energy instead of sustained documentation.” I can see that: a story such as “Heartstrung” (Interzone 210), a fantasy in which a mother has to literally sew her daughter’s heart onto the girl’s sleeve, is all about sensation, a short sharp punch of anger and sadness at how that society (and, of course, our own) constrains and pacifies women. But “Heartstrung” actually seems to me the least successful of Swirsky’s stories that I’ve read, precisely because of its brevity. To make its point in such a short space, the story has to be quite crudely manipulative, in a way that invites a “yes, but …” reaction as much as the visceral one that (I assume) was intended.

In contrast, a story like “The Debt of the Innocent”, from Glorifying Terrorism, takes the time to ground its awfulness, and as a result has a more lasting effect. Jamie Wrede, the protagonist, is a nurse who, in a resource-scarce future, is given the responsibility of removing the babies of poor parents from life support in favour of those from more prosperous families. Jamie is persuaded to take an action that might allow her to become a Rosa Parks for the times. “Frightening but familiar”, she is told, “the best [case] to swing public opinion”; the former statement is a reasonable paraphrase of Glorifying Terrorism‘s mission, but Swirsky’s case is more memorable than most in the book. The structure of “The Debt of the Innocent” highlights one of Swirsky’s apparent interests, which is telling stories that might not otherwise get told. Another writer’s version of the same tale could very easily have focused on Jamie, and left the stories of the families affected implicit; Swirsky makes them explicit. Interspersed with Jamie’s story we get the stories of the families of the babies she’s killed. Many of them, individually, pack as much punch as “Heartstrung” — indeed, most of them are more convincing than Jamie’s characterisation — but they also operate as part of a larger and more satisfying whole.

The interest in the marginal is even more obvious in “Scene From a Dystopia” (Subterranean 4; pdf; story starts on page 5), which manages to pack much more than “Heartstrung” into much less space, and which could also be titled If On A Winter’s Night A Handmaid:

You’ve read this book before. It’s one of the classics from the Cold War era, always worth rereading when you’ve got a little time on your hands — long plane rides, your annual winter flu, the two rainy weeks between autumn and winter when you find your mood drifting toward insular and melancholic. You feel comforted when you read the famous opening lines: “If these accounts have fallen into your hands, then you have been identified as a potential recruit for the rebellion. Take heed, for the Eyes are everywhere and you may already be in peril.” On page four, when Stanley relates his discovery of an ancient book from before the Technocracy, you enjoy the familiar tinge of mystery.

The story was published as part of the John Scalzi-edited “SF cliche issue” of Subterranean, and fulfills that remit completely and slyly: we really have read this book before, or as good as, despite the fact that it doesn’t exist, because the shape of a dystopian story is so familiar. The cliche is therefore the background of the story, a piece of assumed knowledge. When Stanley sees a beautiful girl sitting in a gymnasium, we know he will fall in love, and we know that will lead him into conflict with the state, because that’s what happens in We, in 1984, in other stories. So Swirsky doesn’t waste any time telling us what we already know, and when Stanley’s said his noble piece — “a woman is not a piece of data” — and strides on, the narrator gently stops us from following:

Ordinarily, you would follow him. Instead, allow me to waylay you here.

In the overall plot of the novel, this moment is unimportant. The entire scene occupies only two pages, from 50-52. But take a moment to explore this scene with me, to examine the story that lies not on the page, but inhabits the margins.

Now that Stanley is gone, let us venture where he never treads: into the gymnasium with Natalie.

“Scene From a Dystopia” is fanfic for a story that doesn’t exist. Moreover it’s an argument for fanfic as critique, as a particularly elegant act of criticism — or put another way, an argument for a marginal artistic form (in terms of the cultural value generally accorded to it, if not in sheer numbers), even as the surface of the story is an argument on behalf of marginal characters. By its ending, which challenges the reader’s sympathies as much as, if not more than, that of “The Debt of the Innocent”, “Scene From a Dystopia” provokes some important thoughts about the choices and assumptions made by both readers and writers as they go about their business, the most important of which is probably, simply, notice. Elsewhere, Gene wondered why a character in a story was transexual, then got called on it, and wondered why he wondered. “Scene From a Dystopia”, I think, is among other things a reminder that it’s natural to wonder. If “straight white male” is the default, then anything else indicates that a choice has been made — or at least, it implies that a more conscious choice has been made than the one made by Stanley’s author. Even if the motive behind that choice is, perfectly validly, “why not?”, the choice is there.

Which brings me to the story I thought I was going to spend most of my time talking about, “Dispersed by the Sun, Melting in the Wind” (Subterranean Online, Summer 2007), New Wave-y title and all. It has the best of the three stories I’ve mentioned above. It has the impressionistic, image- and sensation-driven feel of “Heartstrung” (and a lot of scene breaks; if Nick Mamatas really does think that scene breaks are always giant gongs, he’d probably be deafened by this story), the skillful interweaving of narratives that distinguishes “The Debt of the Innocent”, and the direct, telling-it-plain voice of “Scene From a Dystopia”. It’s something of a relief, in fact, to encounter a new writer who uses an omniscient voice that isn’t drenched in Kelly Link-style knowingness. “Dispersed …” is the short story equivalent of hyperlink cinema. It’s how the end of the world would look if you were God.

Wealthy northerners watch the event through cameras on surviving satellites. Milliseconds after impact, their screens go black as the asteroid’s collision displaces earth and rock in a hundred mile radius. Radioactive waste illegally buried in poverty-stricken Puerto Natales flies into the air, joining the plume of dirt that whirls into the chaotic weather systems caused by impact. Soil sewn with radioactive dust distributes across the globe in a storm that blocks the sun for three months.

(It could contain The Road as a sidebar.)

The last humans are an Aboriginal Australian girl, and a Nepalese man. We also see the inventor of “the last major art movement”, a Swedish woman who finds a way to create three-dimensional holograms of memories, and the perpetrator of “the last act of malice”, a man who releases the genetically modified organisms he’s been working on when it becomes clear that his government has abandoned him.

When Scalzi linked to the story, one of the less enamoured commentators (a minority), described it as “heavily didactically left-wing”. A couple of others challenged this assessment, though no debate ever really developed. I think there’s something in the characterisation: the choices Swirsky makes in the course of her story are at every stage choices to focus on people who are, in the here and now, disenfranchised, or choices to highlight the hypocrisy of those in power. When the wealthiest nations come up with their survival plan, we are told that “as for those who won’t be included […] global leaders mumble about regrettable losses then do what they have always done: sacrifice the good of the many for the good of themselves.” Is this cynical? Or just clear-sighted? Certainly the description of those who leave the safety of the north to travel south to stand, and die, with “their impoverished brothers and sisters” as “the last heroes” seems sincere. Note that I don’t intend this description as pejorative, though depending on your personal politics you might take it as such. But the story put me in mind of something Abigail said when reviewing Hal Duncan’s Book of All Hours, about the book being a manifesto. Swirsky’s story isn’t as fierce as Duncan’s, but it has something of the same steel, the same confidence to say “this is how I see it. Take it or leave it.”

And it would be a shame to leave it. “Dispersed …” isn’t as lyrical as its title might lead you to expect, but it’s certainly very atmospheric, full of images of brutal clarity — a child pulling a rib from a rotted skeleton, for instance — and brief, deft sketches. One of these concerns the last music made by mankind. It’s not much, and music is hard to write about at the best of times, but it’s enough to feel the pulse:

#

The last man is tone deaf and the light-eyed child doesn’t like to song because it reminds her that her voice is piping and high when it should be resonant and bass, so the last music mankind makes is subtle and strange. It’s the last man grunting in answer to the raven’s sporadic caws; it’s the light-eyed child splashing in the river to the beat of her heart; it’s the last man’s fingers drumming on his son’s hollow belly.

#

It’s moments like this that make “Dispersed …” the most distinctively Swirskyian story I’ve read so far. If I have a reservation about her work in general, it’s that it seems to be most successful when it has a clear template to follow. I’m going to indulge myself, and quote a John Clute line I’ve always liked about Steph Swainston’s first novel The Year of Our War, that it’s “a coughing of the throat of a storyteller being born in difficult but enthralling times”. It sums up how I feel about these stories, that they’re steps on the way to something more completely owned; what they say, and what might be said next, have the feel of things that need to be said. What will be said next, it looks like, is a story in Electric Velocipede 13, “How the World Became Quiet: a Post-Human Creation Myth”. A fluke of publishing order, no doubt, but it seems that after writing about the end, Rachel Swirsky is going to tackle a beginning.

Light

M. John Harrison writes:

As a reader I’m not interested in a “fully worked out” world. I’m not interested in “self consistency” … When I read fantasy, I read for the bizarre, the wrenched, the undertone of difference & weirdness that defamiliarises the world I know. I want the taste of the writer’s mind, I want to feel I’m walking about in the edges of the individual personality.

And as if by magic, a new story by Kelly Link appeared, which doesn’t come within ten city blocks of being “fully worked out”. It’s the story of Lindsey, a 38-year-old woman whose husband has left her, and whose gay brother has just come to stay with her. Chris Barzak says of it:

I think the rhythm and pacing of the story is different from any of her others. There’s less lyricism than usual. The characterizations feel flatter, but purposively so. The fantastical elements seem to float unfixed, as if the reader shouldn’t be able to contextualize them and understand what they “mean” or for what many readers would try to read as metaphor. In many ways it’s a fantasy that feels like science fiction, if that makes any sense at all. For me, these are different attributes than the ones that usually show up in Kelly’s stories. Or I should say, they have all appeared variously in her stories, but not all in once place as they do here. The closest story of hers that it feels similar to, for me, is “The Hortlak”. But even that story feels as if you can read the fantasy elements as a metaphor for entrapment in a world where consumerism is the lens through which people view and understand, or fail to understand, one another. I didn’t necessarily get that feeling for this story. I can make attempts to analyze it in such a way, but it feels more resistant to analysis than any other story of hers, for me.

I agree that “Light” feels resistant to analysis, but I’m not sure it’s particularly more so than the rest of her fiction. I also agree that the story it feels closest to is “The Hortlak”; both are basically linear stories, and in both the fantastic elements are described in a deadpan way that makes them just another part of the world. (As opposed to a story like “Magic for Beginners”, where the deadpan delivery makes you wonder just which aspects of the story are magical.) But for me the big difference between this story and the rest of Link’s work is the extent to which the fantastic elements saturate the landscape.

I think I’m right in saying that in every other Link story set in our world (which is most of them) the fantastic is only experienced by, at most, a small group of people — the clerks in “The Hortlak”, the poker-players in “Lull”, “The Specialist’s Hat”. The arguable exception is probably “Most of my Friends are Two-Thirds Water”, but that story isn’t explicitly a fantasy in the way that “Light” is — the blonde women might be aliens, but they might not — and even if they are aliens, nobody else knows about it. In “Light”, everyone knows that the world is very weird. In the first scene, Lindsey overhears conversations about the limitations of being raised by wolves, and about how prosthetic shadows are a “not expensive and reasonably durable” option for those born without shadows of their own — and about how children born with two shadows won’t grow up happy. (Lindsey is dismissive of this, since she had a second shadow, which itself grew up to be Alan, and had a happy childhood.) More importantly, though, she overhears people talking about “a new pocket universe”.

Although other fantastic elements are introduced throughout the story — the weather-witches; the unwakeable sleepers who it is Lindsey’s job to look after; the fact that the sky always seems to be a shade of green — it’s the pocket universes that have the most far-reaching implications. We’re told people go there on holiday, or retire there. We’re told that mermaids have come back from a Disney pocket universe. And there’s an offhand remark by one character referring to people who “want everything to be the way it was before”, which certainly gave me the fantasy-that-feels-like-science-fiction jolt that Chris refers to in his comment. It’s still a version of our world — Florida is mentioned, as is the fact that Tibet is “riddled” with pocket universes (which, like the best Linkian observations, somehow feels intuitively right) — but it’s one where magic has become ubiquitous, commonplace, accepted. (It feels, in fact, much like the way I wanted Justina Robson’s post-Quantum Bomb dimensionally-split world in her Quantum Gravity series to feel.) Having read the story, I can’t tell you what any of it means, but I can tell you what it feels like: it feels strange, defamiliarising, and like the taste of an idiosyncratic mind.

Making Love in Madrid

Reviewing a recent installment in Aqueduct Press‘s “Conversation Pieces” series, the novella We, Robots by Sue Lange, David Soyka wrote:

This is a well told story, though nothing particularly surprising or ground-breaking. It adds nothing to the canon. What’s particularly curious is that this is part of a series put out by Aqueduct Press called “Conversation Pieces” that are loosely connected to feminist SF. Other than the fact that women can be considered a subjugated class (and there is a sub-genre of stories specifically concerning female robots, e.g., C.L. Moore’s “No Woman Born” and Lester del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy”), I fail to see anything about We, Robots that is feminist.

In fact, I’m not sure I completely agree with Soyka’s argument with respect to We, Robots. The story — of a robot who is fitted with a “pain interpreter”, in a world where humans are gradually replacing their bodies with prosthetic and cybernetic parts — is an argument for the value of sensation, of sensory experience. If you accept Elizabeth Bear’s feminist critique of the singularity, or something similar, there are certainly grounds for considering We, Robots a feminist work. For all that its primary focus, as Soyka says, is a recapitulation of sf thought, it is also a story about, to borrow Bear’s phrase, “the messy bits of being meat”.

But I’m at least as interested in the comment Soyka notes by series editor L. Timmel Duchamp, in the brief foreword that accompanies every volume, to the effect that “The Conversation Pieces series presents a wide variety of texts, including short fiction (which may not always be sf and may not necessarily even be feminist), essays, speeches, manifestoes, poetry, interviews, correspondence, and group discussions” [emphasis mine]. If you think about it, apart from anything else it functions as a way of counter-acting the assumptions you might otherwise bring to a book published by a feminist small press. Instead of taking the politics of what you’re about to read for granted, you approach it questioningly: is this feminist? What do I mean by feminist? If it’s not feminist, why has it been published in this series?

Which brings me to the most recent volume, Making Love in Madrid by Kimberley Todd Wade. It’s another novella, this time a debut publication, and seems to have attracted pretty much zero discussion, outside of a brief review in the May 2007 Locus by Rich Horton:

Kimberley Todd Wade’s Making Love in Madrid is a lyrical metafictional piece ostensibly about a blocked writer in Madrid who meets a beautiful amnesiac woman, only to be consumed by jealousy when in addition to taking up with him she takes up with the neighbor, a much more famous artist … anyway, this is how things start, but Wade is really writing, I think, about writers and their characters. As I said, a lyrical story, often quite beautiful, but in the end I don’t think it held together.

Personally I’d reverse the description of the premise: it’s about a beautiful amnesiac woman who meets a blocked writer in what is ostensibly Madrid. At the very least, it’s about both of them equally, since the story is told in a very well controlled omniscient voice, drifting between the heads of the two characters, Sheila and John, in a way that reinforces the dreamlike affect of the setting. The much more famous artist, Alan, I have difficulty calling a character — very occasionally we get a glimpse of his perspective, but most of the time he’s a device for poking at Sheila and John’s relationship. The characterisation there is fine, subject to my criticisms below, but if you enjoy this story, it won’t be for the characters, it will be for the affect. If I’d got around to reading the copy of Ice by Anna Kavan that I’ve had sitting in my TBR pile for the past couple of months, I suspect I’d be making a comparison with Wade’s novella; as it is, the writer I’ve read most recently whose work was called to mind by Making Love in Madrid is Zoran Zivkovic, most particularly in the sense that the uncertain landscape and strange events described have some meaning just beyond my grasp.

Reading it not long after We, Robots and Soyka’s review, however, I found myself wondering how feminist or not Making Love in Madrid is. On the one hand it is, like Lange’s story, very much about the messy bits of being human: you could guess that, perhaps, from the title, although there is relatively little explicit sex, despite the fact that in their first meeting Sheila confesses to John that she’s an insatiable nymphomaniac. There is some, but the characters, particularly John, think about it more than they have it — for instance, on a trip to a market near the hotel in which he is staying, John observes mozzarella “floating in salted water like detached breasts”; he “fondles vegetables he will slice into salad”, “radishes of obscene pinkness” and “piles of knobby phallic tubers” (17). Later he observes Sheila eating a cookie “as if eating were the most sensuous pleasure available to mankind” (57). (It runs the other way, too: a character is referred to as being “as limp as an over-cooked noodle”, 33.) Sheila, for her part, is more likely to associate sexual experiences with music. Alan’s apartment, which she visits while John is out, is filled with musical instruments, and in her eyes Alan plays the piano as if seducing it: he “reclines” in front of it, his fingertips “kiss” the ivory teeth; as he plays, she finds herself involuntarily embracing herself as her knees go week and her hands tremble. Moreover, right at the start of the story Wade hangs a big red flag on everything Sheila does:

She sits poised on the edge of the sofa, angled precisely in [John]’s direction with left knee over right, overtly feminine, someone clearly creating a role but perhaps herself unaware of it, more like a female impersonator than a born woman. (2)

In fact Sheila is aware of the impression she creates, or at least becomes aware of it as the story proceeds and she begins to recover her memories. Despite the fact that she realises that for John “heartbreak is inevitable”, she finds that “the possibility of that moment of revelation, when he can bear it no longer and turns his pleading eyes on her so that she feels like she’s going to break under the pressure of his desperate gaze” is “irresistable” (56); later she begins to wonder why she’s leading him on in the way that she is, why she enjoys it; at the end, perhaps, she begins to accomodate a more compassionate approach to relationships (a more literal approach to “making love”, you could say), having started to gain more control of identity.

This strikes me as a feminist theme, except for the fact that it seems to me to sit uneasily with the other major aspect of the novella. In a blurb on the back, Anna Tambour describes Making Love in Madrid as “a fantasia of amnesia”, and that’s certainly what it presents as; but by the end, as Horton’s review indicates, it would be more accurate to describe it as a fantasia about writers and writing. When Sheila first goes to John, it is because she wants him to write her a history. She remembers reading one of his books and loving it, so she trusts him to do a good job. As events progress, inevitably, Sheila is revealed to be a writer as well. Equally inevitably, at the end of the story, one of them is revealed to be the author of the other. (I said you don’t read this story for character; you don’t read it for plot, either.)

And throughout the story’s second half, John and Sheila’s writing styles are contrasted. For John, writing requires control, and has to be his: musing on his muse, he reassures himself that “She is only the catalyst, not the creator […] This is my story. I’m in control. She will be whatever I want her to be” (41). By contrast, when Sheila starts to write it is “immediately evident” to John that she possesses no discipline, and so he determines to offer his own working method as an example. But it’s no good — typically she reads until lunchtime, after which she might pick up a pen and write, sprawled across her bed, “gustily propelling [the pen] across the pages of a spiral-bound notebook” (60). But she’s just as likely to take a nap. A conversation about writing reinforces the differences between them:

“Of course, it’s personal to me in so far as it’s my work, but it’s not specific to me. If it were specific to me it would not be successful, not that my work has been a great commercial–or, ah, critical–success, but you know what I mean, I make a living at it …” he allows himself to drift off, realizing the stupidity of his defense that only serves to lead him on to other things to feel defensive about.

She looks satisfied with herself for a moment and turns back to her broccoli, evidencing no further interest in him.

How does she do it? She isn’t making a living, so she’s the authority on the pure form–oh, writing as grand art never sullied by thoughts of money–whereas the truth is that she’s probably tried and failed at publishing and is now mollifying her wretched sense of personal defeat with the palliative of “pure art”. How self-righteous; it makes him furious with her and at the same time ashamed of himself. (64-5)

All of this — the idea that Sheila is uninhibited and impulsive and writes for herself, while John is controlled and resentful and writes for an audience — comes too close to stereotype for my liking. Because the characterisation is broad to start with, it begins to feel that Sheila is the way she is because she’s a woman, while John is the way he is because he’s a man; in the passage above, I think it’s only that last note of shame that injects any sort of complexity into John, particularly the way it’s doesn’t seem to be a conscious recognition of his hypocrisy. But that’s a pretty thin thread to hold on to. And the larger problem — or at least, my problem — is that the very self-awareness that Sheila achieves with respect to herself and her approach to relationships, which is so satisfying on its own terms, seems to reinforce this more rigid view of art and artists. Because, of course, it’s Sheila who is revealed as the writer — that’s why it’s her story, and not John’s. She’s been debating within herself about her writing, her responsibility to her characters, her whole approach; and (the end implicitly argues) she’s in the right. I’m not denying that John is in the wrong, but when it comes to art it seems to me that questions of rightness must always be shifting, fluid, open to further discussion. When I finished Making Love in Madrid, although I’d enjoyed the journey, I felt like the conversation was over.

Hunger

On the not-small list of books coming out this autumn that I’m looking forward to, Vandana Singh’s The Woman who Thought she was a Planet and Other Stories is near the top. It will be published by Zubaan Books sometime before the end of the year; I know this, despite the fact that I can’t find any information about it on Zubaan’s website, because it’s been mentioned in a couple of interviews (for instance this one at the Aqueduct blog), and because Singh’s entry in Interfictions, “Hunger”, is jointly credited as appearing in that anthology and in the forthcoming collection. And I’m looking forward to the collection despite the fact that I haven’t actually read that much of Singh’s work, or perhaps because of that fact, because everything I’ve read has impressed me — the past and future visions in “Delhi”; the intensity of “Thirst”; the feeling of escape at the end of “The Tetrahedron”. The only reason I haven’t read more already is that the stories have been published in such diverse venues that tracking them all down becomes unrealistic.

But all the ones I’ve read have been science fiction. “Hunger”, as mentioned, appeared first in Interfictions, which might lead you to expect it’s a departure. It is and it isn’t. It is lower-key, not science fiction, and barely fantastical (if that); but it is also, ultimately, an argument for the empathic power of sf that is almost embarrassing in its uncomplicated sincerity. It starts with a woman waking up:

She woke up early as usual. The apartment, with its plump sofas like sleeping walruses, the pictures on the walls slightly and mysteriously askew, pale light from the windows glinting off yesterday’s glasses she’d forgotten on the coffee table — the apartment seemed as though it had been traveling through alien universes all night and had only now landed in this universe, cautiously letting in air.

That long second sentence is perhaps trying a little too hard (“walruses” sticks out to my ear, though it’s undeniably a vivid image; and the repetition of “the apartment” feels just a bit too self-conscious), but it does its job. The suggestion of alienation it sets up is elaborated through the first few pages of the story: she (Divya) gradually realises she’s “lying in a strange bed next to a strange beast that she slowly recognised as her very dear husband, Vikas”; she stands in the doorway of her daughter’s (Charu’s) room, thinking about alien universes; she steps cautiously into the kitchen because at night it belongs “to the denizens of another world”, cockroaches and other insects; and most explicitly, when warily looking ahead to the day to come, she thinks “she wasn’t made for such things — she was from another planet, where you danced with trees and ate parathas and read trashy science fiction novels.” The mix of domesticity with a more distanced perspective echoes, in places, Pamela Zoline’s “The Heat Death of the Universe“, although not in structure, and Singh’s story is not so feverishly intense.

Only gradually does the setting and do the other characters come into focus around Divya. But like Sarah Boyle, Divya is preparing for a birthday party: her daughter Charu’s twelfth. The shadow hanging over her preparations is one of expectation; Vikas has been promoted, and is now expected to socialise with VPs and CEOs and other abbreviations, all of whom have (Divya knows) homes far more spacious, and in far better neighbourhoods. Divya is nervous to the point of resenting the promotion in the first place. But the preparations run on schedule, with the help of a cook and a cleaner, and in spite of Charu (who would rather talk to the old man who lives upstairs) and Vikas (who is more concerned with putting out poison for the mouse he just spotted in their bedroom). Just before the guests arrive, we get another sfnal nudge, when Divya thinks of the book she’s reading, which has a body-snatchers plot: “she stared wistfully at the lurid cover … the plot had to do with Viraa discovering aliens disguised as humans, living in the town of Malgudi. They were from some planet light-years away. Divya wondered how she was going to survive.” The ambiguity of “she” in that last sentence is, I assume, entirely deliberate.

So with all of that in mind, when the guests have arrived and the party is in full swing, it’s somehow not a surprise that the story’s tone shifts slightly. But it doesn’t become sf; the body-snatching is only a metaphor. What we get are a series of sketches that are broader, a bit more cartoonish than what has come before if not outright farcical; portraits of guests who are larger-than-life if not outright grotesques. It matches how Divya feels about the events whirling around her. If the style of “Hunger” is less dense than that of “Delhi” or “Thirst”, it is no less careful or effective; and it can and does absorb a sudden shift, as when the old man upstairs is discovered to have died. The description of the body is quite sober, if not dignified — “What Divya saw was the old man curled up in a nest of rags, clutching his throat with both hands, quite dead. His hooked nose, protruding from his too-thin face, gave him the appearance of a strange bird; his heavy-lidded eyes were open and staring at some alien vista she could not imagine” — and in this context, the reference to an “alien vista” has an extra resonance. But the guests and their reactions remain buffoons and bluster, respectively:

[Divya] turned to face the Lambas. Mrs Lamba gave a high-pitched cry and fell against her husband, who, not being built to handled the weight, tottered against the wall. Mrs Bhosle took over, muttering words of comfort and calling for brandy, giving Divya an unexpectedly sympathetic look. Mr Lamba drew himself up to his full height. Divya noticed that the tip of his nose was quite pale.
“What is the meaning of this! Who is this fellow?”
“The father-in-law of my neighbour’s servant,” Divya said. “They don’t feed him–”
“I don’t care who he is,” Mr Lamba said. “How can you tolerate having riffraff living in your building? The man could be dangerous! Or have a disease! Like AIDS!”

Mr Lamba’s pronouncements are absurd — AIDS is pretty much the most ridiculous disease he could have chosen, in the circumstances — but reading this passage, what struck me is how neatly those pronouncements are prefigured by one word, earlier in the scene: “tottered”. The one we might have expected to totter, stereotypically, is Mrs Lamba; but no, she solidly falls, and it is her much less large husband who totters. His full height, we suspect, is unimpressive; the shrillness of his complaints, when we reach them, is already half-anticipated. (Although it is Mrs Lamba who, when she has recovered her composure, insists she has never been so insulted in all her life; because obviously, the old man’s death is only important insofar as it affects her.)

As the party breaks up the tone shifts yet again, this time undergoing a more wrenching transition into a harsher realism. The reason for the old man’s death becomes clear, but the police have no appetite for an investigation: “If we launched an investigation each time some old fellow dies of starvation, we would be overwhelmed”, says one, bluntly. (But if it had been Mrs Lambas’ father, we think …) Time skips on. Vikas leaves his job, unhappily, and a silence grows between him and Divya. Charu carries a new sadness within her — “after the incident she could no longer bear any kind of cruelty, nor could she, as a consequence, watch the news without tears” — and a silence grows there, too, although the daughter occasionally tries to bridge it: “There were times when the girl would come upon her mother and give her a fierce, deep hug for no reason at all, and Divya felt Charu was trying to tell her something in some other language, and that she was able to comprehend it in that other language as well.” All of this is building up to the change in Divya, which is the story’s fantastic element, which is that she has become sensitised:

When she looked upon the faces of strangers they appeared to her like aliens, like the open mouths of birds, crying their need. But most clearly she could sense those who were hungry, whether they were schoolchildren who had forgotten their lunch or beggars under the bridge, or the boot-boy at the corner, or the emaciated girl sweeping the dusty street in front of the municipal building.

Two things to note here. The first is that the sfnal imagery has become pervasive, the references coming thicker and faster than they have through the rest of the story — this mention of strangers-as-aliens is immediately after Chura’s attempts to communicate in a different language. The second thing is that the world beyond Divya’s family is a darker, more claustrophobic, less welcoming place: Singh writes of “the hungry and forgotten, great masses of them, living like cockroaches in the cracks and interstices of the new old city”; the contrast with the rest of the story is almost too much to bear, even as we remember the cockroaches that owned Divya’s kitchen when she wasn’t there at night.

And then there’s the ending. We return for a final time to the science fiction stories that Divya reads. There is the sense that now more than before she is finding consolation in them, and that though in part that may be a consequence of her trauma it is, on some level, not wrong. Quite the opposite. It is, as I said, almost embarrassingly sincere (or if you can swallow it, a rallying cry), and it works only because of Singh’s absolute control of tone in this story, the nuanced shifts which I hope I’ve mapped at least a little, enough that to leave you with this last quote won’t seem entirely facile. But it is, when you come down to it, a big reason why I want to read Singh’s collection:

Slowly the understanding came to her that these stories were trying to tell her a great truth in a very convoluted way, that they were all in some kind of code, designed to deceive the literary snob and waylay the careless reader. And that this great truth, which she would spend her life unraveling, was centered around the notion that you did not have to go to the stars to find aliens or to measure distances between people in light-years.

Glory

Today, the lion’s share of my eternal admiration for hard sf, at least the best stuff, at least in principle if not always in execution, goes to its sheer bloody-mindedness, the blatant glee with which it ignores more common modes of aesthetic enjoyment. In a hard sf story, truth really is beauty. Take this paragraph from Greg Egan’s “Glory” (to be found in the Strahan/Dozois New Space Opera):

The world the Noudah called home was the closest of the system’s five planets to their sun. The average temperature was one hundred and twenty degrees Celsius, but the high atmospheric pressure allowed liquid water to exist across the entire surface. The chemistry and dynamics of the planet’s crust had led to a relatively flat terrain, with a patchwork of dozens of disconnected seas but no globe-spanning ocean. From space, these seas appeared as silvery mirrors, bordered by a violet and brown tarnish of vegetation.

There is no poetry in this. With the possible exception of “tarnish”, every word of the paragraph is chosen purely for its ability to explain, to set out the particulars of this planet with as little distraction as possible. Yet the image conjured is wondrous, in a strict sense — it is remarkable; it is extraordinary. It is how the story’s protagonist, a mathematician who’s travelled across a reasonable chunk of interstellar distance, sees the universe. Later in the story, she supposes that an alien race’s drawings and poetry “no doubt had their virtues”, but they seem to her “bland and opaque”; it is a conspicuous refusal of that type of beauty, in favour of the symmetry and solidity of mathematical proof. Sure, you could dress up the facts, translate them into a different form, and sure that could be beautiful in its own way. But equally, in its own way, it’s already beautiful.

OK, I’m exaggerating. That paragraph isn’t what’s great about “Glory”, and neither, really, is what comes after, which is most of the story but which feels a little familiar. (The mathematician has the option of sending a final, wonderful proof, one that explains the significance of everything, to her people, and chooses not to, because seeking after knowledge is, in the end, what’s satisfying.) No, what’s great about “Glory” is the opening of the story, the four pages before that paragraph in which Egan’s dispassionate camera tracks the meticulous unwinding of what is effectively a galactic-scale Rube-Goldberg device. We start with two ingots floating in space, one of hydrogen and one of anti-hydrogen. They are forced together in such a way as to produce a needle of compressed matter and antimatter one micron wide, sculpted such that one trajectory is favoured for the annihilation debris. The needle accelerates to 98% of the speed of light and travels, in the few trillionths of a second of its subjective existence, across light years and into the heart of a star. There, the few million excess neutrons included in the original ingots set up specific shock waves in the star’s plasma, the initial pattern elaborating to create a molecular factory, the products of which are ejected from the star at a velocity just below that needed to escape from the star’s gravity well, on arcs that intersect with the gravity well of the system’s gas giant, which captures them and draws them down onto its third moon. Once landed the machines construct a receiver, just in time to collect a series of timed gamma ray pulses from the needle’s original destination, that contain the information needed to recreate the story’s protagonists in forms native to their new location. (Sympathetic viewpoint characters? Ha! Who needs ’em?)

Two mathematicians arrive, and go about their separate missions:

Anne’s ship ascended so high on its chemical thrusters that it shrank to a speck before igniting its fusion engine and streaking away in a blaze of light. Joan felt a pang of loneliness; there was no predicting when they would be reunited.

Having read through four pages that depict a process that is precisely, spectacularly, absurdly, predictable — more detailed and convincing than my synopsis above — you can understand why Joan might be a little nervous. I almost wish those four pages could be carved off and anthologised in their own right; because their glory, I think, is that just for a minute they make you see the universe through Joan’s eyes.