Category: short fiction

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.

Tracking

Doug Cohen:

So I thought to myself, “Hey, what if we did a general subscription drive, to boost the magazines for general purposes? Every subscriber counts.” The difference here is that I’m not talking about any specific magazine in danger of dying. There is no immediate urgency. Nothing right now. But like with oil, one day we’ll wake up and the magazines could very well be gone. We need to do something now, before that happens.

So I’m asking people to do two things. First, spread this post throughout the blogosphere. Get the message out. Second, if you haven’t subscribed to a magazine recently, unless you don’t have the $$$ pick one and subscribe! At least one. Saying you don’t have the time to read the magazine is a lame excuse. How many of us have books we bought years ago that we haven’t read? I do. Add a few magazines to the pile. What’s the harm? And if you just read novels, try short stories. Why have you only been reading novels, especially if you want to be a writer? Do you honestly think there is nothing to be learned from reading shorter works? And don’t tell me you’ve tried all the magazines. New ones are always starting. And when a new editor takes over the helm, in many ways that magazine becomes new.

Paul Raven:

What we are missing are the cold hard facts. Why are subscriptions to short fiction magazines dropping? Subscription drives are an admirable thing, but until the source of the problem is located, it’s like adding more water to a leaking bucket. We need to find the hole and patch it.

Now, for all I know, the magazine publishers may well be hunting for the leak. I certainly hope so. I know some of them are looking at methods of patching the leak, too, if not already rolling out potential patches and strengthening. This is a good thing.

But what worries me is this; subscription drives may cause an unfounded short-term sense of security. If publishers look at the next twelve months and breathe a sigh of relief, they may not think ahead to the next five years.

Jonathan McCalmont:

Like most genre fans these days, I’m not hugely interested in short fiction. I don’t particularly like long books either but I think that any idea worth developing is worth developing in some depth. On a purely shallow level, if short fiction magazines were to be wiped from the Earth, I don’t think my enjoyment of genre would be hugely curtailed. However, I try not to be the shallow type so I think the question one needs to ask oneself when considering Doug and Paul’s advice is, what are short fiction SF magazines actually for if they’re not shop-windows for people who go on to write novels?

Dave Klecha:

Which is why, to me, the fate of science fiction magazines, to me, is somewhat academic. Or, I should say, I don’t have a lot of bias when it comes to them. Not particularly beholden to them, no particular animosity toward them (other than, of course, that cliched sort of frustrated rage at not being able to sell to them–look at me, my fury burns so hot, I’m increasing entropy! Rawr!) And it occurs to me that the move to the web not only seems inevitable, but could actually be constructive.

Like Jason Stoddard, I think the world has already changed away from print magazines and print fiction. Short of an incipient electronic paper revolution (which seems to me to be best poised as that holy grail of effective e-book readers, not the sort of disposable/collectible unique copies that magazines and newspapers are today), I don’t see them surviving in their current form. But, you know, I find the web much more conducive to reading the short stuff.

Jeremy Tolbert:

The gorilla in the room that we rarely acknowledge is that nobody wants to read short fiction. If they did, then there wouldn’t be this mess. I’ve heard and read hand waving about the changes in distribution models, but honestly, I don’t buy it. In this day and age, if you have a burning desire to read science fiction short stories, you can Google up a magazine in less than a second.

Do I think that the public could be marketed towards to encourage the reading of more short fiction? Maybe. A good marketing team can sell just about anything. Do I think anyone has the money to back a large campaign like this? No. SFWA would be the only organization that I could see such an initiative coming from, and they’re a massive joke; an organization dedicated to internal politics and rumormongering more than the decline and collapse of the industry around it.

There is no solution. The public’s interest has moved on. If you’re a writer, go write video games, movies, television, or books, in that order of popularity. That is where the public’s interest is right now, and if you don’t like it, then I’m afraid that you should probably get used to the idea that short fiction is a small, niche hobby of little importance. I’m fine with that. I find that I enjoy writing it, and that’s enough for me. Short fiction for me is a way to learn writing, but I won’t regret leaving it behind if I were to crack another (more popular and better paying) medium, or find some amalgam of several of my own.

(I may come back and add my own comments later. In the meantime, see also most of the comments in that last discussion.)

EDIT: For instance:

But how many people really love to read “speculative novels”? I love to read the novels of — for example, and in no particular order — William Gibson, Maureen McHugh, Geoff Ryman, Connie Willis, and Paul Park, among others. There are other authors whose novels I don’t love to read, but I might be willing to spend eight bucks on them in an airport bookstore for lack of choice. There are some authors I’ve never read that, if I did read read them, would probably fall into one or the other category.

And then there’s the vast majority of authors, whose novels I either am indifferent to, or actively dislike.

I’m probably a little pickier than average, but I would be surprised if most fans tastes don’t follow a similar sort of distribution. How much crossover is there between John Ringo readers and Ellen Kushner readers?

Admittedly, few magazines are as broad as all of SF, but the more major they are the broader they are, and they’re pretty much all a lot broader than my tastes — which, you will note, are not easily categorized by subgenre. If I pick up any SF magazine, there might or might not be a story in there that I like, but I can count on there being stories in there that I hate.

This Time It’s Really Going

SCIFICTION, that is:

As of Friday, June 15, 2007, SCI FICTION will no longer be availabe on SCIFI.COM.
SCIFI.COM would like to thank all those who contributed
and those who read the short stories over the past few years.

That’s Friday. So go, read.

(via Gwenda, who also points out that you can create a personal archive of the site using this; or you could browse the ED SF Project for suggestions of which stories to read. My picks, if I had to pick: “Anyway” by M. Rickert, “The Voluntary State” by Christopher Rowe, “The Empire of Ice Cream” by Jeffrey Ford, “The Women Men Don’t See” by James Tiptree Jr, “What I Didn’t See” by Karen Joy Fowler, and “New Light on the Drake Equation” by Ian R. MacLeod. But you’re going to have a hard time finding a bad choice. I wonder if we could get that Best of SCIFICTION now?)

The Siege of Earth

Writing about favourites is always hard. Not — at least for me — because it’s hard to be critical, but because it’s too easy. Writing about something I really like, I often feel somewhat self-conscious, and try to compensate by pointing out all the flaws before anyone does. And when we’re talking about a writer like Stephen Baxter — who started publishing just as I reached the golden age of twelve, who I keep thinking I should try to write about in some vaguely substantive way, and who remains one of my favourite writers — it has to be admitted that there are flaws to be pointed out. Baxter stories are full of passages such as this, from “Last Contact” (in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, ed George Mann). Caitlin is visiting her mother, Maureen; at this point, on the second page of the story, all we know about the larger situation is that Caitlin is about to deliver news about something called the “Big Rip”:

It was just a scrap of lawn really, with a quite nicely stocked border, behind a cottage that was a little more than a hundred years old, in this village on the outskirts of Oxford. “It’s the first time I’ve seen this properly.”

“Well, it’s the first bright day we’ve had. My first spring here.” They walked around the lawn. “It’s not bad. It’s been let to run to seed a bit by Mrs Murdoch. Who was another lonely old widow,” Maureen said.

“You mustn’t think like that.”

“Well, it’s true. This little house is fine for someone on their own, like me, or her. I suppose I’d pass it on to somebody else in the same boat, when I’m done.”

Caitlin was silent at that, silent at the mention of the future.

It’s that last phrase — “silent at the mention of the future” — that grates, a clumsy intrusion into Caitlin’s thoughts. And it seems both unnecessary — we don’t yet know for certain that we’re reading an end-of-the-world story, but we could have made an informed guess without that sort of nudge — and premature. Why not build up the atmosphere of unease just a bit longer?

Baxter’s writing is never going to be lauded as beautiful, exactly (although more often than not he has a good eye for description), and I think this sort of infelicity is part of the reason why — the sort of thing that, even if entirely intentional, looks like it would have been caught and removed if there’d been one more draft. Of course, there are compensations, most commonly the sort of cosmological vistas that almost nobody else is writing right now. Which is why I was so glad to read, and so dazzled by, “The Siege of Earth”. It’s been over year since I read a really mind-expanding Stephen Baxter story — Transcendent, the third of the three novels that make up what is probably Baxter’s most consistently impressive (if somewhat unfortunately named) sequence of novels to date, Destiny’s Children. “A Siege of Earth” is another pure hit of no-apologies, no-compromises science fiction.

It’s the closing story — and the only original story — in Resplendent, a (very) loosely linked collection of short stories which was published as “volume four” of Destiny’s Children. All four books are set in Baxter’s well-established Xeelee universe, a future history in which godlike and eternally-offscreen aliens deliver as thorough a kicking to the idea of a manifest destiny for humanity as you could wish for. Moreover, all four track the fate of humanity over evolutionary timescales, but in truth most of the stories in Resplendent add little to arguments already made in the novels. In particular, many of them read as pendants to the second Destiny’s Children novel, Exultant. Some of the stories explicate events referenced in the novel — as part of a Grand Tour of the solar system, for instance, Exultant’s protagonists visit the site of “Reality Dust”; you don’t need to know that, but if you do the scene in the novel acquires an additional resonance. Most of the stories are also set in roughly the same period as the novel — give or take ten thousand years, and on the scale Baxter’s working to you can give or take ten thousand years quite easily — and share a predominantly militaristic tone. “The Siege of Earth”, though, is a leap forward from the rest of the book, more elegiac in tone, and set almost four times further in the future than its nearest neighbour, “Between Worlds” (AD 27,152). Admittedly this may seem rather inadequate by the standards of something like “The Baryonic Lords”, which capped Baxter’s previous Xeelee collection, Vacuum Diagrams, and which takes place more than four times further into the future again; but it’s still deep enough into time for the solar system to be virtually unrecognisable, and well past the events of Transcendent, noted in Resplendent‘s timeline as “the high water-mark of human destiny”.

Most of Baxter’s Xeelee stories have a specific date attached to them, but the date of “The Siege of Earth” is tidier than most: 1,000,000 AD. Such an ostentatious declaration of futurity can’t be accidental, and nor, surely, are the associations raised by the oh-so-familiar image in the story’s opening line: “The canal cut a perfect line across the flat Martian landscape, arrowing straight for the crimson rim of sun at the horizon.” Not for the last time, the writing trades openly on a presumed familiarity with earlier sfnal visions to gain emotional power. (With a commendably broad scope of reference; one character even says, in so many words, that “Earth got used up”, albeit to an extent far beyond that implied in Firefly.) The three paragraphs immediately following that opening sentence establish the tone of the story more firmly:

Walking along the canal’s bank, Symat was struck by the sheer scale on which people had reshaped the landscape for a purpose — in this case to carry water from Mars’s perpetually warm side to the cold. Of course the whole world was engineered, but terraforming a world was beyond Symat’s imagination, whereas a canal was not.

His mother had always said he had the instincts of an engineer. But it wasn’t likely he would ever get to be an engineer, for this wasn’t an age when people built things. A million years after the first human footsteps had been planted in its ancient soil, Mars was growing silent once more.

Symat was fourteen years old, however, and that was exactly how old the world was to him. And he was unhappy for much more immediate reasons than man’s cosmic destiny. He stumbled on, alone.

Plainspoken these may be, but they achieve an impressive amount nonetheless, taking us with satisfying economy through several different understandings of what the story is going to be about. Depending on the reader, the “Of course” in the first of the above paragraphs is either a slight jolt (how casually such grand work is mentioned!) or an expression of trust (yeah, you know what Mars is going to be like in 1,000,000 AD). The next paragraph swiftly punctures any hopes we might have been harbouring that this is a time of human prosperity: Mars is “growing silent”. But we’re not given time to fully absorb the implications of that, either, because the next paragraph focuses the story down onto Symat, the boy-engineer, and his much more mundane unhappiness. He has, in fact, run away from home.

The first part of the story continues Symat’s exploration of Mars, gradually unpacking some of the other implications of those opening paragraphs. Through his eyes, we start to see a solar system not just engineered (Mars no longer rotates) but prematurely aged (the sun has swollen into a red giant before its time, and has already swallowed Mercury and Venus). The towns and cities through which Symat passes are magnificent but empty. He encounters some other children, and befriends one in particular, a girl called Mela. But none of them are true humans; they’re Virtuals, holographic projections of Mars’s own artificial mind (which is in turn part of a galactic-scale assembly known as the Conclave), created as surrogates by a human race so broken it seems to have forsaken the future altogether. This turns out to be more of a literal truth than we might expect; in fact, it’s another iteration of evolutionary destiny, probably the grimmest anywhere in Destiny’s Children. The forces shaping human development in Coalescent, Exultant, and Transcendent were (loosely) family, war, and religion: here it is ultimate defeat that provides a selection pressure. The humans of “The Siege of Earth” live between the might of the Xeelee on one hand, humanity having become enough of an annoyance that they merit being dealt with permanently, and the inevitability of the sun’s death on the other. “The trap of history”, we are told, “closing in Symat’s lifetime.”

“The Scourge has been continuing now for three hundred thousand years. To the Xeelee the Scourge is a conscious project. To humans it has become our environment.” Mela’s voice was neutral, her words not quite her own, Symat thought. “A steady force applied to a population for long enough becomes a selection pressure. In such an environment those able psychologically to accept the reality of inevitable defeat will prosper. And that is why you are prepared to walk trustingly into the booths, even without knowing what lies beyond. Your ancestors have learned to accept similar bolt-holes without question, far back into your history. You’ve been preadapted to accept the booths for ten thousand generations! Perhaps even that was part of the grand design of the Scourge.”

As evolutionary theory this may not be entirely convincing, even with godlike aliens to help the process along, but it’s a powerful starting point for a story. Of course the reason Symat is the protagonist of the story, it transpires, is that he’s different. He has, as his mother says, the instincts of an engineer, the engineer’s urge to investigate, find out, solve; which is a shorthand way of saying he has the instincts of someone from our own time, that he is someone we can safely identify with in this alien deep time. The very last thing Symat wants to do is walk into a “transfer booth” of uncertain origin, even if it does ostensibly lead to a pocket universe that might be a sanctuary for humanity. (And others: one of the story’s multiple grace notes establishes that booths have also been provided for the solar system’s other indigenous intelligences, such as those identified in Baxter’s 1993 story “The Sun-People”. Another sidebar notes that Saturn’s moon Titan, now warmed by the sun, is finally blooming into life, an idea Baxter spent more time on in his 1996 novel Titan.)

In pursuit of an alternative ending, Symat and Mela embark on their own Tour of the solar system. Revelations come thick and fast, producing repeated shocks of perspective in Symat, and the cumulative effect is powerful, even if some of the surprises are easily enough anticipated by readers familiar with the shape of the Xeelee timeline. There are still some immortals (described, perhaps too cutely, as “Ascendents”) trying to save humanity from the transfer booths. The plan involves saving the Earth, over the course of millennia — although given the state of it, you’d be forgiven for wondering why they’re bothering. The Earth Symat imagines, our Earth, is a “story-book vision”. In reality, “The mountains were worn down”, and “the air seemed thin, supporting only wispy traces of cloud. And though a few cities still glittered, the ground of Earth shone brick red, the red of Mars, of rust and lifelessness.” The ecology is even more radically reconfigured than this suggests, imported alien species gone wild having developed a new balance with the native flora and fauna. Even the gravity has been reduced. It is through such dramatic aftereffects, rather than direct effects, that Baxter most effectively conveys the scope and power of the forces which have worked on the solar system over time.

There is an extent to which a good-sized chunk of Baxter’s recent sf, and certainly a story like “The Siege of Earth”, can be read as grappling with the challenge of personalising cosmic-scale events. Primo Levi’s recent story notwithstanding, a date like “1,000,000 AD” is not meaningless — quite the opposite. Such a great vista of time, so effortlessly stated, is invested with an almost overpowering amount of meaning. The challenge, for a writer, is to draw that meaning out, and shape it into something resembling a readable story. “The Siege of Earth” is arguably not entirely successful, if you object to being told things by fiction: it contains great gobs of backstory to explain the mighty ruins that Symat finds around him, such as the changed Earth noted above, either exposited by other characters, or by the omniscient narrator. What makes it work, I think, is the impersonal tone with which such information — and the story as a whole — is delivered, the casual mentions of immense projects, and the contrast between that tone and Symat’s emotional, excitable reactions.

Ultimately, as you may already suspect, the story’s resolution involves a choice made by Symat that only Symat can make (in flat contradiction of an earlier assertion by Mela that “every important choice was made long ago”). The setup is a black inversion of the robots-poison-Earth dilemma in Asimov’s Robots and Empire: here, the Ascendents know how to save Earth, but like the robots they need to have their solution authorised, and to do that they have to get around a restrictive definition of “human” that prevents them enacting their solution. So, R. Giskard invented the Zeroth Law; and Luru Parz, first Ascendent, spent several millennia selectively breeding herself a throwback human to fool an ancient machine. The whole situation is so extensively and coldly rigged — not to mention fail-safed, since if things don’t go the way Luru wants, she’ll just start again from scratch; she has time, after all — that the only response left to the reader is a kind of bleak awe.

I don’t know of any contemporary writers as skilled at evoking this sort of vertigo of perspective as Baxter, from the cold immensity of Ring to the dizzying well of futurity in Time to the epic sweep of Evolution. Like the vast emptiness that suffuses “The Siege of Earth”, it’s something that can’t be trivialised, can’t be reduced to something within normal human experience by refiguring it as a metaphor; it simply is. It’s the sort of choice that results, Baxter seems to be saying, when you look the universe as it really is in the eye and don’t blink. It’s also a choice that kills Symat. The story, however, lives on: in the last few pages, it becomes apparent that Luru Parz’s vision of an “Old Earth” is one that Baxter has already started exploring. A sequence of stories beginning with “PeriAndry’s Quest” (2004) has explored a world encased in a pit of spacetime that isolates it from the universe outside, where time runs faster the higher you climb — an extraordinarly resonant setting for all sorts of stories. Symat’s choice is where “The Siege of Earth” ends, where Resplendent ends, where Destiny’s Children ends; but not where the story ends. We’re only in 1,000,000 AD, after all. There’s plenty of time left on the clock yet.

Salon Fantastique: La Fee Verte

I’m pretty sure the fault is in me rather than in Delia Sherman’s story, but as I read the first few pages of “La Fee Verte” I kept thinking of the pilot episode of Angel. As Our Heroine, Victorine, is approached for no apparent reason by the title character (“exquisitely thin … dark eyes huge and bruised in her narrow face”; her name is never translated in the story, although the frequent references to (a) absinthe and (b) green silk should be enough to jog most peoples’ memory), and recoils in astonishment as the enigmatic woman relates events from her past, I kept thinking of the half-demon Doyle appearing out of nowhere and doing the same for Angel. So I was all ready for Victorine to turn around and say, “Okay, you’ve told me the story of my life which, since I was there, I already knew … why aren’t I kicking you out?” (Or, given the setting, some 19th-century Parisian equivalent). Instead:

When the tale was done, La Fee Verte allowed her tears to overflow and trickle, crystalline, down her narrow cheeks. Enchanted, Victorine wiped them away and licked their bitter salt from her fingers. She was inebriated, she was enchanted. She was in love.

I very nearly gave up on the story then and there, because the moment felt unjustified and overwritten, and because it seemed highly unlikely that a character who fell in love on such dubious grounds was someone I was going to enjoy spending the best part of fifty pages with. (“La Fee Verte” is, I think, the longest story in Salon Fantastique.) But I didn’t give up, because many other people have spoken highly of the story, and in the end I’m glad to have read it: I think it’s quite far from being one of the best stories in the book, but it’s enjoyable, with a few moments that raise it above the ordinary.

The first promising moment, in fact, occurs only a few paragraphs later, when it transpires that the stories La Fee Verte tells of Victorine’s past aren’t quite true. “Little by little,” we are told, “Victorine came to depend on [these revisions], as a drunkard depends on his spirits, to mediate between her and her life.” The explicit parallel with drunkenness is probably unnecessary, but the conceit of an addiction to a seer’s visions — not to mention a seer who enables such addiction — is an interesting one. Things between the two women quite quickly sour, though, as La Fee Verte becomes entangled with a (male) client, a writer “of novels in the vein of M. Jules Verne”, to whom she divulges clearly absurd visions of the future, such as a man on the moon who “plants a flag in the dust, scarlet and blue and white, marching in rows of stripes and little stars.” Since this was the US flag at the time the story is set, it’s perhaps a little surprising that La Fee Verte doesn’t recognise it, but the moment serves its purpose, such that when the seer tells Victorine that she is destined to be loved, we know that she is telling the truth.

Gradually Paris as a place asserts itself, and some of the best parts of the rest of the story contribute to a portrait of a city in flux. The story takes place between winter of 1868, when Victorine and La Fee Verte first meet, and autumn of 1870, when Paris is besieged by the Prussian army. Victorine has a succession of lovers, and through her eyes we see the effects that the change in government and fortune is having on the city and its people. At one point, during a relationship with a colonel, Victorine finds herself at an extravagant dinner that “belonged more properly to last month, last year, two years ago”, and feels herself “lost in one of La Fee Verte’s visions, where past, present, and future exist as one.” Such feelings of instability, brought about by the rigid class divisions in the city, are almost eerie, as is the lingering sense — reinforced by La Fee Verte’s periodic appearances — that though Paris too is destined to be loved, the course will not be a smooth one. Which (indulge me) I suppose you could say parallels how I feel about Salon Fantastique. I haven’t been writing about the stories in order; and this is my last post, although “La Fee Verte” is, in fact, the first story in the book. So I know that for anyone who reads the book through, there will be ups and downs, but I think it is probably destined to be loved. There are stories here worth loving.

Salon Fantastique: Down the Wall

In the season four West Wing presidential debate episode, “Game On”, there’s a rather nice running joke about a Republican, Albie Duncan, who Toby thinks they should use in the post-debate spin session, to counteract the fact that the Republican candidate has a Democrat “shilling for him on defense”. CJ and Toby have the following exchange:

TOBY: This is why I’m talking to you. You’re going to use Albie Duncan.
CJ: He’ll do it?
TOBY: Yes.
CJ: Duncan?
TOBY: Yes.
CJ: He will?
TOBY: Yes.
CJ: Look at me. He’s not a little bit crazy?
TOBY: Albie Duncan?
CJ: Yes.
TOBY: No. No. No. [beat] A little bit.

Give or take Richard Schiff’s ever-marvellous delivery, that’s sort of how I feel about Greer Gilman’s story “Down the Wall”. It’s not because of Gilman’s much-discussed use of language, or not specifically. Here’s the opening of the story:

Stilt-legs scissoring, snip-snap! the bird gods dance. Old craneycrows, a skulk of powers. How they strut and ogle with their long eyes, knowing. How they serpentine their necks. And stalking, how they flirt their tails, insouciant as Groucho. Fugue and counterfugue, the music jigs and sneaks. On tiptoe, solemnly, they hop and flap; they whirl and whet their long curved clever bills. A sly dance, a wry dance, miching mallecho. Pavane. They peacock, but their drab is eyeless, black as mourners, black as mutes. They are clownish, they are sinister, in their insatiable invention, their unending.

As I had been led to expect, this is certainly careful, formidable writing — the unfamiliar words (“miching”), the words verbed (“serpentine”) or nouned (“drab”), the striking phrases (“the music jigs and sneaks”), the oddly placed cultural reference (“insouciant as Groucho”), the rhythms — but it doesn’t require significantly more unpacking than the writing of, say, Margo Lanagan, or even Catherynne Valente or Hal Duncan in full flow. What impressed me was what happened next. When the long paragraph (at least double the amount I quoted) ends, we have an extremely vivid image of the bird gods’ dance in our minds, and we think we know what sort of fantasy story we’re reading. And then we’re confronted with one phrase — “the birds are phosphor in a box” — which forces us to reframe everything we thought we’d learnt. The second paragraph continues:

The birds are phosphor in a box. They sift and sift across the screen; they whisper. They are endless snow or soot, the ashes of the old world burning. Elsewhere fire. The hailbox whispers, whispers. There is no way to turn it off. No other channel but the gods. All day and night it snows grey phosphor, sifting in the corners of the air. The earth is grey with ash.

The birds are images seen in the static of a dead tv. And quite suddenly, it starts to become apparent that “Down the Wall” isn’t fantasy at all. There’s a tv the characters can’t, or don’t know how, to turn off; they think of the static as “the ashes of the old world burning”; it all sounds very much like post-apocalyptic science fiction.

I think I’m right in saying that nothing in the story later contradicts this interpretation. The bird gods, it transpires, have an existence beyond static, but it’s an existence in stories of this time. The world of “Down the Wall” struck me very much as world where the horizon has drawn closer, where the giants have been kicked out from under the characters. They describe lightning, for instance, as “godlight”; the bird gods themselves are described so lyrically it’s hard to be sure, but I think we are meant to understand that they are the projections of a people scared by a world they no longer comprehend, and not a literal reality. Which is to say that I think they are wind and sticks and storm, but I could be wrong.

What makes the story — which involves a brother and sister going out from their home, into the world — so decidedly odd, though, isn’t this shift, it’s the way in which the world is rendered. For one thing, the characters all have names — Spugget, Harpic, Fligger, Theek — straight out of Peake, which makes them sound grotesque, although there’s little indication that they actually are. For another, when they speak they say things like “Hush. Nobbut an awd busker. I’ll fend” and “Gerroff wi’ yer. Left, left, down close and top o’t stairs”, which frankly makes them sound like they came from the North of England and brought all their cliches with them. It was all I could do not to imagine the lot of them wearing flat caps — not exactly a common image in sf. But in the end, if the story’s construction feels a bit patchwork, and if its ending is somewhat arbitrary, there’s no denying its urgency or imagination — the descriptions of the gang of children running world are particularly impressive. Later in the West Wing episode I mentioned above, defending Albie Duncan further (the Democrats do eventually use him), Toby says, “Look, he’s Albie Duncan. […] If he’s crazy, then I don’t want to be sane.” Sanity sounds overrated when reading “Down the Wall”, too.

Salon Fantastique: Dust Devil on a Quiet Street

Per Rich’s request, this was meant to be a post about Jedidiah Berry’s story, “To Measure the Earth”. Unfortunately, I find myself with nothing of interest to say — it seemed to me far and away the weakest of the Salon Fantastique stories I’ve read, largely because of the extent to which it embraces obliqueness. At one point, one of the characters notes that “Questions distract”, and we’re apparently meant to take her seriously, despite the fact that insisting on answers is exactly what any half-way intelligent person would be doing. But “To Measure the Earth” isn’t about people, it’s about ciphers; they’re held at arm’s length, and the vagueness of the precise relations between some of them, or the meaning of some of their actions, is more frustrating than suggestive.

So, instead, this post is about Richard Bowes’ story, “Dust Devil on a Quiet Street”, and the difference is striking. The mystery at the centre of Bowes’ story is perhaps more obscure than that at the heart of Berry’s, but far more compellingly portrayed, with its effects rippling out through a multitude of characters. Like its namesake (an episode of The Naked City), “Dust Devil on a Quiet Street” is a New York Story, and drips with references to places and people. I suspect it has more named characters than any other story in the book, deftly orchestrated and all introduced with economy — “In high school, he had an obsessive compulsive disorder. She was bulimic. Now, and it almost seems to follow logically, he is a painter. She is an actress” — and almost all part of New York’s past or present alternative arts scene.

The next-but-one issue of Vector includes a transcript of a panel on Fantastic Cities from Interaction a year and a half ago, in which Jeffrey Ford makes the observation that “every city is really a palimpset of history”, with the new overlaid on the old; “Dust Devil” embodies that attitude. The narrator, an unnamed science fiction writer, is already experiencing a season of reminiscence (“That summer, the whole city, maybe the whole world seemed to be in a similar mood. Books were all memoirs, every concert was a reunion, every museum exhibition a retrospective, every Broadway opening a revival”) when he attends a memorial service for a critic of the local scene, Robin Saint Just. The circumstances of his death set off a chain of memory and investigation for the narrator that rambles across months and between incidents. Perhaps the most impressive thing about the story, to my mind, is that I didn’t feel excluded: I’ve been to New York exactly once, when I was much younger, and I really have no sense of the cultural milieu that Bowes is describing, yet it didn’t seem to matter. Many of the details are decodable from context, and those that aren’t merely add to the sense of the narrator’s New York as a place that is layered, cluttered but vibrant.

You may, quite legitimately, be wondering what the fantastic element is. As in most of the other stories by Bowes that I’ve read, it is notably low-key, probably having something to do with the soul of Callimachus, the first critic, trapped in a ring. (If I have a reservation about liking this story, it’s that in part it’s about the relationship between critics and the scene they comment on, something about which I am perhaps less than objective.) Alternatively, the fantastic resides in the dust devils of the title, which the narrator and a friend once decided, on a whim, “were actually the small gods, the spirits playful and malign, of Manhattan”. Or the magic is in the art itself. You decide.

Salon Fantastique: A Gray and Soundless Tide

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

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

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

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

Salon Fantastique: Yours, Etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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