“Sweets from a Stranger”

Sweets from a Stranger cover So how about those discussion questions? I’m going to take the suggested starting points first, then come back to the main question.

Write a short summary of the story

Girl meets alien; alien tricks girl; girl fails to trick aliens.

Note down what you think the sci-fi elements in the story are

In order: an alien; space travel (imagined technology); another planet; aliens. A nice bag of tropes. Is it a story that could not have happened without its speculative content? I think so; the intended real-world reference is explicit, but without the sf I don’t see how you’d get the reversal of Tina’s position to be so effective.

Draw character profiles of Tina and Talis

Tina: relatively unusually for Fisk, a girl-protagonist. That’s her all solarized on the cover, I think. Less unusually, she’s sharp — knows what story she’s in, at the start; isn’t fazed by the change in scenery; comes up with a proactive plan — but overconfident. “Tina, knowing she was behaving foolishly, went closer to the car.”

Talis: deceptive in appearance and in manner, but not about his true purpose. Everything we seem to learn about him in the first half of the story — his haplessness, his friendliness (his loneliness) — must be a lie for the second half to stick.

Compare the story to other science fiction stories, novels or movies you know

I think that if I worked out what it reminds me of, I would be closer to getting under the skin of the story than I am. It feels old. It feels very different to contemporary YA sf (strictly speaking, it is written for a younger audience). There’s something of Wyndham in the tone; that city of soaring glass towers is how I remember the end of The Chrysalids. There’s something of early-nineties BBC children’s drama (Dark Season, or the adaptation of Archer’s Goon) in the intrusion of core sf tropes into utterly normal British (English) (middle-class) suburbia. I recognise this world.

Therefore (and finally): Do you consider “Sweets from a Stranger” a science fiction story to be taken seriously?

Odd question, isn’t it? A very teacher-ish question. We must be serious. The story certainly wants to be taken seriously; any story so straightforwardly moralistic must want to be taken seriously. I think what allows me to take it seriously is its playfulness: Tina’s knowingness; the matter-of-factness of the journey, or of Tina’s initial escape attempt; the teasing suggestion that it might not give you the moral you’re expecting all along. The last line is perfectly judged, I think.

Reading Nicholas Fisk

Sweets from a Stranger cover Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading a lot of books by Nicholas Fisk. It’s one of those projects I’ve always meant to get around to; with Trillions and A Rag, A Bone and a Hank of Hair Fisk was one of my formative sf reading experiences. I’ve always wanted to go back and see how he holds up, and perhaps write an essay about his work. What I hadn’t appreciated, until quite recently, is just how prolific Fisk is. I’ve read nine of his books now, and that only really scratches the surface.

Anyway, book number ten is a short story collection, the only one by Fisk I’ve come across: Sweets from a Stranger, first published in 1982. I’ve decided to blog it story by story this week, as a start on getting my thoughts on his work into some kind of shape.

First up: the title story. There seems to be precious little about any of Fisk’s work online, but “Sweets from a Stranger” has obviously been taught at some point, since googling it brings up this pdf of the full text, which comes complete with questions for discussion. My thoughts later today, when I’m confident I’ve arrived at answers at least as good as the ones a ten year old would come up with.

Interzone Poll

Well, I got there in the end; which means I can now, for I think the first time ever, cast a fully informed vote in the annual Interzone poll. And this is how I vote:

Stories — positive vote

“Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” by Eugie Foster (IZ220)
“Miles to Isengard” by Leah Bobet (IZ220)
“Black Swan” by Bruce Sterling (IZ221)
“Microcosmos” by Nina Allan (IZ222)
“Unexpected Outcomes” by Tim Pratt (IZ222)
“Glister” by Dominic Green (IZ223)
“No Longer You” by Katherine Sparrow and Rachel Swirsky (IZ224)
“Funny Pages” by Lavie Tidhar (IZ225)

Stories — negative vote

“Monetized” by Jason Stoddard (IZ220)
“Spy vs Spy” by Neil Williamson (IZ220)
“Memory Dust” by Gareth L Powell (IZ220)
“Saving Diego” by Matthew Kressel (IZ221)
“Ys” by Aliette de Bodard (IZ222)
“Butterfly Bomb” by Dominic Green (IZ223)
“Silence and Roses” by Suzanne Palmer (IZ223)
“Bone Island” by Shannon Page and Jay Lake (IZ225)

Artwork — positive vote

Cover, #220 — Adam Tredowski
Cover, #224 — Adam Tredowski
Cover, #225 — Adam Tredowski
“Funny Pages” — Warwick Fraser-Coombe
“Johnny and Emmie-Lou Get Married” — Warwick Fraser-Coombe
“Lady of the White-Spired City” — Martin Bland
“Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest…” — Geoffrey Grisso

Artwork — negative vote

“Sublimation Angels” — Paul Drummond
“The Godfall’s Chemsong” — Martin Bland
“Butterfly Bomb” — Daniel Bristow-Bailey
“A Clown Escapes from Circus Town” — Warwick Fraser-Coombe
“Fishermen” — Geoffrey Grisso
“Black Swan” — Paul Drummond
“Monetized” — Paul Drummond
“Memory Dust” — Daniel Bristow-Bailey

And that, as they say, is that.

“Bone Island” by Shannon Page and Jay Lake

IZ225 cover So it seems I end my gallop through Interzone as I started it, with a disappointment. “Bone Island” is the overlong, over-digressive tale of a hapless young male protagonist caught between two witchy women. There’s a deal of would-be portentious talk about types of magic, creation myths, and suchlike (“Just as the eggs flow from a woman on a river of blood, so do the futures flow from the world on a river of blood”); its attempt to portray a tight-knit island community rather pales in comparison to Ali Shaw‘s (and at times feels rather ersatz); and it is, most criminally, rather dull. A shame.

“Funny Pages” by Lavie Tidhar

IZ225 cover I think Lavie Tidhar had a pretty good year for short fiction; there was “The Dying World” at Clarkesworld, “Spider’s Moon” at Futurismic, and of course “The Shangri-La Affair” at Strange Horizons. All extremely stylish, poised stories, deft with their chosen tropes. This is Tidhar’s best 2009 story, though, for my money.

The polish is still there, but “Funny Pages” feels like it has more going on underneath. It’s a superhero tale, set in Israel — a little like something Jonathan Lethem might have written — and does everything you would expect and hope a modern prose superhero tale set in Israel would do. It’s grounded in the day-to-day mundane, with superheroes facing romantic entanglements and unpaid bills; its superpowers are inventive (“Orchestra is music, Orchestra is a weave of notes: Tank can never see her face, her figure, only hear her, like thousands of pirate radio stations clashing with each other”); it is knowing in its invocation of cliche (the supervillain: “The Doctor, hawk-nosed, white hair combed back, a thick German accent he’d never quite lost […] ‘I will show them! I will show the world!'”); it is often funny; it is political; and it makes good use of comic-script-style back and forth:

The Prime Minister: “You’re a superhero! It’s your job to deal with this stuff!
Solomon²: “Job? I work in hi-tech, with all due respect. Fighting crime doesn’t pay the mortgage. Plus, well …”
PM: “Well what?”
Solomon²: “This is beyond the realm of, well, strictly speaking, crime, now.”
PM: “What are you talking about?”
Solomon²: “It’s become … political.”
PM: “You’re damn right it’s political!”
Solomon²: “Ah, but there lies, as they say, the rub. We’re strictly non-political. Traditional crime only. I don’t think it’s right for us to interfere.”
PM: “But Dr. Meshugeh is!”
Solomon² shrugs: “Supervillains have different standards.”

“The Killing Streets” by Colin Harvey

IZ225 cover I know Colin (he reviews for Strange Horizons), but this is the first of his fiction I’ve read. It piles novum upon change upon invention, seen through a couple of days in the life of an unemployed man in near-future Bristol. One: Snarks, big subterranean bioweapon beasts, infest the country, drawn to the surface by rhythmic vibrations, such as those produced by walking. Two: jobs are scarce, and/or qualifications have been devalued; even the most menial require good degrees, if not doctorates. Three: there’s a deadly, weaponised disease called Blacktongue, that’s almost always fatal and spreads by touch, on the loose. Four: the surveillance state is worse; the narrator’s wife works at the Department of Work and Pensions, referred to as “the Stasi” by some characters; mobile phones are (it is assumed) routinely used to track citizens’ whereabouts. And so on. This is all so vigorously grim that it can’t really be taken entirely seriously, and I’m not wholly sure it coheres; but it’s fun, and bodes well for the proposed Winter Song reading group.

“By Starlight” by Rebecca J Payne

IZ225 cover A cool drink of a story, measured and soothing; a story about freedom that itself feels free. Our protagonists are two sky sailors in a world divided into Flyers and Grounders. We learn how they met, and how they ended up where they are now. We see them trade with a merchant, and get out of a sticky situation. Their world, with its living, healing sky-ships, and “Amerika” and “Aysa” and “Europa”, could be a future and, under the skin, sf, or it could be alternate and fantastical. Payne’s story is detailed, and nicely specific, but the nature of her world doesn’t matter, not to her characters (one of whom, the narrator, is I think also casually unspecified; I didn’t notice any specific cues, and they have been read as both male and female) or to us. What matters is flying free.

One night, as we skimmed low over a wide lake, hauling up fresh water, we caught a silvery bird in our bucket. It had slippery skin instead of feathers and small wings that flapped in water as if in the air.

We threw it back over the side and watched it fly away, into the deep.

“Here We Are, Falling Through Shadows” by Jason Sanford

IZ225 cover “After all, why rippers kidnapped people was the only question worth asking in today’s world.” This is how Jason Sanford’s tales work, it seems: strip the world down so that the sfnal intervention demands an answer. Like “When Thorns are the Tips of Trees”, “Here We Are …” is set in a near-future crippled by disaster. The rippers are aliens that live in darkness (“light can’t remove every shdaow”) and prey on humans, either killing them, or taking them to a terrible fate Elsewhere. Its characters are, as ever, well-sketched but cast in familiar roles, even as they are defined by Sanford’s world: the firefighter (narrator) who must go out at night, the wife who has been killed or taken by the rippers, the teenage daughter alienated (ha) as a result. In “Thorns” these elements balanced each other quite nicely; here, I think, the trick is less successful. Understanding can cast its own shadow.

“Sublimation Angels” by Jason Sanford

IZ224 cover A nugget of New all swaddled in Old, that’s what this story is [pdf link]. Much of the pleasure in “Sublimation Angels” — as in Sanford’s two previous Interzone tales [more pdfs] — comes from the gentle unwinding of a satisfyingly odd setting, in thise case constructed in explicit homage to Leiber’s “A Pail of Air” (1951). Like that story, the narration is straightforward, more transparent even than Leiber (it lacks his folksiness); and, as in that story, the characters live, with very basic technology, on a wandering planet whose atmosphere has frozen. Unlike in that story, a repressive hierarchical society has arisen, based around access to oxygen.

Omare and I were born in the highest level of the cave in as much heat and good air as our expedition could give. While low kids raised their children in the lower cave’s cold, Omare and I never knew this deprivation when we were young. We only knew that our mother and father loved us, and if we climbed down the cave’s spiral tunnels we wore clumsy pails of frozen oxymix around our neck. The insulated pails contained a tiny tick-tock heater, and you cranked them every few minutes to smoke out the extra air needed to live.

What follows is about learning the world, rebelling against it, and becoming master of your own destiny. Heartwarmingly conventional stuff, if perhaps a bit stretched beyond its ideal length. But wait! There’s an ironic twist (arguably revealed very early on). It’s not just Sanford who has (like Karl Schroeder with his Virga) engineered his setting to allow its retro feel, protecting his colonists from the raw tech-dream that is the twenty-first century space opera future: one of the agents in his story has done the same thing.

So much for freedom.

Deborah Biancotti stories available to BSFA members

Deborah Biancotti has spotted that two of her stories have been nominated in the Best Short Story category, and has this offer:

If you are a kind British person &/or a member of BSFA & you’d like to read these stories, feel free to drop me a line (~~deborahb AT livejournal DOT com~~ rous AT deborahbiancotti DOT net) & I will cheerfully — very cheerfully — forward you an electronic copy of said stories. I may get a bit carried away & send you more than those two, but you’ll at least get those two stories & you can read ‘em or use ‘em for your electronic bird cages as is your wont.

So why don’t you?