Salon Fantastique: My Travels with Al-Qaeda

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

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

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

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

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

Salon Fantastique: Concealment Shoes

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

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

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

Salon Fantastique: Femaville 29

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

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

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

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

Salon Fantastique: The Lepidopterist

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

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

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

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

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