Tag: reviews

Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment

Fantasy and Science Fiction Oct-Nov 08 cover

The problem is under control now. No one would think of getting an abortion. There’s already talk about cutting back the program in a few years and I feel kind of sentimental about it. I’ve grown up with executions and can’t imagine what kids will watch instead. Not that I would wish this on anyone. It’s a miserable thing to be in my situation.

So speaks Lisle, the young narrator of M. Rickert’s most recent story, “Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment: One Daughter’s Personal Account“, published in this year’s October/November double issue of F&SF. The sentences above are fairly typical of Lisle’s style and tone; what’s significant about them, I think, is where they place their emotional weight, and which emotions they invoke. By this point in the story, for example, we know that “the program” is the systematic capture and public execution of any American woman who has ever had an abortion, but it’s still a shock to realise that Lisle is so used to it as a background fact of her life that she would miss it if it were gone, and still hard to imagine anything so brutal as entertainment for children. We also know that, as the daughter of a “disappeared” mother, Lisle is something of a social pariah. Having an executed mother is “not necessarily that bad”, purely because it’s so common; “a lot of women of my mother’s generation,” Lisle explains, “were swayed by the evil propaganda of their youth, had abortions and careers even, before coming back to the light of righteous behaviour.” A missing mother, on the other hand, is cause for suspicion: where has she gone, and what is she doing? So Lisle resents her mother’s perceived selfishness in leaving, which explains the miserableness, even if it’s difficult for us to accept.

I start with Lisle because, although her worldview is not the first indication we get that the world has gone wrong, it’s the most enduring testament the story offers to the way in which it has gone wrong. Lois Tilton, at the Internet Review of SF, argued that for her, Rickert doesn’t do enough to make the setting plausible:

With the example of the Taliban before us, no one can really say anymore: This couldn’t happen. Yet it is up to the author to convince us that it could have actually happened, or at least to willingly suspend disbelief and enter into the mutual pact between author and reader in which we accept the scenario for the sake of the message the story is meant to deliver. The problem with such fiction, however, is that the Message can outweigh the story, and I think that in this case it has done so, going too close to the line between chilling and absurd.

While I can take issue with various bits of this assessment, I do think the question of plausibility is hard to avoid when talking about “Evidence of Love”. The idea of an authoritarian, theocratic government presiding over the continental United States is, at this point, something close to a cliché, but even so – and despite the fact that the magazine blurb introduces Rickert’s story as “a chilling glimpse of how the near future might be” – this version of this future is not one I can believe in, Taliban or no. It goes too far, too fast. I can believe (with depressing ease, in fact) in the advent of an American government that criminalizes abortion, even to the point of enforcing the ban with the death penalty. And I recognise that there are people who would like to go as far as the story does, and kill everyone who’s ever had an abortion; one of them provides the story’s epigraph, taken from a 1995 speech: “When I, or people like me, are running the country, you’d better flee, because we will find you, we will try you, and we’ll execute you.” You don’t need to know who Randall Terry is (I’d never heard of him) to understand that “Evidence of Love” is a story where he, or someone like him, has made good on his promise. My difficulty is in believing that a regime capable of enforcing a retrospective ban could arise in the United States within (as “Evidence of Love” must be) a generation. The distance between Randall Terry’s current residence and the White House seems too great to cover in that time, never mind that – so far as I’m aware – there has never been a retrospective act of criminalization on such a scale, and with such severe consequences for those convicted. So I can’t see “Evidence of Love” as a story about “how the near future might be” in anything more than a technical sense and – to return to Tilton’s criticism – I don’t think any writer could have rendered the story’s world convincingly enough to withstand post-reading reflection.

I wouldn’t normally spend this much time discussing whether or not I found a story’s premises plausible, because for an awful lot of science fiction the question is something of a blind alley: execution is all. (And in twenty-five years, when “Evidence of Love” is just one more of yesterday’s tomorrows, the question will be all but irrelevant.) I’ve spent some time on the issue here because, as I indicated, I think you can’t not. “Evidence of Love” gives every impression of being an Awful Warning, which is probably one of the exception categories where plausibility is concerned. If it’s not likely, after all, how urgently can we need to be warned against it? But in both “Evidence of Love” and Rickert’s only other straight sf story (so far as I’m aware), “Bread and Bombs“, the future is presented to us as a fait accompli. Both stories, in fact, draw their power from a gradual accretion of detail, not about the world, but about its inhabitants.

Which leaves us back where I started, with Lisle. Rickert, it seems to me, is intensely interested in subjective experience; a story like last year’s “Holiday” succeeds because it makes its narrator’s worldview both convincing and absorbing, and I think “Evidence of Love” pursues the same goal. (This view of the story means that, for example, I find Chris Barzak’s comparison of the story to “The Lottery” somewhat odd; Shirley Jackson’s story is third-person, and much more interested in a group dynamic than in an individual.) Here too the story has been criticized. Abigail Nussbaum wrote that “Evidence of Love” is “shamelessly manipulative and unsubtle, a piece aimed only at people who agree with its politics, and one which encourages them to sneer rather than think”, and attributed this in part to the setting, but in part to Lisle:

there’s also the fact that the narrator is so clearly brainwashed. She’s someone we can pity, but not sympathize with, because her reactions are so obviously wrong and twisted. Rather than putting us in her head and inviting us to feel her pain (and there is real pain there – this is a child who has lost her mother and been raised to believe that that mother is a horrible person), the narrative stands apart from her and regards her – or rather, what’s been done to her – with disgust.

I read the story differently. I don’t think, for example, that it’s accurate to describe Lisle as brainwashed, since she had no original convictions to destroy and replace. Rather, her personality and beliefs are the result of simply growing up in this future. As indicated in the quotes above, Lisle’s worldview has been shaped by the regime under which she has been raised: she talks of “righteous behaviour” entirely without irony, and resentfully assumes, as the title suggests, that she has been abandoned — the possibility that her mother has been taken never seriously crosses her mind.

What we pity her for is not the pain in her life, but the absence of pain. Here’s what she recalls of a time when her mother caught her with a list of boys’ names, and asked if they were boys Lisle had crushes on:

I don’t know what she was thinking to say such a thing because there were seven names on that list and I am not a slut, but anyhow, I explained that they were baby names I was considering for when my time came and she got this look on her face like maybe she’d been a hologram all along and was just going to fade away and then she said, “When I was your age, I planned on being an astronaut.”

My cheeks turned bright red, of course. I was embarrassed for her to talk like that. She tried to make light of it by looking over the list, letting me know which names she liked (Liam and Jack) and which she didn’t (Paul and Luke). If the time ever comes (and I am beginning to have my doubts that it will) I’m going to choose one of the names she hated. It’s not much, but it’s all I have. There’s only so much you can do to a mother who is missing.

This, to me, is heartbreaking. Nothing in the passage stretches beyond what it is conceivable for Lisle to have noticed or for her to be describing, yet it evokes so much in subtle ways: the long run-on sentence indicating how much the memory troubles her, the mother’s simple statement indicating how bad things have got, the choice of names extremely suggestive of the type of people who are responsible. There is, I think, just a hint in her final sentence that her feelings about her mother’s absence may come from more than one source; a suggestion that, however much she professes to be angry, knows she should be angry, Lisle misses her mother. But that’s powerful precisely because Lisle herself is unaware of it, and for Rickert to make more of it would be to betray her character’s integrity.

So I don’t know that I can agree with the idea that we should be able to sympathize with Lisle. It seems to me that the distance we are kept from Lisle is the major source of the story’s strength, since it enables the emotional misplacement I talked about at the start of this post, and the feeling of hopeless dislocation it engenders in the reader (or, at least, me). When it is strongly implied that, as the daughter of a disappeared mother, the best Lisle can expect later in life is to be a “breeder”, we should indeed pity her; but we should also notice that the problem with being a breeder (for Lisle) is not the idea of being forced to have children per se (since what could be more natural?) but the idea of having to give those children up to other people, every time; the idea of never being allowed to be a mother.

Perhaps most striking are Lisle’s reactions to the public execution she attends with her father. Her depiction of the event itself is unsentimental. It is implied that Lisle’s father takes her in an attempt to show her how horrific it really is — since her mother’s disappearance, Lisle has been obsessed with watching executions on television — but all the trip does is reveal that her desensitization is complete. “It’s way more powerful,” Lisle tells us, “than how it seems on screen”; but her descriptions of the fear and nervousness of the convicts are for the most part those of a person enamoured of a spectacle, detached and dispassionate. “No one wants to be away from his seat when the criminal gets close to the red circle at the center of the field”, she says. And if one of the criminals looks like not breaking down, and not giving Lisle (and presumably the rest of the audience) the emotional catharsis they crave, this is her reaction:

Occasionally there is a stoic one, but there aren’t many of these, and when there is, it’s easy enough to look away from the screen and focus on the big picture. What had she been thinking? How could she murder someone so tiny, so innocent, and not know she’d have to pay? When I think of what the time from before was like I shudder and thank God for being born in the Holy Times. In spite of my mother, I am blessed. I know this, even though I sometimes forget. Right there, in the football field bleachers, I fold my hands and bow my head. When I am finished my father is giving me a strange look. “If this is too upsetting we can leave,” he says. He constantly makes mistakes like this. Sometimes I just ignore him, but this time I try to explain. “I just realized how lucky I am.” I can’t think of what else to say, how to make him understand, so I simply smile.

We stand with her father here: we expect Lisle to be upset by what she’s watching, but of course, believing as she does in the rightness of what is occurring, she finds it reassuring, draws strength from the ways in which (she thinks) it keeps her safe. It’s all the more disturbing because her thoughts are clearly those of youth, and unconsidered. After the shot, this is her reaction: “I see the gaping maw that was her head, right where that evil thought was first conceived to destroy the innocent life that grew inside her. Now she is neither stoic nor alive. She lies in a heap, twitching for a while, but those are just nerves.” It is, to Lisle, justice.

To me, what ultimately makes “Evidence of Love” a success is that we never doubt Lisle. She makes the world real, which is to say that the tale gains what power it has not from the abhorrence of the society in which it is set, but from the shock of what that society has done to Lisle; and the trick at the tale’s heart is that if the society in which it is set were more plausible, Lisle would be less shocking. Put another way, if “Evidence of Love” were merely an Awful Warning against the rhetoric of anti-choice positions, if it were merely a Message story, it would be somewhat facile. The awfulness is fairly obvious. We would indeed, as Abigail puts it, be being invited to sneer. But I don’t think the same follows from the fact that we’re held apart from Lisle. We may not be able to fully sympathise with her, but I think we can certainly understand her, and most particularly we can understand that she doesn’t understand herself. After all, the only certain evidence of love that Lisle displays comes in the very last line of the story, and is its final sting: it reframes everything that came before as a denial.

Speculative Japan

Speculative Japan coverI’ve got a new review up at Strange Horizons: Speculative Japan, edited by Gene van Troyer and Grania Davis. It’s a somewhat belated review, in that the anthology was actually published this time last year to mark the first Worldcon held in Japan, but it’s an interesting book, worth reading and (hopefully) talking about. Not that it’s been entirely ignored until now — I was pleased to see the Hugo nomination statistics, for instance, which revealed that what is probably my favourite story (“Where do the Birds Fly Now?”) got ten nominations for Best Novelette, while another story (“Hikari”) got the same number of nominations in Best Short Story.

The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 2

Dreamers of the Day coverLet’s get one thing clear from the get-go: taken as a bundle, the stories in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 2 will almost certainly not be the best science fiction and fantasy stories of the year for anyone except Jonathan Strahan. Taste is too fickle a thing, and the acreage the book tries to encompass too great. As if to ram home the point, only six of the sf choices overlap with Dozois’ behemoth; only two from Rich Horton’s fantasy collection, and one from his sf book; there are two selections also in the Hartwell/Cramer fantasy book, and there’s no overlap at all with their sf volume. Strahan does get four Hugo nominees, two Nebula nominees, and two Sturgeon nominees, and his anthology is a good read, cover to cover, if that’s the only thing that matters to you; but the larger point indicated by the diversity of contents is that there are reasons beyond simple quality to read a Year’s Best. Strahan — while being quite clear that these are indeed his favourite stories of 2007 — acknowledges this in his introduction, saying that any Year’s Best is “an attempt by an informed reader to identify the best work published in a given year, to put it in context, and to sketch out where SF and fantasy might be going” (2). It’s an attempt, in other words, to provide a map; or, more aggrandizingly, to define a canon. Year’s Bests are one of the most visible and enduring ways in which the sf and fantasy genres memorialise themselves. They are a source to which historians will return.

And what will such historians conclude, on the basis of Strahan’s selections, about 2007? They will, I would imagine, be less interested than most of the book’s present-tense readers about whether it was a good year or a bad year, and more interested in the validity of Strahan’s core assertion about the twenty-first-century field. This assertion, arguably implicit in the decision to include sf and fantasy between one set of covers but made explicit in the introduction, is simply that the walls are breaking down. Strahan credits the change mostly to the ongoing expansion of the field, and the effect this has on how the genre talks to itself: “In effect, the direct dialogue from old to new works has been disrupted, and the nature of the dialogue has broadened enormously … SF and fantasy are broadening, changing, diverging” (2-3). Though he’s careful to note the limitations of grouping the two forms together, and reassure readers that there are traditional SF and fantasy stories in the book-to-come, it’s in the fluidity of the contemporary conversation that Strahan seems to be most interested, building on Gary Wolfe’s argument (I’m brutally paraphrasing “Evaporating Genres”) that the genres of the fantastic have to either live free or die hard: expand their discourse or stagnate.

So even without considering the story’s quality, it’s no surprise that Strahan opens with Ted Chiang’s “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate“, and points out that it’s a hybrid: time travel may be a classic science fiction theme, but stylistically the story’s ancestry is fantasy. A lot has (inevitably) already been said about this story, and I don’t intend to repeat it all; William Mingin’s review is the clearest enumeration of the story’s virtues that I’ve seen, but it’s also worth noting Abigail Nussbaum’s observation that it’s precisely the story’s mixed heritage that allows Chiang to approach one of time travel’s core issues from a fresh angle. The only thing I’d add is another measure of praise for Chiang’s technique, particularly the way in which he renders abstracts concrete (for example, the description of how the time gate works as akin to a secret passage in a palace), and for the way this allows him, as Mingin puts it, to “suggest how we should be and act”. “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” is beautifully gentle in its moralizing; on one level it’s about how we know the world, but it frames its debate in the most practical terms, such that what can and cannot be done is central, and how people act is the most meaningful measure of their character. Perhaps the only contemporary writer whose skill and thoroughness at working through an argument can match Chiang is Greg Egan, represented here by the purely science-fictional “Glory” [pdf]. I’ve written about it, or specifically about the brilliantly barmy opening set-piece, before; second time around it struck me as a bit more coherent, more integrated in its presentation of its core argument, namely that the underlying information of the universe is consistent and can be understood. So, for example, the information that makes up the story’s protagonists, Joan and Anne, can be transformed from human to alien; and in their alien form they can understand other aliens as naturally as they understand their own species; and the ancient mathematics they seek is described in a novel algebra but is still comprehensible; and the final theorem can be re-described by a feat of aerial acrobatics. This pleasing neatness notwithstanding, “Glory” still strikes me as a little too rickety to be first-rank Egan. While there’s something endearing about the blatant way the story is rigged to focus on purely intellectual questions (by, for example, hand-waving away the potential problem of sexual attraction), after those first few pages the glory of the mind isn’t quite conveyed with enough conviction to carry the story on its own, and there’s nothing to tie the mind and the heart together the way they’re interlocked in Chiang’s tale.

If Strahan is arguing that the part of a Year’s Best job that involves teasing out such influences and connections is as important as it has ever been, though, we should be able to find stories among his selections that sit in the same conversation as, say, Chiang and Egan: stories that circle the same issues, that are heirs to the same tradition. And we can. One example is Daryl Gregory’s marvelous, economical “Dead Horse Point”. In its exploration of the psychological consequences of the pursuit of intellectual satisfaction it echoes “Glory”, not to mention some of Egan’s earlier stories, although there’s no evidence of Egan’s sometimes-clinical approach. (Strahan identifies a Tiptree influence, which I can see in the outdoorsy setting, although the story itself is gentler than any Tiptree I’ve read.) In some ways, it’s little more than a character vignette: a woman receives a call from her girlfriend of years earlier, and travels to visit her and her brother; there is some reminiscing about old times, and some discussion of the present; and then a turning point is reached. The sfnal elements, too, are minimal: the girlfriend, Julia, suffers from a psychological abnormality that, so far as I know, doesn’t exist, but which is characterised as “the opposite of attention deficit disorder”, meaning that she has a tendency to disappear into fugue states for periods of time ranging between hours or months, focused utterly on solving whatever problem has snagged her attention. The current problem, which may be drawing Julia so deep into a fugue that she will never return, is a new interpretation of quantum mechanics, the implications of which — and the ways in which those implications are refracted by the actions of the trio — echo not just Egan, but also “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”. The balance in “Dead Horse Point”, though, is tilted more towards heart than head, which is enough to ensure that the story is in the end nothing but itself. Another story in the book, though, seems to owe an even clearer debt to Chiang; in fact, if you told me you’d read a story about the conflict between belief and reason, set in a world where creationists were proved right about the age of the Earth by carbon-dating in the mid-twentieth century, and I didn’t know better, Chiang would be my first guess for the author. In fact it’s Ted Kosmatka. Like “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, “The Prophet of Flores” derives its strength from its hybridity — in this case a science-fictional exploration of a fantastical conceit, rather than vice-versa — and though the pacing, among other things, is not as polished as it might be, the story’s portrait of life in a cosmologically alternate history is thorough and convincing. The protagonist is a boy who grows up to be a “paleometagenomicist” (a sort of cross between an anthropologist and a geneticist) and, as the title suggests, is ultimately sent to investigate the story’s novum — the discovery of the bones of the hobbits of Flores, which, by representing a challenge to the idea that all life was originally created by God, has the potential to send shock waves through this world’s society. Kosmatka’s execution of this pregnant conceit is notable first for its sensible handling of the faultlines between faith and evidence, and second because he finds a resolution which remains true to the parameters of the world established, but still manages to deliver a good old-fashioned conceptual breakthrough.

All four of the stories I’ve discussed so far have recognisable science fiction antecedents, even if two of them are not pure sf and one of them is only tenuously speculative; and none of them ever doubts that reason and logic are appropriate tools with which to try to understand the world, even if they are interested in the emotional consequences of that understanding. A story like Bruce Sterling’s “Kiosk” is more in orbit around this cluster than a part of it, but displays a similar faith that the world can be grasped, albeit with business nous rather than pure rationality. “Kiosk” is your everyday tale of economic revolution, or the Third Transition for the Eastern European country in which it’s set (the first two, we are told, being the fall of communism and the trauma of peak oil), in which a small-time businessman acquires a high-grade cornucopia device and finds himself getting step by step deeper into what eventually becomes a full-blow revolutionary conspiracy. Along the way, there’s a lot of energetic, energising and funny talk — it’s a much more lively story than any of the four above — plus plenty of pithy encapsulations of the way the world is changing. The ultimate moral is that it’s not enough just to have a mechanical invention; you need a social invention to go with it, because one will ultimately be demanded if the technology is pervasive enough. “Kiosk” is certainly one of Sterling’s better stories of recent years, and the most complete dramatisation of a social change in this Year’s Best; but I don’t think it’s the best story about economics. I’d give that honour to Daniel Abraham’s “The Cambist and Lord Iron: a Fairy Tale of Economics“, which is a less raggedy and ramshackle story, and impressive for the thoroughness with which it does exactly what it says on the tin. Formally, Abraham’s story is indeed a fairy tale, in which an admirable hero (“a man of few needs, tepid passions, and great kindness”) overcomes a series of challenges in order to live happily ever after. But there’s no magic, and in fact the setting is a version of our world (Cairo and Paris are mentioned), though not in an analogue of any single historical period I could confidently pin down. The challenges, which are set for Our Hero by a debauched local lord, have to do with the principle of exchange, and quickly become about more than mere physical goods, at which point they demonstrate every bit as much as “Kiosk” how much economic forces shape our lives. But Abraham’s story is told with a much lighter touch than Sterling’s, although both are charmingly logical at points, and offer the satisfaction of seeing smarts win out.

As I’ve hinted, you can argue half of the stories I’ve discussed so far — Chiang, Kosmatka, Abraham — as either science fiction or fantasy. Another example would be Susan Palwick’s “Sorrel’s Heart”, which is once more science fiction — set in a world where extreme mutation has become both rife and survivable, and where people born with their organs external to their body are relatively commonplace — and told in a fantastical tone. (The year’s other girl-with-her-heart-outside-her-body story, Rachel Swirsky’s “Heartstrung“, which inevitably shares some themes, can be found in Rich Horton’s Fantasy Best.) A relationship develops between the title character and a man, Quartz, whose abnormality is less visible; he is a sociopath, but decides that because he can see how his desires hurt Sorrel, he doesn’t actually need to act them out. Their relationship is an abnormal kind of normal; caring and coping and complementing are at the heart of it. Palwick’s touch is sure, and if the use of the heart as a symbol becomes a little bit too explicit at the end (we didn’t need to be told that Quartz’ child becomes his heart) there are powerful moments along the way. But you can also put her story, or Abraham’s, into a fantasy conversation rather than an sf one, by heading into fairy tale and folk tale, and looking at the contrast between Abraham’s story and an ostensibly more traditional fairytale retelling such as Holly Black’s “The Coat of Stars”. The tale of a gay costume maker, a troubled visit to his redneck home, and his attempts to rescue a childhood friend from the clutches of the fairy queen — yes, the double meaning is both conscious and worked through the story — by a succession of increasingly elaborate coats as gifts, it’s a thoroughly unsentimental offering and, in some ways, not that much more traditional than Abraham’s story. Although there is magic, the presentation of it is notably un-magical, and in fact I suspect the complete lack of ethereality is the only reason the happy ending is bearable. You could also look at the two witch stories in the book, by Neil Gaiman and Elizabeth Hand; both are to an extent engaged in dialogue with the conventions of fairy tale, although I’m not sure that the image of a witch as an evil old woman, which both stories clearly want to bounce off, is as pervasive as it used to be. This is not a problem for Hand’s story, which has a lot of other resonance to juice it up; the small-town setting is evoked with skill, but the story’s real triumph is that it manages to talk about the preservation of the environment — in this case, represented by three old trees — from the depredations of business without getting drippy. The magic is real and fierce — the sort of thing that is felt as much as seen — which makes the tinge of wish-fulfillment inherent in the premise bearable.

The feeling that the story might not actually add much to the ongoing dialogue is more of a problem for Gaiman’s “The Witch’s Headstone”, which is as much about Good and Bad as Hand’s story, but is surprisingly clumsy — featuring such convenient environmental responses as the fact that, immediately after the protagonist is captured, what had been a fine autumn day turns gray — although perhaps some of its other clumsiness can be attributed to the fact that it’s an extract from a novel, and is thus filled with hanging references. Still following the trail of a fantasy conversation, from Chiang’s (quite literal) portal-quest story you could skip to a piece like Alex Irvine’s “Wizard’s Six”, which makes more use of traditional high fantasy gamepieces — formal language, unironic wizards and dragon-slaying — than any other story in the book, and goes to some lengths to frame its narrative as one of moral questioning. (Although unlike Chiang’s story, the protagonist is probably not a good match for many of the people reading about him.) Or you could go to another hybrid form, alternate history, and look at Chris Roberson’s “The Sky is Large and the Earth is Small”, an entry in his interesting Celestial Empire series. This time around I think the detail of the research is more impressive than the detail of the prose, but like “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” the story is structured as a series of philosophical challenges, in which an old man leads a young man through an argument, in an attempt to get him to see the wider world.

The concept for The Graveyard Book — from which Gaiman’s story is taken — is, of course, is itself another example of fantasy dialogue, in this case with Kipling’s Jungle Book, a work substantially older than anything most of the sf stories try to engage with. (The exception is Charles Stross’ cacophonously unfunny Wodehouse-homage/parody “Trunk and Disorderly”, but frankly the less said about that the better.) Fantasy has a rather longer tradition to draw on than sf, so it’s not at all a surprise to find other similar examples in Strahan’s selections; such as Theodora Goss’s decision to respond to “Kubla Khan” in “Singing of Mount Abora”. In doing so she is clearly aiming for something of the same intensity of image and feeling — an approach summed up by the observation that “beauty was not a quality but a state of being” — but although there are many things to like about the story, particularly the dance between segments set in Xanadu and those set in contemporary Boston, for me at least the end result is (oddly, like Egan’s story) more beautiful in its conception than its execution. Individual moments, such as the matter-of-fact way the narrator tells us that she’s been to Xanadu and Coleridge got the details wrong, work wonderfully as a way of asserting the importance of individual imagination; but ultimately the story as a whole is too dependent to truly live. More generally, stories like Goss’ and Gaiman’s, and indeed most of the fantasy stories in this collection, seem to point to a difference in the way genre dialogue works, compared with science fiction, specifically that fantasy stories don’t seem to draw as directly on its contemporary tradition in the way that sf does. That may be changing — look at the response to Perdido Street Station (at least if you read it as fantasy), and to a lesser extent the response to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell — but it still seems more common to see direct inspiration (such as Accelerando leading to Postsingular) in sf, and there’s more of a sense of common purpose between Egan/Chiang/Gregory/Kosmatka than between any of the more traditional fantasies collected here.

If this isn’t just observer bias, it may be something to do with the fact that fantasy has a wider range of established narratives to draw on. The danger is that stories that aim to deploy a formula end up mastered by them. Hence stories like Black’s, or to an extent like Elizabeth Bear’s “Orm the Beautiful“, which is an almost flawlessly executed story about a last dragon, but is still a last dragon story. The twist is that said dragon is emerging into the contemporary world; the resulting negotiation with mundane concerns is witty, and the conception of the dragon society is original and impressively fully-formed for a story of this length, but it never feels as though it desperately needed to be told. Similarly, Michael Swanwick’s exodus/development-of-language myth mash-up is impressively textured, obviously knowing in several ways, and better than most examples of his short fiction that I’ve read, but can’t quite overcome the (necessary?) familiarity of its basic plot, in which a girl is kidnapped, an honourable man rescues her, and a treacherous man causes trouble. None of these stories are without merit, but next to, for example, Abraham’s twist on the fairy-tale formula, they feel too well-worn. I’ve praised M. Rickert’s “Holiday” before, and its skillful insinuation of unease into the narrator’s apparent attempt to be straight with us retains its power third time around, but it’s worth noting that it’s effective as a ghostly horror story not just because of its general grimness of tone, but because it successfully misdirects us as to where the horror is going to come from. The presence or absence of that sort of surprise, I think, makes or breaks any story that’s operating within a particular form. It’s why I think that, say, Nancy Kress’s “By Fools Like Me” is not her best work; the setting is almost generically post-Crash — global warming, disease, birth rate way down, garbled religious teachings — and what the characters stand for starts to overwhelm who they actually are. It’s also why I think Stephen Baxter’s “Last Contact” is admirable in concept but not quite deft enough in execution. I’m still a little surprised that it earned Baxter a Hugo nomination. Some of the detail is nice (particularly the idea that the announcement of a universal apocalypse would be made on Radio 4, and that the schedulers would be thoughtful enough to make the entirely pointless gesture of scheduling it for after the watershed), and the total impersonality of the catastrophe is as chilling as Baxter ever is. But some of the rest — particularly the guff about establishing a shelter to survive the end of the universe for about 30 seconds, just to eke out that little bit more knowledge, and the intuitive decryption of alien messages — is trying too hard. It might work in a longer story, but here I can feel my buttons being deliberately pushed. I don’t object to similar button-pushing in Ken MacLeod’s “Jesus Christ, Reanimator”, which depicts a 21st-century second coming, simply because the story is so funny and inventive, from the opening image of the Heavenly host being welcomed with an F-16 fighter escort to the concept of Jesus’ blog (and his “devastating put-downs in the comments”), or Jesus’ own admission that reading Tipler helped him understand how the universe works. It’s a story that ends in the only way it could, but has an awful lot of fun getting there, and is probably MacLeod’s strongest short-form work to date.

What’s left after all this discussion is the set of stories which, for one reason or another, I couldn’t fit into a neat discursive category. In some cases, that’s because the premise seems truly original; the notable example here is Peter S Beagle’s “The Last and Only, Or, Mr Moscowitz Becomes French”, in which nationality is, literally, a disease. But it’s an originality whose charm passes me by, as with so much Beagle; “Mr Moscowitz” seems too fable-like to be satisfying as a rational fantasy (for example, nobody talks about potential treatment of Mr Moscowitz) and yet not fable-like enough to achieve much power (the scattershot targeting of everything that comes within range — law, celebrity, marriage — ends up feeling ineffective). It feels like it should be a story about identity, yet because of the totalizing nature of the change, it has frustratingly little to say there (certainly in comparison to a story like “Dead Horse Point”); yet it is not simply beautiful enough to absorb. In contrast, there’s “The Dreaming Wind”, which is both unlike any other fantasy in the anthology and successful, although perhaps not exactly new ground for its author. “There is no way,” the narrator says near the start, “to encompass in language the inexhaustible creative energy and crackpot genius that was the Dreaming Wind”. But Jeffrey Ford gives it the old college try. The dreaming wind sweeps through the town of Lipora once a year, when summer and autumn “are in bed together” (a lovely phrase), bringing in its wake a rush of surreality. People and landscape become jumbled and strange, and only rearrange themselves when the wind has passed. It’s an event that serves as a demonstration of Ford’s tremendous gift for invention, and the story is worth reading for that alone. But then “The Dreaming Wind” becomes something more: one year, the wind does not come, and as so often happens the absence of a feared thing becomes scarier than the thing itself; at least it turns out not to be the expected blessing. Eventually, the townsfolk put on a play, telling a story that explains why the dreaming wind was and why it is no more; when the magic vanishes, in other words, it is recreated in story, and magic and story might almost as well be the same thing. Tony Daniel’s “In the Valley of the Garden” is, like “Glory”, taken from The New Space Opera, although like “Glory” I’m not sure I could actually call it that; a story about someone who’s survived a space opera, maybe. Strahan places it immediately after Rickert’s story, and initially the change from the intensely personal supernatural horror of that story to the still-personal but much more expansive and adventurous sf of Daniel provides the sharpest whiplash in the book; but the story outstays its welcome somewhat. Interestingly, it echoes Swanwick’s story in several ways: both stories play with sf/fantasy texturing; they have similar villains (Daniel’s aliens are described as “parasites, feeding on order”, which makes them sound awfully like Swanwick’s language-eating demons); and in “Valley”, as in “Urdumheim”, inventiveness is ultimately tamed by a conventional undercarriage.

Strahan closes his anthology with a story by possibly the only contemporary short story writer as near-universally acclaimed as Ted Chiang; but Kelly Link’s “The Constable of Abel” seems to me a less secure anchor, not just because I find it less engaging as a story than my pick for Link story of the year, “Light” (I’m able to believe that Strahan disagrees), but because “Light” seems so much better-placed to illustrate Strahan’s core argument about the breaking down of barriers. Like “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate”, it fantasticates a science fictional conceit (pocket universes), but it does so in a provocatively different way. “The Constable of Abel”, by contrast, is set in a more straightforward fantasy world than is usual for Link, and has a more traditional narrative architecture, built around a mother and daughter con-artist team who leave one town and move to another after the mother kills the local constable. There’s a lot of talk about death, which only Link’s narrative voice manages to avoid making morbid; but it seems more of a struggle than usual, as though the demands of plot cut down the characteristic interplay. Though there are still Linkish touches — such as the way people keep ghosts, which are pocket-sized and need blood to live — under such bright light they start to seem unconvincing, rather than illuminatingly weird. And the final revelation, much as Link tries to spin it into a new riff, can’t stop the story being a rather wearying note on which to end an otherwise good anthology.

But what “The Constable of Abel” does have going for it is that it’s more typical of the direction Link’s work has been going in; and even if you like fewer of them than me, I think it’s hard to deny that Strahan’s selections capture something of the fluidity of the contemporary genre, and range widely over the territory. Of the handful of omissions I think really weaken the collection, for instance, I can see that “By Fools Like Me” already covers the post-ecotastrophe terrain that Holly Phillips’ “Three Days of Rain” evokes so wonderfully; and while I’d have taken Rachel Swirsky’s “Dispersed by the sun, Melting in the Wind“, I can see that the clear debt to classic end-of-the-world stories that “Last Contact” brings is interesting in itself; and while I find the omission of David Moles’ “Finisterra” baffling, I suppose Tony Daniel’s story supplies the heavy-worldbuilding sf adventure. As for the fourth story I’d have picked, Ian R MacLeod’s “The Master Miller’s Tale”, its industrial magic isn’t particularly well represented elsewhere in the book, but it’s a novella, and even in Night Shade’s somewhat cramped layout that demands a certain number of pages. You may have noticed that all my omissions — and all the stories Strahan did pick — are, however they might colonise other narratives, solidly genre stories, drawn from genre sources (for a different kind of fluidity, drawing on newer markets or non-genre markets, you’ll want Horton’s volumes, or Best American Fantasy, I suspect — and in fact, see Abigail Nussbaum’s review here); but if Strahan’s self-appointed task is to map the field of speculative fiction, rather than the mode in the broadest sense, then that makes perfect sense. And I find myself in agreement with the sense of the field that this book promotes: which is to say that I like this map.

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.

20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

A palate-cleanser before the final Clarke Award re-read, this, Xiaolu Guo’s follow-up to last year’s Orange-shortlisted A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (except that the Chinese edition of 20 Fragments was her first novel; although this English translation has, apparently, been substantially revised). You could, if you wanted, run through a list of similarities between the two. Both are lively and interesting and worth reading. In both the subject matter — in 20 Fragments, a young woman moving from the Chinese countryside to Beijing and trying to bootstrap her way into a career in the film industry — feels more than a little autobiographical. The narrator is, in both cases, a young, determined, spirited woman, although 20 Fragments‘ Fenfang is nowhere near as emotionally naive or culturally adrift as Dictionary‘s Z. Fenfang’s voice recalls what we see of Z’s writing in her native tongue: direct, spare, oddly innocent. (It reminded me of Yiyun Li, though I have no idea whether the similarity is a coincidence or an artifact of translation from Chinese.) And both books are concerned with, among other things, the tension between community/constraint and individuality/loneliness.

But 20 Fragments examines that tension through a portrait of a place, rather than a love story, taking from the get-go an unsentimental, unromanticised look at Beijing. When Fenfang arrives in the city, the first apartment she moves into is one left vacant after she sees its owners mown down by a bus; her second home is next to a huge rubbish tip where children play in the summer. The sheer scale of Beijing is something Guo captures well, as is the daunting challenge that carving out a space and an identity in the face of such hugeness represents. The book’s structure, a series of vignettes, often deliberately banal, strung together very loosely, helps with this, as though the scale of the city overwhelms any hope of coherence — as one review put it, events are dictated “not by logic or structural unity but by a hotline to emotions”. And Fenfang’s reflections on the few occasions she ventures to other parts of China throw the city into perspective. She misses, for example, the “sharp edges” it brings to her life.

20 Fragments is also, as you would hope, a culturally enlightening book, although often as much for its presentation of the ways modern China is assimilating emblems of America — Tennessee Williams, McDonalds, Scorsese — as for its specifically Chinese observations. In some ways the deployment of Western cultural references recalls Victor Pelevin; but the larger point, perhaps, is made by an (American) friend of Fenfang, who says he likes China because China is better at being American than America. There’s a sense in which 20 Fragments is an exploration of what that might mean; you feel at times that Fenfeng’s hunger, and the hunger of others of her generation, is something driven by China’s economic rise and drives that rise in turn. A trip home is rendered unreal by the changes that modernity has brought — a TV that looks wrong in her parents’ house, pollution and litter in the nearby stream. What’s real for Fenfang is Beijing, majestically cruel and intense. She goes to Beijing University cafe, to get a free drink, and watches the college kids, and we watch with her. “You could really feel,” she reports, “that, in the future, these kids were going to be running the world.”

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.)

Alice in Sunderland

The most interesting review that I’ve seen of Alice in Sunderland (and there are plenty to choose from) is probably that by Steven Flanagan at Gad, Sir! Comics!. It’s done as a comic in the same sort of style as Alice, and so gives a better idea of what the book is like to read than any of the other reviews. Flanagan, like pretty much every other reviewer, and like me, rates the book (although he has some valid criticisms, one of which Talbot responds to in a comment), and is probably better at articulating why than I’m going to be. But for the record, here’s my take.

Alice in Sunderland is an argument about history, couched as a lecture in a dream. It is, specifically, an argument about the history of Sunderland, or perhaps at a stretch the history of England – to paraphrase Crowded House’s marketing people, according to this book you know more Mackems than you think you do – but in its general form, as a provocation to think about who writes history and what they write and why, it could be applied to just about anywhere. From a stage in the Sunderland Empire, and in another guise (referred to in the text as “the pilgrim”) wandering around Sunderland itself, Talbot narrates, explores, and invigorates the history of the city he has made his home with a fluidity and range of reference that is dizzying, and certainly more than I can decode in one reading. Some individual stories or legends are highlighted, such as the story of Jack Crawford, Hero of Camperdown (and source for the phrase “nailing your colours to the mast”), or the Legend of the Lambton Worm; these are generally presented as traditional panel-driven comics, some with guest art or script by such luminaries of British comics as Leo Baxendale. For the most part, however, Alice is a work of collage, a tremendous mish-mash of many different styles of artwork. The signature look is a black and white line-drawn figure against digitally manipulated photographs of the area being discussed, perhaps with other elements – manuscript pages, older artworks, and so on – overlaid. Such a variety of styles is no doubt intended to reflect the variety of ingredients being thrown into the melting point that is Sunderland’s story, but without pictures, it’s hard to convey how ambitious some of the layout is, nor how playful it can sometimes be.

It’s an approach that allows Talbot to bring many different versions of history, intimate conversations and epic battles and everything in between, convincingly to life in a way that, yes, is not possible in a prose work. Which is not to say the script isn’t important. Throughout the book, Talbot keeps the narration in present tense — that’s one of the things Flanagan expresses reservations about, but on balance I think it works, giving the whole book a panoptic quality, all of its events taking place at the same moment, seen from a god’s perspective. It’s not so much a criticism as an observation to say that the book lacks a strong narrative; it doesn’t do anything so obvious as run through Sunderland’s history from its early days to now, and Talbot is forever freewheeling (or so it seems) off to riff on some seemingly tangential element. Sometimes it’s hard not to feel he’s reaching a bit – to imply that Sunderland University is an older centre of learning than either Oxford or Cambridge because it’s built on the site of an earlier monastery seems a little tenuous, while the explanation of how to “read” pictures, and the repeated justification of comics as a serious medium feels a bit unnecessary in this day and age, particularly when the book itself is the best justification you could ask for. Talbot, for example, links Sunderland to the creation of the Bayeux Tapestry, which he calls “the birth of British comics”; this strikes me as about as useful as some of the claims for Greek or Roman texts as the first science fiction novel.

But looked at another way, the digressions and six-degrees-of-separation revelations are part of the point — you can find interesting facts about anywhere, if you put your mind to it, the book says, and more often than our brains expect everything is connected to everything else. (I have a connection to Alice in Sunderland, as loose as some of the connections made in the book: a couple of the people who contributed photographs of the area are acquaintances.) Moreover, Talbot quite reasonably points out that, thanks to heavy bombing in World War II, much of Sunderland’s history is invisible even to most of its current inhabitants. Perhaps some excess in bringing the history back is forgivable. And if it means the book is best read in small doses, which it is, and that it can get a bit wearying towards the end, which it does, well, those are prices worth paying for the many pleasures Alice in Sunderland offers along its way. It is many things – informative, funny, inventive, argumentative, beautiful – but perhaps above all, as the cover declares, “an entertainment”.

So read it for all those reasons. Of course, I read it because it’s on this year’s shortlist for the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel, and I want to talk about that a bit if only to see if I can get Jeff VanderMeer frothing. Look at it this way: any description of a book is in part about expectation management. If I enthuse to you about a book enough, I can probably persuade you to read it, but I don’t want to do so if it means raising your expectations beyond what the book can meet, or actively misleading you about what the book contains. Equally, shortlisting a book for an award acts of a description — it says, this book is eligible for this award — and similarly generates expectations. Admittedly this is more true in the case of a juried award, where you can probably assume a degree of intentionality (say, considering Quicksilver to be a science fiction novel; or considering alternate history to be science fiction [or not]) than in a popular-vote award like the BSFA, which exists to reflect the taste of a diverse group; but still, expectations are set. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that because I came to the book the way I did, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Alice in Sunderland is, and is not, instead of just being able to enjoy it as what it is advertised as.

The appearance of Alice on the shortlist constitutes an argument that it is a fantasy novel (despite the name, both science fiction and fantasy are eligible for the BSFA’s Awards), which is certainly an interesting way to think about the book, if only because it’s not even clear that it’s fiction. Oh, it’s framed as a story, as I suggested — it opens with a man walking into Sunderland’s Empire Theatre, and ends with Bryan Talbot waking up at the end of a performance of Swan Lake taking place in the same venue, realising that the previous 320-odd pages were all a dream — but for most of the book the frame is irrelevant. What you get is a narrator and a historical lecture; a lecture that often takes the form of a story, and indeed includes sub-stories, but a lecture that we’re told is entirely true (to the best of Talbot’s ability to determine such things). That means that the fictionality of Alice in Sunderland inheres entirely in its frame; it seems to me you might almost as well call Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics fiction; after all, it uses a similar type of narrator in its exploration of how comics work.

But say we accept Alice in Sunderland as fiction; and accept it as a novel, although you could probably argue that it’s better considered as an anthology; and accept that a graphic novel is comparable to a prose novel, although that’s not an unproblematic stance. We’re left with another question: is it fantasy?

Again, technically, yes: as I said, the ending reveals that it’s a dream-story, even if a dream of things that are true. It’s also true that there are occasional moments when, presumably to break up the lecture, Talbot has one or another historical (the White Lady who is meant to haunt the Sunderland Empire; or, from more recent history, Sid James) or contemporary individual (in one of the book’s most interesting sequences, Chaz Brenchley and Colin Wilbourn turn up to explain the genesis of a riverside sculpture park), or even fictional character (mostly from Alice), butt in, somehow, and assume an equal level of reality to Talbot-the-narrator. These are, effectively, moments of fantasy. But even when they add something to the book’s general argument they are also, by and large, intended first as jokes, gimmicks, momentary diversions from the main thrust of the book. Of course, one of the threads that runs through the book, as the title implies, is an investigation of Charles Dodgson’s life, and how wrong the popular portrait of him as a dreaming spires recluse is, and of course Alice in Wonderland is a key text of the surreal and absurd fantastic. Being about something, however, is not actually the same as being something; put another way, although Alice in Sunderland is at times about fantasy and mythology, it is not itself either in more than a trivial sense. Moreover, the fantastic elements are not nearly as central to the book as a whole as is the concern with story more generally, and how story becomes history.

So despite the fact that it’s led me to a good book that would otherwise have taken me longer to get around to reading, I feel a bit mis-led by the shortlisting of Alice in Sunderland. It seems to me that while technically supportable, the implicit description of the book that this shortlisting provides is not a Quicksilver case, is not something that makes us think about what we mean by “fantasy novel”, because Alice in Sunderland is not trying to be either fantasy or a novel. Indeed, to think of it in such a way almost seems to miss the point, to miss what’s good and important about Talbot’s fascinating, if at times frustrating book. Looked at one way, of course, in the end it doesn’t matter, because Alice in Sunderland teaches you how to read it, and even I managed to forget my genre-quibbling ways, which means that most people probably won’t think twice about the issue; and though the detail won’t stay with you (the detail overwhelms), the overall impression will, the passion and the exhilaration of its best moments. But this recommendation does it no favours.

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.

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.