The ED SF Project

“The Tenants” by William Tenn: An Appreciation by Nancy O. Greene

2007-04-25T09:06:00.000-07:00

"The Tenants" by William Tenn (Philip Klass) is laced with the kind of subtle horror and mental decline that comes with obsession. It starts out with the protagonist, Sydney Blake, going about things as he normally would as an employee of a Wellington Jimm & Sons, Inc., a real estate company, but the tale quickly goes from the normal to the bizarre with the introduction of two prospective tenants for the McGowan Building, Tohu and Bohu. These unusual characters are interested in renting a level of the building—the 13th floor—which doesn't exist; while Blake is not successful in swaying them from their "impossible" interest, his boss eventually rents the floor to the unusual pair.

The situation goes on to become more bizarre. Movers and cleaning crews and even the protagonist's secretary, Miss Kerstenberg, see nothing at all strange about the fact that "only those that have any business on the 13th floor" are able to reach the mysterious office. Blake's mental acuity begins to decline as he tries trick after trick to get to the 13th floor, all to no avail.

Written in 1954, it appears that this story can be related to an examination of a type of "Beaver Cleaver" mentality--everything is accepted at face value, very little is questioned. People accept what should be unacceptable and those that question are seen as, and indeed driven, insane.

On the other hand, one wonders at the end of the story, and with the fate of the character, if he should not have adhered so stringently to his world view, his standards of normalcy, and his abnormal curiosity, because this is what ultimately leads to his subsequent downfall. His lack of imagination, his inability to see beyond his own experiences trap him, literally.

As his secretary explains to him, tohuoobohu is a Hebrew word for chaos and void, and the unusual tenants themselves deal in the intangibles. What kind? "The soft kind." And they are not interested in answering questions about what they do or how they exist, the just are. Unfortunately for Sydney Blake, he wishes to know more.

But one should be careful what they wish for, as the protagonist soon finds out. By focusing on Tohu and Bohu, he is drawn into a sort of chaos and void of his own, and there is no one that can rescue him.

The well-known author and a Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University, Philip Klass—writing under his pen name of William Tenn—is primarily known as a science fiction satirist, though he also writes other types of fiction and non-fiction. "The Tenants," just one of his many celebrated tales, is an interesting story; less satire and more subtle horror, astonishing in its simplicity.

Link to story.

"Small Houses" by James P. Blaylock: An Appreciation by Amy Sterling Casil

2007-01-16T09:34:00.000-08:00

I might have overestimated Jim's sense of humor in the past. Or, it may just be that I'm older, and I see so much more clearly how immensely touching his writing is. How the words are laden with quiet emotion.

I might well be writing my first comments on a story that was reviewed previously by others online. According to one well-known SF/F reviewer, "Sci Fiction presents the wonderful and whimsical nostalgic reveries of a dying man in "Small Houses" by James P. Blaylock."

I can think of some words to describe the dying man Mr. Johnson and his reveries, but "wonderful" and "whimsical" aren't chief among them. Another reader, Jed Hartman, wrote that "'Small Houses' is a very nice, and sad, barely fantasy piece."

"Small Houses" is very nice, and it is a little sad, but not really. Maybe you have to have had a grandfather who was handy like Mr. Johnson, and also a fig tree in the back yard, in order to find a sense of order in the story, as opposed to sadness. I am not sure why Jed wanted to mention that the story was a "barely fantasy piece." I think it's fairly clear that Myrt (Mr. Johnson's deceased wife) is showing herself to her husband in the fish bowl. And, I wondered if Johnson had in fact not already died, and simply wasn't accepting it yet -- for he found the other sherry glass, and the anniversary card -- except he does sit down and "pass away" at the end of the story.

According to Flaubert, God was in the details.

The details collected in "Small Houses" pertain to Mr. Johnson's life. He has built a very small treehouse in an avocado tree in his back yard, into which he places his makeshift fish bowl and his fish, Septimus, and, if one reads carefully, himself. He has shut up his house after his wife's death -- and it's really not certain for how long, but probably a long time.

"As time passed and the foliage thickened, the natural light had dwindled, which was to be expected, since that was the way with everything."

"Small Houses" is a story about organizing one's life, the way it has to be in a small house. Today, I think people are sometimes surprised by the tiny spaces previous generations made-do with. Little 800 square foot houses with three bedrooms and a single bathroom were considered fine for families in years past. Today, a single person has trouble "making do" with that amount of space. I know how things were also precious to people as well. For forty years, Mr. Johnson has built a toolbox with compartments that he's always planned to convert to a coffin as the end draws near.

He envisioned compartments for hammers and saws and planes, for squares and levels and a set of bits and augers; cubbyholes for nails and screws and wood dough; slots and panels that could be arranged and rearranged over the passing years until, when the sun was setting at last, metaphorically speaking, he could remove the interior complications more or less altogether, leaving only a nook and a cranny for the few things, beside himself, that he wanted to take along to the afterlife.

As everyone knows, "You can't take it with you," and throughout the meditative, careful pace of Mr. Johnson's preparations, you know that he's not going to be able to take the sherry glasses, the sherry, the cribbage board, or the "Desert Island books." The story is more about his acceptance that he's dying, and how he finally comes to make his peace with his life and his death.

I knew a couple like this. More than one, actually. Sometimes when a couple has been married for many years, and one partner dies, the other one scarcely knows how to go on. I felt this about these two. The doorknob, the saved sherry label, the sherry glasses and garage sale bargain treasures. But people don't much build treehouses in avocado trees like that -- he set the redwood lumber in the tree branches themselves, putting the posts in concrete pilings. Over the years, the tree grew around the posts, shutting them in, closing down the light. And as the light dwindles, so does Mr. Johnson's life.

The details one might call "ordinary," but they are not. They are as unique as fingerprints, as the freckles on someone's nose, as the flecks in another one's eyes, as the pitch of a laugh, and the way one mother folds her daughter's t-shirts and sprinkles them with lavender.

I'll just close by saying, stories like this are their own reward. Everyone who reads it will receive it.

Link to story.

"Hula Ville" by James P. Blaylock: An Appreciation by Amy Sterling Casil

2007-01-10T08:37:00.000-08:00

Hula Ville was once a real landmark on the famous "Route 66" going to or from the High Desert in Southern California. It's not the kind of place any of my people would have been inclined to stop at when I was growing up. Although it's absolutely my kind of place, I never managed to stop there before it sank back into the desert sands.

So, I read "Hula Ville" by Jim Blaylock.

When I was 12, I woke and saw shining lights flickering at the foot of my bed and I was covered in electricity that made all my hair stand on end. For a long time I thought it was the spirits of Indians coming from their burial ground out in the wash. I have a hard time understanding why "Hula Ville" is in SCI FICTION. It's plain it's a true story. The problem is that most people don't understand what goes on out in these places. I guess they never heard that God does live in the desert. I know about those people that went out to Angel's Peak to get baptized. They all acted differently when they came back. Considering the pretty near total lack of what all went on in my town back in those days, it was a good thing.

As Jim writes about this fellow who went out to Hula Ville,

When I was twelve years old, I awoke in the night to find a strange man standing at the foot of my bed, regarding me as I slept. Moonlight through the window cast what appeared to be the shadow of wings against the wall behind him. Instead of being terrified, I was filled with a radiant joy, and as he faded from existence it came into my head that I had been visited by an angel.

Of course he was.

"Hula Ville" has some of Jim's most beautiful writing, and that's saying a lot. It's as stark and graceful as the Mojave itself, where the story is mostly-set. People might not understand that the fellow who visits Hula Ville and who made the desert trek to see what he could see, lives in a terrible place as the story begins. Not magical at all, and not much the kind of place you'd expect angels to visit. Open to wonder, the fellow journeys to Hula Ville and gets a map of the desert and all of its magical places. His journey starts and ends at the amazing Hula Ville--and the thing about places like Hula Ville, which to my knowledge you see only in the Mojave, is that they are testaments to human dreams. The dreams might not make sense to other people. They make sense to their single-minded creators. Scotty's Castle. That lady that has the Opera House in Death Valley. I saw a fellow who had surrounded his house with giant desert rocks, out by Baker.

This road that the fellow takes, where Hula Ville once was, was Route 66, and everyone knows what kind of road that was. It's I-15 now, and mostly, it's the way to Vegas. Thousands of people drive that way every day, chasing a certain kind of dream.

But real dreams are out there in the desert, hidden in crags--found by distant desert oases. Some people chased gold. Others--angels.

This is one of Jim Blaylock's most evocative stories. Do read it.

Link to story.

Amy Sterling Casil
8 January 2007
Redlands, California

"Gauging Moonlight" by E. Catherine Tobler: An Appreciation by Patrick Samphire

2007-01-09T11:33:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, you think that all that can be done in a sub-genre has been done.

Sometimes, someone comes along and proves just how wrong you were.

E. Catherine Tobler's time-travel story is a fine example of one of those times. The narrator of the story is an immensely powerful time-traveler whose job is to observe sentient life but never to interfere. Although possessing the immense power to change history, to wipe people from history's stream, he is forbidden to do so.

Yet when he encounters an English woman, Alice Oxbridge, he cannot help himself, and he violates these rules to remove from her history the man who would break her heart and ruin her life. Over and over, the time-traveler visits the same parts of Alice's life, her birth and her death, and so her life becomes entwined with his. The time-traveler who looks down at the stupidity of the time-locked life-forms discovers himself to be as fallible and as human as they are.

"Gauging Moonlight" is both a tragedy and a love story. Again and again the time-traveler touches on Alice's life, revisiting the key events but unable to stay. Their relationship is a series of poignant and brief encounters, spread across Alice’s lifetime, each one experienced again and again by the time-traveler but not remembered by Alice. Now he returns to her at the end of her life, not for the first time for him, but certainly for the last.

When this moment passes, I can follow the thread backward to her beginning, to our beginning. But I won't.

...

"How many times have you been here, in this room at the end with me? How many times have you come to my garden? I fed you honey years ago, but it was not truly your first time, was it? You came to observe, Edward."

Alice draws the sleeve of her nightgown up to expose her arm. I look at the drawn and gray flesh, withered nearly to the bone. Her wrist seems the width of a bird's leg. I don't wish to observe this. Though I try to look away, Alice claims my chin in her hand and draws my gaze back to her. She forces me to observe the changes time has wrought upon her body. She is gray and growing hollow.

"This is what happens to us, Edward. Never you, though. How many times can you travel back? Did we talk in my garden just this morning?"

"I offered you a bracelet at noon." My voice cracks, uncertain. I have never sounded so afraid.

Alice lifts her opposite wrist. The slip of marcasite I gifted her with years ago and only this noon hangs loose upon her arm.

It would be very easy to do a story like this badly. It is as delicate as the connection between the two lovers. A single wrong step could tear it apart. The great triumph of Tobler's story is that she does not take that wrong step. Her writing is subtle and clever, and the story is full of beautiful images: "the golden dust of African plains", or the lilac branch the time-traveler carries from the garden where Alice is being born to her deathbed. It is an example of form perfectly fitting function. As the narrator skims across the surface of Alice's life, touching only lightly, never staying long, so Tobler passes over the story, touching lightly in turn and never lingering too long. In this, the story's form perfectly matches its function. The reader is left to imagine deeper and thereby understand the full tragedy of their lives, and the way their love transcends.

This is a beautiful, fragile story that remains long with the reader.

Link to story.

"The Thousand Cuts" by Ian Watson: An Appreciation by Mike Allen

2007-01-08T09:06:00.000-08:00

Part comedy of manners, part apocalyptic horror story, "The Thousand Cuts" presents a perfect sample of Ian Watson's darkly puckish sensibility.

Fascination with the nature of consciousness and sentience runs throughout of Watson's work, from the hallucinatory alien encounters in early novels such as Miracle Visitors to the robots searching for identity in A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.

In "The Thousand Cuts," all of mankind begins to experience forward leaps in time, as if some powerful meta-being is cutting and splicing reality in the manner in which a film editor edits a movie. Events happen during the cuts: newspaper articles are published, treaties are signed, but no one remembers what went on; frightened members of the populace gather around radios to wait for announcers to inform what happened during the missing time.

Sometimes the results are disastrous, as people suddenly find themselves at the wheel of a speeding truck, or worse, behind the controls of a plane about to land at a strange airport; other times the results are humorous, as when television director Hugh Carpenter and colleague Alison Samuels are caught up in a hostage situation at a Russian restaurant, and then abruptly find themselves in the midst of lovemaking at Carpenter's flat, with no memory of the week that passed between.

Only one clearly positive thread results from the cuts: nuclear disarmament talks are moving along splendidly. Negotiations among the nations have progressed smoothly, but it's all happened during the cuts, the time no one consciously remembers. (The story was published in the early 1980s, when fear of a full-scale nuclear war informed daily life in a way that it doesn't today — though one could argue there's still plenty to be afraid of.)

In Watson's stories, when confronted with mind-blowing phenomena, his erudite and worldly characters strive to make sense of it. What could be dry explication masquerading as dialogue fascinates because of the complexity of the ideas explored — and in the case of "Thousand Cuts," the droll wit of Carpenter and his circle of friends. Perhaps God has finally taken an active role in shaping mankind's fate. Or perhaps these jumps in time have been happening all along, and only now are people allowed to be in on the joke.

In fact, Carpenter decides that the only way humanity can learn to cope with this strange new circumstance is to learn to look on it with humor. He directs what critics call television's finest half-hour, a comedy show that makes light of what Alison calls "the Life of a Thousand Cuts." The show circulates around the world, and Carpenter becomes a hero of sorts. Until the Creator makes it clear that higher powers have no tolerance for mockery, leaving the terrified director to desperately shout "Cut! Cut! Cut!" as his death approaches, only to learn he won't be spared the experience of his own final scene.

It's interesting to note that recent advocates of fiction that blurs genre boundaries and defies plot conventions don't seem to have discovered Watson, who has gleefully committed such transgressions since his career began in the 1970s — perhaps because he works with labyrinthine ideas rather than labyrinthine prose. Critics sometimes take him to task for wildly shifting genre gears mid-story, for example from religious satire to futuristic alien invasion ("That's how my mind works," he once told me). In "Thousand Cuts" he breaks an unspoken pact with the reader by offering no solution to the mystery. Like the Knight in Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal," the people living the Life of a Thousand Cuts learn the only answer is the final one. Our director protagonist complains to his Creator-—perhaps the author himself?--"Post-holocaust scenes now, I presume. No damn sense of continuity—-"

"The Thousand Cuts" first appeared as an original story in Ben Bova and Don Myrus's The Best of Omni Science Fiction 3 (1982). Ellen Datlow reprinted it three years later in The Fourth Omni Book of Science Fiction, then brought it to light again as a SCI FICTION Classic.

Ellen provided an invaluable service to readers everywhere by making short fiction gems from throughout the genre's history available at the click of a mouse. I regret that it ended so soon, too soon. I hope that readers will take advantage of what riches are still to be found there.

Link to story.

"Little Faces" by Vonda N. McIntyre: An Appreciation by Liz Henry

2006-12-19T11:37:00.000-08:00

"Little Faces" is about a society of women symbiotic with their living spaceships. It answers the age-old question, "How do you write an exciting romantic crime story set in a genderfucked anarchic utopia?"

The women's biology, sex, and gender is complicated. Males of the species, the "companions," are not quite sentient, and are attached to the female's bellies somehow; they are a bit like children, mates, pets, or extra limbs. They're like remora dildos with the emotional personalities of fire lizards. They're also a bit like hard drives that contain part of the memory and experiences of the other women who created them. Out of modesty, on formal occasions they are kept covered, though a thoughtful woman would use a lacy veil so that her companions can see out.

I enjoyed the trashylicious feel to the pulp style of McIntyre's writing, the echoes of romance novels I found, the melodramatic stabbed-in-the-heart emotional tone, the descriptions of omg-changing-color-hair and fashions in extruded shipsilk. Those stylistic echoes will resonate for some people as they did for me; for others they might be off-putting. For me, they make the story extra delicious, fun, and witty.

In the story, Seyyan, Yalnis' lover, and her companions murder Yalnis's primary companion, Zorargul. Her motives seem to be dual: to replace Zorargul with her own offspring, so that it will be the one to provide the sperm to create the daughter that Yalnis is planning; and to mindfuck Yalnis in a horrible power trip. Yalnis reacts with grief and anger. The murder has complicated consequences for Yalnis' plans to reproduce.

"It's our memories Seyyan killed," Zorar said. "Would you send out a daughter with only one parent's experience?"

Zorar was kind; she refrained from saying that the one parent would be Yalnis, young and relatively inexperienced. Yalnis's tears welled up again. She struggled to control them, but she failed. She fought the knowledge that Zorar was right. Zorar was mature and established, with several long and distant adventures to her credit. Her memories were an irreplaceable gift, to be conveyed to a daughter through Zorargul. The sperm packet alone could not convey those memories. "Let time pass," Zorar said. "We might see each other again, in some other millennium."

The companions are evidence of wealth in that they must be nourished by their host's own blood. But they also represent a wealth of information. When daughters and their spaceships are born, other women gather to give gifts of information, "new foods, new information, new bacteria, stories, songs, and maps of places unimaginably distant". At the moment of the daughters' birth, they are given the memories of their two female parents plus some elements from the male companion who provided the sperm for conception.

Zorar, in talking with Yalnis, makes it clear that Yalnis has been blind in dealing with her companions. She treats them more like pets or non-sentient creatures than like the irreplaceable carriers of memory and wisdom Zorar implies they are. Yalnis is surprised by the idea of conversing with her companions.

Aside from the weird biology and gender, this story explores ethical and societal issues. The companions don't seem fully sentient, but they are sentient enough that the death of one is treated as murder. Zorar, too, turns out to have suffered an attack on one of her companions from Seyyan.

The story is also positioned in a way in the genre of abuse survivor narratives. Zorar suffers from what Seyyan does to her, but does not "tell" either the larger society of anarchic, independent spacefarers or her lover Yalnis, who asks about her scars. Because of this, Yalnis decides to "tell" despite her fears of being divisive, and her fears of Seyyan's social power as an old, wise, famous adventurer. I was intrigued at the ways McIntyre used elements of abuse survivor testimonial to form a point of connection for the reader's understanding of a society structured very differently from our own.

Crime is constructed not simply as physical violence or personal selfishness or grabs for social power. It is the disrespect of individual agency. Crime is the destruction of history and the destruction of information.

"Little Faces" is a fascinating look at murder, war, sex, sentience, and memory, set in a world where every woman has a spaceship of her own.

Link to story.

"I Have No Mouth, But I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison: An Appreciation by E.C. Myers

2006-12-13T08:14:00.000-08:00

"I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" first appeared in March 1967 in IF: Worlds of Science Fiction. It won the Hugo award for best short story in 1968, subsequently was reprinted in numerous anthologies and a collection by the same name, and even spawned a video game. Its latest appearance was as a classic reprint in SCI FICTION.

Though I first encountered this story in The Essential Ellison: A 50 Year Retrospective several years ago, it's unsurprising that Ellen chose it for SCI FICTION. In many ways, it is the quintessential SCI FICTION story: dark but not devoid of hope, disturbing, well written, and not easily forgotten. It is this last criterion that is the most significant; one common feature of most SCI FICTION stories is that they are memorable. I still think of "I Have No Mouth" often, but I can't tell you exactly why. Perhaps it's because of Ellison's graphic--even obscene--imagery, or because it is some of the best writing I have encountered. Or maybe it's just because of the striking title. The mark of an excellent story is whether it stays with you long after you've read it, which may explain why editors frequently include this one in their collections.

Ellison's stories are often dark and depressing--dire warnings of the future or commentaries on the human condition--but this one is rougher on the reader than most. In an unspecified future, an artificially intelligent computer achieves sentience then turns on its creators. This has become a familiar tale since the late sixties, but here the computer, AM, destroys the entire human race, save five individuals. These survivors, four men and one woman, are at the mercy of the computer's God-like powers, which give it control over reality itself.

AM takes revenge on humanity by keeping his toys alive for 109 years, torturing them physically and psychologically. Remarkably, they stick together instead of turning against each other, as an admittedly dysfunctional group--in many ways, they end up tormenting each other as much as AM does. By detailing the perverse horrors they face, one gets the feeling that Ellison may be playing with his readers, but its their relentless suffering that allow us to sympathize with his obviously flawed characters.

Though on the surface "I Have No Mouth" may seems pessimistic and mean-spirited, it ultimately shows the triumph of an individual, of humanity, albeit at great sacrifice. It also asks the reader to accept murder as a means of salvation instead of injury, even as the protagonist wrestles with the same doubts over his actions. The story is a paradox, as hopeful as it is despairing. Despite repeated disappointment, many of the characters still hold onto hope: for survival, for escape, for their next meal. At least until the very end.

"I Have No Mouth, But I Must Scream" is no longer available in the SCI FICTION archives, though a savvy web search may still lead you to it. Arguably one of Ellison's best stories, it provides a moving experience that shouldn't be missed. SCI FICTION always brought readers the finest in original and classic fiction, and this is no exception. Ellen Datlow's commitment to finding and sharing excellent work like this with a new and appreciative audience was what made SCI FICTION such a treasure. I hope that she will have the opportunity to thrill, frighten, and challenge readers again on a regular basis.

"Aye, And Gomorrah" by Samuel R. Delany: An Appreciation by Hal Duncan

2006-10-01T19:24:00.000-07:00

And came down in DRIFTGLASS:

Where I read the opening rubric of a poem that asks the simple question--Was Sodom destroyed?--and raced through the stories of the collection, "The Star Pit", "Dog In A Fisherman's Net" and "Corona"--relishing these little intricacies of the Delany that I'd come across, somewhere between 14 and 16 years of age, in the 80s Gollancz Classics reprints of NOVA and BABEL-17, teased by the gruff gamin in the former, Mouse with his syrinx, and by the polyamorous threesome in the latter--to the story that gave me the answer: "Aye, And Gomorrah."

Which, in its clipped tumult of young neutered spacers tearing up the town on shore leave and the fetishists, the frelks, they scorn, tease, hustle and, in one brief fling of incommunication, try to understand--in short, of desires abandoned and frustrated--managed to articulate in a way I couldn't the disjunction at the zero-spot of my queer adolescent sexuality. Laid out in dynamic snapshots of an Earth of foreign cities, the Other, what it is to be it and what it is to want it. Delany riffed with his modern jazz of language, concise yet complex, and I understood something of the frelk in me, that thwarted appetence, and the spacer, the corresponding surgical disconnect, the pervert and the neuter . . . and the gap of need between them filled with energy.

Walked through those cities with Delany's unnamed narrator, recognising the refrain of tactfully expressed (but all the more alienating for it) prejudice in voices saying, "Spacer, do you not think you . . . people should leave?" I admired the subtle magnanimity of not putting a stress on people, not rendering the disquiet in crude bigotry but rather in the recurring implicities of the gap between "you" and "people":

you, here;

people, there.

The story was beyond me at the time. On the surface it's just a simple tale, easy to summarise, of a spacer's encounter with a frelk, but there's so much going on in those fractured sentences, in the stops and starts they create, and the sense of gaps they generate, that as a callow teenager I just stumbled through it, high on the vitality of the language, sensing the other energies in the tension, but without a hope in hell of establishing a rapport at the level the story invites. So I headed on through the rest of the stories in the collection, connected with them all, just not as deeply as with this one, and went to the book shelf in the library or the shop and found myself the next fling. And went up.

And came down in 2006:

Tried to put into words what this story said to me at that age, the way it and myself, like a spacer and a frelk (though I don't know which was which) met in the streets of Delany's words, how it tried to draw out of me what I wanted as I tried to understand its queer aesthetic. I tried to think of ways I could articulate the sense of . . . inarticulacy that, for me, emerges in the tumbling whirl of the story, in the still-point where the narrator and the frelk fail to connect. When this project came up, the thing is, I couldn't pass on the chance to pay the story tribute, but I find it almost as impossible now as it was then to express what the story means to me; the story itself shapes it in better words than I ever could. In the end, I put this appreciation off for months before finally making an attempt, hoping I might at least give some sense of the affect if not the meaning. Part of it lies in the need of the frelk, as any queer kid will surely recognise:

'. . . Me? I study, I read, paint, talk with my friends--' she came over to the bed, sat down on the floor '--go to the theater, look at spacers who pass me on the street, till one looks back; I am lonely too.'

But part of it lies in the less obvious and more insightful psychology of the spacers, in the alienation that goes with the casual hedonism of the neuter, striking a more complex chord than the straightforward identification with the sexual outsider.

Still, I find it hard to say much more than: "Read the story; it says this better than I ever could." Maybe it's appropriate that I wanted to be this story's . . . worshipper? . . . so bad I end up trying to express my reverence by imitating its style (". . . they were a man and woman dressed up as spacers," says one of the narrator's companions, "trying to pick up frelks!"). Maybe it's apt that I end up with a sense of desire frustrated by the story's strange energies ("The changes I put that frelk through," says another, "you should have seen him!"). Maybe it's right that I'd so dearly love to explain how this story hit me as a queer teenager, torn between the frustration of the frelks and the abandonment of the spacers, that despite the inevitable thwarting of that desire, I tried.

And gave up.

Link to story.

"When I Was Miss Dow" by Sonya Dorman Hess: An Appreciation by F. Brett Cox

2006-09-26T07:52:00.000-07:00

The first sf magazine I ever bought was the November 1970 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. From front to back, it contained stories by Keith Roberts, Robert Sheckley, Christopher Anvil, Charles E. Fritch, Richard A. Lupoff, Prosper Merimee (no kidding--a story from 1837, translated by Francis B. Shaffer), and one Sonya Dorman.

Her novelette "Alpha Bets" was the issue's cover story (artwork by Jack Gaughan) and also earned her a spot on the back cover. At that time, F&SF's back covers occasionally featured a small photo and bio blurb of an author. The photo of Dorman--a head shot by Jay Kay Klein--shows a woman of early middle age, with short dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses, looking somewhere off to the photographer's left and smiling broadly. As I look at that picture now, I have a strong sense of her smiling not at something she's seeing, but at something she's thinking.

I probably recognized her name; I'm pretty sure at that point I had already latched onto my older brother's book club edition of Harlan Ellison's original anthology Dangerous Visions and read her story therein, "Go, Go, Said the Bird," as I would later read her work in other original anthologies such as Damon Knight's Orbit and Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker's Quark. When I first came to sf, Dorman's (most of her work was published without the Hess) was one of those names that was just there, familiarly, not sticking out, just part of the scene, part of the crew: oh, yeah, her. She's good. Wonder why she doesn't publish more?

And then some time around 1980 she stopped publishing fiction altogether, and in 2005 she died, and the SFWA obituary mentioned her most famous story, "When I Was Miss Dow," and I realized, to my dismay, that I had never read it. Just slipped through the cracks, one of those Real Soon Nows that never arrived.

But there it was on my bookshelves in The Norton Anthology of Science Fiction, and online at SCI FICTION. So I read it. The timing is important: although Dorman Hess' name held fond associations with my lost skiffy youth, I came to this particular story as an adult, my critical judgment presumably unimpeded by nostalgia.

And still: wow.

On one level, the story revisits the territory of the classic sf horror flick, as a male human scientist doing research on an alien planet falls in love with an alien disguised as a human female. I'm confident there were at least a few people who read the story as exactly that when it was first published in Galaxy magazine in 1966. But from its first words, the story is much more:

Those hungry, mother-haunted people come and find us living in what they like to call crystal palaces, though really we live in glass places, some of them highly ornamented and others plain as paper. They come first as explorers, and perhaps realize we are a race of one sex only, rather amorphous beings of proteide; and we, even baby I, are Protean also, being able to take various shapes at will. One sex, one brain lobe, we lie in more or less glass bridges over the humanoid chasm, eating, recreating, attending races and playing other games like most living creatures.

Eventually, we’re all dumped into the cell banks and reproduced once more.

Imagine: a story whose opening is pure exposition--the above quotes tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the rest of the story--but moves more quickly, exudes more energy, than half a hundred in media res attempts at narrative momentum. And it's not just a matter of telling the story from the alien's point of view (although that certainly doesn't hurt); it's a matter of how the author perfectly matches the resources of her language to the resources of her imagination, as when the alien-as-human starts learning "Terran history": "When the clown tumbles into the tub, I laugh. Terran history is full of clowns and tubs; at first it seems that's all there is, but you learn to see beneath the comic costumes."

It's a story that doesn't hesitate to be sentimental, as the alien shapeshifters have pet "kootas" that are, for all intents and purposes, dogs. (According to her autobiographical comments in Dangerous Visions, Dorman Hess and her husband raised and showed Akitas.) It's a story that buys into audience expectations when the alien-as-human-female falls in love with the male scientist and utterly defies them when the alien, well, just gets over it. It's a story that is of its time and has been overtaken by history (happily, it's no longer easy to imagine an interstellar expedition whose "scientific parties . . . are 90 percent of one sex"), and it's a story that could have been written last week. In its exquisitely energetic language, drill-to-the-bone imagination, and fundamentally subversive view of the alienness of the human, "When I Was Miss Dow" may be the missing link between Alfred Bester and James Tiptree, Jr.

I am very grateful to Ellen Datlow for making this remarkable story available to a new generation of readers. I hope somebody will collect all of Sonya Dorman Hess' stories someplace, so I can see what else I missed.

Link to story.

"Ancestor Money" by Maureen McHugh: An Appreciation by Kristin Livdahl

2006-09-25T08:57:00.000-07:00

My favorite McHugh stories are about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, just like Rachel in "Ancestor Money." No, that's not right. My favorite McHugh stories are about clashes between cultures just like "Ancestor Money." You'll have to read her collection, Mothers and Other Monsters, to find your favorite type of McHugh story. I warn you though, there are not enough of them, and so the ones we have are all the more precious.

If you haven't discovered McHugh's work, the World Fantasy-nominated "Ancestor Money" is a good place to start. SCI FICTION and Ellen Datlow did the community a great service by making this and another McHugh story, "Frankenstein's Daughter," available free on the web. "Ancestor Money" is about home, what we really want from life, or in this case, the afterlife, and the joy of simple pleasures. McHugh writes place as well as anyone I know out there. In this story, she takes us barefoot from a small house in early 20th century, rural Kentucky to modern, supernatural Hong Kong. Along the way, we get geese, gods and demons, flip-flops and some very different views of where we should be going. McHugh, who taught English for a year in rural China, expertly captures the raucous, striving entity that is Hong Kong and mixes in some history and myth for good measure.

"Ancestor Money" is deceptively simple, something reinforced as soon as you try to talk to someone who has also read it. Everyone I've talked to carried something different away from it. It's not surprising since my own interpretation of the bittersweet ending has evolved with each reading. Has Rachel turned her back on transcendence, found it already, made her own heaven or just settled for peace and quiet? You'll have to decide for yourself.

Link to story.

"Auto-da-Fe" by Roger Zelazny: An Appreciation by Jason Stoddard

2006-09-12T09:16:00.000-07:00

Bullfights with intelligent cars? Coolness!

Or at least that's what I thought the first time I read "Auto-da-Fe" in a plastic-embalmed library copy of Dangerous Visions. I was probably 12 or 13 at the time. Many of the stories in the book I had a hard time with. But Zelazny's tale—no problem! I got it.

Or at least I thought I did.

In the years following, I've come back to "Auto-de-Fe," first for the story itself, then for other things. Things like the unique, lyrical voice that carries you through the tale. The choreography between Dos Muertos and the automobiles. The hints of the world outside the Plaza de Autos—a world embalmed in steel plates, where cars have existed 10 centuries, and where mechadors have three lives.

And, finally, to come back to the words of our unseen narrator:

Once I saw a blade of grass growing up between the metal sheets of the world in a place where they had become loose, and I destroyed it because I felt it must be lonesome. Often have I regretted doing this, for I took away the glory of its aloneness.

Alone like Dos Muertos, who the narrator tells us is above any machine. And then he is dead, for the third and final time. After all, this is the Auto-da-Fe, the "act of faith," the place where heretics are burned.

Zelazny accomplished incredible things in "Auto-de-Fe": a world real in texture and detail, an epic struggle, and insight into the human condition. He's delivered it in a way that's accessible to almost any reader, at virtually any level. And it's only about 2000 words long.

Thank you, Mr. Zelazny, for this story. And thank you, Ellen, for bringing it back.

Link to story.

"The Dope Fiend" by Lavie Tidhar: An Appreciation by Jason Sizemore

2006-08-21T09:00:00.000-07:00

Lavie Tidhar will tell you he's not British. No matter the Cockney that paints his voice. And I believe him.

As a writer, Lavie culls from the rich histories of the Jewish religion, African voodoo magic, and the dark secrets of London to build complex, fascinating stories that he describes as "HebrewPunk." A mixture of British Steampunk and religious mythology, HebrewPunk is quite unlike anything you'll find in the short fiction world.

Ellen Datlow introduces the concept of HebrewPunk to the masses with the story "The Dope Fiend." The work is dense with plot, arcane references to mysterious religious entities, and drugs . . . lots and lots of drugs. We're introduced to a fallen Guardian called Tzaddik, a fascinating figure who maintains a taste for the darker aspects of London. Through the machinations of a desperate man and the power of an African hougan, a dark angel is unleashed that looks to make a sinister trade
for Tzaddik's immortal life.

Though I could go into an extended review of Tidhar's tour-de-force, such reviews have already been written in multitudes. Instead, let me extoll an appreciation of Ellen Datlow's knack for recognizing the unique talents and voices of writers such as Lavie Tidhar. How many times has Ms. Datlow done this over her career? Or simply in the five and one-half years at SCI FICTION? No doubt, many others would have passed on "The Dope Fiend." Too dark, they'd say. Audiences won't connect to this.

Sadly, "The Dope Fiend" was the last story published by SCI FICTION under Ms. Datlow's editorial direction. A fine parting shot to the world.

I miss her stories. I miss her visionary influence on the short-fiction world.

I miss SCI FICTION.

Link to story

"Long Cold Day" by Elizabeth Bear: An Appreciation by Haddayr Copley-Woods

2006-08-15T08:22:00.000-07:00

When I think of Elizabeth Bear, I think of a large, ginger-colored creature waiting at the river as the salmon begin their run: muscular, determined, keenly intelligent, but also--even as she plots the deaths of the massive and brilliant fish--a little playful.

Has she ever hugged you? I only ask because she is not stingy with the hugs, and there's a good chance she has. I am a vague, dim acquaintance of hers she has seen a few times at cons, and she's hugged even me.

To be hugged by a bear is an astounding thing. A genial bear, of course--a happy bear, an all-encompassing radiant Sun Bear--one feels embraced by Wildness Herself--thrilled, happier, yet also deeply grateful to have ribs intact.

I got the feeling, all wrapped up in Bear, that her benevolence could turn at any moment, should I threaten anyone she holds dear. Bear could be very dangerous.

Which is why I found "Long Cold Day" so uniquely fascinating--her women, although equally dangerous, are anti-Bears: thin, angular, skeletal hounds with slathering fangs and talons.

As comfortable as Elizabeth Bear seems to be in her own skin, sinew, and flesh, these aliens are uncomfortable: miserable in the envelopes of meat they wear in order to hunt their quarry and serve their master: "She shuffled through the crowd, trying not to brush up against too many of the slimy-soft, grub-squirmy humans. The restroom was crowded with females fixing their makeup and inhaling narcotics. She didn't blame them for wanting to distance themselves from their flesh. Raw, greasy flesh. Meat for worms."

These are thin flesh envelopes which show their stark, thin angles: "She was small, slight to boniness, her little titties poking sharp triangles through her sweater and her jeans slung off hip bones you could cut yourself on. Her elbows and knees and shoulder blades were all angles, and her eyes--green and amber in the light over the bar--were luminescent, huge. Some trick of the dimness made her pupils look weird, lens-shaped like an alligator's."

Our hero Christian Whittaker is uncomfortable in his own body, too: ". . . jowls and a double chin that fell over his throat and collar and two thick cushions on either side of his spine below his ears, like the hams on a hog. He wore a wedding ring because his hands were spongy with retained fluid; he could never take it off." His clothes are ill-fitting, his physical discomfort in who he is so enormous that he cannot even fit behind the wheel of a car he has briefly considers stealing. He doesn't seem particularly surprised by this.

Adding to everyone's discomfort is the constant, numbing, agonizing cold that envelops everyone painfully. Each person or alien who encounters it feels slapped across the soul with the misery of cold, cold, cold. And even the reason for the damaging and unnatural cold--a son's love for and inability to let go of his mother--is a wonderful surprising contrast in itself.

Our hero: lumpy, drunk, bumbling--saves his son and saves the day, which is of course heartwarming and I'm a sucker for that sort of thing. But that's not why I chose to appreciate this particular piece. It's because it made me really wonder, which I don't often do: what was going through her head when she wrote this?

I wonder if Bear meant it--to create antagonists who were quite specifically the polar opposites of her? One thing these jutting, angular mantis-like hounds made this reader long for: a firm, happy, radiant warmth to hold on to. Much like, well, a bear.

Or a magical blanket, or even the horrible mess of a father's awkward and stumbling love for his son.

So that's why I love this story: I found the juxtapositions between Bear's being and the beings in the story utterly delicious.

As delicious as a fresh-caught, river-chilled salmon.

Link to story.

"Flowers on Their Bridles, Hooves in the Air" by Glen Hirshberg: An Appreciation by John Langan

2006-08-14T08:50:00.000-07:00

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that, until Stefan Dziemianowicz brought it to my attention, Glen Hirshberg's name had flown beneath my radar screen. Once I had Stefan's enthusiastic recommendation, I sought out Hirshberg's work, finding the astonishing "Struwwelpeter" in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. From the first paragraph, the narrator's voice seized hold of me and refused to let go; with pleasure, I realized that this was a story that would not release me until I had read every last word of it. And what a story--since Ray Bradbury, I suppose, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, and certainly since Stephen King, it's been almost de rigeur for writers of supernatural horror fiction to write about children and adolescents. Few, though, had limned the adolescent male perspective with as much skill, as much delicacy, as Hirshberg did in this story. Its ending, with its suggestion that everything we had been reading was in explanation of events even more terrible, was truly shocking.

So when I saw that there was a new story by Glen Hirshberg up at SCIFICTION (which, for the record, had published "Struwwelpeter" (which has received fine commentary here from Nathan Ballingrud)), I turned on the computer and printed it out. It was different from the earlier story; while the perspective still was male, this time the narrator was in his early thirties, married, the father of a year-old daughter. "Flowers on Their Bridles, Hooves in the Air" was about a reunion between the narrator, Eliot, and his wife, Rebecca, with Ash, their friend from college and, in Eliot's case, before. At Rebecca's suggestion, the three of them ventured to Long Beach, to a pier at the end of which was a rundown, somehow sinister arcade. The story was suffused with an air of menace, which was fulfilled by its climax, when one member of the trio was left behind at the sinister arcade, betrayed by their friends and their own worst impulses. Once again, the story ended powerfully, this time with a moving, lyric paean to the loss of hope and the death of desire.

I've re-read "Flowers on Their Bridles" over and over again since that first encounter, trying to figure out how it does what it does so well. I can't say that I've solved the riddle, but that's not a bad thing. In fact, I like the idea of stories whose full successes remain, finally, inexplicable to us. That said, I can offer a few observations about its strengths.

For one thing, there's Eliot. Hirshberg's handling of his voice is impressive. It's always clear, always advancing the narrative in some way, yet it's also a study in the subtleties of individual perception. Eliot fills in personal history for himself, his wife, and their friend; offers motivations for the three of them; and documents the various hues of his thoughts. Despite his observations and suppositions, he's not all-knowing; in fact, he readily admits the limits of his knowledge, the tentative nature of his narration. He is honest, though, to a fault. In his attention to the particularities of perception, Hirshberg reminds me--favorably--of Henry James.

If this were his only virtue, it still would be a considerable one. Yet Hirshberg's portrayal of character, of the relationships among Eliot, Rebecca, and Ash, is equally strong. The three of them are on the cusp of something, a kind of tectonic shift in attitude that I think marks your transition from early adulthood to another state, one whose name I'm leery about naming because I may be there myself. Maybe its name isn't important; what matters is that each of the characters is on the cusp. It's a time of death and disappointment. Rebecca's mother, to whom she was close, has died; the PAC for which she was working has folded; her c-section to deliver her daughter has left a scar that remains unfeeling. She and Eliot have realized, not that they don't love one another--it's more that their love has run up against the hard, recalcitrant parts of one another. Their friend's name assumes tremendous significance; he's a reminder of the way things used to be, all the thrill and excitement that has burnt out of their lives. Reconnecting with him is a chance for the three of them to touch, if not recover, their old fire.

To do so, the three of them make the drive to Long Beach. I can't remember who it was complained contemporary writers don't take enough advantage of landscape, but the complaint doesn't apply to Hirshberg. His evocation of Los Angeles, the 710, Long Beach and the pier waiting there, is deft and vivid. Like his other fiction, this story is placed, its sense of the Genius loci sure.

Once at Long Beach, Rebecca directs Eliot to drive to a pier whose far end once held a carousel. The carousel, we'll learn, was a kind of memorial, built by its creator as a tribute to his dead business partner, friend, and probably lover. Long since removed from the pier, the carousel and its horses live brightly in Rebecca’s memory; she describes it in detail. Although absent from the story's present action, the carousel haunts it, a powerful symbol for the return of the past, for our inability to leave what was--especially what has damaged us--behind. It's the culmination of a series of circle-images that lie scattered throughout the rest of the story. The carousel, the story, are deeply nostalgic--not in a high-school-reunion, "Glory Days" sense, but in the word's root meaning of the pain of returning home, the pain of memory, the pain of coming back to our origins.

Rebecca's reasons for visiting the pier are the soul of nostalgia; it was where her father, an alcoholic who abandoned her, her sister, and their mother, used to take her and her sister to ride the carousel while he played in the adjacent arcade. She directs Eliot and Ash along the pier, through enormous sheets of canvas hung from a roof shaped like a magician's hat, to that same arcade. Suddenly, we're beyond the problems of being on the cusp; suddenly the characters and the story are dealing with much more, with damage that threads its way through a life, that warps and snarls its weave. The trio are accosted by homeless men; Eliot sees a man fishing off the pier hook a small ray that makes him think of his daughter; the pier groans and creaks beneath them. Everything feels fraught with meaning. Then the trio are through to the "Lite-Your-Line" parlor, a collection of pinball machines dominated by a pair of signs, one of which invites players to "Lite Your Line Lite Yours," the other of which displays a set of six numbers. The pinball machines are linked to one another; the goal is to sink your ball in numbered slots at the top of each machine in the order dictated by the numeric sign. When a player succeeds at this, the numeric sign congratulates them on becoming "liter" and they are awarded a red chip. What the chips buy, we never learn.

It's a sinister space, one dominated by repetition. The four players Eliot, Rebecca, and Ash find stationed throughout the parlor seem by their dress to represent the last half-century or so; when Ash moves to join them, the group is brought up to date. The change girl, who glides around the floor on roller skates, knows only one word, a question: "Change?" and with each utterance, the question grows more weighty. Do you want to change, or do you want to remain here, playing games, getting lit, recovering the old fire, leaving your cares, your responsibilities, behind, shuffling them off with each win, getting liter? It's a liminal space, to be sure, a place on the margins, but I think it’s also an antechamber of hell. (We are, after all, downtown . . .)

Once the story is done, it's clear that such a description may be more than a metaphor. Eliot and Rebecca have abandoned Ash to the parlor, left him to find his way to their home, if he can. He does not, and while Eliot speaks to him briefly on the phone thereafter, it will be the last time. Eliot and Rebecca's betrayal is too much, the last bucket of ice water on what used to burn among them. In the end, Eliot is unsure that Ash actually escaped the place. The story exists, in a sense, between the carousel and the arcade, between the never-ending return of the past and its pain, and the loss of the self in mindless repetition. Its ending is beautiful, devastating:

I stepped out of the car, felt the stagnant L.A. air settle around me. The rising sun caught in my neighbor's windows, releasing tiny prisms of colored light, and somewhere down the street, wind-chimes clinked, though there was little wind. And the feeling that whispered through me then was indeed magical, terrible, and also almost sweet. Because I realized I might be underestimating the power of Rooff's last carousel, even now. We could be on it, still; Rebecca, me, the whole crazy, homogenizing coast; bobbing up and down in our prescribed places as our parents die and our friends whirl past and away again and the places we love evaporate out of the world, the way everyone's favorite people and places inevitably do. Until, finally, we are just our faces, smiles frozen bright as we can make them, hands stretching for our children because we can't help but hope they'll join us, hope they'll understand before we did that there really may be no place else to go or at least forgive us for not finding it. Then they'll smile back at us. Climb aboard. And ride.

It wasn't until I read "Dancing Men," Hirshberg's story in Ellen Datlow's ghost-story anthology, The Dark, that I was sure of it, but this closing--and that of "Struwwelpeter" before it--strongly suggested to me that Hirshberg was one of the best writers of endings currently at work. Even without that last paragraph, "Flowers on Their Bridles, Hooves in the Air," would be a memorable story; with its closing lines, it moves from the memorable to the haunting.

Glen Hirshberg was only one of the writers Ellen Datlow brought us at SCIFICTION, "Flowers on Their Bridles" only one of the stories. But I take him and his story as an index of the level of talent Ellen featured on a weekly basis. I'm grateful to Hirshberg for having written such a story; I'm grateful to Ellen for having published it. I'm grateful for it all.

Link to story.

"Water Master" by Carol Emshwiller: An Appreciation by Jack Mierzwa

2006-05-08T08:58:00.000-07:00

If Carol Emshwiller had been a painter instead of a writer, then "Water Master" would have been one of those paintings that looks like one thing from a distance and something completely different up close. Walking up to take a closer look, it dissolves into a pointillistic mass of seemingly unrelated details; back away again and it seems almost abstract, really nothing more than a few swirls of bright, empty terra cotta and silver, blue and gold. Negative space on negative space.

Even as a writer, Emshwiller is a master of negative space--of details left unseen and unsaid.

I ought to mention that "Water Master" is the story that hooked me once and for all on both Emshwiller's writing and SCI FICTION. Which might seem like an odd assertion, given that the story's narrator reminds me so much of my mother-in-law . . .

Well, she does.

So what it is about this quiet story and its two lonely, aging protagonists that's so compelling? Honestly, it's difficult to even pinpoint what makes this story a fantasy. It certainly feels like fantasy . . . but there's nothing magical or superhuman about the characters, nothing otherworldly about the setting. There's no reason why the Water Master couldn't easily be making his living in the desert, right now, just over the mountains from where I'm sitting. Even today there are places like the Gila Mountains, places that can only be reached on foot or on horseback, where bathtubs are a rarity and the only hot water comes from thermal springs. But then, by the same token, the story could just as easily be set in the Old West of a hundred years ago, or in a barren, post-apocalyptic future a hundred years in the future. There's no particular detail which definitively places the story in either time or space; the story is set in the desert, but the desert is never named. The river that flows with the Water Master's water is simply referred to as "the river." The water comes from a man-made reservoir called "The Lake of the Mountains." This eponymous ambiguity gives the story a sense of both ubiquity and isolation, and I suspect that this is what makes "Water Master" feel slightly fantastical--like something happening a great distance from the here-and-now.

In this dislocated void of information, the nameless narrator acts as a contextual lifeline. Her happenstance remarks provide the only clues about the desert community, the Water Master's status within it, and the growing, murderous resentment of the drought-stricken farmers. Oh, and did I mention that she sounds like my mother-in-law? Emshwiller's narrator has the same tendency to fill up empty spaces with a constant stream of disjoint observations:

Water is what's on his mind and rightly so. Nothing is better, how it bubbles up and sparkles, silvery in the sun, frothing, foaming as it rushes, roaring down from way up there to here. How it leaps so high over rocks. How it trembles in backwater pools. How it tastes. Cool . . . Cold . . . How dangerous it can be.

This incessant, think-out-loud commentary--which is typical of what I've seen of Emshwiller's first person voices--makes the narrator seem almost simple. Harmless. Possibly even irrelevant and dismissible.

Which is not to say that Emshwiller or her narrator--let alone my mother-in-law--are actually harmless or irrelevant. The rambling streams of consciousness distract from the formidable intelligence controlling the flow of words. In the case of Emshwiller's narrator, her internal monologue is woven out of some very pointed remarks, such as her reaction to seeing the Water Master's house for the first time:

Is nothing they told us down there true, not one single thing? It seems that what we believed was true isn't and what we believe isn't might well be.

A little later, sitting with the Water Master under a tree, she adds:

He knows how we blame everything on him. Especially anything bad. Maybe he knew that one of these days we'd hate him.

These key sentences, embedded though they are in a thread of other observations, act as thematic Rosetta stones for the rest of the story. I said earlier that "Water Master" is a quiet story, and it is, but it is also one framed by two acts of violence. The first, which happened long before the story began, installed the Water Master in his current position; the second removes him from it. Emshwiller has altered the fable of the killing of the Divine King, switching around the details to make it read:

Those who let their hate turn to violence risk becoming the thing that they hate.

In the end, however, Emshwiller isn't really out to club her readers with lessons, and "Water Master" is more concerned with the quiet interludes in between--with starkly beautiful landscapes and the budding relationship between its two weathered, self-reliant protagonists. I mentioned negative space? This is a story with a lot of negative space, in which many of the usual details have been included as omissions--as outlines in the surrounding story. Emshwiller takes her limited first-person narration very, very seriously, and any information outside of the narrator's immediate point of view is completely off limits. Instead of providing temporal, spatial, or cultural context, she focuses our attention on a scattered handful of objects: mesquite trees. Muddy ditches. Porcelain teacups and stone mugs. Blue sky reflected in water. A hillside of golden aspens. The reader never finds out where the desert is located, or when. The reader never learns out the name of the narrator. But the reader doesn't really need to be told any of those things. Trees, teacups, blue water, blue sky--and all of a sudden you know everything you need to about the narrator, the Water Master, and the world they inhabit.

Link to story.

"Floating in Lindrethool" by Jeffrey Ford: An Appreciation by Trent Hergenrader

2006-04-26T09:24:00.000-07:00

Imagine Tony Soprano as an eloquent philosophy professor.

That was my first impression of Jeff Ford when I met him in June of 2004, when he and Kelly Link taught the last two weeks of the Clarion Writers Workshop. Jeff arrived in the midst of a critique session Monday morning and wasted no time in sharing his honest, intellectual, and astute observations on our stories.

In a thick Jersey accent. Punctuated with plenty of colorful language.

That morning was the first time I'd heard "Gabriel García Márquez" and "fuck" used in the same sentence. The amazing part? He made it work. I learned a lot those last two weeks, and I laughed a lot. I hadn't read a lot Jeff's stuff back then and I think I could be forgiven for assuming that most of his stories were both unapologetically crude and hilarious.

And I would have been flat out wrong.

Because if I had to use a single word to describe Jeff's stories, that word would be "delicate." Not in sense of being weak or fragile--far from it. Rather because his stories are characterized by fine workmanship and great sensitivity. He is as exacting and precise with his words as a master surgeon is with a scalpel. When he cuts, he cuts deep. But it's for our own good. Really.

I could blather like this all day but luckily for you I'm supposed to talk about a story: Floating in Lindrethool. I couldn't have picked a better one for an aspiring writer to take a turn at the knife. So let's slice into it and study the entrails, shall we?

Perhaps you're wondering what makes it worth studying. The answer is stuff like this, taken from the story's opening:

Eight men in black rain coats, white shirts and ties, and the company issued, indicative, derbies. They fanned out across the grim industrial cityscape, the soot falling like black snow around them. Each carried a valise in one hand and a large case with a handle in the other.

Forty-nine words, three sentences, and a world is born.

Soon we meet the dispirited, pantsless Slackwell sitting in his hotel room with a bourbon and cigarette, practicing his spiel that has, as his boss describes it, "all the allure of a drooping erection." We pity the aptly-named Slackwell, but no one wants to read a story about a door-to-door salesman crying in his beer. Ford knows this all too well, and we immediately see what Slackwell is selling:

The black metal carrier bulged at the sides as if it housed an oversized bowling ball. The front panel opened on hinges, and he reached in and brought forth a large glass globe with a circular metal base. The base had dials and buttons on it, two jacks, a small speaker, and, in the back, a wound up thin electrical cord was attached. Thinktank, the name of the company was written across the metal in red letters and after it the model number 256-B. The globe above was filled with clear liquid and suspended at its center was a human brain.

Yes, that's right. A human brain.

If you're interested in the technical aspects of writing, take a look at the last sentence in the paragraph cited above. You could be a "good" writer and eliminate the use of the passive "was," rewriting the sentence as: A human brain floated in the globe, suspended by clear liquid."

Yet this sentence is clearly inferior. Look how the sentence structure--hell, the whole paragraph--draws you, like being caught in a whirlpool, to the stunning conclusion. I don't know how many times I've admired this piece of craftsmanship, but it's more than a few. A good paragraph flows into the next one; a great paragraph catapults you through the end of the story. This is a great paragraph.

Writers, it has been said, need to hook the reader early. At this point in "Floating in Lindrethool," this reader was grabbed hook, line, and sinker. We're not even 700 words into the story, yet I'm ready to follow Ford off the edge of a cliff if that's where he takes me.

And off the cliff is about where the story goes. If you thought Steve Martin had the whole "falling in love with a brain in a jar" market wrapped up with "The Man With Two Brains," think again. Despite the absurdity of the conceit, you can't help rooting for Slackwell as he fights to escape the prison of his life--and to help liberate the brain from its prison as well.

I've performed similar vivisections on some of Ford's other stories, yet "Floating in Lindrethool" remains one of my favorites, probably because of its off-the-wall weirdness from start to finish. But no matter how many pieces I break it into, no matter how closely I study the sentences and paragraphs, it remains unique, inimitable, and 100% pure Jeff Ford. And as I've found in my research, that's always worth the price of admission.

Other good news: in case you hadn't noticed, wherever Ellen Datlow pops up as editor, Jeff Ford usually shows up as a contributor. So keep a keen eye out for where Ellen pops up next, because another Jeff Ford classic won't be far behind.

With affection,
Trent Hergenrader

Link to story.

PS - "Floating in Lindrethool" can be found in Jeff's first collection, The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories. Also, check out his newest collection, The Empire of Ice Cream, now available.

"The Yellow Pill" by Rog Phillips: An Appreciation by Sheila Williams

2006-04-18T03:10:00.000-07:00

"The Yellow Pill" in Rog Phillips's classic 1958 Astounding story strengthens the user's perception of reality so that "reality practically shouts down any fantasy insertions." Clearly, anyone under the influence of the yellow pill would have a hard time trying to read, understand, enjoy, and validate science fiction and fantasy.

The school year at my high school carried on for about a week past final exams and graduation. The underclass students' work during that week wouldn't count for a grade so the school offered a number of mini pass/fail courses. One of the subjects offered my senior year was science fiction. The teacher responsible for the class invited me back after graduation to help him teach it. I found it fun and rewarding to be a "teacher" at my own school, but the experience was also enlightening.

Rog Phillips's story was included in the syllabus. To me it was a fairly traditional SF story, filled with third-class freighters and blue-scaled Venusian space pirates. To the students, it was something completely different. For all of them, and perhaps even the teacher, it was a story about a psychiatrist treating an unstable person who thought he was on a spaceship. When the psychiatrist began to think he was on a spaceship, the class was convinced the doctor had gone insane, too. Admittedly, Phillips has fun playing with the reader's perception of reality, but the story was first published in a science fiction magazine in the fifties and repeatedly anthologized in SF books. These are fairly strong clues that the story probably contains some straightforward science fiction concepts. As I recall, though, I failed to sway a single person in the room.

At the time, I assumed that the readers simply hadn't yet acquired their science fiction "legs." Like the kids I knew who'd moved north from Florida and who had had to learn how to walk on snow, I figured the students would get it once they had a little more exposure to the subject. That may have been true for most of them. They must have appreciated some aspects of SF and/or fantasy or they wouldn't have signed up for the course. But I believed that, once exposed to the "good stuff," everyone would be capable of appreciating fantastic literature. Alas, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.

In a March 3, 1996, New York Times review of an Ursula K. Le Guin collection, Francine Prose lamented that some of the fiction in Unlocking the Air and Other Stories was full of the tired ideas only a science fiction reader could love. She compared some of Ms. Le Guin's stories about aliens to the work of college freshmen, and suggested that perhaps the author would have been better served if her stories had been split into two books that would have appealed more to each of her separate audiences. Then, taking the flip side of my own position, she suggested that perhaps it was better that the book hadn't been divided up after all because science fiction readers might accidentally stumble upon "the many-layered story 'Ether, OR,'" and by encountering Ms. Le Guin's "deft tricks with narrative techniques," "light-handed sureness," and "genuinely intriguing ideas" those readers might start to take pleasure in the author's complex fiction as well. Interestingly, Ms. Prose did not seem to realize that "Ether, OR" was first published in the November 1995 issue of Asimov's. Noting this fact, though, might have undermined her apparent assumption that people who enjoyed science fiction and fantasy had to be completely ignorant. If only we'd snap out of it, she seemed to imply, and take that yellow pill, it's possible we could actually be taught how to read English, too.

Well, that was years ago, you might say, and in a fuddy-duddy old newspaper, too. And even if Ms. Prose and her ilk haven't discovered the antidote to that pill, surely younger readers are more open to the wild subjects that pervade today's SF and fantasy. After all, 2005 brought broad recognition to authors whose work has also appeared in such SF venues as SCI FICTION and Asimov's. Jonathan Lethem won the MacArthur "genius grant." Maureen McHugh's Mothers and Other Monsters was nominated for The Story Prize. The 2005 Best American Short Stories anthology included stories by Cory Doctorow, Tim Pratt, and recent Hugo- and Nebula-award-winner, Kelly Link. Both Time and Salon.com chose Ms. Link's Magic for Beginners for their top-ten lists of 2005 books. Yet a review of the same collection in the August/September issue of Bust, a magazine with a young feminist following, maintained that only those who could swallow an absurd premise would be taken with the book. Admitting her own strong preference for realistic fiction, the reviewer indicated that the author's stories had confused her and that only a writer guilty of a certain intellectual laziness would place "such absolutely human, flawed characters inside such baffling, uncanny plotlines."

So the Times reviewer and the supposedly hip Bust reviewer have had the chance to read SF and fantasy by some of the best writers of our day. Yet they still haven't acquired their science fiction legs. They're still confused by zombies and fairies and aliens. They still don't have much tolerance for stories that veer far from everyday reality, and they can't imagine why anyone professing any level of intelligence does. Well, I'll continue to read Rog Phillips and other SF and fantasy writers for fun, and maybe even for their "light-handed sureness," "intriguing ideas," and absurd premises, but I intend to keep Rog's medicine cabinet nailed shut. My sense of reality is just fine, thank you, but I don't intend to let it interfere with my sense of the fantastic.

Link to story.

"Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall" by Frank Belknap Long: An Appreciation by Nicholas Ozment

2006-04-17T07:31:00.000-07:00

"Nothing cruel about poor old Humpty Dumpty. He'd tear your heart out. A lovely goofy old egg. Where's the cruelty then? I'll tell you. The picture that devilish fantasy conjures up is the essence of cruelty. A smashed, quivering, alive egg, in torment, scattered, spilling its yolk." --from "Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall" by Frank Belknap Long.

I am here to sing the praises of Frank Belknap Long's science-fiction story "Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall" (1948). But before we praise its merits, let's be clear about one thing: the Orban boy's loop--the "loop of hollow metal, twisted into a perfect arch like a gigantic croquet wicket [. . .] riddled with holes and an eerie radiance was spilling out of it"--is what we in the storytelling biz call a MacGuffin. It functions to get the plot rolling, much like the serum that transforms Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde. As Stephen King points out in Danse Macabre (1981), Robert Louis Stevenson's serum wouldn't bear up under scrutiny, but it is not the main point of interest anyway--the reader is interested in Jekyll's transformation, and the potion Stevenson throws in merely to provide a pseudo-scientific basis, a sop to those readers who need such rationale to aid their suspension of disbelief. Much the same can be said for the Orban boy's gizmo--it's there to get our protagonists over into the blue world.

"Humpty Dumpty" does contain science-fictional elements, but they are not what the story is about. Plain and simple, "Humpty Dumpty" is a horror tale that posits a What If. What if those cruel nursery rhymes were true? What if we found ourselves inhabiting their twisted logic and demented outcomes? It is a scary story for precisely the reason one of Arthur Machen's characters in "The White People" (1899, 1922) famously argues, "What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. [. . .] And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad." In other words, fairy-tale fancies that we took for granted as children would, if we were to encounter them as sober and sane adults, put sharp blades to the tethers of our sanity. Long's story is a story about madness.

I first came across "Humpty Dumpty" as a young boy perusing my father's bookcase. It was in Robert Silverberg's anthology Strange Gifts (1975). The story was a strange gift indeed to my budding imagination, opening up whole new realms of possibility to me. It was one of the first stories that taught me to ask, "What if?" And the pursuit of that ability is why, twenty-odd (very odd) years later, I am a writer primarily of fantasy and horror. What if you looked in the mirror one day and it was not your face looking back at you? What if you bumped into a wall and instead of bouncing off, you slipped through it into another place? What if you were walking up the stair and met a man who wasn't there? Or, as Long asks in his disturbing little story, what if Humpty Dumpty really did have a great fall?

The story's pulp-era science, with its "Seral blaster," its rocketry and gadgets, is pretty dated now and didn't make much of an impression on me the first time I read it. In fact, when I revisited it years later, I had completely forgotten it was ostensibly a sci-fi story! What I remembered was that image of the broken egg-man, "completely bashed in, a flattish horror swimming in its yolk." That's what got under my skin. That, and the clockwork blue world where the headless bowmen periodically unleash death according to some unvarying, incomprehensible program . . . and the crooked man who ran a crooked mile: literally a "jigsaw giant, bent nearly double" who goes "reeling and stumbling over the plain, as if in unendurable agony" . . . and the floating "gear-and-wheel-filled spheroid" that swings down out of the sky—the only thing in the world that speaks, but merely to repeat and amplify whatever you say in "a vibrant echo that means absolutely nothing." It has no discernable purpose--one of the characters comes up with a rather elaborate hunch that "it's simply a weird regulatory mechanism that sweeps down at long intervals. A kind of cog in the clockwork setup--a stabilizing flying pendulum that's needed here to keep things moving on an even keel." Whatever it is, it, like everything in this world, has some analogue in nursery rhymes, as if this is a world glimpsed into by children--"but the author of the Mother Goose rhymes remembered his dreams of childhood more vividly than most men."

In case you have not yet read it, I will not give away the ending. I will say that Long demonstrates what can be done when one carries a "What if?" to its logical extreme. And "Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall" I submit to you as exhibit A for why asking such questions is a spellbinding pursuit. The science fiction here is, as I noted earlier, dated and pedestrian. But the dread, awe, and wonder that Long evokes is timeless.

And you'll never read Mother Goose the same way again.

Link to story.

"Boz" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch: An Appreciation by Paul Oppenheimer

2006-04-12T13:25:00.000-07:00

Rusch's "Boz" reminds of the more recent coup d'imagination of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

How does one love an autistic child (whether called "Captain" or not)? How does one delicately slip into the interstices of the hyperdeveloped, hyperconnected brain (v. "Nature via Nurture") a human, empathetic touch, such as those of us whose brains are not entirely occupied with their inner activity crave?

Softly, slowly, secretly, a discreet love slips in.

Link to story.

"At the Mouth of the River of Bees" by Kij Johnson: An Appreciation by Hannah Wolf Bowen

2006-04-10T08:12:00.000-07:00

I've been working towards this appreciation, on and off, for months. I didn't expect it to be this hard. A few paragraphs about the story that I knew, when I first heard about this project, I wanted for my own? Piece of cake!

Only not. I've been reading and rereading the story. Starting and restarting the appreciation. And here I am starting it all over again.

There are science fiction stories that work from the outside in, that tackle the entire world on some grand sweeping scale, and there are stories that have plenty to say, but it's all personal. "At the Mouth of the River of Bees" is a story about love and loyalty and loneliness, and about hope and about when to say when, and about magic sliding sideways into the world, about how something as small as a bee sting can be part of something else.

And "At the Mouth of the River of Bees" is a story about one woman and one aged dog. Part of the beauty of science fiction is not having to choose.

The western states that Linna drives through are as strange and magical as the river of bees. Linna "...drives as fast as the little Subaru will go, the purple highway drawing her east. Late sun floods the car. The honey-colored light flattens the brush and rock of the badlands into abrupt gold and violet, shapes as unreal as a hallucination. It's late May and the air is hot and dry during the day, the nights cold with the memory of winter. She hates the air-conditioner, so she doesn't use it, and the air thrumming in the open window smells like hot dust and metal and, distant as a dream, ozone and rain." It's a strange landscape, and one full of potential, and the river of bees can flow through it as naturally as a river of water might.

Despite all this, the characters know that the river of bees is impossible, and so the only ones to follow it are the ones seeking impossible things. Linna's bee sting draws her on; it's not the thing that's breaking her, but it's a hurt that she can stand to recognize. She chases down the river and her grand old dog is along for the ride. He's dying, and he may be ready, but she's not.

"Back at the car, Linna watches Sam chase something in his sleep, paws twitching in the rhythm of running. Live forever, she thinks, and wills his twisted spine and legs straight and well."

It's a story, in a way, about choice. Because in the center of all this beauty and magic, we still have one woman and her dog, and then we have another woman who can perhaps help that dog and be helped by him in turn, if Linna can bear to let him go. And we have an ending that left me infuriated on first and second read, then thoughtful, and finally a bittersweet kind of glad.

I first met "At the Mouth of the River of Bees" two years and some months ago. I've thought about it since then, read it over and over, talked about it and argued and written my own story in response. And I suppose that part of my trouble in writing this appreciation has been that a few paragraphs aren't nearly enough to explain how well the story stands up to scrutiny and how fine and deep it is.

Link to story.

"Two Weeks in August" by Frank Robinson: An Appreciation by Colleen Mondor

2006-04-05T09:23:00.000-07:00

The first thing that struck me when I was reading Frank Robinson's "Two Weeks in August" was how timeless the story appeared to be. It is about one of the most common of 20th (or 21st) century pastimes--complaining about the people you work with at a job that is slowly sucking your soul away. The story's narrator is that all-round ordinary guy, someone who enjoys his moments at the office when he has something to tell--when he gets to share a personal triumph about home and family that makes him the momentary center of attention. The bane of his existence is a guy named McCleary, the classic obnoxious coworker who always has to prove he's better--his kids are smarter, his car is newer, his house is more glorious. Basically, if you walk in to work on Monday having spent the weekend finding a cure for cancer, McCleary will have brought about world peace in the same period.

We all know a guy like McCleary.

The big moment for our narrator, for all the guys at the office, is those two annual weeks of vacation they receive every year. Of course vacation destinations are another opportunity for McCleary to play his game of one-up-manship and the narrator is sick to death of the endless cycle. The situation is all the more frustrating for him this particular year becasue financial concerns mean that he will be spending his two weeks in the backyard. It's not a bad way to see part of the summer but he knows McCleary will be endlessly annoying about his own grand plans and this time our guy just can't take it. So he comes up with a plan to cut his competition off before he has the chance to brag--he decides to announce a vacation destination that is so outlandish, so amazing, so literally out of this world, that McCleary won't be able to compete. He's finally going to shut the other man up and enjoy just a little bit of peace and quiet.

He's finally going to win because frankly, there is just no way to beat him.

But then the story takes a turn, a sweetheart of a turn, and the narrator (and all the other guys) are dumbfounded by McCleary's achievement. They all smartly decide to make the most of it though, and peace finally comes to the office. The fact that McCleary is responsible really doesn't matter because everyone wins so big (really big). And besides, without McClearly none of it ever would have happened anyway so why complain. By the end of the story, the narrator is affectionately referring to his old rival as "Mac" and has come to appreciate him on a whole new level. Every office has a guy just like him, after all, and whether or not you use his competitive nature to everyone's advantage though is up to you, and how badly you want to enjoy those two weeks in August.

But that's not the end of my appreciation. I liked "Two Weeks in August" because it was so easy for me to identify with the characters. I knew the narrator (I have been the narrator) and I certainly have endured the presence of my share of McClearys. But when I saw the copyright at the end--when I saw that Frank Robinson wrote this story in 1951, I was totally blown away. I had no idea this was a fifty year old story, no idea at all. Robinson brought such an impressive air of timelessness to the tiny world he created, such a perfectly adaptable atmosphere that transends all generational or regional assignment, that it has easily stayed with me over the past couple of weeks. So much of our world has changed since 1951 that it is hard to believe how little of the narrator's world is different. But there are still the same offices, the same cubicle games, the same longing for vacation. Some things just might never change.

In crafting his story so effectively around the unchanging aspects of jobs and work Robinson shows one of the best things about science fiction--that it can be a timeless art, a forever art, that will appeal with ease to any reader of any age. He makes it all look easy with "Two Weeks in August," but don't be fooled by that. Give the story five minutes of your time and you will be mightily impressed by Robinson's talent for understatement. I know that I was, and I still can't get this story out of my head.

Link to story.

"Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons" by Cordwainer Smith: An Appreciation by Alan Deniro

2006-03-23T13:25:00.000-08:00

"Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons" is one of the greatest science fiction horror stories of all time. It might not be readily apparent that this story is horror; other stories by Cordwainer Smith such as "A Planet Named Shayol" may play up this element more on the surface. But this is a story that seemingly does the impossible--have a sprightly, almost jovial tone; and at the same time incorporate a creeping and creepy sense of inevitability about its protagonist.

That protagonist is quite the villain. Benjamin Bozart was "sworn to rob Old North Australia [Norstrilia] or to die in the attempt, and he had no intention of dying." From Viola Siderea, a planet of thieves, he was the best of their thieves, kept alive for centuries to rob Norstrilia blind. They have gained their wealth through the refinement of "stroon." A dollop can add decades to life; Norstrilia deals in stroon by the ton. Needless to say, Norstrilia has developed unreal defenses in order to protect its investment and its people.

The story has a masterful approach to voice and pacing. Fairly early in the story, when Bozart's plans start to fall apart, it's readily apparent to the reader (though not to Bozart) how the story is going to turn out. The thief, surely, is going to die in an unpleasant way. Cordwainer Smith has given away the "secret" as such. But how, then, does Smith keep the narrative crackling, edgy, fun, and terrifying all at once?

For one, we just don't know how horrible Bozart's untimely end is going to be. He is the greatest thief on a planet of thieves, but this means nothing. He is going to fail. There is no disputing this. The devil is in the details--we know the mouse is confidently striding to his doom, but are surprised to see that the cheese is actually in the middle of a bear trap.

Secondly, it comes down to his style, which solders together these disparate elements. In the first section of the story one comes across this sentence: "One of her weapons snored. She turned it over." Again, the devil is in the details--Cordwainer Smith poses odd juxtapositions of the senses, and our sense of what technology does and how it feels to its users is depicted in an almost dreamlike fashion.

All of this would have been masterful if its sole purpose was to provide effect, to show the machinations of a kind of wind-up-toy story. But there is more. Smith is always searching for more with his stories. What the reader is left with is a sense of the Norstrilian people's own connectiveness and openness with each other; not in any political or military sense--for in that realm they cannot be assailed--but rather in their inner lives. They are both powerful and tender toward each other. But, to anyone who would threaten that--or murder a Norstrilian child, as Bozart did to attain information--they unleash the fearsome kittons, unleashing a psychic onslaught from decidedly non-cuddly "kittens" in the name of safety. The epigraph states: "Poor communications deter theft; good communications promote theft; perfect communications stop theft. --Van Braam." This is a sharp encapsulation of the issues at stake in this story, and yet also reveals the koan-like nature of the story's resolution. What constitutes "perfect communications" in the first place? Who controls these communications? There are certainly no easy answers to these questions, but with the Norstrilian's power comes a strange innocence that is both hard to understand and dislike. It's Mother Hitton, the "weapon mistress," who takes danger upon herself and allows Norstrilian lives to go on peacefully.

The story reads as fresh and timely as I imagine it did in 1961, when it first appeared in Galaxy. Issues of national (OK, galactic) security, data theft, small tragedies, and some really nasty minks all add up into an intoxicating concoction. It has remained the only story of Cordwainer Smith's available online. I couldn't think of a better gateway drug to the wild, incantatory worlds of Cordwainer Smith and the Instrumentality than this gem of a story.

Link to story.

"To Bell the Cat" by Joan Vinge: An Appreciation by Sarah Prineas

2006-03-13T07:30:00.000-08:00

Joan Vinge's novelette "To Bell the Cat" was first published in Asimov's in 1977, but I can see why Ellen Datlow chose to republish it in SCI FICTION, because it is a terrific read. On the intellectual level, the reader is confronted by uncomfortable questions about about humanity, animality, punishment and redemption, individual agency, cruelty, and, maybe, an odd kind of love.

It's also a very moving story about a lost man who manages to find himself, or perhaps the self he has become, through an act of hope in the midst of devastating hopelessness.

And this is also a skiffy story about first-contact and cute scaly aliens.

Thanks, Ellen, for giving this reader the chance to read a story she would otherwise have missed.

Link to story.

"God's Hooks!" by Howard Waldrop: An Appreciation by Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon

2006-03-10T11:33:00.000-08:00

There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who ask "Who the hell is Howard Waldrop?" And those who already love to read anything by Howard.

When I first stumbled onto Howard's work, it was "The Ugly Chickens" and I nearly cried for the main character and his doomed search for dodoes, long after the dodo was extinct. What made Howard's writing so outstanding was a combination of meticulous detail--I saw the old photograph, I saw the book of birds on that bus with the old lady, and I saw and sweated as the protag fought his way through the overgrown old farm . . .

Alas, someone else claimed "The Ugly Chickens" first. But now that we're doing seconds, I was immediately drawn to "God's Hooks", which I read on the SCI FICTION site for the first time just a few weeks ago. Amazing how many stories I've (re)discovered on SCI FICTION since this Appreciation business began.

The story "God's Hooks" concerns a number of men who meet after the Great London Fire of 1666 to reestablish their friendship, toast their fortunes and mourn their losses--and pine for getting away for some serious fishing. Then they get wind of a monstrous fish away from the city which is attacking people. That's enough to give them a mission to catch this fish. Tied up in this is some superstition and some good old fashioned Biblical end-of-the-world paranoia. So far, you might be left scratching your head as to where the spec fic element is hiding, but fear not, gentle reader--things are going to get downright weird from here. There's a sense of evil and doom where the great fish hides, and then there's the stranger. I'm not sure what really happens at the end and I don't care! This is a fish story to end all fish stories--the one that got away (and thank God for that!).

What can I say about Howard's meticulous research on The Great London Fire? It's like some lurking iceberg--no matter how many details creep into the story, you can be assured that there's ten times the detail hiding in his notes. With some writers, James Michener comes to mind, the research fills long thick novels. Howard plays his research notes as if they were a fine instrument--just the right leitmotif to perfect a short story. Star-gazey pie indeed!

High and thick, it smelled of fresh-baked dough, meat and savories. It looked like a cooked pond. In a line around the outside, halves of whole pilchards stuck out, looking up at them with wide eyes, as if they had been struggling to escape being cooked.

What better feast for a group of men obsessed with The End of the World and fishing?

Ah, the fishing . . . if Norman Maclean hadn't written "And A River Runs Through It" then Howard Waldrop might've had to. I have read that friends of Howard get wind of his various projects and so know about "the bicycle story" or "the dodo" story for months or years before he gets them written. I remember someone talking about "the fishing story" and methinks it has to be "God's Hooks." And a what a fishing story it is!

There's a brotherhood of ironmongers, of whom one of our group is a member. For a great task against a leviathan, a great fishhook is required--and the metal used once fell from the sky. There's a mysterious "prophet" who accompanies them on their quest, even though he doesn't believe in their mission. It's Modern Men (at least for 1666) up against ancient fears. It's a ghost story, a tale of a doomed quest (is there any other kind?), perhaps even a tale of unrequited love. It's a tale of salvation and damnation.

It's the damnedest story I've read in a long time--probably since I read Howard's "bicycle story."

You know, I attended Clarion in the summer of 2004--and deliberately not in 2003 when Howard taught. I didn't want to go to Clarion just to be a fan--I wanted to learn to be a better writer. But oh it was a hard decision, mediated only by the fact that I wasn't yet ready for Clarion in 2003, and didn't have the money that year either. So I've yet to meet Howard. But through his writing and stories like "God's Hooks", I am happy to know Howard. And I hope you have (or will) discovered him, too. Thanks to the efforts of Ellen Datlow and SCI FICTION--you can.

Dr. Phil

Link to story.

"The Starry Night" by Barry N. Malzberg and Jack Dann: An Appreciation by E. Sedia

2006-03-09T10:44:00.000-08:00

"The Starry Night" by Barry N. Malzberg and Jack Dann is a complex story of art and the end of the world, and is as strange and meditative as the painting that inspired it.

In the past, Vincent Van Gogh struggles with mental illness as he paints "Starry Night", one of his strangest and most haunting paintings, over and over again, unable to get away from the image of the unraveling firmament. In the present, Rachel, a little girl suffering from epilepsy, copies Van Gogh's painting, and notices things that nobody else does. In the future, a Jesuit priest inhabiting a terminal space probe watches from too-close distance as the stars explode and die. These exploding stars are the link between the three of them.

"Starry Night" is one of my favorite paintings; I am amazed that a story can do it justice. Like the painting, the essence of this tale is difficult to describe, haunting and visceral, and just as open to interpretation. I read it as a tale of a singular spectacle – exploding stars, unraveling skies, the end of the universe – passed back in time, from a witness to an artist, through means less crude than a traditional time machine that allows actual time travel. Instead, there's a meeting of minds ravaged by illness and loneliness, centered around this single image. Their interpretations of the image lend a richness of imagery and meaning to the story, and each of the three point of view characters possesses a unique voice, sensibilities, and understanding of the world.

This is not an easy story, but with each rereading something new opens up, a new meaning, a new possibility. The fractured manner of telling serves the story well, and it is worth the effort.

Link to story.

Editor's Note: A slightly different version of this appreciation appeared originally at Tangent Online.