Round-the-Corner Stories

kw: book reviews, fiction, fantasy, anthologies

A well-known author once attended a lecture about his own writing. The speaker made some surprising and specific claims about what the author had been thinking and about his character. Afterwards, the author introduced himself to the speaker, and remarked, "You realize, I wasn't thinking any of those things as I wrote, and I am a very different person than you have portrayed." The speaker replied, almost with a sniff, "What do you know, you are only the author."! Since that time, the author (Initials I. A. if you're the guessing type) put his own notes with many of his stories, and analyzed them in his columns in various periodicals. He may not've been able to get an arrogant reviewer to believe his own version, but at least he got in the first word...and usually the last, because reviewers don't get re-published. He wasn't the first to supply Author's Notes, but it seems he was a catalyst; many more now do so.

Some authors put notes ahead of the story, some after. I prefer after; I want a story to take me somewhere, and when (if) I get back, a note by the author is then welcome. Jeffrey Ford, in The Empire of Ice Cream, puts afternotes. They reveal that, as fantastic as the stories often are, they are rooted in experiences or speculations he's had in the very real world.

I read the title story a couple of years ago, in a Nebula Awards collection. Synesthesia is a rare condition, but less rare as an occasional phenomenon. Extreme psychological states, brought on by exhaustion or certain drugs, have synesthetic effects, causing a mixing of sensations that are usually separate: adding colors to musical notes, smells to certain words, and so forth. Here, Ford extends a synesthetic experience to a reciprocal hallucination between two synesthetes, or so it seems...

The kind of engaging stories Ford excels at result from "what if" questions and extensions of mundane experiences. What if a model-train model of your town began to reflect the real town...and if you change the model, the town changed? How closely can a single person's history repeat itself? Can really tiny beings really live unseen by us...and how long would they live? Do giants live in fear of bigger giants? And the eternal magical question: Can words really do more than simply convey meaning?

The answer to the last is, Yes, the pen is mightier than the sword, and the tongue can be even mightier. The most powerful forces known begin as ideas.