Three more and it is done

kw: continued review, story reviews, collections, short stories, poetry, literature

The final third of Pushcart Prize XL, edited by Bill Henderson and (many) others, contains three stories I thought worth mentioning:

"Constance Bailey in the Year of Monica Lewinsky" by Sarah Vallance is nonfiction, evoking a year she spent visiting an impoverished, elderly black woman and attaining a loving friendship with her. While there are several threads to this, the chief is that being unabashedly oneself tends to lower barriers, given time. To one such as I, who spent decades behind a constructed personality (but no more), this is refreshing.

Meghan O'Gieblyn presents herself as a former Evangelical Christian in "Hell"; it presents her experience the weirdo fringe of the evangelical movement, those who tend to have the bumper sticker, "God said it, I believe it, and that settles it." Trouble is, the source of the "God said it" part is typically an over-enthusiastic, theologically undereducated preacher. Ms O'Gieblyn begins with an interesting description of a project by Chris Herron to re-brand Hell. This is actually real, though it is an ironic exercise in public relations. Kind of like a Fabergé egg: much prettier than the original and entirely non-functional. Her theme is the watering down of the concept of Hell, such that now it is never mentioned in many congregations. This parallels her own disillusionment with evangelicalism. I can't resist quoting a wise Bible teacher: "Do not limit the breadth of God. When He is loving, He is very, very loving, and when He is severe, He is very, very severe."

One never knows what will resolve the hurt in a heart. In the story "Night Movers" by Perry Janes, Zeke (first person voice) and his boss Tye labor overnight to clear out houses of all sizes that need emptying in a hurry. One of several reasons why is on the last day before a foreclosure that a homebuyer has fought and lost. Zeke's brother recently died in a horrible accident. After an extra-busy night of emptying a veritable mansion, the two find a large school bell in a dank basement. This is the kind of bell that usually requires a crane to move. To say more would spoil a unique resolution.

I'd like to stop here, but I must mention one other story. It is not just fiction, it is pathological fiction. Character assassination of President Reagan, of the worst kind, attributing thoughts to him that he could not have thought, motivations that are so below reason I must conclude that the author is a stranger to fact and to reason. Neither author nor title is worth mention, lest this miserable person accidentally profit therefrom.

Sturgeon's Law states, "90% of everything is junk." So if a little junk got into a collection that I consider the best yearly anthology, it is no surprise. In the Pushcart Prize series, there is way less than 90% junk.

Some little escape pieces

kw: continued review, story reviews, collections, short stories, poetry, literature

A few more pieces I liked over the past four days of readings in Pushcart Prize XL (2016), edited by Bill Henderson and many others:

Anthony Doerr brings us a capsule history of Boise, Idaho, as lived by the first family to settle there, in "The Thing With Feathers That Perches in the Soul", which is a line from Emily Dickinson. It is told in a third person, personal style that feels like second person. One feels placed within the family cabin.

I have read two other dystopian stories of the forced demise of print. "The Knowledge Gallery" by Joanna Scott comes at it from a new angle. The writers that matter most engage in a kind of aggressive samizdat, fiercely deflecting all attempts to describe them or to collect their work, in a society that punishes excessive use of paper.

"The Soldier of Michtlán" by Rigoberto Gonzalez, seems an experiment in building a pounding heartbeat by ending every line with the same word, "soldier". Not entirely rhythmic, the lines flirt among tetrameter and pentameter and hexameter, keeping the reader off balance. I must admit that this item really is poetry.

Another very uncomfortable piece, a new kind of reportage: "Food and Worker Safety Across the Globe: A Nervous and Incomplete Case Study". It will make you wonder if your iPhone, tablet or other similar gadgets are really worth their human cost; and a parallel thread shows how some of "the elite" pay for farm worker exploitation because of the incredibly poor sanitation that results. E. coli salad, anyone?

I am nearing page 400, with about 150 to go. I don't plan to do more than skim the apparatuses.

The frog leapt from the pot

kw: continued review, short stories

This covers the story I actually finished among the last five in The Best American Short Stories 2013, edited by Elizabeth Strout.

"The Wilderness" is an interior monologue by a teacher navigating the changed culture of students not so much younger than herself, though she is becoming a veteran teacher. It is but 9 pages long. It does seem that a "generation" is rather a shorter time than in the past, doesn't it? The ending is ambiguous; is she seeking acceptance from another or from herself? But then, aren't we all? By getting me to ask that question of myself, this story moved into the top ranks.

A few more I could bear

kw: continued review, short stories

A couple days ago I wrote of one among the first seven stories in The Best American Short Stories 2013, edited by Elizabeth Strout. Here I have read eight more; I completed half of them, and two are worth mention:

• "A Voice in the Night" by Steven Millhauser, written as trios of vignettes, offers the author's insights into the story of Samuel when he first heard the voice of God in the night, and uses them to trace the inner life of a young Jew, affected by the story, growing out of his faith as he ages.
• "Philanthropy" by Suzanne Rivecca at first seemed just another ugly story of the mean streets, but draws a reader with its authentic voice into the heart of a reformed druggie now sheltering others who are reforming, or variously trying to, as she struggles to obtain financial support for her work.

As I read the first parts of some of these stories, I began to think of Hemingway. He was a pioneer of using a heady mixture of lyric writing and gritty realism. The stories I'm thinking of began with "The Indian Camp", where we are introduced to Nick Adams. It is a bit hard to stomach, but has something worthwhile to say about coming of age. But to my memory, the Nick Adams stories went downhill, as Nick became more of an anti-character and his life became pointless. The 24 stories don't depict 24 "comings of age", but a series of events that show Nick learning less and less from each "life lesson". The growing cloud of despair that hovers behind them seems to reflect a growing apathy or despair in Hemingway that led him to suicide.

It seems that many try to emulate Hemingway without understanding what he was doing at his best, nor the trap of following him off his private cliff. Such authors compete with one another in an anti-chic chicness of nihilism. The stories are skilfully written but have nothing useful to tell us. Thankfully, at least these two (above) of the eight (stories 8-15 in the collection) actually arrive somewhere useful.

The rest of the 2012 O Henry Award stories

kw: collections, continued review, short stories, story reviews

The last four stories in The Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories for 2012 are a motley mix, though three lean hard on imaginary landscapes.

•  Rothko Eggs by Keith Ridgway – A girl apparently falling in love, though either the girl is weird, or everyone around her is. Rothko is an artist she is not sure she likes, but when she takes her boyfriend to a Rothko exhibit, he is moved to an extent that alarms her.
• The Deep by Anthony Doerr – A young man with a serious heart defect, in the 1920s, learns to cope with life in spite of it. He is drawn to ocean creatures, perhaps because of the uncertain ocean within.
• The Woman Who Lived in the House by Salvatore Scibona – A divorced man, also newly broke (the cause, not the result of the divorce) returns to the farm, where he must cope with a cannibalistic dog, even as his mind eats itself from within.
• Corrie by Alice Munro – A story of an affair, this one long-term. Blackmail is involved, but what do you do when you've outlived your blackmailer? It has an unusual twist on the typical story of infidelity.

In the early years of the O. Henry Prize collection, I got a lot from nearly every story. For a number of recent years there has been such an emphasis on highly skillful writing that the notion a writer has to have something to say was forgotten. The pendulum seems to be swinging back.

More from 2012 O Henry Awards

kw: continued review, short stories, story reviews, collections

Herewith, notes on five more of the stories in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories for 2012.

• Kindness by Yiyun Li – As long as any three of the others in the volume. A retrospective by a self-contained, middle-aged Chinese woman of her army years, and of those who thought they were being kind, and a few who were genuinely kind to her.
• Phantoms by Steven Millhauser – An odd treatment of seeing imaginary folk.
• Boys Town by Jim Shepard – Ought to be subtitled "The making of a psychopath". Inside the mind of someone different from most of us, the kind that people always say later, "He was so quiet." The title refers to an old movie with Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney.
• The Hare's Mask by Mark Slouka – A boy learning what his father went through growing up, resulting in a phobia about rabbits.
• Eyewall by Lauren Groff – A hurricane story, but most of it takes place in the imagination of the protagonist, who has chosen to ride out the storm.

A characteristic of all these five is that they draw you into a world you didn't know before.

More experiments and some finality

kw: story reviews, continued review, anthologies

Continuing and concluding prior reviews of stories in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories for 2010.

• Into the Gorge by Ron Rash: Two lives in counterpoint, a man's great aunt who ends her life sitting unclothed under a tree in winter, and he, getting old, revisiting the land he no longer owns, and getting into more than a spot of trouble over it. As I read, a refrain of an old song: "I fought the law, and the law won." Right or wrong, it always does.
  
• Microstories by John Edgar Wideman: In the endnotes, the author says a requested short short was followed by 120 others, of which this is a selection of eighteen. They range from evocative to disturbing, from one that is a single 500-word sentence to one that includes nearly as many full stops as words.
  
• Some Women by Alice Munro: The story's impact hinges on a single decision by a dying man, perhaps the only decision he's been allowed by the powerful women who surround him.
  
• Making Good by Lore Segal: Based on a few real incidents, descendants of "good Germans" (or in this story, Viennese) are closeted with Jews who've lost family members in the Holocaust. Who knows what people think? The focus character seems satisfied at the end, for no good reason; satisfied it is over, I suppose.
  

I'd say there were three stories I was glad I'd read, and only one or two that I felt wasted my time. I clearly have sensibilities very, very different from those who chose this collection.

The odd experiment or two

kw: story reviews, continued review, anthologies

Continuing prior reviews of stories in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories for 2010. Among these stories are a few literary experiments, which is at least noteworthy in itself.

• Oh, Death by James Lasdun: A young man's struggles to make a living, amid forces he cannot comprehend, and his untimely death. The archetype of a puma's presence indicates a torch passed from the protagonist to the narrator.
  
• Fresco, Byzantine by Natalie Bakopoulos: The milieu is the island prisons where members of the Greek opposition were kept. Artists and other political prisoners make what life they can, and a hidden fresco epitomizes their defiance. Actually quite a good story.
  
• The End of My Life in New York by Peter Cameron: After an experiment in "open partnership" (the modern analogue to "open marriage"), the character ends the story as clueless as he began it.
  
• Obit by Ted Sanders: An experiment in parallel-track writing. Everybody dies sometime, and by the end of this, you wonder if you've also died.
  
• The Lover by Damon Galgut: A very odd story of compulsive travel told in a mix of first and third person (sometimes within the same sentence), and with a range of time perspectives. If there is a message, it is to take opportunities as they arise. Evocative phrase: "…the story of traveling a long way while standing still." Yet the piece is of traveling hard to go nowhere.
  
• An East Egg Update by George Bradley: Another experiment, consisting of ten sentences, each a long paragraph of 300-800 words. The author has succeeded in producing a piece to which the Gunning Fog Index cannot be usefully applied. The subject is the mystery of the adult world to a pre-schooler whose mother has just learned she is soon to die of cancer.
  

These stories are at least interesting, if not (with one exception) enjoyable.

Some stories go somewhere

kw: story reviews, continued review, anthologies

Continuing yesterday's review of stories in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories for 2010.

• Birch Memorial by Preeta Samarsan: This one is interesting in its voice, a Malaysian pidgin. A poor young woman becomes the research subject of a student of folklore and colonial history, which leads to a bit of culture shock in her home society.
  
• Visitation by Brad Watson: A single dad trying to "help" raise his young son, an all-too-frequent situation these days. He almost learns something, culminating in a palm reading that leaves the end of the story ambiguous.
  
• The Woman of the House by William Trevor: An elderly crippled man contracts with shadowy handymen to have his house painted. His sister deals the the flak of his passing away during the work. In an unusual development of trust, everyone leaves well enough alone at the end.
  
• The Bridge by Daniel Alarcón: Differing interpretations of the accidental death of a blind couple, as a man struggles to cope with his insane father. Another story that almost goes somewhere, a protagonist left on the verge of learning about himself.
  
• The Spoiled Man by Daniyal Mueenuddin: In counterpoint to "Birch Memorial", an elderly pauper gets employment quite a bit above his station, which of course turns out rather differently than he might expect, but is quite predictable to anyone who knows the ways of privilege.
  

Does today's audience for literature really like being left in the lurch by all these stories? While I might imagine various endings to such stories, I do so even when an author provides a clear and conclusive ending. I don't mind "what-if" thinking, but I do want to know what the author had in mind when writing the story. I am left thinking, the author isn't going anywhere either, and perhaps that is true.

The close of one long day

kw: book reviews, mysteries, fiction, continued review

So is it here, under Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, supposedly named for the "Rose Line" or meridian upon which it lies? The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, doesn't end in as big a cop-out as I was expecting, but… The attempt near the end to make Bishop Violet (Aringarosa) into a sort of good guy falls flat, and the long-lost missing family reunion was as expectable as an oncoming train.

I mean, it is sort of a nice note that what Langdon and Neveu really find at Rosslyn is a great treasure indeed. But in a turn as much out-of-the-blue as any hairbreadth, nick-of-time escape, it is just too much to have Langdon return to Paris for a "just maybe this is really it" moment.

Does the tip of the lower pyramid signal a bigger structure below? Does it matter? In the end, the author tries to make nice, stating that Opus Dei and the Priory of Sion were "innocent", just pawns of the real villain. The damage is done already.

I went to the Opus Dei website, where they discuss "mortification" as it is actually practiced. By the way, none of their members is a monk, though some are priests. Their discussion includes a paragraph beginning, "Penance and mortification are a small but essential part of the Christian life." The forty-day fast of Jesus is given as an example. I'll simply state this, according to my own study of the Bible: Jesus, John the Baptist and the Apostles called for Repentance. There is no "penance" in the New Testament. Penance means to pay for your own sins, which the NT writers all state is impossible. Secondly, fasting and early rising are the only "mortifications" found in the NT, and both are clearly seen to be for the purpose of closer fellowship with God, particularly when dealing with troubling events. In my experience, effective fasting occurs when you're too busy to eat.

Finally, I just have to present some symbolism that makes it a lot less likely that Constantine "chose" the four Gospels or any other Bible books. He'd called together Christian leaders from all over the Empire, who had been out of contact for long times because of persecution. The conference just ran away with itself, and the Emperor did little but moderate the louder disputes. And it was not at Nicea that the Canon was settled; that was a council at Chalcedon, about fifty years later.

Once artwork began to be added to the fancier Bibles of the early Middle Ages, the four Evangelists—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—had animal avatars added to icons of them. An angel or man for Matthew, a lion for Mark, an ox for Luke, and an eagle for John. These were chosen, because they were the four faces of the Cherubim of the Old Testament, and of the "four living beasts" in Revelation 4. Interestingly, there is a rationale given for each of these choices in traditional theology, but explanations I have seen do not mention the real reason. In Ezekiel 1:10, the four faces of a Cherub are given in the order Man, Lion, Ox and Eagle. This is the real source of the medieval animal choices, and rationale was later applied to fit.

However, in Revelation 4:7 the four creatures (one face each) are, in order, Lion, Ox, Man and Eagle. This order better matches the character of the four Evangelists, in order:

• Matthew begins with a genealogy of Jesus, "son of Abraham, son of David". Matthew is written for Jews, proving that Jesus is their King. The appropriate symbol for a king is a Lion.
• Mark has no genealogy. The book focuses on the things Jesus did, much more than on what he said. He is presented as the laboring servant of God. An Ox is appropriate here.
• Luke includes a genealogy of Jesus, this one going through a different son of David, and continuing to Adam. The book focuses on Jesus's teachings, and contains the greatest amount of ethical instruction. Jesus, son of Man, is shown to be the prototype of an ethical man, so the Man is the best symbol here.
• John presents a transcendent Jesus, the divine Jesus. Only in John do we read that Jesus said, "If you do not believe I am, you will die in your sins." Lion, ox and man are ground-bound. Not so the Eagle, the transcendent creature.

The book of Revelation was written late in the First Century, about 90-95 AD. Even the latest of late-daters dare not put its authorship later than 140 AD. In either case, it is not until 250-300 years later that this symbology even matters. There is no hint in the documents that survive that Revelation 4 had anything to do with the choice of four Gospels out of dozens.

By the way, I have translations of a couple of dozen early Gospels. Other than the four we find in the New Testament, they all read like stories from the Arabian Nights or like miracle-adventure stories. The language is overblown. None has the sparse, descriptive narrative we find in our received Evangelists. I see the hand of God, not just in the choice of the books of the New Testament, but in their order of presentation. The writer of Revelation had no idea that his vision of four beasts would have a connection to the Gospels that would be noticed only fifteen centuries later (you'll find much of what I have written above follows documents written after the Sixteenth Century).

And, even more finally, a big point is made that Jesus "could not" have remained single in First-Century Palestine. Every generation of every culture has had its confirmed bachelors. Paul was also single, only half a generation later. Where he catalogs the married apostles, he mentions "the brothers of the Lord" and Cephas (Peter), but leaves out Jesus (1 Cor 9:5). Since he was defending marriage, he'd have definitely mentioned Jesus had He been married.

Of violets and mirrors

kw: book reviews, mysteries, fiction, continued review

I've now made it about 3/4 the way through The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. People claim to have read it in one sitting. The standard hardbound is 480 pages, and this large print edition is 737, so that represents quite a long "sitting"! At least eight hours, at my reading speed.

A central figure is Bishop Aringarosa. Did anyone else immediately think "Ring around the Rosie"? It is too bad that the nursery rhyme's connection with the Plague has been debunked, because Aringarosa is the prototype of a plague on humanity. Considering that so much is made of the Rose and its/her identity in the middle part of the novel, the "rosa" in his name makes me suspect more depth to his character than has so far been shown. The "posies" of the rhyme consist of whatever flowers a child may have at hand, frequently the common, weedy yard violet. I have come to think of the character as "Bishop Violet".

When I saw the graphic of the inscription at the beginning of Chapter 71, I immediately recognized it as mirror writing. While Da Vinci is famed for employing it to (slightly) obscure his documents, it has been used by many much less famous folks.

This image shows some of the text that appears below the Vitruvian Man illustration. I don't know what it says, because I can't read Italian, either reversed or direct. In the novel we find a couple pages of explanation as to why Saunière used English for the mirrored inscription. He was French, after all. Well, he is the creature of the author, so he can have whatever prejudices the author finds convenient.

For that matter, the Leonardo of this book is equally the author's creature. I've had a close look at high-resolution images of The Last Supper, and while the person to Christ's right does look a little too pretty to be a man, and has the longest hair in the scene, I am by no means convinced of its femaleness. Even if the real Leonardo wished to depict a woman, and was convinced that Mary Magdalene was at the Supper, that tells us more about him than about the event.

The scene in the fresco itself is ridiculous from a Biblical perspective. The twelve plus Jesus reclined; they did not sit on chairs. They may have sat around one central serving table, or perhaps there were two or more seating areas, for it was a "large upper room".

Here is the image from above, reversed. In this one it is much easier to recognize the letters. I found out decades ago that it is not hard to write in reverse. Simply use your opposite hand. For me that is the left hand. Once your handwriting using your dominant hand is well developed and well practiced, you can take advantage of a property of the nervous system: your right and left hands are "wired" to use complementary (i.e. mirror-image) motions.

Draw a quick circle with your ordinary writing hand. Then do so with your other hand. It will look best if you draw the circle in the opposite direction! With much less practice than you might imagine, you can learn to write backward with that hand, and the handwriting will be the same (in a mirror) as your major hand. This is easiest to do first on a chalk board, then work toward smaller and smaller script until both hands can write at the same size, just opposite directions.

Well, back to my reading. I have a growing suspicion of the butler, since a couple chapters ago the albino Silas is wishing for a miracle, and the hidden narrator tells us that one will occur a few hours later. That's a pretty big clue, Mr. Brown!

Hunting the avid reader

kw: book reviews, story reviews, anthologies, science fiction, continued review

The fifth story in Dreamwish Beasts and Snarks by Mike Resnick has a safari theme, following the first four. The four stories that follow it are on different aspects of the hunter theme.

• The Lord of the Jungle is a Tarzan parody, with a lordly ape-man bringing socialism to the apes, though he finally succumbs to a very capitalist proposal.
• Bwana, one of the author's "Kirinyaga" series, found also in his book by that name, explores the law of unintended consequences. In this case, it is in this form: "If you bring in a predator to deal with your problem, you now have to deal with a predator that is stronger than your original problem."
• Stalking the Vampire is a parody of articles with titles such as "The Tiger on His Own Ground", found in "True Tales" sorts of rags.
• The Soul Eater has been called a very different love story. Though this 125-page novella tells an all-too-familiar tale of using hate to hide a love one fears, it puts it in the context of a man and his relationship to an energy being the size of a planetoid. Like the Snark of the first story in the book (see prior day's post), the Starduster/Dreamwish Beast/Soul Eater is misunderstood at nearly every step. This story has a slightly happier ending, however.
• Nicobar Lane – The Soul Eater's Story tells a brief version of the tale from the energy being's point of view. Now that's a stretch!

Mike Resnick's unique imagination quails at no challenge, and challenges our assumptions with such stories. A treat.

Pushing more limits

kw: book reviews, fantasy, science fiction, anthologies, continued review

As I thought overnight about the stories I reviewed yesterday, I realized that "Special Economics" is indeed science fiction. The factory where the oppressed young women work is making bio-batteries and bio-computers, and a quirk in one of the batteries is a fulcrum of the plot. Having read the rest of The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, I find one other that I would so label, and a couple that are close, but to take things in order:

• The Goosle by Margo Lanagan –It didn't take more than a page or two to realize this is a story about buggery; not just using it as a main element, but about it. I opted out.
  
• Shira by Lavie Tidbar –To start with, imagine Jerusalem is gone, just flat wiped out. Then how will the Mideast evolve?
  
• The Passion of Azazel by Barry N. Malzberg –Here the "goat for Azazel", that is, the scape-goat, has a chance to speak for himself. Kabbala is a fruitful source of mystical elements in Jewish-inspired fiction, and here even more so.
  
• The Lagerstätte by Laird Barron –The word means "resting place". Grief that leads to obsession is nothing new, and lying to one's analyst is probably universal, but is this woman suicidal, or simply murderous?
  
• Gladiolus Exposed by Anna Tambour –A very different kind of obsession. Does the author really expect the reader to become sympathetic to this nut? (And would it give too much away to call him a bonehead?!)
  
• Daltharee by Jeffrey Ford –Science fiction emerging into fantasy; the shrinking ray posited here obviously violates all quantum principles, particularly by shrinking atoms in proportion. Energy has to go up when size goes down.
  
• Jimmy by Pat Cadigan – Stripped of story: a young boy is being "made to know" things by some alien influence, but it makes him automatically hated by almost everyone. Is How we know as important as What we know?
  
• Prisoners of the Action by Paul McAuley and Kim Newman – Solid science fiction, and the second-best story in the book. A seeming alien attack has led to capture of the "aliens", if the things captured really are the actual aliens…
  

I could naively say that the preponderance of more fantastical fiction indicates that it makes fewer demands upon an author, but I reckon that really isn't so, just different demands. The greater reason seems to be societal: fantasy is more popular now than ever, and the market for stories with a strong technological element is shrinking. Anthologies such as this one must reflect what the journal editors are buying, after all.

Time, imagination and mountains

kw: book reviews, story reviews, continued review, science fiction, fantasy, anthologies

Continuing the review of Kevin J. Anderson's stories in Landscapes, we have four more science fiction stories, seven of fantasy, and three items grouped under "The Great Outdoors", two of which are essays.

• Paradox & Greenblatt, Attorneys at Law –Should time travel become practicable, it will of course result, as all new things do, in sundry legal conundrums. It is only by being just a bit sloppy that this client escapes conviction on charges of attempted murder by time paradox.
• Collaborators – The ultimate virtual reality device is expected to be something that directly jacks into the nervous system. Once people get direct access to one another's total mentality, this cautionary tale postulates one possible result.
• Prisons – "Iron bars do not a prison make", and a grudge can be just as confining.
• Mammoth Dawn – Anderson reports that his friends often ask why he writes so many sad endings. While he is able to write happy endings, this sideways prequel to "Jurassic Park" is one of his sadder ones.
• Sea Wind – This first of the "fantasy" stories has no fantasy elements; it is a straightforward tale of growing up just a little too fast.
• Frog Kiss – A little fantasy here, in the form of a sorcerer who has turned the royal family into frogs, then conveniently died. Is it worthwhile finding the appropriate frogs?
• Short Straws – One of the happier dragon tales (OK, it is sad for all but one dragon slayer).
• Special Makeup – One of the better lead-ins to a classic actor's dilemma. Stanislavski should have had it so good!
• Redmond's Private Screening – The first half is an unutterably sad story of Japanese honor and sacrifice, the second half a new look at the Japanese view of ghosts.
• Splinter – A fresh treatment of Catholic relic-fantasy: what powers, if any, might a genuine sliver of the True Cross bear?
• Santa Claus Is Coming to Get You – There is no fantasy here, except in the minds of some over-imaginative children. Yes, Kevin, I could have done without reading this one.
• False Summits – A ruminative essay that likens the attaining of successive false peaks on the way to a real summit, to the progress of a successful career. It is harder to know when you've peaked in real life, except in retrospect. [Near where I live, the "Ebright Azimuth" is the highest point in Delaware, but is actually the spot where a rising ridge crosses into Pennsylvania, much of which is at a higher elevation yet. Sometimes you gotta get into a different environment to find higher peaks.]
• Landscapes – A lovely story of getting one's head clear (while seeking a sublime, majestic view), to see what is right in front of your face. In that, it is like "Frog Kiss".
• Above the Crowds – An essay based on one real ascent of the 54 the author undertook to belong to the "All 14000-plus" club in Colorado. When he described Knife-Edge Ridge on the flank of Capitol Peak, I realized I am just not the type to take risks at that level.

Well, I am sure sorry to have Landscapes come to an end. It takes a whole stable of idea factories like Anderson to keep me in reading material!

Time passing, unevenly

kw: book reviews, story reviews, continued review, science fiction, fantasy, anthologies

Kevin J. Anderson is best known for around a hundred novels, including the "Seven Suns" series. His short fiction is little known, yet it contains the same diversity of ideas and settings. The 2006 collection, Landscapes, consists of 24 stories; 14 are SciFi, 7 are labeled "fantasy", and three "The Great Outdoors". This review involves the first ten SciFi stories, five of which are set in the Alternitech milieu, in which researchers visit alternate realities to find lost Beatle albums, medical remedies, and other technologies our reality might have missed.

• Music Played on the Strings of Time – This story introduces the Alternitech stories. A musician in a creative rut is searching for "lost" music, and finds some of his own that, in his own reality, he hasn't written. That'll get you out of your funk…won't it?
• Tide Pools – A remedy found too late. How do you come to terms with it? This question is confronted daily, without the need to look "sideways".
• An Innocent Presumption – The prior two stories had their own protagonists. This is the first of two with Heather Rheims. She begins by fingering a mass murderer, but finds out there is more than one way to kill.
• The Bistro of Alternate Realities – Heather has fortuitously met several alternate versions of herself, and found the values—and risks—of collaboration.
• Rough Draft – In another take on the theme of Music Played, a "retired" author is confronted with a book written in an alternate reality. Will this re-start his career, or destroy him?
• Job Qualifications – One of the more unpleasant implications of cloning: using clones of a candidate for global office to gather experience in many fields, which he can then assimilate through some kind of brain probe. He becomes much more qualified for the position. Too bad for the clones.
• Rest in Peace – A what-if story of leadership, and whether a very exaggerated "conservative" or "progressive" approach will work better.
• Carrier – A sad tale of self-sacrifice, with a darkly humorous twist, promulgated by a naive AI system.
• Controlled Experiments – Make a bunch of rats super-intelligent, and you might just find yourself their target, particularly when they find out what the term "lab rat" means.
• TechnoMagic – Clarke's Dictum, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", forms the basis for this amusing story. Would a real, highly advanced alien among us show such self-restraint?

Great ideas all, and I haven't even got to the Fantasy stories.

I, alien

kw: book reviews, story reviews, continued review, science fiction, space aliens, space fiction

Continuing and concluding Tuesday's review of The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge, the book finishes with five stories and a novelette:

• Just Peace – One one level, a set piece contrasting three cultures that have arisen on a remote colony planet. It explores, just a little, the alienness we can feel among our own species. On another, the archetypical "I have to deceive you to save your life" story of love and seeming betrayal. Written with William Rupp, this is one of Vinge's rare collaborations.
• Original Sin – How do you define "sin" when your life cycle requires murder and cannibalism? Does it help or harm to bring human-style religion to you?
• The Blabber – One of the more delightful treatments of a multi-bodied entity, sort of a "secret princess" tale.
• Win a Nobel Prize! – A story in the form of an advertisement, published as part of a series by the journal Nature. Another treatment of the brain enhancement theme that so fascinates the author.
• The Barbarian Princess – Is this young girl, who becomes so skilled at portraying a warrior princess, a real goddess?
• Fast Times at Fairmont High – The newest piece in the volume, written in 2001 and first published here. Vinge, who is also fascinated by the prospect of an imminent "technical singularity", brings us close to that point with a gaggle of eighth-graders who find multi-layered connectivity in an intelligent environment as normal as today's youngsters find life with smart phones, Facebook and Twitter.

This collection particularly showcases the author's ability to get inside aliens of all kinds and give us a glimpse of life from inside their skin. Yet perhaps the most alien, to each other, are the two extreme cultures of "Just Peace", one much stiffer than early American Puritanism, and one a few steps more hedonistic than Rome in the depths of its moral collapse. Clearly, we already know a lot more about "alien contact" than we are willing to admit.

The selfness of the alien

kw: book reviews, story reviews, continued review, science fiction, space aliens, space fiction

Continuing yesterday's review of The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge, I've had time to read four more stories:

• The Whirligig of Time – A deep-time riff on the theme, "What goes around comes around," with a nicely spun ending.
• Bomb Scare – Possibly the first treatment of magically powerful aliens who aren't quite as grown up as they seem. At least one episode of Star Trek, starring Liberace, made use of the idea.
• The Science Fair – Centauroid beings who inhabit a free-wandering planet (it takes a while to determine this) are about to pass by a normal star.
• Gemstone – I've read this at least twice before, in different collections. Always a joy. One of those alien stories that sneaks up on you.

Six to go.

Weirdness winding down

kw: book reviews, continued review, story reviews, fiction, fantasy, horror

The third and fourth (final) sections of The New Weird are titled Symposium and Laboratory. Three of the five pieces in Symposium are essays, and the other two are discussion threads. All revolve about "What is the New Weird?" This is a clear indication that, if New Weird ever existed as a unified genre, that is over. Based on my own understanding of the fiction collected for this volume (see the prior two posts), the rubric is struggling to include material that is not always new (in tone or goal) nor weird.

In an old Pogo Possum panel, Howland Owl is holding a book titled "Nuclear Physics". He remarks, "New Clear Fizzix? 'Taint New, 'taint clear…" he drops it into a bucket full of water and adds, "And nary a fizz!" 'Nuff said.

Laboratory is a seven-part, seven-author continuing narrative. I think of Weird as having a supernatural or fantastic or at least occult element. The "weird" in this case is more "unsettling", such as the locust-worshipping cult, some of whose devotees implant living locusts under their skin, or the parasitic Salps, which seem strange but whose life cycle is an enlargement of several kinds of small parasitic wasps. The denouement, which I cannot really call an ending, seems to be a thermonuclear blast, though the description is an attempt to make it more eerie than that. In sum, this is more akin to the segment on some showings of "America's Funniest Videos": "Weird Enough For Ya?". No, not really.

In the book as a whole, I liked quite a bit of the fiction. Some I definitely didn't like. The volume is a fine attempt by the VanderMeers to gather together threads that bear at least a glancing relationship to the quite diverse meanings of "weird" (my big unabridged dictionary lists seven senses). However, it is a bit like herding squirrels.

I thought I was wired, but I was just weird

kw: book reviews, story reviews, continued review, fiction, fantasy, horror

Almost half of The New Weird is taken up by the section titled Evidence, containing nine selections. The last of these, "The Gutter Sees the Light That Never Shines" by Alistair Rennie, opens ugly, and a bit of hopscotch convinced me it gets uglier, so I didn't read much of it. There is enough ugly in my soul already; I don't wish to add to it.

"Immolation" by Jeffrey Thomas could have got quite ugly, but instead ennobles the unloved, producing a story of friendship upon a background of betrayal. The idea that clones become n^th-class citizens is not new, but is freshly portrayed.

"Jack" by China Miéville balances a rather horrifying portrayal of novel bio-engineered "punishments" with a tale of the regard an enforcement officer has for his quarry, based on the maxim, "If we didn't have such enemies, we'd be forced to invent them."

"The Lizard of Ooze" by Jay Lake seems to have begun as a riff on "The Wizard of Oz", that ran away with the writer's imagination. Stripped of its weird and speculative elements, it is a story of deception and conflict, with a typically against-all-odds success for the (almost) good guy.

"Watson's Boy" by Brian Evenson and "The Art of Dying" by K.J. Bishop both manage to go nowhere artfully. The first narrows the characters' world down to nearly featureless corridors to explore the resulting obsessions, and the second puts a story of unwitting sacrifice upon a backdrop of professional assassins' territory.

It took a while to think through "At Reparata" by Jeffrey Ford. Reparata is a kingdom built on caprice, supplied by unearned wealth, which is ravaged and eliminated by a magical moth made of the king's grief. It's an odd combination of lyrical and pulpish narrative styles.

Letters from Tainaron by Leena Krohn is pure description, and a part of a larger work. It almost stands alone, but makes more sense as a descriptive sideshow for the novel. The letter-writer describes interacting with "men" and "women" who are really insects, millipedes and other invertebrates. But all this is by implication; nowhere is a certain beetle-man, for example, called so, though his antennae and jointed limbs are depicted. This is a showcase of descriptive text, which I understand is a defining characteristic of New Weird.

"The Ride of the Gabbleratchet" seems also to be a part of something larger, though it seems the rest of the work is as yet unproduced. "Ratchet" is an old word for bloodhound, because of the hounds' voices, and "Gabble" is a corruption of Gabriel, whose trumpet knells the end of the world. So these are the Hounds of Hell, though in this instance they are space/time/dimension-hopping horses and riders a bit more ghastly than "the Devil's Herd" from "Ghost Riders in the Sky" (the song). The story line is successive escapes with the aid of a collective being called the Vermiform, also a dimension-hopper.

This ends the explicitly fictional sections of the book. The two smaller sections that follow are (1) essays and (2) experimental excerpts…or so it seems.