Tomorrow I’m putting up a brief posting on John Dos Passos’ U.S.A Trilogy, and I came across this piece from Jason Friesen’s on Ernest Hemmingway and John Dos Passos.
Ernest Hemingway
The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Six: Multiples, 1983-87
Low Res Scan: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Six: Multiples, 1983-87, ed. Robert Silverberg, 2011.
This anthology significantly overlaps with the first and only volume in the aborted The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg from US publisher Bantam Spectra in 1992. All but two of the 14 stories in that earlier book of 24 stories. Silverberg’s introductory notes have slightly been altered in many cases, particularly to note when the story was somehow used for a later, post-1992 novel.
I don’t have a lot to add to what I’ve said earlier about that collection, so I’ll talk mostly about the two new stories.
When Silverberg wrote “Blindsight” in 1985, the news of the infamous Dr. Mengele’s death had just come out. The story also involves a “mad scientist” and illicit human experimentation. There a couple of interesting elements of setting. Silverberg envisioned the breakup of the Soviet Union, and his scientist, Wu Fang-Shui, did his work in Kazakhstan. He also sets the story on a L-5 colony which seems a bit late in science fiction to use such a setting (though William Gibson and John Shirley used it just a couple of years earlier). Silverberg’s L-5 colony has been ruled for 37 years by El Supremo who gets his money by selling protection to criminals fleeing extradition. El Supremo is not keen on his paying clients being found by people looking for them, but that’s exactly what a man called Farkas wants to do. He hires protagonist Juanito, a young fixer, who helps visitors get what they need. Juanito isn’t keen on providing that service. It violates the colony’s one taboo. But Farkas is persistent. He may be missing eyes, but he has “blindsight”, an alternate sense of vision, genetically engineered into him. Silverberg’s plot doesn’t take the obvious turns.
In some sense, Silverberg is a writer of ghost stories. His one great theme is the revival of the dead. You can see it in his many stories of simulacrum of historical personages, time travel, or, as with “Born with the Dead”, the literal resurrection of the dead. Continue reading
Selected Short Fiction of Kathe Koja
Essay: Selected Short Fiction of Kathe Koja
Another summer and fall and winter taken up with charting an author featured at the local Arcana “dark fantastic” convention.
In 2014, it was the dead Ambrose Bierce. In 2016, it was Kathe Koja who is still very much alive and a novelist and a playwright and theatre producer.
I’ve already covered four of her early novels, but Koja has written numerous stories since her 1987 debut. The “selected” of the title means my diligence did not extend to moving boxes of magazines in the home archive to access every Koja story I had, so I looked at her stuff easily at hand in the house and online.
This post will cover stories appearing in various anthologies and magazines.
I didn’t revisit “Skin Deep” (Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 1989) after reading it in 1994. According to my less than completely helpful notes, it seems to be another tale of sexual obsession and, perhaps like Koja’s Skin, The Cipher, and Kink, a fatal quest for transcendence. A man takes an alien lump of flesh as a lover. This commentary on the power of sexual desire – strange and unexplained, a force of nature – is the story’s main strength, relayed through vivid, creepy imagery. Ultimately, the alien absorbs him and kills him. It’s the death of his body. However, his consciousness is melded with hers. Body dead but desire achieved.
That’s one version of real world love – sexual obsession leading to physical destruction. But it’s also a metaphor for the old “man and woman cleaving together” idea, two minds and two bodies becoming one. So, you might also consider this another example of Christian imagery showing up in Koja’s fiction.
Many of these stories came from theme anthologies so Koja, weird fiction author, isn’t the only thing on display here. Koja, in a 1998 interview, said she wrote for such anthologies if the theme was “interesting and sufficiently broad to allow room to maneuver and play”. Continue reading
Strange Monsters of the Recent Past
Since the alternate history series is continuing, I return to Howard Waldrop.
Raw Feed (1992): Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, Howard Waldrop, 1991.
“Foreword: The Left-Handed Muse”, Lewis Shiner — Shiner details Waldrop’s writing method: long bouts of research while he talks endlessly about the story he’s going to write then a burst of (usually) single sitting writing to make a story — usually he needs to write it down so it can be read at a convention).
“All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past” This story has a fun premise: every single monster and alien menace from 1950s sf movies comes to Earth to wreck death and destruction. The ending was just ok: our protagonist decides to go out fighting the giant ants from Them!. This story illustrates why Waldrop is, in some ways, the quintessential example of what some consider sf’s genre shortcoming: interesting setups and premises with little attention paid to plot or character or theme, a lingering feeling, beyond the initial description of setting, of what’s-the-point?
“Helpless, Helpless” — An interesting, ok story of the Artificials Plague which strikes the robots, androids, and artificial intelligences of a future society. The tone reminded me a bit of Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (with some bits of humor from psychotic, sometimes violent machines) which is perhaps inevitable given the subject matter. Waldrop never explains the reason or origin of his plague but, as he explains in the introduction, that’s the point of the story: a sf recreation of all those historical plagues which had so much effect on their societies but couldn’t be explained by the members of those societies. I’m not sure the story would have been as enjoyable without the introduction. Continue reading
Night Moves and Other Stories
The Tim Powers series continues while I work on other things.
Powers writes few short stories because he finds them almost as much work as a novel with a lot less pay.
However, the ones he does are often high quality.
Raw Feed (2002): Night Moves and Other Stories, ed. Tim Powers, 2001.
“Two Men in New Suits”, James P. Blaylock — Very nice introduction by Blaylock about his long time friend and sometime collaborator Tim Powers. He talks about their initial meeting back in 1972 before either was a published writer and some of their adventures since then. Blaylock talks about Powers’ grace under pressure, his extensive Arkham House collection back in 1972, their mutual fondness for Fellini films and dwarves in their writing, and how they became involved teaching creative writing to high schoolers in Orange County, California.
“Night Moves”, Tim Powers — A story whose lyricism reminded me very much of Ray Bradbury, specifically his Something Wicked This Way Comes in that both stories have a variety of characters in a small town responding to the coming, on the wind, of something fantastical — perhaps their hopes will be fulfilled, perhaps something frightening is coming. For that matter, both stories do feature characters having their wishes filled — at a steep price. I liked the description of Roger and his neurotic girlfriend Debbie who, in some way, seems to be healed by the events of the story even though she is only affected by them because she insists on tagging along with Roger. At story’s end, she seems to have weaned herself from returning to her parents’ house whenever life gets tough. Powers keeps things vague here, just vague enough to suggest things without making concrete statements. For instance, it is never explained why Cyclops knows more about what’s going on than any character. (He also seems to lack any of the deep wished and compulsions that the other characters have.) It is Cyclops who suggests that Evelyn (or, perhaps, the combination of the ghostly Evelyn and her brother Roger) amplify the imaginations of others to create a closed off, pocket universe that can trap a person forever. The dry scrap that Cyclops notices and thinks resembles a little desiccated devilfish, the scrap that falls in a fountain at story’s end, seems to be Evelyn, an aborted fetus. It is memories that resemble (the smell of ether, the dragging from a horse’s stirrup) her abortion that she blots out of brother Roger’s mind. It’s never really said, but Roger’s constant contact with Evelyn must have created an unbearable strain on his parents who, after moving frequently to escape Evelyn’s presence, eventually abandon Roger. (I wonder if Powers is implying that getting an abortion and abandoning a child are manifestations of the same personality. How they know Evelyn — unless they, for some reason, named the baby before the abortion — is the child they aborted is not explained.) It seems that the parents, for reasons not clear, opt to stay in the pocket universe. They claim they “can’t go through it”, “it” seeming to be the way out. It’s not explained if they have meant Evelyn before. Evelyn resting at piece seems to be because Roger now knows who she is and why she died and that he can stop looking for his parents who aren’t what he expected. (They’re not rich, for one thing. Perhaps Powers is also implying their not worth having around.) It seems a fair guess that Catholic Powers is expressing his abhorrence of abortion in terms that resemble some pocket universe/purgatory C.S. Lewis might have created (or, maybe did — I haven’t read that much Lewis). If Roger’s parents are trapped in a pocket universe, it is like purgatory. I find it surprising, given the disapproval of abortion and the usually liberal views on the subject by fantasy and sf fans, that this story was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Powers’ notes say this story was originally created for — but not sold to — an anthology where each story was to have an accompanying map.
“The Better Boy”, James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers — This story may have been inspired by a tomato growing experience of Powers (Better Boy is a breed of tomato) and a remark by Serena Powers, Tim Powers’ wife, that his struggle to preserve a huge tomato from worms resembled Santiago’s struggle in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, but its tone and concern with the magic in everyday life is very Blaylockian. (I believe I’ve read an interview with Blaylock that finding the magic and numinous in everyday life is a thematic concern of his.) Powers, in his notes, also says that the air of goodness surrounding protagonist Bernard Wilkins, originally intended to be a parodic figure (the story’s plot was originally to be a parody of Hemingway’s novel) of the sort of customer found at a diner near Powers’ house, is all Blaylock’s invention. Wilkins does come across as a very sympathetic character. I found it interesting that some talk of “luminferous ether” and “ether bunnies” (pieces of crystal shaped like rabbit’s ears and designed to snag the luminferous ether and take tomato worms with them) was simply thrown in to get the story in a sf magazine, and the story was published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. It’s also curious that whether the ether bunnies would have worked is left ambiguous at story’s end. Indeed, it could be argued that there is no fantastical element in this story. Continue reading
MarzAat 