Uncanny Magazine Issue 37

by Lynne M. Thomas

  The Neverending Story by Michael Ende (1979) is an entry-level epic fantasy, written for an ambitious child who wants a deep worldbuild but something a little more accessible than Tolkien. The story takes place in two locations and two timelines: one in the imagined world of Fantastica, the other in a small boy’s adventure with a purloined book. In most editions of this novel, the text is printed in two colors: red and green. The red printing tells the story of the boy in our world; the green the tale of Fantastica in peril. The effect on the eyes is strange; the colors are opposites on the wheel and it’s a shock to go from one to the other just as much as it’s a surprise to read a book printed in anything other than black.

  The use of color in Ende’s masterpiece serves to separate one world from the next, but it does much more than that. It makes the eye behave differently while reading, receiving a shock after every paragraph break. It’s difficult to pull off the trick of being a book about an unusual book, but this printing is what puts the work over the edge, even in translation from the original German. Bicolor printing suggests the reader has stumbled across something special, something rare.

  For the reader who saw this trick as a child, another example might not have presented itself for more than a decade. If we grow up, if we are ready to confront the true horror of real estate, the next book to put this principle to use might have been Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000).

  Danielewski’s inimitable post-modern horror novel uses a lot of formal abnormalities to set itself apart from the typical reading experience. Pieces of the book are printed as marginalia, or in pull-boxes like those used for important quotes or blurbs in a textbook. Selections are printed backward, readable only in the mirror. On some pages, white space overwhelms a single word or a short phrase, forcing the reader to confront the emptiness, or else flip pages rapidly to advance. All of this is used to tell the story of a house that defies the laws of physical existence, and the madness of the people who are obsessed with it.

  Most shocking of all, Danielewski (and his unsung team of layout artists and publishers) uses color printing to single out a specific word throughout the work: house. ‘House’ is always printed in blue, a subtly unsettling choice that spots on every other page or so, breaking the reader’s pace and reminding us that the house is a thing that does not belong. Symbolically, the rest of the text is mundane and correct: it is black. What is blue becomes aberrant, but in a just-noticeable way; as subtle as a haunted house sitting on a street in a suburb. Rarely but notably, deletions from the footnotes are also printed in red, screaming like an alarm and drawing the eye to them out of order, as demanding as a bleeding cut. House of Leave s is a perennial backlist bestseller because there is nothing like it. Each of these formal elements leaves a powerful stamp of experience on those who read it, remembering the non-Euclidean strangeness of the titular house, but also the ineluctable weirdness of the text itself.

  If weirdness in genre text lends itself to color printing, S. by Doug Dorst is the ultimate example for both. S. is a book about a book: a tale told in conversational marginalia written in the edges of Ship of Theseus by fictional author V.M. Straka. Dorst wrote the intradiegetic novel about a man kidnapped by the monster crew of a cursed ship and taken on a bizarre journey first so that it could stand alone, then set about writing the marginal notes between Jennifer and Eric, two people trying to unravel the mystery of this book and Straka himself. Taken from an idea presented by labyrinthine narrative lover J.J. Abrams, what follows is complex and self-referential. The book also contains ephemera such as photos and postcards, maps and notes and napkins that fall from between the pages.

  In the use of colors, S. is flamboyant. Each layer of annotation gives us the voice of the speaker as well as a timeline of when it was written. Eric, the first reader, makes his furtive notes in light pencil, afraid of a librarian’s eye. Jen follows boldly in bright blue, then Eric answers her back in black ballpoint. Jen returns in a layer of orange gel pen, and Eric answers in green after traveling to Europe and South America in search of more clues. Jen’s choices mark her throughout as younger, less studious, the person who provides opportunity for exposition because she knows less. Her pen choices reflect this: less serious, less academic, more childlike, more girlish. Eric’s choices are consistent with him as a grad student: more respectful of the text itself, less aberrant to the typical printing values, more rigorous in his role as educator. In the final pass, the pair (spoiler) turns to purple and red: the perfect colors to express the change in their relationship. In these margins, the two have fallen in love and are thus equally aberrant and equally ridiculous.

  S. provides an engrossing and bizarre reading experience because of these deliberate choices. Dorst knows that there is nothing inherently gendered or value-laden about these color choices, but he trusts the reader’s connotative values to adhere close enough to intuitively inform the tenor and timbre of this conversation. He projects innocence and curiosity through Jen’s voice, but also through her pen choice. He projects Eric’s timidity arcing into certainty going from pencil to pen, and then his studious focus into love and limerence as his notes branch out into more vivid colors. It is as clear to the reader as the symbolism of a white dress, a black hearse, or a red lip-print upon a mirror.

  There are examples of this principle applied not to the print itself, but to page edging. In 2017, fans of the narrative horror podcast “Welcome to Night Vale” were delighted to discover that the first edition hardback of the Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor novel in the Night Vale universe titled It Devours! has its page edges printed in purple, giving the book an unusual look in profile and matching the Night Vale merchandise branding in exact shade. The cover of It Devours! is a shocking shade of yellow, sitting in direct opposition on the color wheel to that purple and providing a high-contrast and otherworldly look to the novel. Similarly, Tamsyn Muir’s 2019 Gideon the Ninth delivers a solidly gothic aesthetic not only with its skeleton war cover art by Tommy Arnold, but also with black-edged pages as if the book had been handled by someone covered in midnight-harvested graveyard dirt.

  Both color printing and page edging have a particular resonance in American culture with the experience of the Bible as a product of design and marketing. Many editions of the Bible printed in English feature the words of Jesus Christ in red, a tool which sets them apart from the rest of the text for ease of location when reading, or to emphasize them above all others. Here again, the symbolic use of color is important; red is not only used to attract the eye but to evoke the feeling of danger and to call our imaginations to blood. Jesus is introduced through a quartering of his royal blood, confirmed in the manner of virgin blood, and ultimately sacrificed in the bloody climax wherein his blood becomes magic to engender eternal life. These Bibles grew out of a more practical use of color in printing. Before the Gutenberg press allowed for the mass production of the Bible, early religious manuscripts were often scribed in two passes: first in black and second in red in a process called “rubrication”. Rubrication functions as a navigational aid by marking the beginning of a section in the same way that publishers now use page breaks, chapter breaks, or paragraph breaks. Drop capitals were used as a convention not to bestow importance on the text, but to separate closely-printed sections into comestible pieces for the reader. American genre writers may have taken this concept from the Bibles of their childhoods and the traditions that inspired those books, even if only subconsciously.

  In a similar vein, many mass-produced Bibles feature gilded page edges. Gold traditionally symbolizes value and has been used in religious iconography for centuries to install haloes and beams of light to indicate divinity. Its use in the Bible carries that divinity from the flesh to the word without words; hear ye the word of the gold. Novels with pretense to divinity often satirize this expectation by printing an edition with gilded pages (see Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal for its biblical drag). Others have used it
to acknowledge the zealotry of the book’s own fandom: Chuck Palahniuk’s classic of face-pounding masculine toxicity Fight Club boasts one collector’s edition stamped on the spine in 22kt gold with leather binding, gilded page edges, and a ribbon bookmark reminiscent of an ecumenical text. When these colorful tricks appear in genre fiction, they come without an intention of cross-dressing, but the association is clear.

  Fiction speaks to the psyche, arousing empathy for people who never lived and courage for battles that don’t have to be fought. This effect is profound, whether it’s printed in black ink or e-ink or whispered into the ear by a talented narrator. Color speaks to us on another level, subtly engaging the subconscious to make assumptions and associations, to taste the words in a synesthetic trance even as they deliver us the dialogue, the setting, the tone. It’s not accessible to every reader, and it’s not right for every book. But in a line of books that are all black and white, there are readers who will always choose to go on the adventure that is red all over.

  © 2020 Meg Elison

  Meg Elison is a science fiction author and feminist essayist. Her series, The Road to Nowhere, won the 2014 Philip K. Dick award. She was a James A. Tiptree Award Honoree in 2018. In 2020, she is publishing her first collection, called Big Girl with PM Press and her first young adult novel, Find Layla with Skyscape. Meg has been published in McSweeney’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fangoria, Uncanny, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and many other places. Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of UC Berkeley. Find her online, where she writes like she’s running out of time.

  Traveling Without Moving

  by Michi Trota

  Paul: “What’s in the box?”

  Rev. Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam: “Pain.”

  The summer after my tatay died, I went into his study and pulled every single science fiction novel from the shelves to send to Reading, Pennsylvania, where I was moving to start high school and live with my mother’s oldest brother and his family. Both of my parents had been avid readers, but Tatay was the one with a personal book collection, which spilled out of haphazard stacks on bookshelves amidst an obstacle course of unfiled paper piles and model battleship boxes littering the floor. Unlike my mother’s sunlit sewing room, with its bins of neatly folded fabric and shelves of supplies and everything grouped by size and color, none of Tatay’s books were organized by title or author or even genre, so I grabbed anything and everything with familiar names on spines and covers with spaceships, galaxies, and silhouettes of humans in spacesuits. These were the books he talked about at dinner parties, whose plots he told me as bedtime stories. While our relationship had become strained in the two and a half years between my mother’s death and his, SF/F remained one of the few ways we could communicate without stumbling into another cycle of resentment, disappointment, and recriminations. I never felt closer to him than when we watched and talked about Star Trek, Robotech, or Doctor Who, so if he’d loved these books, I thought I could, too.

  At the very least I wasn’t about to let them end up in the garage sale my stepmother was unaware I’d overheard her talking about.

  I found several of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels, which I would bounce off multiple times before finally giving up in my 30s. There were hardcover copies of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010 and 2061, but oddly 2001 was nowhere to be found. I’m sure there were a few Year’s Best collections from the 1980s and dozens of other books that would be considered part of the SF/F canon. I packed them all. But the ones that mattered most were all six (at the time) of Frank Herbert’s Dune series.

  While I didn’t actually read Dune until after Tatay died, we still had a shared love of the story since I’d watched David Lynch’s 1984 film adaptation of Dune with him for the first time when I was seven. Unlike Star Wars, the world of Dune was dark, morally ambiguous, violent, and utterly, unapologetically bizarre. I was fascinated. I dug up earthworms to bring to the playground sandbox to play “Arrakis” and pretended I had a weirding module. I still think of Patrick Stewart more as Gurney Halleck than Captain Picard. And because Tatay recorded Dune on VHS when it was broadcast as a two-night movie “event” on network TV, we would watch it together repeatedly. He taught me to recite the Litany Against Fear from memory by the time I was in second grade. I still have some of my old notebooks from junior high and high school where I’d jotted down the Litany on the blank untreated backs, nestled among lyrics by Metallica and Megadeth and Joy Division and snippets of poems by Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg.

  I remember reciting the Litany under my breath when the plane carrying me away from Chicago took off while I cried silently.

  Bene Gesserit proverb: “Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.”

  Tatay didn’t talk much about his childhood in the Zamboanga Peninsula of Mindanao in the southern Philippines. I know that my lolo was a prominent local doctor and that my lola was deeply involved with the Catholic church, and they had adopted my tatay from a Catholic-run orphanage when he was a toddler. I have vague memories of meeting two Filipinas visiting from Canada who were his sisters, but that singular visit is the only time Tatay ever mentioned his birth family. The only paternal aunt I really knew was the daughter Lola and Lolo had a few years after adopting my Tatay.

  Despite growing up close to the coast, Tatay hated the ocean only slightly more than he hated the jungle. Every story he ever told about being out in nature ended with him stepping on pissed off eels or getting blisters from fire coral or falling off the back of a runaway horse into a patch of what he swore was “razorblade grass.” The last time I visited the Philippines, we went on a beach resort vacation with his family, and he refused to go any farther out than knee deep in the water. After treating my arm when I accidentally swam into a swarm of jellyfish and got stung from fingertips to shoulder, he admonished that the best way to avoid jellyfish stings was to stay out of the ocean, and that’s why he’d never been stung. I got back in the water the next day, bandages and jellyfish swarms notwithstanding, while he sipped martinis at the beach house.

  Tatay preferred to keep his adventures mostly imaginary, reading anything he could get his hands on. He often lamented the loss of his collection of Prince Valiant and Superman strips, which were left behind when his family had to pack up in the middle of the night and escape into the mountain jungles. Tatay was 14 when the Japanese armed forces invaded the islands at the end of 1941 and declared Manila an occupied city in January 1942. The Japanese military initially overlooked Tatay’s family since Lolo was a well-respected doctor whose skills they thought they could make use of. Lolo, however, was apparently treating Filipino resistance fighters on the sly, and eventually someone let that knowledge slip. Tatay and the whole family fled their home to avoid retaliation. By the time the family returned from the jungle after Japan’s surrender to the US in 1945, Tatay was no longer a child. His comics collection had burned to ashes, along with everything else in the house.

  At some point, Lolo moved the family to Manila, and Tatay immigrated to the US to attend medical school after graduating from the University of the Philippines. He eventually became a naturalized citizen, got married, divorced, married, widowed, and married again. From the time I was born until Tatay’s death, we only visited the Philippines three times. The last time was when I was 13, shortly before Lola died, so that Tatay could introduce her to my future stepmom. He died a year later, and I haven’t been back since.

  Maud’dib: “There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man–with human flesh.”

  I started reading Dune as soon as it arrived with the rest of my things at my relatives’ house. Here’s the thing about reading Dune if you’ve already seen the 1984 movie: familiarity with the movie doesn’t actually mean you’re prepared for the full depth of the book. It’s like thinking once you’ve waded in a pond, you know what it’s like to swim in the ocean, and finding yourself utterly unprepared. Everything that I’d loved abo
ut the movie was magnified and deepened in the book: the complex relationship between economics, religion, politics, and propaganda, the scheming between Houses and the Bene Gesserit, the fascinating weirdness of Herbert’s vision, and in particular, Paul’s uncertainty and his struggle to carry the weight of his father’s legacy and mistakes.

  I didn’t realize until reading the book that Paul was in fact nearly the same age as me when my Tatay died, nearly the same age as Tatay when he fled his familiar home to find refuge in an environment he’d learned to see as dangerous and unpredictable. Like Paul, the end of Tatay’s boyhood was marked by war and exile, and an accelerated path to adulthood. I wondered how much of himself my tatay had seen in Paul, what he thought about losing his childhood to another country’s dreams of empire, if he had allowed his fear to pass over and through him to see a path forward with a clear eye.