Some of the same karmic impulse that must have motivated Heinlein to write Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) seems to have lodged in the breast of John Shirley, because his new novel, The Other End (Cemetery Dance, hardcover, $40.00, 292 pages, ISBN 1-58767-150-6), at times recalls that earlier classic: higher-level consciousness erupts into the fallen human sphere, and radicalizes existence. But at the same time, given Shirley's political bent, there's another explicit motivation for his novel: offering a counterweight to the smarmy success of the Left Behind series. In any case, what we have here is a bang-up apocalypse told from “the other end of the philosophical spectrum,” as Shirley declares in his “Author's Note.” And a fine book it is. Following a large cast of characters—most notably, reporter Jim Swift and his family—Shirley details the three phases of human transcendence and judgment that follow on the heels of the arrival of messengers from the Absolute. Deftly weaving Gnosticism and science together, Shirley dares to make the unimaginable concrete, depicting the ineffable and summoning up genuine visions of the laws of the universe above morality. One character describes his epiphany as “something painful and powerful and gorgeous at once,” and that's an apt description of this novel as well.
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Single-author Collections
Spilt Milk Press shows the world how to produce an attractive chapbook. The Sense of Falling ($5.00, 62 pages, ISBN unavailable), consisting of stories by Ezra Pines, features handsome design; an introduction by an author with a certain level of name recognition (Hal Duncan); some original stories as well as reprints; clear copyright acknowledgements for nerdy bibliographers such as I; attractive interior art by Mark Rich; and an author's Afterword. But of course all this would avail naught if not for the magnificence of the fiction herein. Pines writes like an R.A. Lafferty raised on a diet of the TV show Lost and the prose of André Breton. His “Mr. Brain” sequence of stories is hilarious, while his other pieces are disturbingly surreal, yet emotionally close to the bone. The unstable nature of reality is Pines's theme in all cases, and seldom has a sense of falling felt so right.
Just as impressive as the Pines volume is Show and Tell and Other Stories (Tropism Press, chapbook, $6.00, 56 pages, ISBN unavailable), containing six marvelous tales by Greg van Eekhout (with the author's own illos!), plus his informative notes. Van Eekhout's language is zestily inventive, his story premises splendidly wacky, and his execution flawless. Whether he features Santa Claus as an end-times superhero a la Captain Future ("In the Late December") or posthuman school kids striving for a good grade (the title story), he can be counted on to amaze, entertain, and illuminate the sapient condition.
If you crossed Franz Kafka with Thomas Ligotti and Warren Ellis—well, you'd be one sick puppy. But the result might be Rhys Hughes—at least in his particular authorial incarnation on display in At the Molehills of Madness (Pendragon Press, trade paperback, 7.99, 187 pages, ISBN 0-9538598-8-6). This volume assembles all of Hughes's horror or dark fantasy stories, and a splendidly scabrous and scaly and squamous lot they are. As Hughes explains in his “Pompous Afterword,” this type of fiction is (or should be) a window into the neuroses of the author. Hughes has the courage of his convictions, and the talent to bring it all off. Just check out, for instance, “The Crippled Gollywog's Fox Hunt,” which rakes the British upper classes over surreal coals.
Glen Hirshberg has immense range, sharp chops, an assured voice and vision. What more could you want from a short-story writer? He can do an over-the-top performance like “Safety Clowns,” about drug dealers hidden in ice-cream trucks; or an atmospheric historical saga like “Devil's Smile,” focused on new England maritime mysteries; or a Bradbury-style piece about a brother and sister dealing with the death of their beloved grandfather, as in “The Muldoon.” All these Guises of Glen, and others, are on display in American Morons (Earthling Publications, hardcover, $24.00, 191 pages, ISBN 0-9766339-8-1). You'd practically deserve the book's title if you didn't check it out.
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Anthologies
The four editors who have assembled The James Tiptree Award Anthology 3 (Tachyon, trade paperback, $14.95, 276 pages, ISBN 1-892391-41-4)—Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin, and Jeffrey D. Smith —wisely do not feel constrained by mere calendar years in assembling relevant stories and non-fiction. Thus, while we do indeed get to see the most recent prizewinners, we are also treated to such timeless goodies as Tiptree's own “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” and a 1990 essay by Dorothy Allison on Octavia Butler. The mix of old and new serves well the cause of highlighting gender issues in our field, and how it's been a long hard slog from days of willful ignorance and exclusion about such matters to a relatively enlightened present. Let a thousand bake sales bloom!
It's been much too long since the world has been graced by new fiction from Rachel Pollack, and we have editors Richard Labonté and Lawrence Schimel to thank for the latest such eruption, to be found in the pages of their new anthology, The Future Is Queer (Arsenal Pulp Press, trade paperback, $17.95, 213 pages, ISBN 978-155152-209-8). Pollack's primo story, “The Beatrix Gates,” about an alchemical, transexual future, is the standout in my eyes. But every contributor here has intriguing things to say on the theme of differently gendered, differently sexed worlds. Writers such as Candas Jane Dorsey and L. Timmel Duchamp prove that any future worth living in, whatever its failures or successes, must be open to all persuasions.
Can one generalize usefully about the Polyphony series from Wheatland Press, assembled by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake, now that we've reached Polyphony 6 (trade paper, $18.95, 350 pages, ISBN 0-9755903-4-0)? I think so. First off, it's safe to say that they've lived up to the “many-voiced” promise of their name. This newest installment, like its predecessors, does not impose any ideological or formalistic party lines, but rather accepts all modes of fabulist fiction. You get pure SF, as in Richard Wadholm's “Orange Groves Out to the Horizon,” Lovecraftian pastiche, as in Robert Freeman Wexler's “The Adventures of Philip Schuyler and the Dapper Marionette in the City of the Limbless Octopi,” surreal goodness, as in Ray Vukcevich's “The Library of Pi,” experimental New Wave montage, as in Forrest Aguirre's “Keys I Don't Remember,” and so forth, through another dozen schools. Additionally, while all the authors and editors are plainly serious about the value of their stories, there's no literary pomposity or solemnity here. These writers believe in fiction as ludic enlightenment. And finally, the editors do not run a closed shop. Veterans (Barry Malzberg, Jack Dann, Howard Waldrop, et al) consort happily with newcomers (Anna Tambour, Darin C. Bradley, Hannah Wolf Bowen, and others). Put all these generalizations together, and you've got one enticing salon.
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New Imprint, New Writer, New Thrills
It's always a grand moment when a major new line of SF/F/H books premieres, and our field, rather marvelously, has recently experienced it twice. There's the USA branch of the UK's long-running Orbit line, and we'll be encountering their offerings in later columns. Also originating in the UK, and distributed maximally in the USA, is Solaris, under the very capable hands of editor George Mann.
And one of the first volumes from Solaris consists of a debut novel. Now, that's leading with confidence and brio and forward-thinkingness.
Thief with No Shadow (mass-market paperback, $7.99, 463 pages, ISBN 978-1-84416-469-1) by Emily Gee is, within the tight parameters it sets itself, a highly accomplished work, rewarding on any number of levels. It's a fable of sorts, almost something by the Brothers Grimm. As such, it shares affinities with work by Jane Yolen and Patricia McKillip. What it does not do is to build the typical extended subcreation of a Tolkienesque fantasy (and that's actually kinda refreshing). The world Gee sketches out is just dense enough not to put your foot through its scrim as you speed excitedly down the taut tightrope of plot. A name or two of a king and a kingdom. A sketched-in town. Some exotic sentients to rival humans. A little bit of countryside. A couple of tales-within-the-tale as cultural touch
stones. And a single mundane household that constitutes about 75 percent of what we see. Out of these components, Gee succeeds in fashioning a melodrama (in the best sense of the word) of sacrifice and redemption.
Our four main protagonists are two brother-sister pairings. Melke and Hantje are wraiths, humans possessed of the power to go “unseen” by others. Many wraiths naturally turn their talent for invisibility toward a life of crime. Melke and Hantje have higher moral standards. But, forced to flee to a strange land by political persecution, they reluctantly in their poverty detour to thieving. Their clumsy initial foray—Hantje's idea, really—goes dreadfully wrong when Hantje is captured by salamanders. (There are four supernatural races besides man: salamanders, lamias, gryphons, and psaarons, corresponding to fire, earth, air and water.) To rescue Hantje, Melke must steal a unique magical necklace from Bastian and Liana sal Vere, the scions of a cursed estate. Bastian has the power of conversing with dogs (his own dog Endal is one of the brightest lights in the book), while Liana is a healer.
Now the fates of the magical foursome are inextricably bound together by the thefts. Melke and Hantje end up on the ruined farm of the sal Veres, and the quartet undergo shifting balances and counterbalances of emotions, interspersed with bouts of danger.
Gee's schema for her tale, consciously or not, almost perfectly mirrors John Clute's famous stage-by-stage progress of the Ur-fantasy as “an earned passage from bondage.” As such, Gee's novel possesses a rich share of archetypical power. Although one might question whether the plethora of domestic scenes could have been trimmed a bit to avoid some small repetitiveness.
Her language is sharp and colorful, subtly shifting depending on whether Melke or Bastian hold the reins of POV. Her subplot in the village of Thierry proves to be integral to the main thread. And her depiction of the alien races is nicely otherworldly and erotically spooky, a la Yeats. It should also perhaps be mentioned that Gee inverts the standard damsel-under-threat-of-rape scenario in inventive ways, without being programmatic or tendentious.
Gee's first novel offers lots of pure fairytale resonance, and portends much fine work to come.
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The Sleeper at the Heart of the World
Haruki Murakami resembles no other creator possibly more than he resembles filmmaker David Lynch. Both men delight in the surreal, in bizarre patternings and weird symbols whose meanings linger on the edge of vocalizing, in depicting existential life-or-death quandaries, in walking the edge between innocence and perversity.
But in his newest novel, After Dark (Knopf, hardcover, $22.95, 191 pages, ISBN 978-0-3072-6583-8), I believe Murakami is paying homage to a different filmmaker and to one of that director's more anomalous offerings: namely, Martin Scorsese and his 1985 film After Hours. Aside from the unmistakable similarity of titles, the action is just too kindred to be coincidental. Whereas in Scorsese's film, Griffin Dunne found himself embarked on a screwball nocturnal odyssey across SoHo, New York, in Murakami's book we find our characters swept up in a similar round of events in urban Japan. Perhaps a tad less slapstick and extroverted, and more sober and internalized—but kissing-cousin journeys nonetheless.
Mari, our heroine, is a shy, quiet nineteen-year-old student living with her parents. But this particular evening (the action of the book occupies a mere eight hours, each short chapter cued to a certain interval) she feels the overwhelming urge to escape for a time from a certain set of circumstances at home. So she resolves to spend the night awake, sitting in fast-food joints, reading. Unfortunately, she picks a rather rough neighborhood to frequent. There she meets a friendly, good-hearted musician named Takahashi. Her casual instant involvement with him sweeps her up in a sordid situation at a love hotel named Alphaville. The night will spool out from there, and we will ultimately get the sense that all the events cosmically revolve around Mari's sister, Eri, who has undertaken a vow to sleep indefinitely until her unstated problems are solved.
Eri proves to be rather like a certain Dunsany figure: “The chief of the gods of Pegana is Mana-Yood-Sushai, who created the other gods and then fell asleep; when he wakes, he ‘will make again new gods and other worlds, and will destroy the gods whom he hath made.'” Murakami slips back and forth across planes of existence, in classic butterfly-or-philosopher mode, employing the tactic of a nameless, first-person, bodiless narrator.
As always, Murakami's prose stylings and vocabulary (as ably translated by Jay Rubin) are extremely primal and spare, yet somehow cohering into subtle and colorful and beautiful cadenzas. He's the ultimate global cosmopolitan, in that his characters partake of a world-spanning set of touchstones. And yet there's something undeniably Asian and Japanese about his work—how could there not be?
Murakami specializes in pulling the rug out from under any sense of certainty his characters long for—and out from under the reader as well. As a character named Korogi observes, “The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop out right from under you. And once that happens, you've had it: things'll never be the same. All you can do is go on living alone down there in the darkness.” (Recall that one of Murakami's most famous protagonists spent plenty of time literally immured in a well!) This is the most pessimistic formulation of Murakami's thesis, and Mari rightfully rejects Korogi's words to some degree. Mostly, this sense of unpredictability instead brings a kind of deliciously scary joy to his characters, who might often be stuck in a rut anyhow. If you survive your trials, you'll emerge somehow richer, even ennobled.
The French pioneered this kind of “anti-novel” half a century ago. (Murakami makes the tie explicit with “Alphaville” and a Godard reference.) Brian Aldiss did an SF one with Report on Probability A (1968). But Murakami imbues his books with less of the clinical and more of the humanistic. They're tender meditations on the impossibility and utter necessity of being human.
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The Artist and the Writer Were Lovers
The history of genre literature in the twentieth century needs to be documented even more extensively than it has been (and the semi-neglected visual aspect of the field even more so than the bibliographic side). The people who lived it, who contributed to it, are all mortal, and slipping away fast—as the obituaries in Locus and Ansible remind us every month. Much fascinating material about the larger-than-life characters who built the field of fantastical literature we all love is on the point of vanishing.
With this goal in mind, author Luis Ortiz has succeeded admirably in chronicling one of the more historically important and still vital careers—actually, joint careers—in the field, that of Ed and Carol Emshwiller. The main focus in Emshwiller: Infinity X Two (Nonstop Press, hardcover, $39.95, 173 pages, ISBN 978-1-933065-08-3) is on polymath Ed, his paintings and films, but Carol's life as a writer is treated in honorable and comprehensive fashion as well. The loving synergy that was their marriage assumes almost the role of a third character in the biography.
Primarily, fans today know and revere “Emsh” for his magazine and book illustrations, and this aspect of his career receives top billing and the largest amount of space. Printed on nice rich stock, the cleverly arrayed reproductions of Emsh's marvelous paintings leap off the page, conveying just what a unique visionary he was, and how his work helped codify the look and feel of modern SF. Ortiz's capsule descriptions of the paintings capture their most intimate craftsmanly and thematic secrets. Moreover, Emsh's non-SF art in the mystery and men's mags outlets gets a good airing as well.
But Ed Emshwiller eventually came to see himself essentially as a creator of films, and Ortiz documents Emsh's progress in this arena with lots of verve and insight. This part will be a revelation to most readers. And, as I mentioned above, Carol's arc of literary self-discovery, and her co-creative support for her husband, emerge in tandem with the main arguments.
Ortiz superbly evokes the vanished era of the fifties and sixties, arguably Emsh's heyday. He places Emsh's work into context with other leading artists of th
e time such as Richard Powers. And he conveys the struggles of a pair of creators who never had much regard for social conventions or riches, without either romanticizing or downplaying their chosen lifestyle.
This book is a model of the vibrant narrative scholarship the field needs.
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Cellulose in His Veins
An early example of such scholarship is Ron Goulart's classic survey, Cheap Thrills, originally published in 1972, when studies of pulp literature constituted but a fraction of what we have today. The book was a landmark, due to Goulart's extensive primary reading among the many genres of pulp magazines, his affectionate tone, and his first-hand research conducted with the survivors of that milieu. He paved the way for later scholars.
Does his book hold up today? We have the chance to find out, thanks to Hermes Press, which has just reissued a splendid oversized hardcover reprint ($49.99, 208 pages, ISBN 1-932563-75-X).
Visually, the book still delivers plenty of thrills. The covers that Goulart chose to reproduce are real winners, and not often duplicated in later volumes. (Oh, sure, there's some overlap, but you can never look at some of these specimens often enough.) The stock and reproduction is top-notch too. My one beef? No artist credits! It's an affront to these painters, and would have been quite easy to remedy.
The text, at this late date, is not going to deliver any major surprises. Although Goulart does manage to provide a tidbit or two I had not encountered before. I never knew, for instance, that Doc Savage's early appearance was based on Clark Gable's. But additionally, and more vitally, we get Goulart's analysis of societal trends, marketplace conditions, literary fads and fashions, and a host of other pertinent matters. These insights remain exemplary.
Asimov's SF, February 2008 Page 21