International Speculative Fiction #4

by Various Authors

  At first I refused. Not because I thought I was not a writer for hire, but for a simpler reason—I knew I wouldn’t be able to write anything that wasn’t already fully shaped in my subconscious. But about two weeks later I called the minister to accept their offer. I didn’t go into detail. How could I explain to a politician that it was actually my subconscious mind that had decided to accept the challenge?

  Writing The Five Wonders of the Danube in a mere 164 days nearly killed me. Quite literally. Under the terrible tension of a very tight deadline, the necessity of coordinating its translation into four languages, as well as my numerous professional and other obligations, my blood pressure soared dangerously high. It took me a long month and a half, in late December 2010 and January 2011, to get it back under control. Had it killed me at that dramatic time, I could think of only two consolations. First, it wouldn’t be entirely in vain because I was aware I had written a novel I had no reason not to be proud of. Second, such an ending would be very seemly for a writer. Indeed, what more can an author hope for but to die for his art?

  Fortunately, I survived the ordeal. My rational self now warns me that I should learn a lesson from what I went through. Writing a new book could easily be counterproductive. I can’t hope to create good books forever. No one can. A poor book, however, would cast a shadow over my entire opus, and it could well be the next one. Also, I have to be very careful about my writing circumstances. I am not getting any younger. Deadlines or similar technical restrictions could be rather hazardous to my health. No benefit, however lucrative, is sufficient compensation for ruined health, let alone for the worst outcome.

  Unfortunately, I have another, dark, irrational self that shares the same space from which my fiction originates. It very rarely, if ever, listens to the voice of reason. If it decided to accept a new challenge, to awaken me one morning with the initial sentence of, or an image from, a new literary work, I would have no alternative but to obediently accept its gift. For better or worse.

  August 2011

  About This Interview

  This interview was conducted by email between March and August of 2011. Both participants are grateful to Tamar Yellin for her generous help in bringing it to its final form.

  The interview was first published at www.ou.edu/wlt/11_2011/zoran-interview.html.

  About Michael A. Morrison

  Michael A. Morrison is David Ross Boyd Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Oklahoma. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, he has written over one hundred research papers on theoretical atomic and molecular physics, several textbooks on physics, and innumerable book reviews and essays about the literature of the fantastic. He edited and contributed to Trajectories of the Fantastic (1998) and (with Tony Magistrale) A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Gothic Fiction (1997). Recent and forthcoming books include The Joy of Quantum Physics (2012), Low-energy Charged Particles in Atomic and Molecular Gases (with Rob Robson and Ron White; 2013), and Effective Scientific Writing: Recipes and Strategies for Students of Physics and Other Sciences (2013).

  About Alice Copple-Tošić

  Alice Copple-Tošić is a professional literary translator from French, Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian into English. She has translated nearly one hundred books, including seventeen by Zoran Živković.

  Reviews by Sean Wright

  “One of the best things about folklore and fairy tales is that the best fantasy is what you find right around the corner, in this world. That’s where the old stuff came from.”

  —Attributed to Terri Windling

  It is the quality that Windling alludes to in the quote above that really sits at the core of my appreciation of the writers and works in this issue’s column. That combining of the familiar and the magical, to give us something that we can relate to but that will also enchant us.

  Some of the works are a retelling of fairy tales, some use folklore or tradition as a springboard, and others maintain this atmosphere despite the absence of fairies or glass slippers.

  It is with a work of fairy tale retelling that I will begin. Rabia Gale is a Pakistani born author now living with her family in the United States. She grew up in the bustling city of Karachi, and her reading canon was one many Commonwealth readers would be familiar with: Enid Blyton and Rosemary Sutcliff, to name but two.

  Gale is largely a self-published writer. My discovery of her writing grew out of that organic web of connections that forms through writer and reviewer networks. It was her friendship and interaction with Australian Aurealis Award-nominated Jo Anderton that led me to her writing and to discovering a gem in the rough. The two have since gone on to pen a collaborative work for the soon-to-be-released One Small Step anthology from Australian small press FableCroft.

  I am still wary of self published works offered for review, because there are fewer filters for the writer to go through to get to me. So I derive great pleasure from discovering works and authors that are good, if not great, from this section of the writing community.

  Gale’s published work stretches back a decade, but it was the release of her self-published collections of short stories that snared me. Shattered: Broken Fairy Tales is a retelling of Snow White, Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella. These stories are so well known that the audience is looking beyond the plot to find excitement, in either language and style or the twisting or inverting of tropes. Gale does two things that as a lover of reworked fairy tales excite me: she gives us a new angle and makes the conundrum, the moral, relevant to modern readers.

  In The Most Beautiful Woman in the World (Snow White), Gale has the Mirror as the centerpiece, the central character. Like a good traditional folk tale there is wisdom to be gained, a philosophical conundrum to examine. This story strikes at the heart of the perception of beauty and how destructive and unrealistic misguided perceptions can be. It highlights the cost of chasing beauty that is only skin deep.

  Beauty, Unraveling is a twist on Beauty and the Beast with a suggestion that happily-ever-afters are not always inevitable. I detect Gale raising a cautionary note about our ability to deceive ourselves if our will is strong enough. She also highlights our tendency to project our wants and hopes onto others and the disaster that can bring.

  Lily in Winter, the final piece, asks a “what if” about the tale Cinderella. What if someone else fit the shoe? A love gained by deception will destroy itself, seems to be the strongest wisdom imparted by this piece.

  I sense in Gale someone who is comfortable writing across the speculative fiction genre. Leaving aside her fairytale retelling, she gives the reader a cybernetic Rapunzel in her post-apocalyptic short Wired and then treads carefully into supernatural territory with a short story double in Unseen. Her skill and dexterity has her work being favourably compared to Catherynne M. Valente by editor Tehani Wessely.

  Where I have seen Gale’s work and ability blossom is in her novella Rainbird. In a relatively short word count she delivers a world that has aspects of steampunk without slipping into cliché or trope, a fusion of magic and technology—a not quite Dickensian England engineered onto the decaying skeleton of a giant, not quite dead, dragon. In my imagining it is reminiscent of the atmosphere in the screen adaptation of Jeanne Duprau’s City of Ember. It cries out for a larger treatment, a further exploration.

  Rainbird is, at its heart, however, a tale of acceptance, of struggling to find a place. Rainbird, our main character, is caught between worlds, between races, between cultural and mores. Gale delivers a strong female lead, and nail-biting action and suspense, without resorting to excessive violence. The villains, male and female, are intelligent adversaries. On the strength of Gale’s skill displayed in Rainbird I bought her latest dark fantasy novella, Mourning Cloak, the minute it was published.

  I interviewed her recently and queried her on the decision to go the self-publishing route. Her answer was interesting and illustrative for writers who may be considering a similar path. Gale had
been successful in getting her work published in paying markets, but increasingly she was finding that her work was getting knocked back, not because of quality but because it didn’t fit the market.

  There, I think, lies the issue: like some better exponents of the craft, Gale has the skill and facility to make genre conform to the stories she wants to tell. In essence, making genre elements work for her and not the other way around. She has decided what she needs to write and the path she needs to tread to do it.

  Gale’s plan is long term; she home schools her children and her plan is to devote what time she can to producing quality work. As her children age, she wants to take writing from being self-sustaining to a profitable business. It’s a calculated plan, not a get-rich-quick scheme, and as such her turnaround time on work is not that much different than if she were traditionally published. There’s a solid and professional process of employing beta readers and trusting in their judgments, of line editing, of employing the best people she can find to give her work the best presentation to the reading public. Her recent covers, employing the artist Ravven, round out a solid, professional product.

  Gale’s also determined to explore the freedom that being your own publisher brings by experimenting. Currently she is serializing her first full-length novel, Quartz, on her website.

  Eliza Victoria’s A Bottle of Storm Clouds makes me yearn for closer writing relationships between the Australian and Filipino speculative fiction communities (considering our relative geographical closeness). Here is a writer that many Australian fans of the weird, of the dark and edgy modernization of folklore, would love.

  This collection brings together short stories published over the past five years, a number winning awards and a significant number being regularly shortlisted.

  Similar to Gale, Victoria has the ability to turn genre to her own ends. The work has a local focus, but is accessible, the prose poetic, not purple. The majority of the collection has the naïve quality of folktales, a lack of artifice. Victoria lets the stories tell themselves, making the act of telling stories seem effortless—a sign of good craft, you will agree. The stories that are more structurally complex, that diverge from this pattern, are also very well done.

  My favorite, Sugar Pi, won third prize in the 11th Amelia Lapeña-Bonifacio Literary Awards in 2005. A beautiful tale of love and maths. A tale that I will not spoil because it is wonderfully constructed and revealed. A tale that should be read as naïvely as possible. It’s also one of the lightest stories in terms of tone.

  Victoria has a delicious darkness to some of her other stories that would enthrall fans of Margo Lanagan or Kaaron Warren. Once In A Small Town rounds out the collection and could almost qualify as flash fiction, being just shy of two pages. It delivers, however, an uncompromising emotional punch and leaves the reader questioning what we love our about those dearest to us—their memory or their reality.

  The Just World of Helena Jimenez imparts an imagery so vivid I can still see and hear the Wardens as they deal out justice. The sound of ball and chain moving through the air and impacting flesh and skull. It’s a dark tale of justice, fantasy spliced with the very real occurrence of racial hatred and violence. We are treated to the Gothic imaginings of a victim of crime, whom the system has failed. It begs the question, I think, as to whether justice is the best form of treatment.

  Out of all the dark fiction, though, I probably enjoyed Monsters the most. We are presented with a doting father unable to leave his daughter alone, caring to the point of being suffocating. We come to learn that the daughter has survived some terrible incident, something that requires them to live away from family and friends, safe in the obscurity of the city. The story tugs strongly on themes of family and on one’s true nature and whether you can escape it. It also cleverly realizes ancient folklore in a modern context.

  The Storyteller’s Curse and Reunion deal with religion or belief, and being non-religious I find neither story patronizing or discomforting. Stories with a biblical allusions, or theological questions, can be very enjoyable when done well and Victoria does so here. The Storyteller’s Curse is possibly the most structurally complex story in the collection and she uses the temporal shifting of scenes to great effect, building anticipation, weaving a story within a story, with skill.

  A Bottle of Storm Clouds is a collection I will try and find time to return to. Reading for review places certain time pressure on the reviewer and does not always allow a story to get under your skin. With A Bottle of Storm Clouds, Eliza Victoria is almost always leaving us something to think about, asking a question of the reader. It deserves to be experienced in a relaxed manner.

  The strength, the attraction, of these two writers is in their focus on elements of character that are broadly relatable. Their characters are, at their core, like us, they express our desires and hopes. Whether it is maintaining the skeleton of an ancient dragon-turned-skyscraper or imagining sinister revenge. Both take the mundane and weave magic and wonder through it.

  Note: I wish to offer a formal apology to Viki Chua, whose name I misspelled in last issue’s column.

  Shattered: Broken Fairy Tales

  Rabia Gale

  Self-published e-book - December 2012

  Rainbird

  Rabia Gale

  Self-published e-book - October 2012

  A Bottle of Storm Clouds: Stories

  Eliza Victoria

  Visprint Inc., ISBN 978-9-710545-15-5, paperback (201pp), July 2012

  Note: an e-book version with wider distribution will be released shortly.

  Reviews by Jorge Candeias

  A Casa de um Homem, which could be translated as “A Man’s House”, is a science fiction short story by Portuguese author Luís Filipe Silva set in a future that combines deep political dystopia with equally deep technological sophistication, in which people’s homes are managed by somewhat temperamental AIs and are no longer limited to the location where they were built, having instead their own means of locomotion. The concept of mobile home amplified to the size of mansions—somewhere between a common trailer and Blish’s cities in flight.

  The protagonist is a man with connections and a past that allow him to gadget his house up even further than is usual for the time (with gadgets proper and with software), while giving him pretty powerful and determined enemies as well. And then the house gets stolen, putting him on the track of the house and whoever it was that managed to do something he or she shouldn’t be able to do. That search is what drives the story—the search and the reason why the protagonist is so keen in undertaking it.

  What I liked the most about it, though, is that this setting might have been used to produce one more of those boring shoot-em-up type of stories, with film-flat characters and lots of unlikely plot twists. And explosions, of course. Plenty of them. But it wasn’t. Instead, Silva wrote a subtle story with deep emotional undertones, which are very, very subtly hinted at throughout the text and revealed in full only at the end... but only if the reader is able to decode the hints. It’s a very well done piece of work, probably the best he has produced during the last decade.

  In Kaishaku, a novelette by the Cuban writer Yoss, we are introduced to a future Earth, devastated by an alien species that pops up suddenly and mysteriously in the Solar System. The same devastation happens wherever humans had established a foothold in other Solar System bodies and their orbits, with a single exception: a space station, orbiting Earth, is the only place the aliens didn’t thoroughly destroy. It, alone, gathers the last representatives of our species. Therefore, that becomes the point of origin for the protagonist of this story: a young woman who leaves, alone, to investigate how and why the genocide happened.

  This is a story that includes a few too many infodumps, and I see that as a problem. It’s also a profoundly ideological story, one of those stories that strive (too much?) to show the reader how inhuman humans really are. There’s more than a bit of implicit Christianity here; the aliens function as some kind
of extraterrestrial Knights of the Apocalypse that descend upon Earth to punish the sinful, which, in this case, is the whole species—albeit sparing a few survivors, maybe to let them start over, or perhaps to teach them the error of their ways in the hope that they will henceforth try to avoid repeating the mistakes and crimes of the past.

  I don’t have a problem with that, not per se at least. The only literature that isn’t ideological is the one that has no ideas at all. All the rest is. Even those stories that try their very best to stay clear of politics are political to the core—usually in a conformist and conservative kind of way. So that isn’t the problem.

  I do have a problem with stories in which the message gets in the way of the story itself, though—when one can no longer believe in the fictional reality with which one is presented because of the philosophical or ideological questions the author wants to tackle... or, which is worse, when he feels the need to explain those questions. In short, when the stories lack subtlety.

  And this is where I believe this story fails. It could be a good story if it were longer, allowing for more space so that all the information that gets dumped is more diluted and much less “in your face” than it is. It does have some qualities: it is pretty well written, showing Yoss to be a talented stylist. But overall, I’m afraid this is not one of his best efforts.

  If you speak Spanish, you can read the story at axxon.com.ar/rev/142/c-142Cuento2.htm.

  —Jorge Candeias

  About George Munteanu

  As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been surrounded by art and I always wanted to draw. I have to thank my mother for that, for always drawing cars for me as a kid whenever I wanted. Naturally, I went to an art school early on, with a real passion for sculpture, and I continued studying sculpture throughout my college years at the George Enescu University of Arts in Iasi, Romania.