IGMS Issue 39
Page 15
I've written a fair bit about all this in books such as Reading by Starlight, The Architecture of Babel, Theory and Its Discontents, Transrealist Fiction (which looks at sf through the lens of Rudy Rucker's approach, transrealism: writing about immediate perception in a fantastic way, and writing about the fantastic, the invented, the inverted, the dementedly shocking, via well-known literary techniques developed to capture and notate the world of immediate perception), Unleashing the Strange, and so on. I really should leave it to others to tell me whether my own fiction has taken some of its shape and coloration from this explicit theorizing . . .
SCHWEITZER: Can too much theorizing give a kind of "centipede's paradox" paralysis to the storytelling? Is it possible to become overly preoccupied with the operational details and forget about why people want to read our books in the first place? So what do we mean by "a story" anyway?
BRODERICK: A story is a machine for leading you astray, using words that trigger dreams while you are awake. Is a writer who's aware of the nature of her or his theories worse than one who ignores what's going on within the shaping of the dream, its seductions, its invitations, its rote or compelling manipulations? I'm pretty sure Heinlein and Ayn Rand had a strong sense of their own theoretical base as they wrote tales of individualist virtue, honor, creativity, audacity. Certainly Kim Stanley Robinson and Chip Delany know very well how their theories of the political and sexual unconscious and hegemonic power drive their stories and build the worlds that unmask these forces -- by acting them out, enthrallingly, without preaching. Well, without only preaching.
SCHWEITZER: Tell me something about your most recent work. You've mentioned doing some short fiction lately. What are you working on now?
BRODERICK: Aside from the science-based anthologies I mentioned, I've been editing gatherings of interesting essays from two Aussie literary sf fanzines, Australian SF Review and Science Fiction, hoping to bring this cornucopia (in Chained to the Alien, Warriors of the Tao, Xeno Fiction, the naughtily titled Skiffy and Mimesis, others yet to be published) to American readers who care to think about their sf as well as wolfing it down.
I wrote an sf thriller with my wife, Barbara Lamar, Post Mortal Syndrome, which appeared first as an online serial that got more than 100,000 hits, later as a trade paperback from Borgo/Wildside, who have released a lot of my recent work. I've done collaborations with my pal Rory Barnes, most recently The Hunger of Time and the Sheckleyan Human's Burden, with another forthcoming. I curated John Boston's funny and insightful and not at all academic three volume study of the John Carnell magazines: Strange Highways (on Science Fantasy, my favorite magazine when I was still at school), and two volumes (Building New Worlds, and New Worlds: Before the New Wave) on Carnell's major landmark magazine, plus his more entry-level Science Fiction Adventures.
Short fiction? Yes indeed. I started with short pieces at 17 or 18, and have never really stopped writing them, although infrequently. Lately I've been bringing those stories and novellas together in collections that mix the best of my early work with recent fiction, books such as Uncle Bones, The Qualia Engine, and Adrift in the Noösphere. What got me back into the short(ish) form was the temptation to inhabit the voices of great sf writers, as a tribute, of course, but also as a terrific game. One of these stories, "Under the Moons of Venus," appeared in five Year's Best gatherings. It plays off some of the obsessions of J.G. Ballard; also the Abyss. It's not a slavish pastiche, nor are the others, but it is one way of working out my indebtedness to the sf megatext, that vast encyclopedia and lexicon that lets us tell new stories which resonate with all the others we know and love (or hate).
One of the imaginary worlds I loved as a kid is probably already unknown to most younger readers, although it seems to have been the basis for X-Men: Wilmar Shiras's "In Hiding," "Opening Doors," and the rest. These dealt in the late 1940s with a future then 30 years hence, with a few superintelligent children tracked down and brought together. They are mutants, we're told, their parents irradiated to a swift death in a nuclear accident but not before conceiving these Children of the Atom. We now know that you can't get the same advantageous mutation in several children by smashing the gonads of their parents with random radioactive sleet. So when I wondered what the children of those superkids would be like, late teenagers in the 21st century, I had to work out a complex backstory that explained why the "atomic accident" cover-up had been circulated to hide early genomic experiments. That story's "The Qualia Engine," and I'm not sure if anyone remarked the connection to Shiras's tales.
Cordwainer Smith, that marvelous dreamer of future Lords and Ladies of the Instrumentality and their persecuted Underpeople, was a major figure when I was in my late teens, and after. So I wrote "The Ruined Queen of Harvest World" as a hommage to his work without in any deep sense trying to copy his inimitable stylistics. "Flowers of Asphodel" was my Zelazny techno-mythic story, "Dead Air" my attempt at a cruelly funny Phil Dick yarn, and another well-received piece, "This Wind Blowing, and This Tide," was inspired by a Rudyard Kipling poem. "The Unheimlich Maneuver," mentioned above, puts Freud into the middle of a horror classic from the 19th century.
The most ambitious of these impersonations is "Quicken," a 30,000 word continuation of Bob Silverberg's major 1974 novella "Born with the Dead." It appears together with its progenitor, with Silverberg's blessing, as a novel under both our names: Beyond the Doors of Death. Like "The Qualia Engine," it's an attempt to fill out the sketchy background of a masterwork, and carry its logic forward in surprising ways. It still astonishes me to be able to write those words: here I am, this aged kid from the boonies, self-taught as a writer (as most of us are, except all those dozens of Aussies who are now doing PhDs in Creative Writing), collaborating with one of the Grand Masters I read with relish when I was 15. That can make your head swim. It goes well beyond those theories you distrust, Darrell, and into epiphany.
SCHWEITZER: Thanks, Damien.
Letter From The Editor
Issue 39 - May 2014
by Edmund R. Schubert
Editor, Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show
* * *
Welcome to Issue 39 of IGMS. It's a busy, busy time, with a boatload of exciting new developments to tell you about.
First, our cover story this issue is "Foreign Bodies" by Melinda Brasher. A colony on an alien world is functioning as best it can with limited resources when an infection causes hallucinations that could prove as deadly as the infection itself -- and the doctor who was supposed to deal with it died on board the ship before it ever reached the planet in the first place, leaving one resourceful young lady scurrying to figure this mess out before time runs out.
In Kate O'Connor's "Salt and Sand," the beaches of the afterlife are the unusual setting for a confrontation between an entity whose sole purpose is to consume the dead (so as to return their memories to the world), and the unexpected stowaway on one of the ships that deliver them, a woman not ready to let go yet, much less see her daughter's body eaten before her very eyes.
Jacob Boyd's "Memory of Magic" is a mystical Americana story of young girl who's lost her father in a mining accident in an alt-history old-West. She finds a baby wizard and, while waiting for said wizard baby to grow up and restore her father, must contend with a truly unique group of characters and tribulations.
"Rapture Nation," penned by Jennifer Noelle Welch, is a very brief but somber look into a community of people convinced that the end times are coming . . . any moment now.
Proudly co-sponsoring the 2nd Hydra Contest (spotlighting the best of Brazilian spec fic), IGMS is thrilled to present this year's winner, "The Other Side of the River" by Camila Fernandes. This fablesque fantasy follows a young man and the life-changing moments leading up to his arranged marriage. To showcase the Hydra Contest, we've also made this story our audio piece for the issue, read in spectacular fashion by Princess Alethea Kontis.
Also in this issue, Darrel Schweitzer's InterGalactic Interview with
multiple-award-winning author Damien Broderick. With this issue we're launching something brand new: Vintage Fiction, featuring a reprinted story from the interviewed author, selected by the author him or herself. In this issue we bring you Damien Broderick's "A Passage in Earth," along with a brief introductory essay about why he selected this particular story.
Additionally, you'll find the third installment of our other new feature, "At The Picture Show: Extended Cut," an in-depth article by film critic, Chris Bellamy.
Not enough goodies yet? Then here's the list of this year's winners of our own IGMS Reader's Choice Award, celebrating reader's favorite works from 2013. Winning authors and artists receive fame, glory, and a bit of bonus cash:
Stories:
1st place - "The Cartographer of Dreamland" by Robert Howe
2nd place - "Explaining Cthulhu to Grandma" by Alex Shvartsman
3rd place (tie) - "Notes on a Page" by Barbara A. Barnett
3rd place (tie) "The Temple's Posthole" by M.K. Hutchins
Interior Art:
1st place - "Note on a Page" by Nick Greenwood
2nd place - "At the Old Folk's Home at the End of the World" by M. Wayne Miller
3rd place - "Last Resort" by R.L. Carter
Cover Art: "What the Sea Refuses" by M. Wayne Miller
Also, everyone who voted during the poll was entered into a drawing for a free copy of Earth Awakens, the third book in the First Formic Wars series by OSC and Aaron Johnston. It will be autographed by both authors. Congratulations to the lucky winner, Terry Maulhardt.
And last but light years away from least, one more tidbit to share with you -- and for you to share with your friends: Starting this month, IGMS will make the most recently published previous issue free on a rotating schedule. This means that from now on, during the same time that the current issue is live, the entire issue that was published right before it will be free for anyone and everyone to read. For as long as Issue 39 is the latest one out, Issue 38 will be available for free. Then when Issue 40 is published, Issue 39 will be free, and so on. You still need a subscription to read the latest issue, and you still need a subscription to have full access to our entire archive of issues and all the stories contained therein, but we believe in the authors and stories we publish and we want a wider audience to have a chance to sample them. So tell your mother, tell your best friend, tell that co-worker of yours who's a closet SF-fanatic but doesn't want the boss to know; tell everybody: free fiction from IGMS!
Enjoy.
Edmund R. Schubert
Editor, Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show
For more from Orson Scott Card's
InterGalactic Medicine Show visit:
http://www.InterGalacticMedicineShow.com
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