Strange Horizons, September 2002
Page 14
Necrotic Bibliophilia (full-length CD)
Appetite for Deconstruction (forthcoming)
For more on Blöödhag, including their song list, ordering information for their albums, and concert schedules, visit their official Web site.
* * * *
Victoria Garcia and John Aegard live in Portland, OR in a state of holy matrimony. This is their first collaboration.
Victoria made her fiction debut this year in the acclaimed anthology Polyphony: Stories Beyond Genre. John's stories have been published by The Third Alternative, On Spec, and Best of the Rest 3, and will shortly appear in 3SF. His reviews have appeared on Slashdot and also here on Strange Horizons. To see more about us, check out www.johnzo.com.
[Back to Table of Contents]
All Those Bleached Bones ...
By Andy Miller
9/2/02
all those bleached bones
beside a road carved out of desert night
curled back in waves
propulsion
* * * *
having flung d'artagnan clear
to luna's tepid stone
all earthly aspirations
our astronaut ignites
* * * *
discarding only those most hollow shells
in his affective wake.
Copyright © 2002 Andy Miller
* * * *
Andy Miller is currently working out in the mountains of central Virginia. He's a writer, artist, and composer.
[Back to Table of Contents]
The Children of the Moon
By Heather Shaw
9/9/02
I
You can see them as they move among you
their opalescent aura shimmers like summer pavement heat,
mother-of-pearl, on the tips of their frizzed-out split ends.
They like to think they're normal.
The light behind their eyes is a look they share with the acid-
eaters, you know, an enlightened other-worldliness.
Their power comes from this world, though,
the dark side lighted only by the cycles of the moon ...
Draw it down, draw it down.
The world of night is their kingdom—
they rule as the rulers sleep.
In woody nature the feather light edges soften
the twinkle of lights glimpsed in the trees.
They leap from one long shadow to the next,
Zig-zagging in catty-corners.
Everything in the negative, the feminine dark shadows
moon-shortened.
II
In the suburbs, you can hear the triumphant “Hah!”
as the pretty girl dances from her tiny tab. Night vision
comes from dropping back, pupils wide giving dark eyes
innocent overtones. Lovely Sacred Daughter of Diane.
She is sister to children of the moon, city lights too
close, ancient roots faded. Frantic finger-
honey finds solace in the night, each star a distant diamond
winkling clearly reflected in the dark space of her eyes.
The mad chant sweats beneath her delicate summer rain gown.
Using the game to create the essential essence,
she is led in where glowing bulbs force the male upon her.
Mist is left on the threshold; inside where the air won't move
her delicate power pounds beneath the want of others.
In her tiny sleep, the music of her distant siblings dying
doesn't waken her.
Copyright © 2002 Heather Shaw
* * * *
Heather Shaw has been a poetry editor, a performance poet at Lollapalooza, and was recently nominated for a Rhysling. When not immersed in verse, she writes fiction, non-fiction and makes up silly songs with her boyfriend, writer Tim Pratt. For more, see her Web site.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Mr Hyde's Daughter
By Mary Alexandra Agner
9/16/02
watches her fingers shrink
back to human size, her knuckle hair disappear,
leaving only the smooth, ivory skin
so coveted by gentlewomen.
Too tired to forget the rapist
she has stalked to empty alley in her madness,
she feels the flaking, dry skin
of his throat between her sensitive palms.
She feels his death kick cut her shins, again.
Again, in the morning light of the rented room
a cloudy liquid fizzes, full,
in the glass beaker on the desk.
The incessant sound mocks her, marks her
as a murderer. One draught down her throat
last dusk would have kept her human all night.
She picks up the paper coated with London
sewers and smeared with blood, to read
the elegant stanza she awkwardly printed
just hours ago, with her too-large hands,
while sitting on a corpse. She tastes the words.
The consonants bite and are swept away
by fluid vowels. They come so close to closing
the poem, five other stanzas written
in the last five feverish days.
One more stanza, one more life.
Copyright © 2002 Mary Alexandra Agner
* * * *
Mary Alexandra Agner holds a Masters in Earth and Planetary Science from MIT and is currently enrolled in the MFA program at Emerson College. She has spent most of her life observing the universe and writing about it. She makes her home outside Boston.
[Back to Table of Contents]
The Garden of Time
By Lorraine Schein
9/23/02
(after a painting by the Surrealist artist Eileen Agar)
Here, an atomic clock blooms chronons.
Nuclear pistils strike and quiver at the hour.
The bright petals of minutes enfold me.
A Cesium fountain spouts an arc of atoms
resonating with distant stars
that spread like weeds.
A sundial, growing profusely in the shade,
cross-pollinates a digital clock's electric blue numbers.
A nanosecond flowers into eternity.
Green horological splicings
oscillate hybrid pendulums.
Greenwich Mean Time droops on the vine.
Dinosaur seedlings sprout into
paleontologic remnants of the future.
A fossil-plant turns its bony head from the moon
to watch us extinct.
Copyright © 2002 Lorraine Schein
* * * *
Lorraine Schein is a New York poet and writer whose work has appeared recently in Gargoyle, Space and Time, Full Unit Hookup, and 2001: A SF Poetry Anthology.
Her work will be included in the anthologies Angel Body and Other Magic for the Soul (Wordcraft of Oregon) and Mondo Alice. Her novelette, “The Raw Brunettes,” is also available from Wordcraft.
[Back to Table of Contents]
A Bestiary
By Tim Pratt
10/7/02
Plate Spinning
You know Amala? Big man, lives over
by the bay, hunched over with a pole
balanced on his back (I think it's a cedar
pole, but who knows?). Kids around here
(when there were kids around here)
used to climb on patient old Amala,
and shimmy up his pole, up through
the clouds and the top of the sky,
and they say the great wheel of the Earth
is up there, balanced on the end of the pole,
spinning, like Amala is a plate-spinner
on Ed Sullivan or in vaudeville, though
old Amala's been around since long before
those shows began. (Oh, you've got that
college-boy look on your face, you think
this sounds like that idiot Atlas, but
Amala's not as stupid, and he doesn't hate
his job, mostly; and you think “How
can he stand on the Earth, and at the same
time support the Earth?” There's a reason
the ancients never asked such dumb
questions. This isn't about physics or
geography, it's about the fact
that the world must rest on someone's
shoulders.) Amala always picked
one of those kids, whichever climbed
the highest with the least fear, to be
his servant for the year. It wasn't such
a bad job—I did it in my time. You
just rub duck oil into his muscles on
Midsummer's day, and soothe his
aches, and then you can go on your
way. The stories say that someday
all the ducks will be gone, over-hunted
to extinction (though I think it's more
likely they'll die from over-development
of the wetlands), and the servant
will search far and wide for duck oil
and find none, and Amala will groan
and cramp, and his muscles will shudder,
and he'll slip, just one slip in the whole
of forever, and the spinning Earth
will fall from the pole, crash into
itself, and shatter like a dropped plate.
And so, my son, I suggest you do
as I say, gather a few ducks from the lake,
take them back East with you somewhere
safe, and see that they breed; and when
a young man with callused hands
and a desperate look on his face comes
to you from far away, give him a bottle
of duck oil, free of charge, and teach
your sons to do the same. For all our sakes.
Copyright © 2002 Tim Pratt
* * * *
Tim Pratt is a poet and fiction writer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Clarion in 1999, and now works as an editorial assistant for Locus, and also edits Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. His work has appeared in Asimov's, Strange Horizons, The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, and other nice places. His previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive. For more about Tim, visit his Web site.
Author's Note: In my ongoing Bestiary, I focus on mythic creatures, often beings of truly cosmic stature, and attempt to look at them from an unusual perspective while still remaining true to the myths from which they originate. “Plate Spinning” is about Amala, a being from the mythology of the Tsimshian people, native to the Northwest coast of the United States.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Those Were the Days My Friend, We Thought They'd Never End: The Golden Age by John C. Wright
Reviewed by David Soyka
9/2/02
In Greek mythology, the Golden Age was an era in which humanity lived like gods, nearly immortal, without wars (because there were no nations or governments or weapons) and without need or appetite of any kind. It didn't last. In taking the name of “The Golden Age” as the title for his first novel, John C. Wright seems to suggest that wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
Of course, the Golden Age also refers to the pulp science fiction tradition of the 1930s and 1940s in which fabled editors Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell Jr. captained a bold band of storytellers who crafted tales of intergalactic adventure nevertheless grounded in scientific speculations: writings that reflected the zeitgeist of an emerging industrial nation and world superpower. Just to be sure you get that, on the dustcover above the title appears this description: “An Epic of SF Adventure."
Considering that I recently had to explain to a 12 year old that the wooden dialogue of Star Wars was a jokey riff on the famous (well, maybe not so famous considering that she had never head of it) Flash Gordon episodic films, I suppose that there are readers who won't get it, any more than they'll get the myriad allusions to classical philosophy, SF and mainstream literature, and contemporary culture. I suspect that a few went over my gray-haired head as well.
No matter. Even if you don't recognize all the references, The Golden Age is still a marvelous romp. It may deepen your pleasure to catch the more obvious allusions (when the main character wishes to reach “home,” he clicks his heels three times) or deepen your understanding to pick up on more the abstruse ones (the novel's actual subtitle, “A Romance of the Far Future” alludes to Olaf Stapledon's SF classic Last and First Men: A Romance of the Near and Far Future), but you don't need to go reference-hunting. This story, like all the best stories, can work without explanation.
In some ways, SF storytellers had it easier in the Golden Age. To evoke the future, all they had to do was strap a blaster onto their characters’ hips, mumble something or other about the atomic drive that got them to other worlds, paint the aliens green and maybe add a set of arms or eyes or webbed feet. In projecting a far-future humanity, Wright has to be a bit more inventive, since our present contains so much that only a short while ago was considered futuristic. Of course, predicting the future is not the point. But in paying homage to the space opera tradition, Wright avoids the cliches (except where he's making fun of them) while placing the convention in a whole new context. At the same time, quite in the tradition of Stapledon, Wright poses the big questions as to what makes human existence meaningful, though in a way that is perhaps more entertaining.
As in the Golden Age of Greece, humanity has achieved virtual immortality, with the emphasis on the “virtual” as the means of life extension, as opposed to the grace of the gods. While still possessing flesh and blood bodies, people for the most part “exist” on a higher plane of computer-generated simulacra. As Wright describes it:
Here was a future where all men were recorded as brain-information in a diamond logic crystal occupying the core of the earth; there was one where all humanity existed in the threads of a plantlike array of sails and panels forming a Dyson Sphere around the sun; a third promised, larger than worlds, housings for trillions of minds and superminds, existing in the absolute cold of trans-Neptunian space—cold was required for any truly precise subatomic engineering—but with rails of elevators of unthinkably dense material running across hundreds of AU, across the whole width of the solar system, and down into the mantle of the sun, both to mine the hydrogen ash for building matter, and tap the vast energy of Sol, should ever matter or energy in any amount be needed by the immobile deep-space mainframes housing the minds of mankind.
Got that?
The Golden Age has been compared to Neuromancer in that its breathtaking, if sometimes abstruse, language comprises original world building of the first rank. While it seems unlikely that Wright's work will match Gibson's by inspiring a subgenre of its own, that is no criticism of Wright's creative prowess. Gibson's success was enhanced by the emergence of the Internet and computing capabilities that seemed to turn his vision of the digital age into realizable reality. His notions of “envisioning data” and avatars are not that far removed from what has actually evolved. Wright's future is not analogous to the Internet. (I doubt any of us will be inhabiting virtual Dyson Spheres around the sun anytime soon.) Instead, it represents what cybergenetics could conceivably lead to—a world so fabricated, so literally and “spiritually” unreal that it is arguably no longer human. For whatever adventures Case had in Gibsonian cyberspace, the characters were all too human, particularly their negative sides.
While the postulated virtual worlds of The Golden Age are extraordinarily inventive, the plot, or at least what we have of it so far, is a bit more conventional, loosely based on the Greek myth of Phaethon, the offspring of the sun god Helios. Accused of being illegitimate, Phaethon drove a drove a sun chariot through the heavens to prove his parentage, creating the Milky Way galaxy. Unfortunately, he's still on a learner's p
ermit and gets too close to the Earth. To prevent the planet's complete incineration by the scorching flames of the chariot, Zeus kills Phaeton with a thunderbolt (though you would think a little water might have done the trick as well).
Similarly, Wright's namesake wants to explore interstellar space, a venture which the ruling Peers (among them his ostensible father, named Helion) fear will upset the stability of a highly complacent civilization that, for all its technological achievement, is content to remain within the physical boundaries of the solar system. Instead of killing Wright's version of Phaethon, the Peers erase his memory so he will not only abandon the project, but will have no recollection of ever trying. Moreover, Phaethon consents to this amnesiac state. The book is about how—and, more importantly, why—Phaeton chooses to discover what has happened to his memory and to retrieve it, despite the warnings of dire consequences not only to himself, but his family.
Wright casts his Phaeton in the classic Heinlein mold, with a significant additive of the Ayn Rand individualist. He is a man of action, the consequences be damned, even if it threatens the greater good. For there can be no “greater good” if it stymies the individual initiative, creativity and risk taking that make humanity a force even in an immense universe and that inspire others to strive further towards ever new achievements.
The plot is not all individualistic heroics, however. The author is a retired attorney, so it is not surprising that some legalistic leavening moves the plot along. It is also, in parts, very funny.
What it is not, however, is finished. The ending, though it nicely reflects the philosophical proposition of the premise, is just a cliffhanger for a concluding volume (entitled Phoenix Exultant, due out in January of 2003). Until the real ending is revealed, I'll have to reserve judgment on Wright's talents as a storyteller. And the wait seems unnecessary. At 336 pages, The Golden Age is hardly weighty in comparison to the 800-page doorstoppers that burden book sellers’ shelves. The complete tale could have been bound in one volume. But, no, readers not only have to wait, they have to shell out another $25 to find out how the story works out. The same sort of strategy was employed by Tony Daniel's publisher, whose Metaplanetary is another highly inventive and distinctive space opera that ends as the preface for a concluding volume. Maybe it's an industry trend. No, come to think about it, it's really just the continuation of a longstanding tradition set by the aforementioned Flash Gordon serials: keep them hanging on the edge of their seats at the end so they'll come back next week and pay for more of the same.