* * * *
Robert Randolph Medcalf, Jr., was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1949, where he grew up and spent most of his early adulthood. He is a 52 year old, divorced, father of three, and grandfather of eight. His first published story, “Catapilla,” appeared in 1976, and his first published poem, “A.L.U.,” appeared in 1978. His previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive. For more about him, visit his Web site.
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Long Voyage
By David C. Kopaska-Merkel
7/8/02
"I would have liked you to have been deep-frozen too."—Hawkwind, “Spirit of the Age"
This world is all we could have wished for:
The native life is edible, sub-sentient, and
Just dangerous enough to keep us on our toes.
The continents, dispersed within a sea that teems with life,
Provide variety in weather, topography, and climate.
Cyclonic storms invest the coastal areas in due season,
But we know how to predict their courses,
How to build against their savage surges where we must.
I just wish that you were here.
You and I had something special back home.
The sex was great, but that was secondary,
To your gentle insight. You should have been a teacher.
I visit your tube each watch that I'm off work
And there are many such; the years like leaves behind us swirling
In our plasma trail. Have I aged well, you think?
I like to believe you do under your frost.
We built this city out of magic, sand, and dust,
A testament to those who brought us here,
The lonely souls who tended us while we coldly slept,
Who, dying, brought us here, through the generations.
I like to think that you remarried, raised some handsome sons
Or daughters who, clear-eyed, grasped the tiller and carried on.
My step is slower now, but not my mind or memories—
I still visit every watch. Soon my tale will end,
Adventures that await you I will never see.
I could have found another, but no man on this ship could
Stand the shadow of your sleeping face. Not for me the
Heady procreation of our next-gen crew; those handsome
Sons and daughters who will carry on.
The years have grown and so have I, but I'm alone here
In the gentle breeze. I stare seaward, but I see your
Face in every wave.
I wonder: Is this madness or a dream?
For now I seem to hear your voice, to scent you
In the gardens rife with native and transplanted blooms,
Burgeoning in sweet harmony in this distant spring.
But no, this colony of thousands, humming all around me
Just beyond my sight, could be no sluggish fantasy of
Cryogenic sleep.
They tell me that you're fine, your vital signs,
Still steady at the norm, will carry you
Beyond the years I knew.
These nurses treat me as a final, fragile
Link with worlds we left behind.
But they don't understand: that link lies
Sleeping under glass, and maybe dreaming of the past.
Copyright © 2002 David C. Kopaska-Merkel
* * * *
Writing articles about ancient reefs by day and sick, twisted poetry by night, David Kopaska-Merkel has been called a workaholic. In reality, he is so lazy that clearing his calendar for sloth is a full-time occupation. David lives with a house full of artists and pets. His previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive. For more about him, visit his Web site.
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To Atlantis
By S. R. Compton
7/15/02
Great city, fabled isle, were you at the far end
Of the world, across the starry ocean,
As some aver? Or Krete's sister,
Now only a dead volcano's crater?
Atlantis! Home of philosopher-kings,
Bull-leapers, golden fruit,
The port of a thousand ships!
Scholars came to you; poets sang of you!
Atlantis! Emerald towers sunk
A hundred fathoms beneath the waves,
You were the world's first civilization,
And suffered every civilization's fate:
By man or nature destroyed—
Only the faintest traces whereof
In the sands of memory remain.
But, Atlantis—
Your crushed heart's wound
Still burns!
Copyright © 2002 S. R. Compton
* * * *
S. R. Compton is an occasional poet. In the last century, he had poems in Star*Line, Velocities, and Alba. His previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive. He works as a senior copy editor at PC World Magazine in San Francisco.
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poet waiting for the season of despair
By John Sweet
7/22/02
rain
just after midnight
and the sound of
geese moving south
my own quiet breathing
in a dark room
the fact of
20,000 innocent people
brutally murdered
cannot stop the slow
approach of winter
* * * *
there is always
something stronger
than this luminous
shell of faith
* * * *
the poet avoiding confessions
By John Sweet
awake and mostly blind
at two in the morning
in a house where
nothing fits quite right
cold
ashamed of my
twenty-two years spent
feeding a pointless addiction
but unable to quit
unwilling maybe or
maybe afraid
nothing is ever gained
by putting
the truth on paper
Copyright © 2002 John Sweet
* * * *
John Sweet, 33, lives in upstate New York with his wife and son. He has been writing for 20 years, and publishing in the small press for 14. For more about him, visit his Web site.
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Of Explorers and Button Eyes: Neil Gaiman's Coraline
Reviewed by Tim Pratt
7/1/02
The canon of my childhood favorites was set, not surprisingly, in my childhood, and includes Lewis Carroll's Alice books, Le Guin's Earthsea Trilogy, and too many others to list. And yet, recently, a new book made its way onto that list, and managed to inspire the same sense of adventure and wonder; to transport me, in all the good ways, back to childhood. That book is Coraline (which rhymes with “horror-wine,” if you have Gaiman's British accent), the new YA by that increasingly impressive author-of-all-trades, Neil Gaiman. The phrase “instant classic” is an annoying oxymoron, but I'm tempted to use it for Gaiman's book anyway—I think it's one that children and grown-ups will be reading for a long time. The US edition features fabulous illustrations by Dave McKean; I had no idea the master of photo-collage could draw so well. When I have children of my own, I'll be waiting impatiently for them to be old enough to enjoy hearing me read Coraline to them aloud.
But before I get to the book in more detail, I'd like to say something about the author, and why Coraline is his crowning accomplishment. Neil Gaiman is the consummate storyteller currently working in the various fields of speculative fiction. In a world where niche marketing is increasingly prevalent, where authors sometimes have to resort to pseudonyms in order to even publish work in a different sub
-genre from the one their fans are accustomed to, Gaiman defies categorization, and uses whatever approach seems appropriate for the story he wants to tell. During the course of his career, he has tried his hand at a variety of storytelling media—the comics that started his career (most notably Sandman, but also The Books of Magic and Violent Cases); illustrated narratives like Stardust and The Dream Hunters; powerful short stories like “Chivalry,” “Troll Bridge,” “Harlequin Valentine,” and “Keepsakes & Treasures: A Love Story"; poetry like “The White Road,” “Eaten: Scenes from a Moving Picture,” and “Vampire Sestina"; the BBC mini-series Neverwhere and the novelization of the same name; his first true novel, the Hugo-nominated American Gods (which won a Stoker award, beating out odds-on favorite Black House by Stephen King & Peter Straub); and now a children's book, Coraline. Opinions differ regarding the relative quality of these works, of course, but I find all of them worthy of attention. In the breadth of his efforts and the depth of his accomplishment, Gaiman is slowly proving himself to be the storytelling virtuoso of our age, and Coraline may be his single most successful work to date.
Coraline is immensely important to Neil Gaiman. In his online journal, Gaiman talks about how much Coraline means to him, making it clear that the work is very close to his heart.
It's not difficult to see why. Sandman is the work that cemented Gaiman's fame, but its effect is a cumulative one—over the course of several years, Gaiman created an intricate, vast story composed of smaller stories. Coraline's effect is far more compressed—the book can easily be read from beginning to end in a sitting—and all the more powerful for that. It's being marketed as a children's book, yes, but it's full of pleasures for adults, too.
So what's it about? Like most great children's books, it's about a smart, perceptive, quirky child dealing with deeply serious problems. The child in question is Coraline, who as the story begins has just moved into a new apartment with her mother and father. It's obvious that her parents love her, but they're too busy to give her the attention she would like. Her mother does her best to keep Coraline busy by setting her small tasks—like counting all the blue things in the flat—but Coraline is happiest when exploring on her own. (If her character could be summed up in a single word, it would be “explorer"—in the brave-and-intrepid sense, not the eaten-by-cannibals imperialist one.) In the course of her explorations, she finds a mysterious locked door in the drawing room. Her mother has the key, and shows Coraline what's behind the door—nothing but bricks. The door is an artifact from when the apartment house was a single dwelling, before it was split into flats, and there's an uninhabited apartment beyond the bricks.
Coraline explores the grounds and meets the other tenants. There's a “crazy old man” upstairs who tells Coraline that he's training his circus mice to play music, and Coraline finds him vaguely alarming, if only because she can't tell whether he's serious or joking. Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, two aging former actresses, live downstairs with a coterie of Scottie dogs. The ladies are happy to dispense tea, inedible cookies, and advice, and they read Coraline's tea leaves, which indicate that she's in danger. Coraline is the type to find the prospect of danger more interesting than alarming. They give her a stone with a hole in the middle for protection.
Inevitably, Coraline takes the key and returns to the door, and this time when she opens it, there are no bricks, just a dark corridor. Coraline takes this in stride (perhaps because she's recently watched a television program about protective coloration, and understands that things can pretend to be other things). She passes through the door—what explorer wouldn't?—and emerges in a flat that is the mirror image of her own.
There she meets one of the most disturbing creatures I've ever encountered in fiction, a thing that looks much like her mother, except for the too-white hands and the black buttons she has instead of eyes. She tells Coraline that she's her “other mother,” and that Coraline may stay with her forever; the chief advantages of this arrangement seem to be delicious food (Coraline's own parents seldom cook anything to her liking) and a lack of disciplinary constraints. Coraline also meets her “other father,” who has buttons for eyes as well. The other mother leads Coraline into the kitchen, telling her there's just one thing she has to do before they can be a family. She shows Coraline a needle and thread and two buttons, which she wants to sew over Coraline's eyes.
Coraline sensibly refuses this disturbingly surreal request and escapes out the front door, into a garden much like her own. There she meets a black cat, which can travel freely from the real world to this one—but here, in the other mother's world, it can talk. The cat is a marvelous character, as inscrutable and infuriating as Lewis Carroll's Cheshire cat, and even more arch. “We—we could be friends, you know,” Coraline says to the cat, which replies, “We could be rare specimens of an exotic breed of African dancing elephants.” Nevertheless, the cat stays with her, and even provides help, later on.
Coraline explores further, and finds strange analogues to her own world—a theater full of dogs downstairs, where younger versions of Miss Forcible and Miss Spinks perform an endless vaudeville-style variety show, and a distinctly lunatic old man upstairs, who has dozens of red-eyed rats living in his suit. This world doesn't extend much beyond the garden gates, however, and seems altogether an unfinished place.
Unnerved, Coraline returns through the corridor, home—and discovers that her parents are gone. She tries not to worry, making dinner for herself—Coraline is a whiz with the microwave—but her parents don't come back, and later, Coraline sees them trapped behind a mirror, obviously imprisoned by the other mother. Being a sensible child, Coraline calls the police, and explains the whole situation to them. They react as one would expect, suggesting that Coraline have some hot chocolate and get a hug.
At this point, the problem is clear; Coraline will have to go through the door and get her parents back, though the prospect of facing the other mother again terrifies her. (At this point, she tells the cat a story about something her father did once, and in so doing offers the most concise and moving explanation of what it means to be brave that I've ever read.)
Getting back her parents is not an easy task. The other mother proves ever more monstrous, from the visceral (eating black beetles) to the temperamental (she calls the cat “vermin") to the personal (she tells Coraline that her real parents don't love her anymore). Things take a turn for the even-worse when Coraline meets the ghosts of children the other mother has “loved” in the past, and realizes what her own fate will be if she doesn't defeat the creature.
Armed only with her own resourcefulness, the stone with a hole in the center, and the cat's unpredictable assistance, Coraline has to outwit and defeat the other mother, and in so doing rescue not only her parents and herself but the poor trapped ghosts—and protect herself and the rest of the world from the other mother's grasp forever after.
The story is full of twists and nightmare images, dark surprises and moments of stunning beauty, and through it all there is never a misstep, nor a moment when it seems that Gaiman is unsure of what he's doing or what happens next, despite the fact that it took him ten years to write the book, and that he did so piecemeal, averaging about 2,000 words a year. It is a masterly achievement, a delight for children and adults alike—and I strongly encourage reading it aloud to someone you love, young or old or in between. You'll both be the better for it.
(For fun beyond the text, the Coraline Web site is quite entertaining, though it's Flash-intensive, so patience may be required; once it gets started, it's a very rewarding pointing-and-clicking experience.)
* * * *
Tim Pratt is a poet, fiction writer, and reviewer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He 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, Realms of Fantasy, The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, and other nice places. Tim's previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive
. Visit his Web site for much more.
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Crazy Corporate Creepy Crawlies: Mark McLaughlin's Your Handy Office Guide to Corporate Monsters
Reviewed by Michael Arnzen
7/8/02
Dilbert meets Edward Gorey.
That's Mark McLaughlin's Your Handy Office Guide to Corporate Monsters: a curious little chapbook just twelve poems long released from Richard Geyer, Publisher in Spring 2002. It's hilariously successful. And it's small enough to fit in your back pocket as you walk from cubicle to cubicle, diagnosing the office drones.
McLaughlin—who has been a leading voice in surrealist humor in the small press for the past ten years—is as well known for his witty charm and performative fiction readings as he is for being the editor of The Urbanite magazine. In the UK fantasy scene and among diehard US horror fans, he's known mostly for his short fiction, which has a tendency to combine Lovecraftian imagery with hilarious (and often perverse) comedy (for example, in a story posted on Horrorfind.com called “When We Was Flab,” McLaughlin unleashed a Cthulhu version of Lennon and McCartney on the internet that earned him several Bram Stoker Award nominations). In Corporate Monsters, you get a great example of his voice and a generous sampling of his clever wit in poetic form. And it's only two bucks.
Corporate Monsters is a book written in the tradition of the “grotesque"—a catalogue of character studies that accurately captures the way a specific setting influences its occupants. But Corporate Monsters is also much more than that. It relies on an ingenious premise: that the people who populate any given corporation are really freaks of neurotic monstrosity who have not only sold out, but who are also out to get you. As the front and back cover illustrations suggest, these creatures staff (and infest) an imaginary corporation named “Hell Co."—and clearly, Mark McLaughlin knows what it's like to be enslaved—and mutated—by big business ideology.
Strange Horizons, July 2002 Page 14