By now it must be evident that not only “Byndley” and “Oak Hill” but most of the stories in Wonders of the Invisible World are borderland tales where characters slip from one realm into yet another—most often from one fantasy world into a more fantastic one. Virtually all the stories center upon physical transformation, shape-shifting, stepping over an invisible line into another world. “Hunter’s Moon” has an apparently contemporary, mundane setting (where hunting rifles and pizza are to be found) but also some forest denizens who may be other than human. The same can be said of “Jack O’Lantern,” except that the woodsy setting is Pre-Raphaelite Victorian. “Undine” is a tall tale about a water sprite who expects to snare a mortal man and leave him to his fate when she tires of him, but she ends up being stuck on land with an environmental activist: the agent of transformation is the one transformed
“The Kelpie,” which portrays yet another conjunction of mundane and fantasy realms, is one of the oddest stories in the collection—partly for how long it takes for the supernatural to raise its horsey head (quite a while, for this is technically a novelette) but also for its late-Victorian community of young artists who appear utterly preoccupied with posing for each other’s historical/mythological canvases. Not just the professional models but practically everyone in the story is eager to throw a little drapery over the shoulder to pose for canvases with titles like Last Soldier Standing Watch on Hadrian’s Wall. The absurdly fact-packed opening sentence catches some of the drollery of the setting and the tone: “Ned met Emma Slade at her brother Adrian’s new lodgings, the night Bram Wilding brought the monkey and it set fire to the veils in which Euphemia Bunce was posing for Adrian’s painting” (39). But I found the story of interest not so much for the intrusion of a fantasy realm upon these less than eminent Victorians as for McKillip’s portrayal of another kind of transformation within the mundane world: the budding feminism within the circle of artists. The heroine of “Jack O’Lantern” yearns for her father to allow her a proper education, but she is living in an earlier, more entrenchedly patriarchal Victorian realm than in “The Kelpie.” Here we are introduced to a collective of women artists and to a heroine who exclaims at one point to her love interest, “If I can’t fight for myself and my art, then what kind of an artist can I be? Only what you will permit me to be” (69). (His lot in life, he begins to realize, is to be “never the hero, always the squire, the spear-bearer” [84].)
Another tale of transformations, though on a more cosmic terrain, is the brief “The Old Woman and the Storm”—perhaps the most unclassifiable story in the collection. It reads like some mythic origins story with touches that hint at Norse or Native American or Biblical analogues (for the last, a protagonist named Arram who thinks about “First Names”) as well as cave painting, prehistoric humans. The story might have been called “How the Rainbow Came to Be,” but within the larger narrative, Arram tells mythic stories to calm the destructive anger of the Old Woman, and there are shifts in levels of reality that align “The Old Woman and the Storm” with “Byndley” in particular. One could imagine the story as an animated short with constant morphing: a wall painting becoming a woman, a sunny day rapidly turning to egg-sized hail, a rock conversing with a butterfly.
On the other hand, the title story—and be warned, here the spoilers begin with anything beyond mere quotation of the (brilliant) first sentence, “I am the angel sent to Cotton Mather” —seems intended to reduce encounters with magical worlds to an accountable single level of mundane, if future, reality. This story, we gradually realize, is rather whimsical science fiction in which a researcher, trying to understand the Puritan imagination (or actually imagination at all in a world where most people let computers construct alternate realms for them), uses time travel to send a colleague back to Mather’s day to impersonate an angel. As the colleague, Nici, explains:
The ring of diamonds in my halo contained controls for light, for holograms like my wings, a map disc, a local-history disc in case I got totally bewildered by events, and a recorder disc that had caught the sudden stammer in Mather’s last word. He had asked for an angel; he got an angel. I wished he would quit staring at my feet [which are bare and the floorboards cold] and throw another log on the fire. (15)
The only fantasy in Nici’s world appears to be in the VR games played by children, though the story does leave open the question as to whether the images conjured up by one such game might be merely devised by the computer within its parameters or truly formed by the child’s—or Nici’s—imagination; but the story, unusually for McKillip, ends with more of a sense of imprisonment than of worlds opening up.
For a conclusion to Wonders of the Invisible World we are offered a reprint of the Guest of Honor speech McKillip gave to the 2004 WisCon. It’s a welcome supplement to the stories, though in its personal history it offers little of the Strange (except perhaps for marrying for the first time at 53), even less of the Frightening (a cesspool backing up into a bathtub, a scary drive through the Rockies), but a good deal of the Domestic (weddings, cesspools) and quite a lot of the Comic. The latter is manifested—as it is in several of the stories—mainly in her teasing indirection in narrative: in answer to the question “What inspires you to write?” she proposes money (leading to an elaborately detailed story of how The Book of Atrix paid for the new cesspool for her Catskills home), “a steady accumulation of detail” (284; her very lengthy commute by car, train and subway from the Catskills to Manhattan to take a music course, providing story patterns for Song for the Basilisk), and a looming deadline (occasioning a yet more digressive story of getting married and moving back to Oregon, which forced her to write Alphabet of Thorn in record time). More directly relevant to the stories, her description of her commute to Julliard and especially the return journey has the same feeling of strangeness as the constant transformations of her fantasy:
out of the enormous, intense hothouse of civilization until the roads became narrow and solitary, mountains hid the river and the city lights, and I reached the strange point in my drive home where I felt that I had somehow traveled so far that I had left the real world, real time behind. I had passed into the realm of Sleepy Hollow, the Otherworld. (285)
It appears that in McKillip’s world, as in her stories, the Strange seeps into the Domestic quite effortlessly.
* * *
Joe Milicia lives in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
Works Cited
November, Sharyn, editor. Firebirds: An Anthology of Original Fantasy and Science Fiction. New York: Firebird/Penguin, 2003.
Datlow, Ellen and Terri Windling, editors. A Wolf at the Door, and Other Retold Fairy Tales. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
When the Blue Shift Comes by Robert Silverberg and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro
Rockville, Maryland: Arc Manor/Phoenix Pick, 2012; $12.99 tpb; 190 pages
reviewed by D. Douglas Fratz
The Stellar Guild Series, edited by Mike Resnick and published by small press Phoenix Pick under its Arc Manor imprint, represents an interesting new concept: each book in the series consists of a novella by a major author along with an associated work by a selected younger author. Earlier books in the series have included a science fiction novella by Kevin J. Anderson with a sequel by Steven Savile, a fantasy novella by Mercedes Lackey with a prequel by Cody Martin, and a fantasy novella by Harry Turtledove with a sequel by daughter Rachel Turtledove. When the Blue Shift Comes by Robert Silverberg and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro is the fourth in the series.
In this case, the volume features a novella-length science fiction piece written by Silverberg in 1987, entitled “The Song of Last Things,” that is completed by Zinos-Amaro in “The Last Mandala Sweeps,” to form a short novel, When the Blue Shift Comes. The two parts are punctuated by a non-fiction piece by Silverberg explaining the history of his unfinished work and the selection of Zinos-Amaro to complete it.
Silverberg’s tale is set in a far–distant future where near-immortal mankind is thinly spread across th
ousands of star systems throughout our galaxy and neighboring galaxies as well. Hanosz Prime, the somewhat bored hereditary ruler of his planet, hears of the possible pending destruction of Old Earth by a mysterious space anomaly that may grow to threaten all of mankind. Upon hearing stories of Old Earth from a traveler who recently visited there, he decides to abdicate his throne and embark on the long journey to seek out the immortal Kaivilda, whom the traveler describes to Prime as both beautiful and welcoming to visitors. Moreover, Prime becomes convinced that he himself might be the key to saving Old Earth and all of mankind. He is welcomed when he arrives by Kaivilda and her father, Sinon Kreidge, in their secluded palace. Prime learns that the aloof immortals of Earth are split in their reactions to their impending doom and receives additional evidence that he may be the key to stopping it. While the viewpoint character for the narrative is almost solely Hanosz Prime, there is also an apparently omniscient narrator with a distinctively different voice who steps up occasionally to comment wryly on the story.
After reading Silverberg’s story, it is easy to see why it has remained unfinished and unpublished all these decades (except for one portion, “Hanosz Prime Goes to Old Earth,” published in 2006 in Asimov’s). Silverberg has introduced more questions than answers in the narrative, and it is difficult to see where the story might be headed. What is the mysterious super-black-hole-like anomaly in space that appears to be growing exponentially and may threaten the entire universe? What could explain the portents that lead Prime to believe that he may be the key to stopping it? And most perplexing of all, who is the mysterious, unidentified narrator who breaks in to provide wry commentary?
As an additional challenge, Silverberg’s story, although written in the 1980s, has an even more antiquated feel, with its vision more characteristic of classic sf of the 1950s and 1960s, the period when he was cutting his teeth as a young author. The story’s vision of ethereal immortal inhabitants in a far-flung extra-galactic society is very characteristic of that optimistic era (based on the assumption that advancing technology will lead to rampant increase in personal wealth and power for all and no need for teeming minions), and the clever narrator feels like an experimental technique right out of the 1960s New Wave. (These futures became far less common after the stunning late-1960s visions of overpopulated dystopias such as John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar and Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room!) Completing this novel for modern readers represented a major challenge for the veteran Silverberg and even more so for a new writer.
I was therefore surprised to find that Alvaro Zinos-Amaro did an excellent job of finding answers to all of these puzzling questions, creating a conclusion to the novel that in retrospect feels not only right but the only way the story could proceed to its logical conclusion. He also matches Silverberg’s quirky narrative technique and style so well that much of the text (especially early on) reads like a pastiche of Silverberg’s piece.
While Zinos-Amaro’s finish is both clever and resourceful, however, I don’t think that what results is a superior science fiction novel. When the Blue Shift Comes as a whole feels both dated and contrived. It is hard to get fully engaged in the narrative and forget that this is an interesting experiment to see whether or not the novel could be completed with all its anomalies explained.
In the end, When the Blue Shift Comes is like reading the results of a writers’ workshop exercise: very interesting to those of us immersed in the field of science fiction writing, but not really a satisfactory work of sf.
* * *
D. Douglas Fratz lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Three Imaginaria of Forgiveness and Transformation
Ron Drummond
In Honor of Samuel R. Delany on the Completion of His Seventieth Circumambulation of the Sun
4.1.12
Should I include Chip’s recipe for lentil stew, which I’ve now made three times in as many weeks and which is utterly incredible? Or share the amazing imaginarium he’s invented for forgiving people and oneself and for seeing all that happens in the best light? Should I talk about how I would not be alive today if not for him? What more appropriate gift can I give than to share some of the thoughts he has recently shared with me in the context of one of the greatest friendships I could ever hope to have in this life?
7.6.11
If you don’t get at least half your day’s work done by ten in the morning, you won’t get the other half done during the rest of the day.
—Sara Ophelia Fitzgerald Boyd (Chip’s grandmother)
8.1.11
Chip told me this story in conversation; the following reconstruction of what he said is much compressed and does not do justice to the richness of the spoken original.
When I first met Bernard Kay, one of my mentors, I was 17, and he was 42. He had just taken a job working on a series of translations, for a boss who was hell on wheels. Her way of criticizing his work was incredibly rude and patronizing and painful to Bernie. What he ended up doing was, every time this happened, he would get up and take a walk around the block, and fantasize in detail that she had given him her criticism in the nicest possible way, and when he was done he firmly decided, in his head and heart, that that in fact was how she had offered him her criticism—in a manner that was friendly and sympathetic and encouraging and minutely helpful, and then he would go back to work and everything was fine. What he found was that by practicing this every time someone was mean or bullying or rude to him, he prevented himself from internalizing their meanness and generally it made for improved relations with most such people. And that’s what I’ve tried to do, myself, ever since, and it’s worked wonderfully well for me too! Really, it makes for genuinely Christian behavior, because you’ve taught yourself how to turn the other cheek in a way that can really work for you!
12.8.11
I was experiencing a dark night of the soul, one that revisits me far too often, and Chip and I had an intense phone conversation about it. Afterwards I wrote a long letter to him, in which among other things I said,
In my overwhelming frustration with where I am in my life right now, I can’t figure out who or what to blame other than myself! So I guess I lay all the things I don’t like about my life and myself at my own doorstep—and I think I do that because I dislike the idea of blaming others, or blaming circumstances, or blaming anything or anyone at all! Yet I’m okay with blaming myself, duh, what’s up with that? Maybe “blame” is the problem—I shouldn’t blame myself either!
A few hours later Chip sent me the following reply:
Dear Ron—
All the answers are in your own response. Yes, stop blaming, period. It isn’t productive. Finding who or what is to blame is like finding origins. There’s never just one origin, one single cause. Finding things to blame is an endless process that distracts you from finding places to intervene—and there is only ever one place to intervene, and that is now. Blame is always a matter of finding something in the past that is responsible that is, by definition, also untouchable.
Anything you want to change, you change it by doing something now. Maybe you can only do tiny little things—but that’s how you start doing larger and more significant things. You want to do more work on Little, Big? Do more work on it now. You need to take a rest? Take one so you can do more work on it, when . . . not back then or in the future, but right at this now, which is not the now we were talking about up two lines above. And so on.
You are an amazing man. You can do whatever you want. Write things down, so you don’t forget. Now is always changing. It’s always new. So you can always do something new with it.
Much love and big hugs—
—Chip
* * *
Ron Drummond lives in Albany. Samuel R. Delany lives in New York City.
An Exchange
Michael Swanwick and Tom Purdom
From: Michael Swanwick
To: Tom Purdom
Date: October 30, 2012
Tom:
They’re on to us! The latest NYRSF has a photo of us, labeled “Michael Swanwick & Tom Purdom make a flower.” How did they find out? How did they get a camera to function when we were employing our powers?
Most importantly, what should we do? I’m thinking of erasing everybody involved with the magazine from human history, just to be safe.
Michael
From: Tom Purdom
To: Michael Swanwick
Date: October 30, 2012
I went to the NYRSF site but I didn’t see any pictures. Have you already acted?
Tom
From: Michael Swanwick
To: Tom Purdom
Date: October 30, 2012
A PDF of the issue is attached. The picture is on page 23.
I am always careful not to kill anybody or to undo any significant portions of history without your explicit permission. I would never challenge your authority, Tom. But this is serious. Given NYRSF’s subscription rate, dozens of people must have seen that picture already.
Michael
From: Tom Purdom
To: Michael Swanwick
Date: October 30, 2012
Another picture in which I look sinister and there’s a younger, even more sinister villain in the foreground.
What evil will this blossom bring upon the world?
Tom
From: Michael Swanwick
To: Tom Purdom
Date: October 30, 2012
NYRSF January 2013 Issue 293 Page 7