Asimov's SF, January 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  First off, we get an Introduction that's nearly sixty pages long, and brand new. “Emblems of Talent” is a hard-nosed but sympathetic survey of, among other things, the current publishing world, the nature of talent, academia, the essence of story, and the ways in which writers (beginning and otherwise) can maximize their native skills. Delany places supreme importance on Begeisterung, that indefinable passion or enthusiasm for the creative act without which all else is mere window dressing. It's the lens through which talent is focused, and through which Delany assesses the various techniques he's accumulated or encountered throughout his career. He certainly exhibits this very quality in his own prose, and it's hard to argue against its centrality in the writerly life.

  Delany's essays proceed to march brilliantly and with formal precision up and down the territory staked out in his introduction. (There's also a new thirty-plus-page Appendix that parallels and supplements the Introduction.) This much one expects. But why the presence of letters and interviews? Well, first off, Delany's letters and interviews are not the ones you or I might hastily produce. They are crafted just as carefully as his essays, and shine laser-like lights on the same topics. It's amazing how much work he puts into these. For instance, the interview with Lance Olsen that focuses on experimental fiction functions almost as a survey course in that area, chronicling a particular history (not the definitive history, which, as Delany points out, cannot exist) of non-normative texts. Anyone looking for a reader's guide to such books would have a decade's worth of study laid out for them here.

  Certainly one of the most intriguing aspects of this book is the autobiographical angle. As with most of Delany's work, his personal life leaks out through the living pores of the page. He can honestly give us only the writer's life and lessons as he himself has experienced them—literally embodied them. “Samuel Delany” or a simulacrum thereof is the covert protagonist of this book, and his exemplary character and career carry his observations. (Guess what the first book to make the young Delany shed a tear was: Heinlein's Farmer in the Sky [1950]! To find out why, you'll have to read his interview with the journal American Literary History.) Delany is both humble yet proud, caring yet feisty. He's paid his dues and is not shy about asserting that bittersweet fact. He honors fledgling writers and his peers by assuming that they are as serious as he is about what they hope to achieve. This attitude can result in his sometimes appearing strict and harsh, but it's the “cruel to be kind” techniques of a zen master.

  Delany maintains that a writer is meant to formulate new and better questions—for herself, for her audience—and not overconfident, dogmatic answers. Nonetheless, readers will find many answers here to the mysteries of getting words down on a page.

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  Families Are Murder

  Anyone who's enjoyed the recent short fiction collections of Holly Phillips or Sonya Taaffe should definitely pick up Sherry Decker's Hook House and Other Horrors (Silver Lake Publishing, trade paperback, $12.95, 165 pages, ISBN 1-933511-09-5), a volume that matches the aforementioned in quality and vigorousness and vision.

  This collection holds eleven stories. Let's have a look at them.

  “Hook House” conveys the cursed history of a family whose members have indulged in a generational series of murders shaped and forced by the ghostly aura surrounding their deadly domicile. A young girl, a serial murderer, and an ancient Indian spirit haunt the pages of “Hicklebickle Rock.” “The Clan” finds a feuding vampire and a witch turning their suburban neighborhood into a vicious battleground. A second youthful female protagonist has the ability to apprehend a variety of supernatural beings in “Heat Waves."

  Within the body of a remorseless convict lurks a multitudinous evil, as we learn in “Chazzabryom.” The murder of a woman by her greedy niece goes all wrong for the perp in “Shivering, We Dance.” A young girl named Magdalena oddly insists that Death is not final in “Gifts from the North Wind.” “Twisted Wishes, Twilight Dreams” features an incubus who offers one fateful boon in return for sex.

  “A City in Italy” focuses on a woman named Venice—and her alternate identity. A reclusive elderly woman, the titular “Jessica Fishbone,” learns a horrible truth about herself thanks to the discovery of her mother's journal. And finally, a witch exacts a fitting vengeance for the death of her sister in “Tarissa."

  As you can tell from these brief descriptions, Decker's work favors the Gothic. She walks quite confidently in the footsteps of Poe, Bradbury, Bloch, Matheson, and Shirley Jackson. Her tales deal with simple yet primal tropes. Characters have to come to grips with the dark cores of their beings, usually in the act of killing or being mortally threatened. The natural world has its share of exterior threats and pitfalls, but it's mainly the psyches of the characters that propel these tales.

  Decker's prose is very alluring, not flashy, but solid and clever. She has a great way with an opening sentence or paragraph, snagging the reader instantly. She doesn't accomplish this by offering some extravagant act, but rather by subtle evocation of place or person. For instance, the opening of “Hook House” deftly establishes the mother-daughter relation that will drive the whole story.

  Decker's families are furnaces of misery, generally, with internecine rivalries. This theme pervades the book. An exception occurs in the semi-comic “The Clan,” where the bond between mother and daughter witches in their battle with an egregious vampire neighbor is strong and supportive.

  Decker's take on the supernatural is fresh and authentic. The weird rituals in “Tarissa” evoke a kind of body-centered folk magic that feels very organic and believable. The strange beings in “Heat Waves” genuinely feel like another order of creation coeval with ours.

  Without being didactic in the least, Decker's sensitive focus on a wide gamut of exclusively female protagonists offers a feminist angle on a genre where too often women are merely the reactive objects in peril. In Decker's work, they're heroines, villains, and all types in between, moving vividly through sharply limned incidents of magic and mortality.

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  Past Heroes and Villains Come Alive

  When it comes to the nooks and crannies of fantastical literature, critic and scholar Jess Nevins has already proven himself a fount of erudition and charm, with two sparkling books that annotate the work of Alan Moore: Heroes & Monsters (2003) and A Blazing World (2004). But his latest volume, the work of many years, blows these two admittedly capable books plain out of the ocean. The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana (Monkey Brain Books, hardcover, $50.00, 1010 pages, ISBN 1-932265-15-5) is nothing more nor less than an instantly indispensable part of any serious fan's reference shelf.

  What Nevins has done is to painstakingly ransack the vast literary output of the Victorian era, like some more refined and discerning Sam Moskowitz, for forgotten genre gems. He does not neglect to catalogue the famous icons either, but of necessity—Sturgeon's Law and all—the overwhelming majority of this book concerns the lesser-knowns, also-rans, unjustly neglecteds and might-have-beens. But that's a major part of the book's immense charm and value! It turns out that the substrata that supported the great writers holds as much fascination, and rewards our reading to as great a degree, as any study of Parnassus.

  The book features a simple organizational scheme: alphabetical entries on the fictional characters themselves (with occasional outcroppings of places, things, or themes). Within these character-centered essays, Nevins will of course discuss the authors themselves at length. Paging with fascination through this book is like reading hundreds of miniature biographies of some of the most colorful people you could ever imagine meeting.

  Nevins's prose is sprightly and clear-eyed and delightfully opinionated. He renders his story synopses economically, but without losing the essence of each work. He compares and contrasts among similar groupings of protagonists, and between dissimilar ones. And he establishes historical and literary context for everything (doing so involves discussion of many relevant early Gothic works
that predate Victoria's reign).

  His thematic entries shine light on such arcane topics as “Lady Detectives” and “The Räuberroman,” the latter being traditional tales of noble bandits. Nevins's remit is a wide one: not all of the works he chooses to discuss feature actual non-mimetic incidents. Many are straight historical novels. (Consider John Bennett's Master Skylark [1897] for one.) But there's a common, easily discernible thread among all his choices. Call it “adventure” for lack of any better word. It's a signpost that has always attracted a certain venturesome crowd—such as those of you reading this column, I'm sure!

  Nevins exhibits an admirable equality and fraternity toward his subjects. The products of high and low art are treated with equal seriousness, with Flaubert and Henry James consorting with Luis Senarens and the prolific Anonymous.

  What strikes me most about the era so lovingly limned in this volume is its catholicity of subject matter and its sheer exuberance. These writers left no possible exotic biography unplumbed. Kings and peasants, outcasts and establishmentarians, thieves and detectives—male or female, elderly or youthful, virtuous or wicked—every possible specimen is on display here, forming a vast human tapestry. Nevins captures this quality of all-inclusiveness so well.

  So many of these characters impacted millions of lives, giving great pleasure, before vanishing from the public's eye. Just consider two Franks: Frank Merriwell and Frank Reade. The lengthy mythoses of each Frank are summarized brilliantly here, and, as with all these entries, they have the effect of making me want to rush out and read some of the original texts.

  It's unlikely that many of these more obscure books and stories will ever fall under the eye of the average reader, but in Nevins's accomplished, witty documentation of a vanished era, they are reborn in our hearts and minds for a brief moment in the next-best fashion.

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  A Town Called Punk

  In retrospect, it's easy enough to identify Jeffrey Thomas's arresting collection of linked stories, Punktown (2000), as a harbinger of the New Weird, which hadn't even been invented at century's turn—hadn't been labeled as such, anyhow. A defiant hybrid of SF, fantasy, surrealism, Ashcan Realism, and horror, the book appeared from Jeff VanderMeer's Ministry of Whimsy Press, itself a bastion for allied rascals. And now that there's a sequel, complete with a blurb from the Godfather of New Weird, China Miéville, the identification of Thomas's project with that exciting movement is complete.

  Not that the concept of Punktown really needs any shoring-up by cliques or claques. The venue that Thomas has created is a strong one, uniquely his own, and amenable to hosting just about any kind of tale. Punktown's receptivity to infusions of new ideas from new creators is proven in this second volume by the appearance of Jeffrey Thomas's brother, Scott Thomas, himself a writer of stature, who contributes half of the text in Punktown: Shades of Grey (Bedlam Press, hardcover, $45.00, 225 pages, ISBN 1-889186-31-7).

  Punktown is really the colony city named Paxton, on the alien world named Oasis. The place has the usual array of industries, residences, monuments, and institutions, but mainly seems to function as a dumping ground for the galaxy's down-and-outers, human and otherwise. With its “crayon-bright, playground-noisy” streets continually throbbing with heterogeneous beings with radically different needs and goals, the place is more violent than Miéville's New Crobuzon combined with Steve Aylett's Beerlight. Yet there's room for pathos and nobility as well.

  Jeffrey Thomas's stories read a bit more whimsical and wistful than those of Scott. (It's Jeffrey after all who titles one piece “Sweaty Betty, Termite Queen of the Danged.") Jeffrey has more affection for his creation, is more willing to let it drift organically of its own accord, whereas Scott, I feel, is intent on amping up the action, pushing the parameters of life in the city. Both are ceaselessly inventive with their cast and plotting, but Jeffrey's stories seem less metallic and brassy somehow than those of his brother. Each mode offers its own distinct pleasures, of course.

  Both writers like to focus on the average citizen. There are no slices of high society life here. A bus driver ("Pulse"), a pet groomer ("Purple Wings"), an office worker ("The Hate Machines")—these are the kind of Phildickian protagonists through whom the city is filtered. But certainly they encounter the most outrageous events: killer aliens who happen to look like cute little tykes; an interdimensional leviathan stuck halfway between universes; an amusement park where living dolls are the prizes.

  Like VanderMeer's Ambergris, Punktown is a place that undeniably and forcefully intrudes its existence into our bland reality, rendering our own world colorless by comparison.

  * * * *

  Management Hair

  Do you recall an episode of The Simpsons titled “You Only Move Twice” (1996), in which Homer and family relocated to work for a mysterious company run by a fellow named Scorpio—a company that seemed too good to be true, and yet was surprisingly creepy? If you crossed that episode with J.G. Ballard's great cynical and despairing story “War Fever,” you'd begin to approach what Max Barry has accomplished in his excellent third novel, Company (Doubleday, hardcover, $22.95, 338 pages, ISBN 0-385-51439-5).

  Readers might recall me praising Barry's previous book, Jennifer Government (2003), as an updated take on the classic Pohl-Kornbluth mode of SF satire. Barry continues to exploit that angle of attack here, but tosses in elements of Herman Melville (specifically, “Bartleby the Scrivener"), Kafka, Tom Holt, Christopher Moore, Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame), Joseph Heller, and John Sladek (I'm thinking of his vastly overlooked “Masterton and the Clerks"). The end result is a biting satire of all things managerial and vocational. The captains of capitalism meet their match in his hyperbolic scenario.

  Young Stephen Jones is starting his first real job at a company called Zephyr Holdings, Inc., of Seattle. He's to be a mere assistant in the Sales Department, and is eager to do a good job, convinced that he can rapidly work his way up to a better position. (His immediate boss, Roger, is a monomaniac currently fixated on an incident of perceived disrespect: the theft of his personal donut. This incident will reverberate ingeniously throughout the whole novel.) Stephen's fellow go-fers, Holly and Freddy, welcome him with jaded disregard for his enthusiasm and curiosity. Little do they realize that Stephen's zestful naïvete will take him higher than they can imagine. For in quest of Zephyr's real, secret concerns, Stephen will stumble on the incredible secrets hidden on Floor 13, and become swept up in the Secret Master doings of the corporation. The seductions of one of the cabal, the lovely Eve Jantiss, will render his ethical dilemma—get everything he wants by stepping on the little people, or not?—in very solid terms of flesh and blood.

  Barry has conceived of a great central conceit—which, as a responsible reviewer, I cannot ethically reveal here; check out the Ballard allusion above for a hint—which he exploits for all it's worth. The permutations of his notion are worked out in rigid detail, as in any good SF novel—which makes their surreal effects all the more startling. His characters are endearingly flawed and embraceable, his dialogue crackles and sparks. Nearly constant laughter should be the general readerly reaction, followed immediately by despair upon realizing that Barry is indeed limning the worst excesses of corporate life. His plotting is zippy, with plenty of twists and turns. In short, this novel is a joy to read.

  At one point Barry has clever fun with an extended metaphor. As Senior Management (all of whom have excellent haircuts) put together the new organization chart resulting from their heartless purging and cutting and reassembling, Barry pretends that they're building a Frankenstein monster. Suddenly, all the suits come across like the mad scientists they are, without even the saving grace of Faustian hubris. It's genuinely scary. Just like the workplaces we all contend with.

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  Visiting Vanceland

  The name Gardner Dozois might just ring a faint bell with readers of this column. Fellow who edited this magazine so dynamically and selflessly for two decades? Winner of numer
ous Hugo awards? Convention-going raconteur? Ah, that last one did it. Now you've placed him! Well, Gardner's departure from these pages has left him free to edit any number of other projects, including a superior original anthology titled One Million A.D. (SFBC, hardcover, $13.99, 400 pages, ISBN 07394-6273-3). The book's theme is alluring, and the execution of that theme by its six contributors bold and striking.

  Dozois asked his authors simply this: to portray some slice of the universe, human or otherwise, as it might look one thousand thousand years in the future. In his introduction, Dozois charts the small but brave corps of SF writers who have previously ventured into such deep expanses of the future. To my mind, the archetypical purveyor of such futures is Jack Vance, followed closely by Gene Wolfe, who took direct inspiration from Vance. In the tales by these two men the presence of the immense past that weighs on the “contemporary” milieu of the narrative is almost palpable. And, for me, that sense of eras come and gone and half-forgotten is the main attraction of this sub-genre.

  Oddly enough, the writers in this volume don't really provide such a specialized frisson—maybe a little, once or twice. But they offer other thrills of estrangement that are equally valid and exciting.

  Robert Reed is up first, with “Good Mountain.” Humanity finds itself existing precariously on a watery world of unstable continents. Our hero, a young teacher named Jopale, is fleeing one tectonic disaster, and perhaps unwittingly heading to another. Reed's world is exotically dangerous and well-conceived—truly alien. Jo-pale is something of a dreamily reactive type, which sometimes limits his attractiveness as a protagonist. But the story is carried by the sense of imminent disaster. Yet this could be a colony of mankind established, say, two hundred years in the future, and any sense of a long human history is undercut by the discontinuity.