Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 95

by Caroline M. Yoachim

  They agreed to separate for a while. Elanore would head off to explore pure virtuality. Gustav would go back to foreal Paris and try to rediscover his art. And so, making promises they both knew they would never keep, Gustav and Elanore finally parted.

  Gustav slid his unfinished Olympia back down amid the other canvases. He looked out of the window and saw from the glow coming up through the gaps in the houses that the big reality engines were humming. The evening, or whatever other time and era it was, was in full swing.

  A vague idea forming in his head, Gustav pulled on his coat and headed out from his tenement. As we walked down through the misty, smoggy streets, it almost began to feel like inspiration. Such was his absorption that he didn’t even bother to avoid the shining bubbles of the reality engines. Paris, at the end of the day, still being Paris, the realities he passed through mostly consisted of one or another sort of café, but there were set amid dazzling souks, dank Medieval alleys, yellow and seemingly watery places where swam strange creatures that he couldn’t think to name. But his attention wasn’t on it anyway.

  The Musée D’Orsay was still kept in reasonably immaculate condition beside the faintly luminous and milky Seine. Outside and in, it was well-lit, and a trembling barrier kept in the air that was necessary to preserve its contents until the time came when they were fashionable again. Inside, it even smelled like an art gallery, and Gustav’s footsteps echoed on the polished floors, and the robot janitors greeted him; in every way, and despite all the years since he’d last visited, the place was the same.

  Gustav walked briskly past the statues and the bronze casts, past Ingres’ big, dead canvases of supposedly voluptuous nudes. Then Moreau, early Degas, Corot, Millet . . . Gustav did his best to ignore them all. For the fact was that Gustav hated art galleries—he was still, at least, at painter in that respect. Even in the years when he’d gone deliberately to such places because he knew that they were good for his own development, he still liked to think of himself as a kind of burglar—get in, grab your ideas, get out again. Everything else, all the ahhs and the oohs, was for mere spectators . . .

  He took the stairs to the upper floor. A cramp had worked its way beneath his diaphragm and his throat felt raw, but behind all of that there was this feeling, a tingling of power and magic and anger—a sense that perhaps . . .

  Now that he was up amid the rooms and corridors of the great Impressionist works, he forced himself to slow down. The big gilt frames, the pompous marble, the names and dates of artists who had often died in anonymity, despair, disease, blindness, exile, near-starvation. Poor old Sisley’s Misty Morning. Vincent Van Gogh in a self portrait formed from deep, sensuous, three-dimensional oils. Genuinely great art was, Gustav thought, pretty depressing for would-be great artists. If it hadn’t been for the invisible fields that were protecting these paintings, he would have considered ripping the things off the walls, destroying them.

  His feet led him back to the Manets, that woman gazing out at him from Dejéuner sur l’Herbe, and then again from Olympia. She wasn’t beautiful, didn’t even look much like Elanore . . . But that wasn’t the point. He drifted on past the clamoring canvases, wondering if the world had ever been this bright, this new, this wondrously chaotic. Eventually, he found himself face to face with the surprisingly few Gauguins that the Musée D’Orsay possessed. Those bright slabs of color, those mournful Tahitian natives, which were often painted on raw sacking because it was all Gauguin could get his hands on in the hot stench of his tropical hut. He became wildly fashionable after his death, of course; the idea of destitution on a far away isle suddenly stuck everyone as romantic. But it was too late for Gauguin by then. And too late—as his hitherto worthless paintings were snapped up by Russians, Danes, Englishmen, Americans—for these stupid, habitually arrogant Parisians. Gauguin was often poor at dealing with his shapes, but he generally got away with it. And his sense of color was like no one else’s. Gustav remembered vaguely now that there was a nude that Gauguin had painted as his own lopsided tribute to Manet’s Olympia—had even pinned a photograph of it to the wall of his hut as he worked. But, like most of Gauguin’s other really important paintings, it wasn’t here at the Musée D’Orsay, this supposed epicenter of Impressionist and Symbolist art. Gustav shrugged and turned away. He hobbled slowly back down through the gallery.

  Outside beneath the moonlight, amid the nanosmog and the buzzing of the powerfields, Gustav made his way once again through the realities. An English tea house circa 1930. A Guermantes salon. If they’d been foreal, he’d have sent the cups and the plates flying, bellowed in the self-satisfied faces of the dead and living. Then he stumbled into a scene he recognized from the Musée D’Orsay, one, in fact, that had once been as much a cultural icon as Madonna’s tits or a Beatles tune. Le Moulin de la Galette. He was surprised and almost encouraged to see Renoir’s Parisian figures in their Sunday-best clothing dancing under the trees in the dappled sunlight, or chatting at the surrounding benches and tables. He stood and watched, nearly smiling. Glancing down, saw that he was dressed appropriately in a rough woolen navy suit. He studied the figures, admiring they animation, the cleaver and, yes, convincing way that, through some trick of reality, they were composed . . . Then he realized that he recognized some of the faces, and that they had also recognized him. Before he could turn back, he was called to and beckoned over.

  “Gustav,” Marcel’s ghost said, sliding an arm around him, smelling of male sweat and Pernod. “Grab a chair. Sit down. Long time no see, eh?”

  Gustav shrugged and accepted the brimming tumbler of wine that offered. If it was foreal—which he doubted—this and a few more of the same might help him sleep tonight. “I thought you were in Venice,” he said. “As the Doge.”

  Marcel shrugged. There were breadcrumbs on his moustache. “That was ages ago. Where have you been, Gustav?”

  “Just around the corner, actually.”

  “Not still painting are you?”

  Gustav allowed that question be lost in the music and the conversation’s ebb and flow. He gulped his wine and looked around, expecting to see Elanore at any moment. So many of the others were here—it was almost like old times. There, even, was Francine dancing with a top-hatted man—so she clearly wasn’t across the sky. Gustav decided to ask the girl in the striped dress who was nearest to him if she’d seen Elanore. He realized as he spoke to her that her face was familiar to him, but he somehow couldn’t recollect her name—even whether she was living or a ghost. She shook her head, and asked the woman who stood leaning behind her. But she, also, hadn’t seen Elanore; not, at least, since the times when Marcel’s Venice when Francine was across the sky. From there, the question rippled out across the square. But no one, it seemed, knew what had happened to Elanore.

  Gustav stood up and pushed between the twirling dancers beneath the lantern-strung trees. His skin tingled as he stepped out of the reality and the laughter and the music suddenly faded. Avoiding any other such encounters, he made his way back up the dim streets to his tenement.

  There, back at home, the light from the setting moon was bright enough for him to make his way through the dim wreckage of his life without falling—and the terminal that Elanore ghost had reactivated still gave off a virtual glow. Swaying, breathless, Gustav paged down into his accounts, and saw the huge sum—the kind of figure that he associated with astronomy, with the distance of the moon from the Earth, the Earth from the sun—that now appeared there. Then, he passed back through the terminal’s levels, and began to search for Elanore.

  But Elanore wasn’t there.

  Gustav was painting. When he felt like this, he loved and hated the canvas in almost equal measures. The outside world, foreal or in reality, ceased to exist for him.

  A woman, naked, languid, and with a dusky skin quite unlike Elanore’s, is lying upon a couch, half-turned, her face cupped in her hand that lies upon the primrose pillow, her eyes gazing away from the onlooker at something far off. She seems beautiful
but unerotic, vulnerable yet clearly available, and self-absorbed. Behind her—amid the twirls of bright yet gloomy decoration—lies a glimpse of stylized rocks under a strange sky, whilst two oddly disturbing figures are talking, and a dark bird perches on the lip of a balcony; perhaps a raven . . .

  Although he detests plagiarism, and is working solely from memory, Gustav finds it hard to break away from Gauguin’s nude on this canvas he is now painting. But he really isn’t fighting that hard to do so, anyway. In this above all of Gauguin’s great paintings, stripped of the crap and the despair and the self-justifying symbolism, Gauguin was simply right. So Gustav still keeps working, and the paint sometimes almost seems to want to obey him. He doesn’t know or care at the moment what the thing will turn out like. If it’s good, he might think of it as his tribute to Elanore; and if it isn’t . . . Well, he knows that, once he’s finished this painting he will start another one. Right now, that’s all that matters.

  Elanore was right, Gustav decides, when she once said that he was entirely selfish, would sacrifice everything—himself included—just so that he could continue to paint. She was eternally right and, in her own way, she too was always searching for the next challenge, the next river to cross. Of course, they should have made more of the time that they had together, but as Elanore’s ghost admitted at that Van Gogh café when she finally came to say goodbye, nothing could ever quite be the same.

  Gustav stepped back from his canvas and studied it, eyes half-closed at first just to get the shape, then with a more appraising gaze. Yes, he told himself, and reminded himself to tell himself again later when he began to feel sick and miserable about it, this is a true work. This is worthwhile.

  Then, and although there is much that he still has to do and the oils are wet and he knows that he should rest the canvas, he swirls his brush in a blackish puddle of palette-mud and daubs the word NEVERMORE across the top and steps back again, wondering what next to paint.

  First published in Dying For It: More Erotic Tales of Unearthly Love, edited by Gardner Dozois, 1997.

  About the Author

  British writer Ian R. MacLeod was one of the hottest new writers of the nineties, and his work continues to grow in power and deepen in maturity as we move through the first decades of the new century. Much of his work has been gathered in four collections, Voyages By Starlight, Breathmoss and Other Exhalations, Past Magic, and Journeys. His first novel, The Great Wheel, was published in 1997. In 1999, he won the World Fantasy Award with his novella “The Summer Isles,” and followed it up in 2000 by winning another World Fantasy Award for his novelette “The Chop Girl.” In 2003, he published his first fantasy novel, and his most critically acclaimed book, The Light Ages, followed by a sequel, The House of Storms in 2005, and then by Song of Time, which won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award in 2008. A novel version of The Summer Isles also appeared in 2005. His most recent books are a new novel, Wake Up and Dream, and a big retrospective collection, Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod. MacLeod lives with his family in the West Midlands of England.

  The Issue of Gender in Genre Fiction:

  Conclusions

  Susan E. Connolly

  What is the situation with women in SFWA-qualifying science fiction short story markets? What proportion of publications are authored by women? What proportion of submissions are authored by women? Is science fiction significantly different from the other genres in these markets? Can we see any trends that might explain the differences between markets?

  These were the questions I wanted to ask when I began emailing editors back in the early months of 2014. In all honesty, I was not aware of the size or complexity of the task I was taking on when I began this study. As the data began to come in, and I saw the numbers of submissions that editors were categorizing for me, I gained an even greater appreciation for their assistance. This study has, in many ways, been a community project, with slush readers and editorial staff taking time out of their already busy working days to help provide valuable information to the science fiction and fantasy community.

  Where We Are

  Overall, authors who are women are less well represented in terms of submissions and publications than authors who are men. While some markets published more women than men in both all genres and in science fiction specifically, no market received more submissions from women than from men. However, markets displayed significant differences in terms of both submissions received, and stories published, for both science fiction alone, and all genres.

  There are differences between markets, so there is something that makes a difference. What that is, we cannot say from our data. We found some relationships and correlations, but nothing we can point to and say, “This is it. If all markets made this change, we would see a greater representation of women authors.”

  Upon deeper analysis of multi-genre markets, I found that there was a correlation between a high proportion of women authors overall, and a high proportion of women authors of science fiction stories. However, we still found that women were, in many cases, not as well-represented in the science fiction section as they were in the market taken all together. Clearly, many of these markets are very friendly to authors who are women, and in some cases are attracting relatively high numbers of submissions by women, and still, science fiction is lagging behind other genres. The cause of this is unclear from our data, but it is an interesting result.

  What Might Affect Gender Ratios?

  Submissions

  Age of senior editorial team, gender of senior editorial team, or whether a market is multi-genre or science fiction only had no relationship with the proportion of submissions received from women.

  Publications

  Gender of senior editorial team had a moderate relationship with the proportion of published stories by authors who are men, but no relationship with science fiction stories.

  Age of senior editorial team had no impact on the proportion of women and men selected for publication.

  Science fiction only markets were more likely to publish stories by men than were the science fiction sections of mixed-genre markets.

  Study Limitations: Submissions/Publications

  Given the limitations of the data, it would be misleading to statistically analyze submission data and publication data together. The reasoning for this is given in the previous article, but in essence, it’s because there are differing and inconsistent time lags between receipt of submissions and selection of stories for publication, and between acceptance of stories and the final publication date. We can’t know from our data what the proportions of submissions were for a particular issue’s publications.

  No editor considered their submissions data to have an unusual proportion of men and women authors. A few points of percentage difference might not be noticed by an editor, but could lead to significant differences in statistical results. Hence, we can’t really run correlative tests and so on for various factors. That said, we can draw general inferences from the submissions data, when considered with the publication data. Large swings of 10%+ would likely have been noticed by editors, so it seems fair to say that we can see large differences in the relative proportions of men and women selected from slush by different markets.

  As you can see from the chart, it is not as simple an issue as saying, “We need to increase submissions by women,” or “Markets who publish more women have greater numbers of submissions to choose from.” While some markets closely track publications percentages to submissions percentages, other markets do not, showing that submissions ratios are not the only factor affecting publications ratios. Basically, we don’t have an easy linear relationship between proportions of submissions by women and proportions of publications by women.

  Whether or not increasing submissions from women would lead to an increase in acceptances from authors who are women is not a question I can answer from the data. I would need to compare markets over time, cont
rolling for other factors that might affect acceptances. In addition, due to the time-lags and variation between submissions and publications, I can’t run the tests necessary to say there is a statistically significant over-representation of women in publications, as compared to submissions. I can say that from a general reading, markets are at least matching their proportions of submissions, with some individual markets publishing a greater proportion of authors who are women than they have in submissions.

  One useful outcome from this study has been a decision by some markets to update their guidelines to explicitly welcome submissions from authors who are women. Should this increase submissions from women, the time-study mentioned earlier would be possible, and the question of the relationship between submissions and publications ratios might be more easily answered.

  At the start of June, Escape Pod made use of this strategy. In terms of raw numbers, their June submissions from authors who are women increased from an average of 19 of 75 total submissions (25% share), to 27 of 83 total, making up 32.53% of that month’s submissions. July (up to the 29th of the month) showed a similar increase, with 36 submissions by women of 111 total, for a 32.43% share of submissions.