by Andy Cox
“Do you know what she’s going to dance to?” I ask, to say something.
“No idea. You know she doesn’t talk to me any more than she talks to you.”
“What are we going to do, if she gets into Juilliard?”
He puts his phone away. Puts his head in his hands. Looks up at me. “Christ, Christine, I don’t know. We can’t afford it. Not in a million years. Unless she gets a full ride…”
“Yeah.”
We both know she won’t.
“It’ll kill her,” he says. “She’s been talking about it since she was six.”
“It’s terrible to be in a place where we’re hoping she doesn’t get in. At least then we’re not the bad guys.”
He nods. We both watch the road, now.
I ask: “Did you have something like that, when you were her age? Something you wanted so much that nothing else seemed to matter?”
“To lose my virginity?” He chuckles, then coughs. “For a while I wanted to be a rock star.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I was in about six hundred bands. Just me and my friends talking about it a lot. Most of us didn’t even play any instruments. Never practiced together. Changed names every five minutes. Pillow, Panacea, The New Creatures. Drew logos in textbooks. Standard stupid teenage shit.”
But from the way he watches the night roll past him, I can see how much it meant to him. His brow furrows as he shuffles through memory scraps. The moments that changed his life, that he can’t quite recall now. The smell inside long-closed bars. Drunken late-night movie arguments. Time takes so much away from us. If a song could send him back there, into the body of that very-different boy, would he ever come back?
“What about you?” he asks.
“I was shockingly unambitious as a teenager. I just wanted to survive.”
“Well then. At least you can say your dreams came true.”
I know what he is thinking. How? Is it pheromones, sorcery, the mere accretion of so many years alongside someone? He’s thinking what I’m thinking. He’s thinking of where he came from. We’re thinking of where we can’t go back. The Lowlands trailer parks where I grew up are underwater half the year now – the freight train tracks abandoned – and the Brooklyn of his childhood has grown so expensive his grandmother was murdered by someone working for her landlord, desperate to get her out and rent to someone richer. Our jobs are fragile – twigs that barely support our weight, and may snap at any moment in the winds of software innovation or the shifting trade tariffs of faraway countries. That’s why my fingers fidget, half-wanting to switch on the radio and flash back to Teenage Me again. Her fear of the future is such a welcome escape from the stress of my present.
***
My daughter dances magnificently. In our living room, on the beach on family vacations, at the corner waiting for the bus. She dances with headphones on, for my benefit. She becomes the song. Watching her, I can feel it. She doesn’t know it but she’s my surrogate, translating art I won’t allow myself to hear into something I can see.
We arrive at the high school where the Tri-County talent show is happening. Laughter fills the parking lot. A bottle breaks. The past is too present, here: the weight and call of my own high school days, how easy it might be to step back into who I was then. For the first time, I see that there’s a reason I’ve been so scared to abandon myself to a song, and it’s not just the fear of re-experiencing some particularly ugly event. I worry what Teenage Me will do to Now Me. I don’t want the two of them getting too close. And I worry what other dark magic Ariel could have transmitted from her brain to mine. She taught my brain how to travel through time; what if more time with her teaches me how to take myself out of the space-time continuum altogether?
***
“Ariel Hosking,” says the announcer, and my daughter steps out onto the stage. We are darkened. She wears all black, her hair expertly bunned. She is a dancer. My Ariel nods to someone off-stage, and the song starts.
A bass line, sad and happy all at once. Nirvana. My nose fills up with the smell of my childhood best friend’s bedroom. I don’t want to go back, I think.
My husband turns to me, panicked. Poised for action. Ready to drag me out of there if he has to. We are old, we are slow, but he would still fight like a boar to protect me. “It’s okay,” I whisper.
I want to go back, I think.
His hand clasps mine. Our fingers interlace: a swift and elegant gesture. Nothing is promised to us. Tomorrow may see everything we love taken away. But this is what I have now. Ariel was wrong: it is magic. Every song is magic. Every song we love can trigger the time-travel nodes of the brain. A dead man’s voice comes in, singing low and sad. The song hits me like love, like loss, like a river in reverse, like a freight train bearing me north to the abandoned cities of the selves I have been.
***
Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organiser. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lightspeed, Shimmer, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Electric Velocipede, Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, The Minnesota Review, and The Rumpus, among others. He is a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, a graduate of the 2012 Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and the co-editor of Horror After 9/11, an anthology published by the University of Texas Press. Visit him at www.samjmiller.com.
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COLD TURKEY by CAROLE JOHNSTONE
All Raym wants to do is give up smoking. So why is his entire life falling apart? Why are new mistakes and old terrors conspiring against him? Why is he being plagued by the very worst spectre from his childhood? And why does giving up suddenly – horrifyingly – feel much, much more like giving in?
“Darkly funny, assuredly written, and deliciously creepy. It’s also the best giving up smoking manual I’ve read” Sarah Pinborough
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BOOK ZONE
TWEMBER
Steve Rasnic Tem
THE RACE
Nina Allan
THE SEVENTH MISS HATFIELD
Anna Caltabiano
CALIFORNIA
Edan Lepucki
THE UNREAL AND THE REAL
Ursula K. Le Guin
SMILER’S FAIR
Rebecca Levene
GREEN PLANETS
edited by Gerry Canavan & Kim Stanley Robinson
CALL AND RESPONSE
Paul Kincaid
THE VERY BEST OF F&SF 2
edited by Gordon Van Gelder
BARRICADE
Jon Wallace
THE HOUSE OF THE FOUR WINDS
Mercedes Lackey & James Mallory
THE BEAUTY
Aliya Whiteley
THE COLLAPSE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway
COMPANY OF SHADOWS
Paul Gerrard
THE CYBERIAD
Stanislaw Lem
A KILL IN THE MORNING
Graeme Shimmin
TWEMBER
Steve Rasnic Tem
NewCon Press hb, 176pp, £18.99
Peter Tennant
Twember is the latest entry in the Imaginings series from NewCon Press, each volume of which will “feature the work of a single selected author, bringing together the very best of that author’s previously published but uncollected short fiction, as chosen by the author themselves, plus original stories”. In the case of Twember the selected author is Steve Rasnic Tem, who is primarily known for his horror and weird fiction output, but here shows what he can do when he chooses to dabble in the science fiction genre.
Opening story ‘A Letter from the Emperor’ put me in mind of the Foundation universe of Isaac Asimov, but here
with the space opera elements given a very human dimension, as the sole surviving crew member of a messenger ship visits a remote outpost of a galactic empire and brings a little joy into the life of a retiring official by faking a letter of commendation from the emperor. This is a gentle story that touches on so much – the remoteness and uncertainty of our political collectives, the shifting nature of memory, the need for a human side to the most colossal of enterprises – entertaining for the way in which it plays with human foibles, and seeming to show that our basic nature, with the need for recognition, will remain the same no matter how far we spread throughout the galaxy.
Title story ‘Twember’ originally appeared in Interzone #239 and is set in a world where society has been undermined by the sudden appearance of artificial structures that move through the landscape like icebergs. They appear to be shards of frozen time or memory, and Will, the protagonist of the story, refers to them as “escarpments”, and in the way they effect the world, with past events and memories thrown up at random, I think an argument could be made for them being an externalisation of dementia – Will’s father, who suffers from dementia, is the only one who seems content and at peace in this uncertain world. Tem’s apocalyptic vision is impressively rendered on the page, but his story is focused on Will and the family unit he is trying to hold together, as they adjust their expectations to suit the altered circumstances, finding serenity and acceptance of a kind, with the feeling that while they must abandon physical things they can still cling to something that represents essentially who they are.
In ‘The Day Before the Day Before’ an operative of an agency that works to change the past in subtle ways is abandoned in a different time period after he fails in his mission, the story setting up an opposition between views of pragmatism and the universality of suffering, but focusing on the human dimension, with the man remembering his family and the things that have been lost. A former soldier who maintains a park’s artificial environment in ‘Pathetic Fallacy’ encounters a wild child who changes his ideas about how he should conduct himself, so that when she tries to leave him he calls the authorities to capture her for her own good, the story showing how brittle our values can become. The brief ‘Forward’ marks the idea that nothing really changes, only the technology with which we express ourselves.
‘Visitors’ has an elderly couple visiting their criminal son who has been imprisoned in a cryogenic facility so that he will suffer eternally, the story heartfelt and moving as it shows us the cruelty of what is being done, contrasting our attitude to animals with that to humans, and at the end concluding with the idea of the comforting lie that enables both parents and child to continue with their existence. Dead children are brought back as ‘Cubs’ and go off on a camping trip, the story exploring the idea that perhaps death should be an end, that sometimes the reality of continuing on is too horrific to contemplate, as here with a child committing a terrible act and a conspiracy of silence to cover up what has taken place. As metaphor, the story touches on the issue of letting go, of how we can sour both our own life and that of those we care for by clinging on to a past moment.
Longevity is conferred on the most valued members of society in ‘Forty-three Thousand Sunsets’, but the cost to others is severe restrictions on the right to reproduce that cause social upheaval and civil unrest. There’s a struldbrug quality to the life of city architect Brian, as he witnesses countless changes but loses his capacity to keep track of them with the onset of a form of dementia, the story both sad and chilling in its depiction of the life he clings on to, asking if it really is worth the high price.
‘Ephemera’ is the longest story in the book, and one that deftly dramatises the conflict between progress and the need to hang on to things of value. Book dealer Ascher convincingly ridicules collector Daniel’s addiction to digital books, wanting books to be cherished as objects in themselves, but later we learn that his house has become a mausoleum of sorts, piles of books on every side, his inability to let go of things that have outlived their purpose holding Ascher back in a powerful story that presents both sides of the argument, soliciting our sympathy and compassion for the protagonists, while at the same time showing how even our own children can become strangers to us, and then ending on a note of triumph, with the objects of the past transfigured into art in the present, though it is perhaps a pyrrhic victory.
Tom wakes from a cryogenic sleep to find that aliens are ‘At Play in the Fields’, the human race having fallen from its technological peak, but his attempts to find a place in this new society flounder in a kind of existential angst, with questions that only he can answer for himself, or to which perhaps there are no answers. The story is mirrored in ‘The Long Afternoon of the Human Race’ in which the last surviving human in the flesh takes his leave of mankind’s descendants, mechanical and virtual, with the vagaries of evolution celebrated, the story offering a sense of continuity in human life and affirming the value of the fictions with which we make sense of our condition, reminiscent in some ways of Pohl’s work, as are many of these stories, and ending the collection on a positive and upbeat note, playing counterpoint to the sadness of much that preceded it.
THE RACE
Nina Allan
NewCon Press pb, 251pp, £12.99
Peter Tennant
Nina Allan’s latest work is a book that eludes easy categorisation. For a start though it’s being pitched as a science fiction novel, I’m not sure that strictly speaking either tag applies. A novel yes, but also four self-contained sections that form a greater whole. Science fiction yes, but a story in which the genre elements are both central and subordinate to a mainstream narrative. As with Allan’s previous work, the brilliant Stardust, what we have here is fiction as a series of matryoshka dolls, each new part forcing the reader to re-evaluate and interpret anew what has gone before.
Each section takes its title from the name of the viewpoint character. Opening section ‘Jenna’ is set in a borderline dystopian future Britain, with the landscape soured by fracking and the populace looking back at a disastrous war that cost the lives of millions. The town of Sapphire survives on smartdog racing, an illegal activity to which the powers that be turn a blind eye, with technology used to establish a mental/empathic link between the dogs and their handlers. Jenna makes luxury gloves for the handlers, while her brother Del is an owner, with a secondary career on the black market. Central to the plot is the abduction of his young daughter Luz Maree, who everyone calls Lumey and who may have a natural ability to “converse” with the dogs. Del hopes to raise the necessary ransom money through a smartdog race. Allan painstakingly creates this detailed world and then in ‘Christy’ reveals that it is in fact a fiction, a story by Christy Peller, and what follows involves a fascinating examination of the relationship between reality and fiction. Christy too has a brother Derek (Del), one even more unsavoury than his fictional counterpart, an abuser of women whose girlfriends have a habit of disappearing when they don’t toe his line. There are other correspondences – between Hastings and fictional Sapphire, abducted Lumey and missing Linda, the runaway mothers of Jenna/Del and Christy/Derek.
The third part is set twenty years later and focused on a meeting between Linda’s former boyfriend ‘Alex’ and Christy, who is seeking to lay the ghosts of her past, and once again what we are told forces us to reconsider what we had believed to that point, though not without an element of ambiguity. Finally we have ‘Maree’ in which we learn what happened to Lumey, how she was kept in a halfway house of sorts for many years, believing that her parents had died in a tragic accident and preparing to use her ability to communicate with smartdogs. The main part of this segment involves a steamer crossing of the Atlantic, with Lumey/Maree being sent to a research base where her talent will be further developed, but apart from the term Atlantic all of the place names used appear to be fictional, distancing this segment from both our world and that of the story in the first section, though Allan throws us a curve ball near the
end by referencing Hastings, Christy and Derek, as if the mask of fiction is slipping, a glimpse behind the wizard’s curtain. Overall it feels like Christy revisiting old material, and providing the happy ending she couldn’t write before. There are further correspondences to be drawn, with Alex mentioning a woman whose face was shot away and a pilot with a scarred visage appearing in the fourth part, Christy’s brother Derek having gone off to Australia to be with their mother and aboard the steamer a mother travelling to be reunited with her estranged son, and the Hotel Charlotte, an abandoned building Christy visited in the second section resurrected as a place of sanctuary for Maree in the fourth part.
One of Allan’s great strengths as a writer is her ability to draw convincing, fully rounded characters. She tells us far more about the lives of these people than my brief description can convey, and with the feeling that she knows even more than she chooses to reveal. In a sense everything that takes place could be seen as an exploration of Christy’s character, the writer using fiction to work through her own issues – her emotional and aesthetic needs, the wish to have a brother who is not a monster and a family unit that supports and encourages her. And, distancing ourselves yet one step further from the narrative, Christy is a fictional creation of the writer Nina Allan (in parenthesis, note the second syllable similarity between the writer’s name and that of the character Jenna Hoolan, which may or may not be significant), who is exploring her own concerns through the medium of interlocking stories. Empathy seems to be central – that between the smartdogs and their handlers mirrored in the relationship between author and characters, with fiction as a way to make sense of our reality, and possibly reinvent it in ways that are more pleasing to us. Conversely, a lack of empathy seems to be at the heart of most of the book’s problems, as with the racism that Alex suffered in his youth and the misogyny that is Derek’s defining characteristic, and the disdain for humans that is felt by the whales that make Atlantic crossings such an ordeal in Maree’s section. And finally, there is the possibility that Maree and others are being trained to communicate with aliens, that the establishment of a way to divorce meaning from language is the goal.
