The New York Review of Science Fiction

by Burrowing Wombat Press

  “Repairer of Reputations,” written in 1895, is set in a future 1920. New York City has opened the first public suicide booth. “Foreign-born Jews” have been excluded from the country “as a matter of self-preservation,” and there is a “new independent Negro state of Suanee.” There was a “Congress of Religion” which apparently ended bigotry and intolerance, at least officially (9).

  Chambers gives a few more tantalizing references to the way this future world differs from his own, but he shows very little of how this world works. None of the other stories in The King in Yellow consider this future world, yet it remains vivid in readers’ minds. Laws sets a number of his stories in the world of “Repairer,” or in a world that might be about to become that world, or a world that has been that world, but is now changing. Since he is taking into account modern technology, and since some of his characters question whether their world is the world that was truly meant to be, the exact relationship of the world of “Repairer” and the world—or worlds—in Laws’s tales is as delicately obscured as exactly how the world of “Repairer” functions.

  “Gaps,” told in the second person singular, has an unreliable viewpoint character who knows that he (or at least, I assume the character is male) is unreliable. He has gaps in his memory and only a vague idea of what triggers these gaps. The gaps started when he accidentally read the play. Like many others, he was “yellow rolled,” tricked into clicking on a link to the play. He becomes involved in very unsavory deeds, as one might expect from reading That Play—and yet, whatever causes the gaps, whatever personality takes over, seems to be not only protecting him but also trying to do what is right. The shape of the story changes until, in the end, it has become a chilling yet oddly touching ghost story, with the narrator still suffering from gaps, still trying to do the best he can, and making the best peace he can with the situation.

  “The Blood on the Wall in the Fortress” is not actually listed in the table of contents. While it would be amusing to theorize about mystical or conspiratorial reasons for this, I am fairly sure it was a simple mistake. This story continues to focus on unreliable viewpoints and alternate timelines. Set in a world where war is raging in 1947, the point of view character’s senses cannot be trusted—or can they? Is he hallucinating the ever increasing amount of blood, or is he causing it? Is he guilty, as his fellow soldiers and commanding officer (who is reading Notes on the Yellow Sign by Albert Camus) claim? If so, of what? Of madness? Of perceiving a reality the others do not want to acknowledge? Of creating reality? Things seem to be spiraling out of his control and into the hands of something worse.

  “A Boat Full of Popes” seems to have a sane and competent narrator and to be set after “Gaps.” The narrator is one of the men who service the suicide booths introduced in Chambers’s “Repairer of Reputations,” booths which do not kill cleanly and which sometimes require a lot of cleaning. These are also booths which, since some kind of revolution took place, many hoped would no longer be needed, and yet, despite the new freedom from the old regime—a regime which had something to do with the Yellow Sign, I think (and yet, wasn’t Chambers’s Castaigne insane? Surely there was no truth to any of his delusional ramblings?)—are still used and still carry a fascination for many.

  This story ends happily, or so it would seem. The narrator saves his friend and coworker from a group of alien cultists. And yet, while the aliens were a threat that had to be dealt with, the words of their leader are not so easily dismissed. He preyed upon those who were unhappy because they did not fit in, instead making them unhappy by forcing them to conform. Is this really so different from what any society does? And, while the narrator escaped that fate, the alien leader’s description of him seems spot on, a man openly revered but secretly feared for his competence at a distasteful job, a man doomed to loneliness. Kenneth Hite’s mention of the “fantasy of competence” in his introduction to this book echoes uneasily in the mind.

  “Distressing Notification” is a nicely creepy tale about the titular smartphone app, made by the company Carcosa LLC. Download it and you’ll get all sorts of distressing messages, telling you what your neighbor really thinks about you, how your coworker is planning to stab you in the back, and so on. Occasionally, the app will inform you that it cannot come up with a topper to its most recent distressing notification for you. People trying to remove it from their phones may discover that it reappears. Just a small bug, no doubt. The narrator reluctantly agrees to try the new app at the urging of her friend, a woman who may or may not have truly broken up with her abusive boyfriend and who may or may not resent our narrator’s meddling. As events run their course and the narrator’s friend meets her fate, the app and the company that makes it vanish without a trace—but not before the app sends one final message to the narrator: “We couldn’t have done it without you.”

  This still puzzles me as I am not sure if this means that the narrator’s friend could not have been maneuvered by the app if the narrator had not tried it out. This seems unlikely; the app seems quite capable of maneuvering people all too well on its own. I wonder if the narrator’s job has something to do with this. We know she has some kind of marketing position, but not what is being marketed.

  Of all the stories, I find “Pendulous” the most ambiguous. Skygaunts, creatures with skeletal wings, darken the sky at irregular intervals and feast off those unfortunate to be passing by. This is not an occurrence worthy of comment by the protagonist and her boss, both of whom freeze in the boss’s office until the skygaunts are done and then return to their conversation. In his introduction to the collection, Hite describes the protagonist as “maneuvering for the corner office,” yet I fail to see signs of this. The protagonist is told by her boss that she can stay as his assistant if he is offered the promotion they both are sure is coming or he can recommend her for his current position. No maneuvering seems necessary, unless one considers the everyday actions of businesswomen competing with men to be “maneuvers.”

  In addition to the decision about her future career path, the protagonist is concerned with an architectural project in the lot next to her workplace and with its advertising sign, which she abhors. She later meets the architect and starts a relationship with him. This relationship is still going on as the story ends, months later. She has chosen to take her boss’s old position and now has an assistant of her own.

  Of course, her lover has no idea that she has subtly altered his plans for the building. In the world where the Yellow Sign dominates, I do not know if her changes are an attempt to wreck a good project or to to modify a potentially dangerous one, whether they are attempts of a frustrated architect to improve on someone else’s work or are evidence of the “motiveless malignity” Hite sees in the story.

  The protagonist of “The Dog” is a fringe member of a circle of would-be revolutionaries, hoping that the woman in the group will notice him. His father was apparently a revolutionary, for in his basement, the protagonist finds some very interesting books, including The Communist Manifesto, which one revolutionary insists is what should have been influenced the world, rather than The King in Yellow.

  A copy of the infamous play is also in the basement, and the protagonist thinks of it as a dog hoping for approval. Soon, there is a strange, four-eyed animal in the basement, an animal that the protagonist forces himself to think of as a dog. After his ailing mother dies, he uses the dog to deal with minor enemies and has one of his fellow revolutionaries dispose of the remaining evidence.

  At this point, the cell of revolutionaries is dealt with, for one member turned out to be a collaborator. The collaborator now has a place with the regime, and he also has made a place for the woman, who, the protagonist guesses, is probably only going along with him out of self-preservation. But the protagonist has a “dog,” contacts among the larger revolutionary movement “up north”—which is apparently far more successful than the regime would have its citizens believe—and an opportunity to use these to bring down the regime.<
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  The final story of the collection, “Fuck You You’re Not Getting Out of This Car,” is a perfectly respectable monologue of a tale, but it seems a little obvious and workmanlike compared to the others. Then again, perhaps for just that reason, it makes a good closer.

  Throughout the collection, Laws captures the ambiguity at the heart of The King in Yellow mythos. The play is supposedly irresistible and beautiful, yet fatal and nihilistic. Seeking it out, or seeking tales about it, is as strange as collecting Yellow Sign jewelry or Cthulhu plushies (of which we have five). Yet there is a promise of beauty in some of the tales and a promise that evil can be destroyed, as in “Gaps” and “A Boat Full of Popes” or “The Dog.”

  Even there, it is not clear how meaningful victory is. I think this is another part of the appeal of the tales. We do not want ultimate bleakness, but neither do we want facile assurances that good will inevitably triumph over evil.

  And we do want mystery. Is there a coherent chronology of the world Laws constructs on Chambers’s foundation? We see only glimpses of it, dis-ordered and fragmentary. As with the play The King in Yellow, perhaps these glimpses are more satisfying than any whole could ever be.

  * * *

  Lisa Padol lives in Sunnyside, New York.

  Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, the Graphic Novel

  adapted and illustrated by Hope Larson

  New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012; $19.99 hc; 392 pages

  reviewed by Avram Grumer

  L’Engle’s Prose Novel

  Published in 1962 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (after being rejected by dozens of publishers), and continuously in print since then, A Wrinkle in Time is part science-fiction story, part religious metaphor, similar in spirit to C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series and Space Trilogy. But while Lewis’s work grants a unique metaphysical status to the Christian story of the Incarnation and Resurrection, L’Engle’s is more ecumenical, putting Jesus on the same level as Gandhi, the Buddha, Beethoven, and Einstein, and emphasizing the value of math and science.

  Wrinkle is the story of a teenaged girl, Meg Murry, the daughter of two scientists, currently being raised (along with her three brothers) by just her mother, her father having vanished while working for the government on some mysterious classified project. Meg’s younger (but precocious and psychically sensitive) brother, Charles Wallace, is also a major character, as is Calvin O’Keefe, a neighboring teenaged boy, but Meg is the hero, which may have accounted for some of the difficulty L’Engle had finding a publisher.

  Meg is an awkward teen with glasses and perpetually tangled mouse-brown hair, convinced that she’s ugly, unpopular at school, bright but academically undisciplined, and on top of that having to deal with neighbors who believe that her father has run off with another woman and that her younger brother is mentally handicapped. She’s impatient and short-tempered as well. When we first meet her, she’s sulking over the fight she got into with a boy who’d said something insulting about Charles Wallace. She bears a big bruise under one eye.

  We aren’t given many details about where Meg lives. There’s a house with an attic and a garden, “isolated on a back road.” Meg walks home from school and lives someplace small enough for neighborhood gossip, but she’s ridden on a subway train. There are no references to popular culture and only occasional mentions of the existence of radio, telephones, and televisions. When I first read the novel as a child in the 1970s and reread it as an adult around 1990, it seemed to me to have a timeless quality that probably has helped keep it appealing to audiences across the decades. Nowadays, the absence of cell phones and computers makes it seem dated, as does the line about how Meg’s mother is “planning on giving her a typewriter for Christmas.”

  A storm (“It was a dark and stormy night” is the novel’s first sentence) introduces us to Mrs Whatsit, one of three enigmatic figures who turn out to be Not of This Earth. (Here companions are Mrs Who and Mrs Which. We’re never told why they are “Mrs” rather than “Miss” or “Ms”—I imagine the former would make them seem too young, and the latter was too obscure or radical at the time.) Mrs Whatsit drops hints to her otherworldly nature, first mentioning that she’d been “caught in a down draft and blown off course” by the storm and then mentioning a tesseract.

  The tesseract is a figure from non-Euclidian geometry, the four-dimensional analog of the cube, as the cube is the one-dimension-higher version of the square. In the world of Wrinkle, it is a five-dimensional figure (L’Engle doesn’t quite have a handle on her math) and a way of crossing interstellar (or even intergalactic) distances in a few seconds and even traveling in time. This turns out to be what happened to Meg’s father—his government project had discovered tessering (space-travel-by-tesseract), and he had tried to tesser to Mars, winding up instead in an entirely different star system on the planet Camazotz, a world whose population lives under the totalitarian control of a giant, pulsing brain called IT, itself an agent or manifestation of “the Black Thing,” a darkness that shrouds various worlds (and taints but does not dominate Earth). IT controls every aspect of life on Camazotz, even forcing the children to bounce balls and skip rope to the same rhythm, and torturing them if they fail to keep it.

  Here is another example of how the book can appeal to multiple audiences. To a typical American, Camazotz evokes the threat of totalitarian communism. To a free-spirited member of the counter-culture, it can read as an indictment of the conformist pressure of middle-class consumerism and managerialist technocracy. The rows of identical houses (“all exactly alike, small square boxes painted gray”) that we encounter in the suburbs of Camazotz’s capital could have been plucked straight from the lyrics of Malvina Reynolds’s “Little Boxes,” recorded the same year Wrinkle was published.

  Fortunately for Meg’s father, there are agents of light opposing the darkness. Who, Which, and Whatsit are angels in the celestial order, and at least one of them was formerly a star. In a conversation about fighting the darkness, the children learn that all of the great artists, philosophers, scientists, and thinkers of history were also doing their part to fight the darkness.

  Who, Which, and Whatsit cannot interfere directly on Camazotz but can and do transport Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace there to rescue Mr. Murry, which they do, at the cost of losing Charles Wallace to IT’s domination.

  In their escape (Mr. Murry knows enough about tessering to get them to another planet in the same star system), Meg is exposed to the darkness, leaving her paralyzed and filled with bitterness. Luckily, this is an untainted world, and the locals can nurse Meg back to health and summon Who, Which, and Whatsit for a second rescue attempt. This time, it’s just Meg who goes. Her stubborn individuality protects her from IT’s telepathic domination long enough for her love to rescue Charles Wallace, and they (along with Calvin and Mr. Murry) are tessered back to Earth.

  Larson’s Graphic Adaptation

  This is a very faithful adaptation, following the novel very closely. It has the same chapters, and most of the dialog is verbatim from the original. Some of it has been trimmed, but very little—while the Yearling paperback edition of the prose novel is a bit over 200 pages, the comic clocks in at nearly twice that.

  Faced with the option of bringing the book into contemporary times (maybe giving Calvin a cellphone and putting a laptop computer in the Murrys’ lab—given how much of the story takes place off-planet, these wouldn’t have changed the plot), Larson instead leaves it in the 1960s. When Calvin borrows the landline phone to call home, Larson depicts it as an old ’40s-vintage desk model with a rotary dial. When Meg’s older brothers watch television, it’s a western on an old-fashioned console TV with lines of static on the screen.

  Technology in the Murry household (70, 80)

  But she’s willing to diverge from the source when the needs of adaptation require it. L’Engle gives this description of the newspaper boy’s vehicle on Camazotz:

  a machine that was something like a combination of a bicycl
e and a motorcycle. It had the slimness and lightness of a bicycle, and yet as the foot pedals turned they seemed to generate an unseen source of power, so that the boy could pedal very slowly and yet move along the street quite swiftly.

  This distinction between how quickly the boy is pedaling and how fast his cycle is moving is something nearly impossible to illustrate in comics. Larson’s solution? Give the boy a hoverbike. Simple and effective, it keeps the encounter other-worldy and science-fictional, while still working within the medium of comics (193–196).

  When I first became aware of Hope Larson’s art (I think it was around 2004), she had a very controlled line and a somewhat abstractedly geometric approach to form, resembling vector artwork. Here’s a panel from “WeatherVain,” her piece for the second volume of the Flight anthology series, published in 2005:

  “WeatherVain” from Flight #2, 2005

  Her art in her adaptation of Wrinkle is generally warmer-seeming, with a more hand-drawn look. This seems appropriate for a story that vilifies the planned and orderly; it might also be more kid-friendly and approachable than Larson’s early work. But it (like Meg) has its clumsy, awkward moments. Larson doesn’t convey motion very well, and since 2005, she seems to have forgotten how to draw hands:

  Meg confronts her principal, page 44

  Larson depicts the world of Wrinkle in two-color line art, black and blue, generally using solid regions of blue for shading. There’s one exception, though: To depict the Black Thing, the interstellar darkness that surrounds Camazotz and taints Earth, Larson uses a fine-grained, graduated tone which I suspect is either dry brush or a grease pencil (or a digital emulation):

  The Earth is touched by darkness (154)

  Aside from the Black Thing, there is only one other place that Larson uses this technique: the bruise on Meg’s cheek, the one she got from fighting with her schoolmate who insulted Charles Wallace. The bruise is present from when we first see Meg (11) to when Meg is touched by Aunt Beast (313) who cures her of the effects of passage through the darkness. Clearly Larson means us to see the bruise as a way that the Black Thing touches us through anger and violence. She even shows us the bruise in close-up as we’re first being shown the Black Thing.