http://worldsf.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/world-sf-blog-to-merge-with-the-portal-expand-operations/

Arrangements are made, but we can’t say anything definite yet n public (although we’re very excited).

Thank you for bearing with us. More in early November 2011.

This was one of the eeriest and most unsettling stories I’ve ever read.  What I found utterly fascinating, and I don’t know if the author intended it to happen, was the fact that he showed a cultural change that I believe would happen if mass communication is no longer possible.

The internet, television, magazines, books, and radio allow ideas to travel like lightning all over the earth.  Before mass communication, cultural change came much slower.  Liu had the few teenage children left doing the same dances as their parents, which would happen if the kids had no way to be exposed to newer dance moves.

The voice was strong, the conflict compelling, and I absolutely loved it.

In “Pony,” by Erik Amundsen, a pirate attack leaves a space wrangler alone to tangle with his nemesis, Skull Pony.

Amundsen managed to do several things extremely well.  I grew up on a ranch, and my father used to break wild horses as a young man.  I’ve worked with horses my entire life, and Amundsen captured their behavior admirably, especially the personality of Skull Pony.  His behavior reminded me very much of a mare I rode as a teenager.

As one reads, details that dribble in make you realize that the wrangler’s quarry is no ordinary herd.  They way in which the ponies survive and reproduce is creepy and deepens the stakes for our space wrangler, and the final interaction between the wrangler and Skull Pony was fantastic and weirdly believable.  Overall, it was a great, quirky read.

In “Silently and Very Fast, Part 1″ by Catherynne M. Valente,  Elefsis is a very old form of artificial intelligence that is passed from one family’s generation to the next.  He longs to uplink to the rest of the world, but is forbidden by his current owner, Neva.

Valente’s story dances a very fine line between completely unworkable and brilliant.  The prose is incredibly dense and has to be read with the fullest attention to avoid missing a tiniest critical detail.  It frequently flashes to mythological stories that have no apparent connection to the plight of Elefsis.  The other stories will be relevant eventually, as it is the first of three parts, but I think one will need to go back and re-read Part 1 when parts 2 and 3 are published in subsequent months.

There are fantastic moments in the story that define Elefsis’ relationship to Neva.  She holds back a part of herself from Elefsis, and it hurts his feelings, rather, it causes a pre-programmed emotional response.  The setting was rich and colorful, most of it taking place in a fantastical dreamworld.

The story has much promise, but it is difficult to know how much I liked it until I see the subsequent parts.

All the scenarios are near future, and Ms. McHugh uses references from pop culture, such as the tidbit that Elvis Presley died forty-five years ago today, to help orient the reader to the story’s world. Desperation, madness, confusion, and despair induced by the aftermath of disaster spurn the characters into action that might seem barbaric or drastic, but given the current state of the world, local or global, the author has succeeded in providing credible character motivation for most, but not all of the protagonists.

Though bleak, the stories are plausible, given current trends and events, and thus chilling portents of what might await us. The science from which Ms. McHugh extrapolates is sound and, though a little lumpy at times, never dominates the plots, which are more about the characters, their actions, and reactions.

 In “The Naturalist,” Cahill was clearly a bigot before the zombies arrived, and things haven’t gotten better along the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. He sees the survivors, as well as those who might have escaped, as enemies, rivals for the little food, shelter and resources that remain, and is willing to do anything to prevent himself from becoming zombie fodder. There is a surprise twist at the end of the story, which inculcates blame for mishandling the zombie invasion—clearly a metaphoric reference to some of the other mismanaged disaster, wartime, and human rights crises both in America and the rest of the world. Though disturbing, the story is far above the quality of most zombie fiction I’ve read.

“Special Economics” lands us in China in the wake of a deadly bird flu epidemic. Jieling, widowed by the flu, is struggling to find work and a clean, safe place to live. One of the strongest points of the story is verisimilitude, and Ms. McHugh utilizes key details about the cities, the culture, and even the nuances of dialect in such perfect detail, I felt like I was walking the streets with Jieling.

The description of a post-epidemic China evokes the feel of nonfiction. The science of creating bio batteries doesn’t seem all that farfetched to me, but the street vendor dropping a plastic sheet with molecular memory into boiling water and watching it bend and fold into cell phone shape was pretty innovative.

“Cells?’ Jieling asked.

‘Nerve cells from the electric ray. It’s a fish.’

They took swabs and Baiyue showed her how to put the cells on in a zigzag motion so that most of the gel was covered. They did six trays full of petri dishes. They didn’t smell fishy. Then they used pipettes to put in feeding solution. It was all pleasantly scientific without being difficult.

[…] Baiyue was from Fujian. ‘If you ruin a batch,’ she explained, ‘you have to pay out of your paycheck. I’m almost out of debt and when I get clear’—she glanced around and dropped her voice a little—I can quit.”

While the first half builds the tension nicely, just past the midpoint the story becomes repetitive. Perhaps the post traumatic stress left the survivors burned out but, after “over a quarter of a billion people died in four years” of the bird flu, I would have expected more details of masks and hand washing paranoia.

The main conflict, the bioenergy company that entraps its workers, seems too easily and painlessly resolved. Despite the fact that one girl has been thrown in prison for trying to escape, and Jieling flaunts the rules, feeling she has nothing left to lose, the tension hissed out of second half the story like a leaky balloon.

The ending bordered on a Deus ex Machina, a bit too saccharine for a story that started out with the promise of such danger and intrigue. The floor auntie and Mr. Cao from “Human Resources” could have been a source of much more conflict, but they just disappear.

“Useless Things” is as delightfully eccentric as the feisty New Mexican woman who switches from making custom dolls to dildos.  She also gets a gun to defend herself against local thugs and weird clients. There isn’t anything speculative about this literary fiction piece about the wisdom one acquires during life, and survival, which evoked the same feeling as stories by Annie Proulx but, once again, the ending only hints at what is to come. The first person, present tense narration, which Ms. McHugh uses in other stories in this collection, engaged me from the beginning.

“He offers me an iced tea and then gets the gun, checks to see that it isn’t loaded, and hands it to me. He explains to me that the first thing I should do is check to see if the gun is loaded.

‘You just did,’ I say.

‘Yeah,” he says, “but I might be an idiot. It’s a good thing to do.’

He shows me how to check the gun.

It is not nearly so heavy in my hand as I thought it would be. But truthfully, I have found that the thing you thought would be life changing so rarely is.

Later he takes me around to the side yard and shows me how to load and shoot it. I am not even remotely surprised that it is kind of fun.”

“The Lost Boy: Reporter at Large” details the travails of a kid trapped in the foster care system, set after a dirty bomb detonated in the mid-Atlantic state of Maryland.  Simon has a bad case of dissociative fugue, characterized by amnesia, mental fog—prompting them to leave home for what can amount to months, often adopting another identity, common after combat or natural disaster. The former William was not seen by his family after disappearing from a class trip, which coincided with the explosion in downtown Baltimore, and never looked for them.

The structure of this story is that of an investigative reporter describing the events from the point of view of William/Simon, his mother, his foster parents, his classmates, and the therapist who eventually diagnoses and treats him. Clever, compelling, and all too realistic, this is the kind of near-future science fiction that doesn’t seem fictional at all.

“Kingdom of the Blind” is about artificial intelligence, introducing the concept that non-sentient programs develop awareness, and exploring the uneasy peace humans have with the hardware and software they create and administrate.

“What do you think DMS wants?’ she asked.

He looked puzzled. Or maybe he was really not paying attention. […]

‘If it’s aware,’ she said, ‘what does it want?’

‘Why does it have to want anything?’ he asked.

“Everything wants something,’ Sydney said.

[…] ‘Why did you think it’s conscious?’ Damien said.

‘Why do I think you’re conscious?’ Sydney said. […] ‘But if it’s aware, then it has consciousness.”

So they plan to shut it down and restore from back up. But will that kill DMS? This is a fascinating exploration, but the dialogue is stilted and repetitive, and it takes far too long for the programmers to finish their debate and make their decisions.

“Going to France” is breezy and lyrical, like the disordered actions and thoughts of someone with mental illness or Alzheimer’s, but a kindly one so happy in the dream world there is no reason to face reality. A slipstream treat to read, the style, tone and characterization is reminiscent of those in Ursula K. LeGuin’s collection “Changing Planes.”

‘It was that they all had this thing in common, that they could fly. They had come East across the U.S., flying by day, like hitchhikers or something only not needing rides. The were going to fly to France. Since they couldn’t actually fly when they were sleeping, this was dangerous and yet they felt they had to. They didn’t talk about it. But the Englishman was the most worried. He had been brushed by mortality, and the crisp woman seemed caught up in dealing with logistics and the autistic one was just pure compulsion.”

The only hint of apocalypse comes at the end, and it seems to be those of bystanders rather than a the narrator, who calmly accepts whatever comes her way even while knowing her turn will come.

“Honeymoon” is the first person story of a young woman who ditched her husband even before taking off her wedding gown, after finding he gambled away the money she saved for their trip to Cancun.  Kayla moves on and earns extra money to pay for her Not-A-Honeymoon-Trip with a few girlfriends by participating in clinical trials of investigational drugs and medical treatments.

The result is a bit of a medical thriller as well as a abstract portrait of recovery from a relationship broken before it even had a chance. Again, the ending doesn’t play out into a full-fledged apocalypse, but it’s certainly a personal one, which I found to be a satisfying read.

“The Effect of Centrifugal Forces” is more about the effects of “Avian Prion Disease” than forces of energy, but Ms. McHugh’s technique of blending literary forms such as first person journal entries and musings, with the third person day-to-day details of a person dying from APD, similar to Mad Cow Disease though spread by consuming chicken nuggets, her partner, her former partner and new boyfriend, and her daughter.

Though the details about APD are info dumped into the story early, it ceases to be the main source of conflict, which is, as daughter Irene describes, the fact “that HER family couldn’t get it right because they were a fucking freak show.” The writing style makes this one of my favorites of the collection, and my heart hurt for the characters by the end.

“After the Apocalypse” is my least favorite of the collection, due mainly to the very unsympathetic characters. After “the big Disney World attack where a kazillion people died because of a dirty bomb and then the economy tanked,” the borders of the U.S. are infiltrated by Mexican drug cartels and there is mayhem in the Southwest.

Jane packs her thirteen-year-old daughter Francisca, Franny for short, into the car and they head for Canada. When they run out of gas, they start walking. I lost any glimmer of sympathy for Jane when she doesn’t even think to be concerned about her police officer boyfriend she left behind, probably dead. Nate, the guy she hooks up with along the route, isn’t much more inspiring. It doesn’t get better, the ending lacks closure, and any of the possible scenarios are sickening. But the writing is descriptive and compelling, in the true spirit of literary fiction, with the style of Joyce Carol Oates.

I am impressed with the breadth of Ms. McHugh’s writing, and the depth of emotion and world building detail she captures in this collection. Post apocalyptic fiction is, by necessity, bleak as are some of these stories are, but her well-drawn characters and believable settings raise the standard for even the most well worn tropes such as zombies. There is an undercurrent of ironic humor in the writing that softens the impact, perhaps a bit too much in some cases.

Perhaps Ms. McHugh wanted to show that human beings are resilient and will survive even in the face of misfortune, even outright destruction of the world as we know it. People in crisis do unpleasant, unpalatable things. While these characters might not be ones I’d like to hang out when in crisis—global or individual— they seem real as fiction can get.

“Journey Into the Kingdom” is from M. Rickert’s collection “Holiday”, and is in the form of a nested tales. A young man attending an exhibition of paintings reads, within a black binder labeled “Artist’s Statement” a work titled “An Imitation Life”, a story written as the recollections of a young woman who grew up at a light-house on a desolate island, who encounters magic in the form of her drowned father’s ghost, who frequently visits his widow and daughter, occasionally bringing friends, some of whom have their own tales to tell. The young man reading this is intrigued by both the work and the artist, and tries to forge a relationship with her, for all of the wrong reasons. But are they so wrong? Within the story, the young man finds it a little difficult to tell the difference between fantasy and reality, between imagination and fact, and with that sort of deftly-crafted ambiguity and potential for multiple interpretations by all of the characters as well as the reader, this is much like the sort of psychological thriller that keeps people guessing up until the last plot twist. Yet this isn’t so much a thriller, nor could you really call it horror. It’s more like one of those sad romantic tragedies in which although everyone dies, nonetheless the love is real and beautiful.

Desmond Warzell offers “Wikihistory”, a humorous take on time travel and the people who paradoctor paradoxes. Written as a tongue-in-cheek series of e-mail exchanges, this deals with newcomers to time-traveling of the sort who decide to go back in time and kill Hitler, and the sort of administrators who are grumpy and tired of having to go back and fix other peoples’ mistakes.

“A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel”, by Yoon Ha Lee, provides fascinating vignettes of a few alien star-faring cultures, in which the underlying nature of their culture is briefly examined in the context of their stardrives. Perhaps most interesting is the culture of the unnamed civilization which invented a variation on stardrive which is 100-percent lethal to all life aboard the ships so equipped, though not at all affecting the non-living ship or cargo. Although they possess safe stardrive of their own, they continue to tout their lethal drive as being what it is, and continue to allow volunteers to test whether or not it remains 100 percent effective. This is a very well-written short piece providing odd insights about hypothetical aliens. What insights it might give us about ourselves is left as an exercise for the reader.

Robert Reed gives us “Swingers”, on the subject of aliens who arrive as small information archives, grow human bodies to inhabit while they visit, and then descend to earth to offer advanced gifts of knowledge and technology… if the earth people will Join with them. In orgies.

Mr Reed does an excellent job of conveying the realities of a modern courtship and marriage in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington DC. A neighbor couple become good friends, and seem destined to be more than just friends. Yet what has appeared to the young couple to be merely a flirtation from a swinger couple becomes something more deep and curious as the flirtation is accepted and embraced. At dinner one night, the truth comes out: there are aliens present, negotiating with the Administration, and the neighbor couple is deeply associated to the wheels of government and diplomacy. And an alien diplomat has somehow become enamored with the woman of the young couple, and wants to Join, though for a Joining a minimum of four humans is required. Will she be willing? And what might she be willing to do? Earth’s fate may hang in the balance, but perhaps, so does the fate of her marriage.

If the cardinals waved their red wings at me, and the wolves called me on the phone, I’d be questioning my sanity, but Lewis, the protagonist of “The Wolves of St. Etienne” by A. D. Jameson never does. Wolves love to play Othello, though they occasionally eat the pieces, and they’re always asking Lewis to join them. The wolves are disguised as humans, though never the humans as wolves. And where has Lewis’s family gone? The story ends without resolving any of these questions, leaving the reader (unlike the protagonist) wondering whether this is a tale of madness, or a story about the ultimate fate of humanity.

“The Hedon-Ex Anomaly,” by Jessy Randall, never explains what Hedon-Ex is, or how the rays that emanate from Billy’s head once he takes off his helmet can put an entire school to sleep. Those things are just part of life for the nameless seventh-grade narrator. Being thirteen is hard enough without the Hedon-Ex anomaly turning you into a “whirling dervish.” But there’s an up-side: these dervishes come in pairs, and sometimes your partner is the boy you have a crush on. Could it happen again? “I’m willing to participate in such an experiment in the name of science,” says the narrator.

In “Thou Earth, Thou,” K. M. Ferebee does an exceptional job of matching the language and the pacing of the story to its content. The wealth of domestic detail makes the supernatural elements stand out more vividly.

“Then they sat together on the couch, watching a marathon of a crime drama that neither of them had ever seen. Halfway through, Dunbar fell asleep on Mason’s shoulder. Mason lowered the volume on the TV. [...] It seemed to him that they were the only two living things for miles, and furthermore that all round them darkness was closing. If he moved, if he switched off the TV, they would be marooned.”

The couple have just moved from the city where Mason is at home, out to the country where Dunbar is entirely comfortable working in the garden and writing his thesis. The lushness of the language partners the lushness of the garden, as in:

“Rosemary ran rampant in great spiny outgrowths; tomato plants towered and drooped their sad, untidy leaves. There were masses of flowers, grown tall and rather savage. The smell that rose out of it was vast and wild and heady, a riot of scent somehow indecipherably green.”

The tension builds gradually as the strangenesses of the garden are revealed, until Mason reaches a decision point.

“The Malanesian,” by Sarah Harris Wallman, takes an entirely different approach to story construction. Wallman weaves together two seemingly-unrelated plot lines, a runaway Goth girl and the title character, a live-in maid from far-away Malanesia, contrasting the lives of street kid Lexie and the wealthy but unhappy couple and their daughter. I’ll refrain from describing the ending, but I’m fond of stories that come together with a bang, like closing cymbals. This one made me quite happy.

No, of course Elvis isn’t dead. Elvis will never be dead and gone, but will live on in others. “Elvis in Bloom,” by Karen Heuler, comprises four vignettes that span the childhood, late adulthood, old age, and ripeness of Elvis. He’s an alien? That explains so much. Heuler tells a story that could only happen in the southern US. I’m not entirely comfortable with the voice, as it verges on parody in places. But then again, it’s a story about Elvis, so over-the-top is the only way to go.

In another Southern setting, small-town Missouri, Toby watches his wife Lita’s decline into insanity. “A Sackful of Ramps” is M. K. Hobson‘s retelling of the Rapunzel story. Lita has decided that a neighbor is a witch, but that she will die without the vegetable she craves: a sackful of ramps from the woman’s garden. Toby takes the best care of Lita that he can, so he sets out to get his wife the ramps she requires. This story works in hints of race and class, but the central conflict pulls Toby between two insane women, one he loves and one who holds something he needs. The story ends before the birth, where many Rapunzel retellings begin.

“I’ve always wondered who I was.” Doesn’t everyone? The opening line of “The Mismeasure of Me,” by Carol Emshwiller, probably resonates with everyone, or are there people so secure in themselves they’ve never wondered? The nameless narrator has spent time here and there looking for herself, but never succeeded. Now she’s met an interesting man, and wants to “present him with the real me,” so she tries even harder. She meets a crow man in a dream (or is it?), and ends up defining herself in reference to him, insofar as she manages to figure out who she is at all. Even at the end, she’s more interested in projecting an appealing image than a true one.

Magic can’t resurrect a dead relationship, but in “Music Box,” by David Rowinski, it might be able to nourish the last vestiges. The music box of the title was taken from Janice’s house by mistake when Patrick broke in to recover his own things. This music box is special, and can cause rain, birds, and water; it’s never quite clear whether those are illusory or actual, but they remind Patrick of the best times he spent with Janice. Returning the music box might prompt Janice to think well of Patrick.

The second time I read Joan Aiken’s story “The Sale of Midsummer,” I took notes. Midsummer Village is reputed to only exist for three days a year, at midsummer. A wealthy man wants to buy the village, and a TV crew has come to interview the locals about the legend of the village. It’s midsummer, of course, and the village is just as the name conjures:

“Among the elms grouped in pairs through the village there were also lime trees, and the scent of lime blossom plus cowslip meadow was almost overpowering. The village drowsed in it; a solitary dog barked, a cuckoo called, nobody was about in the street or on the green.”

The reporters talked to five people, and each had a subtly different version of the tale of why the village is only present for three days a year. The emotions of the people telling the stories are fascinatingly at odds with the words they say, and the versions fit together neatly, almost. Nobody is telling the whole truth, not even the interviewer, and the unstated motivations are the most interesting part of the tale.

Two of the stories, “The Sale of Midsummer” and “The Malanesian,” have structures that I very much enjoy: the first uses repeating variations, almost like a logic problem, and the second a sudden resolution. Neither one is easy to do well, but both of these stories succeed. “Thou Earth, Thou” is less interesting structurally, but the use of language fits the building tension beautifully. This issue of LCRW is definitely worth a read.

In “Trois morceaux en forme de mechanika,” by Gord Sellar, the end began when the first mechanika butchered its maker.  Within a few generations humanity’s accomplishments became little more than relics in museums.

I loved the story, which I think can be most accurately described as dystopian steampunk.  It takes place over several hundred years, which is a difficult thing to do in a short story.  The scenes felt like independent vignettes, but there was always a thread that tied them together.

My favorite vignette involved a mechanika that longed to be a pianist.  In a departure from what one traditionally finds in a short story, Sellar included snippets of sheet music and midi recordings of music written by the mechanika.  I don’t know how effective that was for readers who cannot read music.  One can see some musical jokes in the sheet music that are really funny, but only if one plays piano.  I would wager the recording sounds just like someone running their elbows up and down the keyboard to most people.  It was a fun addition to the story, but I think it may have had limited impact.

In “Frozen Voice,” by An Owomoyela, alien longlegs have conquered the world and forced their nearly unpronounceable language on the humans that remain.  Few can explain the longlegs’ desperate fear of books, things they call “frozen voices,” but one family is willing to die to save the books from oblivion.

Owomoyela, a linguist, often brings unique and fresh perspectives to the story based on the way language functions and feels.  The alien invaders, called longlegs by humans, were more complex than one would expect, though I don’t want to elaborate for fear of giving away spoilers.

Lost or orphaned children is a perennially favorite plot component for authors of all genres, and the author of the story chose to use it, as well.  It never seems to get old, as long as it’s used in new ways, and I think that’s because it’s every parent and child’s worst nightmare.  I loved the children’s resourcefulness and strength, and it made for a good read.

August

In “The Conservation of Shadows,” by Yoon Ha Lee, we are given a glimpse of the underworld, a place poor Inanna has seen many times before.

The story is a guide to the afterlife written in second person perspective, which immediately makes it different from the vast majority of fiction.

The author, Yoon Ha Lee, has a sparse style, and I’ve reviewed her work before.  ”Ghostweight,” a story she wrote for the January issue of Clarkesworld, was fantastic.  ”The Conservation of Shadows” fell flat for me.

The author chose an obscure myth as the basis for her tale, if the commenters beneath the story are correct.  As a teacher, I know that if I’ve chosen an obscure song or work of art, I need to provide context if my students are to understand.  In the realm of speculative fiction, it’s entirely up to the author to give this context.  Often, the audience can infer and understand whatever the author has chosen to leave out because the settings feel similar to things they have read in the past.

This is not the case with “The Conservation of Shadows.”  Yoon Ha Lee’s spare style, coupled with an obscure myth and setting, made the story very difficult to follow.  Several phrases were truly brilliant, but constantly being jarred out of the narrative out of sheer confusion made it frustrating to read.

“The Fish of Lijiang,” by Chen Qiufan, was originally written in Chinese and was translated by Ken Liu.  Robotic tour guides, an artificially blue sky, and dog messengers in his hometown rattle a young man’s already fragile state of mind.  Apparently, one can’t can’t go home again.

The author, Chen Quifan, gives us a glimpse of his homelan, China, despite the fact it takes place at what I assume is some point in the future.  Differences in values and customs from Western ideologies are very apparent, which I liked very much.  I often wondered if the author was making a statement about the current waves of change sweeping over China.

It is very easy to empathize with the protagonist.  The technological cause of his health problems was very innovative, as was the mind-bending way the technology warped his worldview.  It was a great read.

September

In “Pack,” by Robert Reed, a desperate drought has brought dogs begging to a man’s castle door.  The dogs’ survival, and probably the man’s, depends on the choices he makes.

Reed, the first-ever winner of the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future award, produced a very unsettling world for the story.  One suspects immediately that those called dogs are not truly dogs, which raises the question as to who or what the owner of the castle might be.  The characters were engaging, and the twists in the plot leaves readers feeling as though they are groping around in the dark, trying to figure out what in the world is going on, a feeling I like to get from a good story.

I found the severity of the drought plausible, but not the relative plenty the resident of the castle enjoys.  The author didn’t specifically say how his technology worked, only that he received his food through his “cultivators.”  “Cultivator” implies farming, which implies the use of water, something his world doesn’t have.  I don’t find technology that can make food appear from nothing to be very believable because of the laws of physics.  Matter can’t be created, only changed.

The ending frustrated me.  The author did such a wonderful job building up tension, only to cut it off ambiguously at its climax.  The arc of the story felt much more like a novel than a short story.  I think I would have loved reading this if it were written as a novella or novel.

In “Signals in the Deep,” by Gred Mellor, a mother chases her son through the stars, spending all she has to find the boy for whom she longs.

I sympathize heartily with the protagonist.  I dread the day my little boy will fly away on his own and wonder if he’ll remember to call or write, especially when he doesn’t need to borrow money.  I also understand her need for feeling firmly grounded in the past.  My students have many fabulous strengths, but looking back isn’t one of them, so I understand her frustrations with her son, Matt.

The technology in the story was interesting, especially the rockbuster Ryan, a human grafted with metal plates.  One also had to admire a woman that risked her financial future and her life to find her son.  There were times it wasn’t especially clear, and I had to go back and reread it, but it wasn’t so bad as to dramatically reduce my enjoyment.

Overall, I believe the July issue was my favorite.  Both stories were original and fresh, and had unusual quirks woven into their texture, which I appreciate.  I’ve mentioned it in a prior review of this magazine, but one of the trends I see with the magazine is a fondness for nameless protagonists.  That may work out fine and dandy for most readers, but it makes my job a great deal harder as I attempt to write plot summaries for the stories.

The editors also seem to favor a sparse, ambiguous style in their stories, which can effectively create a certain mood, but also risks creating confusion and frustration.  I suppose if that’s the writing their regular readers crave, then there is no problem as long as their audience is happy, and happy audiences make for good sales, which I hope Clarkesworld is able to attain.

“Burning Bibles”, by Alan Wall, follows the investigation by UK and US intelligence services into several fires suspected to be linked to terrorists. An undercover agent able to read people’s thought waves is sent to find out what is really going on. The characters are interesting, but the explanations for the thought reader’s abilities didn’t strike me as entirely plausible and the narrative pace is slowed down by big infodumps about the background of the thought-reading power. The story is overly long for the material it covers and the revelation at the end is anti-climactic.

“Shadow Angel”, by Erick Melton, features an international cast of characters. A Romanian starship pilot and his Korean ex-wife make a deal with the ship’s Chinese captain. There are mentions of hyperspheres, angels trapped in hyperspace, flashbacks, and doublecrossing deals, but I found the story very confusing. I never worked out exactly what was going on.

“The Observation Post”, by Allen M. Steele, is an entertaining story about US soldiers aboard a zeppelin in the leadup to the Cuban missile crisis. They are forced to take shelter from a storm on a Caribbean island and encounter a group who they suspect are East German spies. The story is straightforward, but the main character is likeable and the alternate history details are intriguing, making it my favorite story in this issue.

“D.O.C.S”, by Neal Barrett, Jr., is a short, grim piece about survivors getting a visit from the Department of Curative Science. The main character is a boy distressed at the seeming indifference of the doctors to the plight of his family. Bad thing after bad thing happens. None of the characters are at all likeable, nor interesting. The post-apocalyptic setting is generic in nature, resulting in a story that I found little to enjoy in.

“Danilo”, by Carol Emshwiller, is a character piece focused on a woman on a journey to find her husband and her friend who accompanies her. At first the story seemed set in a generic fantasyland. I found it jarring when Wal-Mart was later mentioned and it becomes evident it has a contemporary setting. There is little plot to speak of, but the strength of Emshwiller’s writing and the quirkiness of her characters meant I still enjoyed the story.

“Stalker” by Robert Reed, is well written, has believable characters, and has some interesting ideas about AI, but the violence in the story aimed at women may make some readers uncomfortable. The narrator is a “stalker”, an intelligent computer system designed to watch over its user. Unfortunately its owner is a rapist that takes particular delight in humiliating women. The bulk of the story relates what happens when the rapist meets a young woman more resourceful than his other victims.

The main premise of Ian Creasey‘s “Odor of Sanctity” revolves around the development of devices for the recording and release of smells. The story is set in the Philippines and involves a dying priest. The main character is presented with a difficult dilemma and the implications of the new technology are thoroughly explored, making the story an enjoyable read.

“Grandma Said”, by R. Neube, is set on a human colony world called New Prozac. The main character has taken on a job as a plague cleanser, collecting the bodies of victims of a disease that has devastated many human colonies. Even though it is dealing with a dark subject, the humor isn’t exactly black: in most parts it takes the form of weak puns (the main character Vic is dealing with “vics” or victims) and jokes such as the name of the colony world. Humor is of course, a very personal thing, but I found the humor in the story very uneven, and it just didn’t work for me. The folksiness of some parts of the story (Grandma’s secret remedy for surviving the plague) sometimes seems at odds with the futuristic setting. The future society also seems very much like our own. Even though humans are living on a distanct colony world, they are still spending much of their time in traditional schools and watching TV.

In “Dala Horse”, Michael Swanwick offers us a fairly short story of a far future, told from the viewpoint of a little girl in Sweden who is told by her parents to run to her grandmother’s house in a nearby town to escape some calamity. Five-year-olds might not understand all that much of what’s happening around them, or how strange and wonderful to the readers are the things they might take for granted, yet which may hold surprising secrets for them. We see some classic Swanwickian elements in this piece, such as extremely advanced technology unobtrusively embedded in seemingly everyday artifacts, in more than a slight return to the universes of Vacuum Flowers and Stations of the Tide.

The story is written with the simplicity and attention to process and detail that are required in a good children’s story. Things start at the beginning and move right along in a way a child could follow, in a linear way with little use of such techniques as foreshadowing or flashback, other than in the conversations of the adults. For adults who have read Stations of the Tide, this story might fill in the blanks on some aspects of that tale, but this piece is good as a standalone. In this future, technology is so advanced that it might seem magical to us although to the little girl it is unremarkable. Apparel and utensils, and even toys, provide information and most of them obey orders. Yet this isn’t a perfect world. As smart as are the tools and toys, there are far smarter and more powerful things, and our little girl discovers that some of them can be very dangerous, far more so than even the worst of human beings, one of which she too closely encounters. It’s a fine bedtime story for the inner child in even the most jaded adult technophiles. Best of all, it has something which quite resembles a happy ending.

Michael Bishop offers us a piece called “Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes”, written for David G Hartwell on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. Despite Bishop’s impeccable literary talent, which he brandishes throughout the piece, this is one of those works that forcefully reminds me why I’d usually rather read a collection of stories that won or were in contention for the Hugo, as opposed to those which are admired by other artists for the artistry. This is a “symmetrina”, a work made up of thematically linked shorter narratives, in a rather demanding framework of rules regarding length and person. One of the central narratives appears to be a rather lengthy set-up for a shaggy-dog story, and halfway through it, I was expecting that at any moment I’d see a punchline with some pun so atrocious that I’d have to stomp my laptop to death. Fortunately that punchline failed to materialize. Don’t be dismayed, and fail to read it, though this is far less a work for the reader and far more for the other authors, and even discusses to some degree which audience should be intended to be more impressed. This was written in honor of one of the most influential editors of our time, and might be seen more as a carefully crafted gift than as entertainment for folks who are less concerned about style and more interested in plot. If literary technical mastery interests you, this would be a good piece to study.

At the other end of the spectrum of my preferences in literary SF&F, we have “The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland – For a Little While”, by Catherynne M Valente. Set deep in Fairyland, the plot is a bit slow to appear in this rather long piece. Yet don’t be in such a hurry to get to the plot. This is the sort of piece you savor like a fine tea served piping hot in the manner of old-school teatime, when it was far less about the tea and far more about the ambience of an hour well-spent in the company of good friends in the garden at its peak on a peaceful old estate.There’s a great deal of fine scene-setting to be done in this story before it can be moved forward, and Valente takes her time to set the stage, lovingly and with great skill.

In this masterful piece, eventually the tea is served and the story is developed apace, about a reclusive young lady who wants nothing more than to study her books and learn her magic in a pleasant isolation. Yet when all of Fairyland is summoned by the King to gather for the World’s Foul and the Tithe, as with all else, she too must attend. During her journey she meets and falls in with some fascinating Folk and even demi-gods and their leonine steeds, all gathering at the world’s fair of Fairyland, the World’s Foul. It’s all the more troubling to her that nobody seems to know, or to be willing to tell her, what exactly is this Tithe. The general consensus seems to be that it will be something horrid but it turns out to be actually worse. How can all of this be resolved?

This is, in many ways, the sort of tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, though set down with far greater detail to literary merits. Valente’s wordsmithery here is exquisite as is her deep and broad knowledge of the Fairy Folk of all sorts. I found it to be slow reading, mostly because I insisted on lingering over every finely turned phrase and well-constructed allegorical element, savoring the magic down to the last drop.

Q: How do you use your short fiction? What does it do for you that a novel or novella can’t?

A: I love short stories. It’s the long and short of it, because there’s really no other point in writing them. You could just as happily only ever write novels. For me, I love novellas, and they’re the worst thing to write in terms of publishing them or getting paid for them. I was lucky to sell all five novellas I wrote, and I’d love to do more, but . . .  it’s not easy. Short stories, I can do one in a single sitting, when it’s fresh and exciting! You can’t do that with a novel.

Q: How much worldcraft do you do for your short fiction? Do you start with images and go from there? Or is there a lot worked out in the background before you begin writing?

A: I write in different ways. Sometimes I have a cool title and the story flows from that. Sometimes the title only comes with the last sentence. Sometimes I just have a cool first line I want to use. Then I explore where it goes. Sometimes I give stories a lot of thought, a lot of planning before I start. It differs. It’s part of what makes short stories so much fun!

Q: What’s the story of this story, the initial inspiration, the germ of the ideas that became Osama?

A: I was in Dar-es-Salaam (recovering from malaria) in 1998, when the attacks on the American embassies (there and in Nairobi) happened. I actually stayed at the same hotel in Nairobi as the Al-Qaeda bombers. So I saw the attacks firsthand, long before 9/11 made it suddenly relevant. It kept happening, too. Then Sinai 2004. London 2005. It was pretty much impossible not to write about it, when it becomes a part of your life, a part of your own story.

It started off with a short story, “My Travels with Al-Qaeda,” in Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling’s Salon Fantastique anthology. The two characters in that story, a man and a woman, are trapped in a time-loop between those different attacks. So Osama has been germinating for a long time before I took the plunge, as it were, before I said, “I have to try and do this.” This was in Laos, where the book starts and ends. And I suspect the same two characters are in Osama, trapped again.

Q: Describe a little of the “alternative history” setting of Osama. In a world without global terrorism, what does the Osama bin Laden character do? What is his function?

A: In the book, “Osama bin Laden” is a fictional character in a series of pulp novels called Osama bin Laden: Vigilante, written by an obscure pulp novelist called Mike Longshott. And Joe, who is also a sort of pulp detective, is tasked with finding him. It’s “the war on terror” as pulp, but the pulp begins to disintegrate as Joe learns about his world and has to face some difficult realisations.

Q:  How does the increasing fragmentation of the protagonist Joe’s psyche relate to or comment on a post-9/11 worldview?

A: I was fascinated by narrative of the invasion of Iraq, for instance. If you looked at the newspapers, it was “Mr. Bush” vs. “Saddam.” I often wonder what would have happened if it was “George” vs. “Mr. Hussein.”

We were sold the war as a pulp novel. “War on terror!”–“weapons of mass destruction!” It struck me that the West has a fundamental blindness as to the why of what was happening. “Axis of Evil! –you know, it was almost Flash Gordon like. So the book tries to address that, to look at both sides of this “war.” There’s a lot of anger there. There has to be, I think. It’s okay to kill and maim and hurt people in pulp novels. It’s less so in real life.

Q: How did the World SF Blog come about? Obviously, it began as a companion to the book you edited, The Apex Book of World SF. What do you think made it take on a life of its own and why?

A: Well, yes, it began as a companion for the anthology, though the idea was there for a while and, of course, it became its own thing almost immediately. I think no one was doing anything like this, so it was something new, something that could put together very different groups, across geographical spaces, across languages. It’s been very fulfilling doing it.

Q: What does the blog’s tagline “ideologically suspect” encompass?

A: Well, it’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, obviously. Occasionally I’d play with different sub-headings. But I think it has a serious undertone, too: that we’re challenging a lot of the underlying assumptions of “default” sf/f. You know, when James Gunn says, “American science fiction is the base line against which all the other fantastic literatures in languages other than English must be measured”–you know–all other fantastic literature!–then yes, ideologically we’re thousands of miles apart. Physically too, of course! We’re saying, “This isn’t how things are, or should be.” And if it means poking the occasional stick at a bloated and egotistical corpse, then hell, let’s have fun doing it, at least!

Q: What’s the story of the World SF Travel Fund’s genesis?

A: The fund is something I’ve been kicking around for a while, but it was the current list of World Fantasy Awards nominations–particularly, Charles Tan being nominated in the Special Award – Non Professional category – that helped crystallize the idea into a tangible form. I felt–we felt–that Charles deserved to be there for the ceremony, whether he won or lost–and of course he couldn’t go. The stark reality is that he could never afford it.

So we got together–quite a few people–to make this happen. First, to bring Charles over for the World Fantasy Convention and, second, to be able to help other people that way in the future. It’s very exciting being able to do that!

Q: As a board member, what did you do with the fund?

A: I’m essentially the administrator–it basically means doing the grunt work! The board is tasked with deciding on future candidates. There are people ‘behind the scenes’ too–helping with the arrangements and so on. It’s a group effort.

Q: What’s your vision for the ways in which the fund will change the landscape of genre fiction and fandom? Does the fund aim to encourage upcoming authors specifically or fans in general?

A: I don’t think I see it as a ‘fan’ fund, specifically, though who isn’t also a fan? But the idea is that it helps people who might get something out of it, and who also give back to the field a lot–Charles being a prime example of someone who has done so much, and is being recognised for it. If we can help a writer or editor travel, who could never afford it otherwise, then to me we’ve achieved what we set out to do.

Will it “change the landscape of genre fiction and fandom?” I doubt it. But genre needs to become more diverse. It needs to look beyond its borders. And I hope the fund helps that, is part, at least, of that conversation, in however small a way.

The difficult availability of Arabic translations of major science fiction and fantasy novels has always made it problematic for Arabic speakers to read the most important works in the genre. I have written many books in the Dune universe with the son of the original author Frank Herbert; Dune is the single best-selling science fiction novel of all time, and has been made into two films… and yet I don’t believe it has been translated into Arabic. When I visited the UAE, I was surprised to find that many of the science fiction fans I spoke with were not familiar with it.

However, many English books are available for import, and those are widely read. I was very surprised and thrilled to have long and involved conversations with other fans who are so completely dedicated to the genre. We were glad to introduce some of my works to new readers, and most importantly to exchange ideas with people from a different culture, which sparked a lot of story possibilities!

The Dune series of books takes a lot of elements from what seems like the Arabic language and culture – the most famous I imagine would be (Paul) Muad’Dib. Do you research Middle Eastern/Arabic references when creating new names, places etc.?

Frank Herbert originally created Dune, and I know he studied Arabic language, culture, and religions extensively (although I don’t believe he traveled in the Middle East). He was very astute in extrapolating the culture and influence into the far future. For the further Dune books I’ve written with Brian Herbert, I’ve tried to do my research to pick up on the details and way of life; in addition to the UAE, I’ve been to Qatar, Morocco, Turkey, and Egypt. Now, remember, these stories take place tens of thousands of years in the future, across many planets, so the details can’t be exactly the same are they are in everyday modern life, but the flavor should be correct.

If you could give just one piece of advice to budding fiction writers in the region what would it be?

You have more opportunities now than ever before in the history of the genre. Thanks to the wide dissemination of fiction as ebooks, as serialized stories on websites, a writer’s location is no longer any sort of hindrance. Get involved with other writers worldwide on social networking sites, on discussion groups, and submit stories to publications, whether they are based in the US, the UK, or anywhere else. I think fantasy and SF readers are very interested in stories with Muslim/Arabic/Middle-Eastern influences.

What got you started and at what point did you think you could make a career from writing sci-fi and fantasy?

I knew I wanted to be a writer from the time I was a child. I started writing stories when I was eight years old, and just kept writing them. Many people were practical and discouraged me, pointing out that it was extremely unlikely I could ever make a living as a writer. Our cliche is of unemployed, nearly starving writers struggling to get their novel published. But I never gave up. I took a full-time job as a writer of brochures, papers, posters, and articles for a research laboratory, which paid the bills, and I wrote stories and novels in my spare time. Eventually, I did get them published, and they began to earn me money, and within years I became a Real Writer.

What’s the most challenging part of the creative process?

This might sound strange, but the hardest part is finding the blocks of time. I write very large, epic novels with many storylines and countless details of alien or fantasy worlds. But when I’m trying to write, I have so many other obligations, interviews, appearances, phone calls, and the like that it’s nearly impossible to carve out the time and find hours just to concentrate on my big stories. Sometimes, that gets frustrating!

With fantasy in particular it must be difficult to create original characters and story lines-how do you do it and is it important to be ‘original’-i.e. who cares so long as it’s a good story!?

Millions of stories and novels have been published since the beginning of the science fiction genre. I don’t think you can find anything that hasn’t been done in some fashion before. But when I write a story or a novel, I do it in my own personal way, adding my touch to it. I think the most important thing is to tell a compelling story, with plot twists, engaging characters, interesting settings, and maybe something meaningful thematically. If the readers enjoy it, then I have succeeded.

Sci-fi and fantasy continues to grow as a percentage of book sales-what do you think the appeal is to fans?

I think we all like good stories with imaginative settings. When I was a kid, very few mainstream people ever admitted to reading sci-fi and fantasy, but then came the popularity of Lord of the Rings, and Dune, and Star Wars, and suddenly everybody enjoyed it. We love to be entertained by something different than our daily lives-and SF delivers the right stuff.

With the launch of Game of Thrones on HBO and a number of other fantasy series rumoured to be in production, do you expect a boost in new authors/titles?

I certainly hope so. Game of Thrones is about the best I can imagine for a long-standing fantasy series, and it opens many doors, proving that we can create an epic-length story with sustained quality, something much more than a single movie and not designed to be episodic ‘adventure of the week.’ (I only hope someone gets interested in my Saga of Seven Suns!)

It was a process of recommendation, I guess. Gary Wolfe and I were on board from the start, and Gary recommended the folks at UC Riverside as he knew they had an interest in translations. I recommended Kevin Standlee as someone who could help us navigate the processes of setting up a non-profit organization, filing taxes and so on. And then the various Board members recommended people who they thought would make good jurors.

The current plan is that we will rotate jurors, because it is an onerous task that people won’t want to do every year, but we will try to have some continuity from one year to the next.

How did the Awards’ association with UC Riverside come about?

UC Riverside is the home of the Eaton collection, so it is a well-respected center for science fiction research. But it has a particular interest in translation thanks to the presence of Professor George E. Slusser, who is an expert in international literature and is married to a French academic, Danièle Chatelain.

What plans does the board have for the future, in terms of promotions, award ceremonies, etc.? Are you going to have a more formal nomination process next time around other than comments on your website and works that happen to come to the attention of the board and jury?

To a certain extent we are still finding out what works. However, we will continue to be a juried award. We have a public ‘nomination’ process only because it is so hard to find out what translated works are available. The honorable mention in the short form category this year came from a publication that is the Finnish equivalent of the SFWA Bulletin. This year I found a bunch of translated stories in a Croatian fanzine. You won’t find things like that without asking people to suggest works.

As to other plans, we’ll have to wait and see. But we will certainly need to raise money again this year if we want to give cash prizes, which we do.
What are the board’s larger goals, outside of the basic functioning of the awards, in the short term, and in the long run?

In the short term we’ll be very happy to get the awards on a firm footing. That is our primary mission and we don’t have the resources to look beyond that. In the longer term we have a more general remit of promoting interest in translated literature, and there are many things we could do, but we can’t commit to anything at this stage.

How did the board come to decide upon including a short fiction category?

Science fiction and fantasy is one of the few areas of literature where there is still a thriving tradition of short fiction. It would have been foolish of us to ignore it. We could have just opted for one category, as with the Tiptree, but the effort required to translate a novel is so much greater than that to translate short fiction that it would not seem a very fair contest.

What trends do you forsee helping the cross-pollination of sf across languages and cultures? Is translation to English potentially a bridge, even as English’s apparent primacy (for many forms of media as well as books) is potentially evidence of cultural and economic imperialism?

I think that the Internet is doing a wonderful job in promoting connections between SF&F communities around the world. You can see from the increasingly international nature of the Hugo and World Fantasy Award ballots that something very exciting is happening. Lavie Tidhar and Charles Tan, with the World SF blog, are doing a superb job in making our world smaller and more connected.

English is definitely used as a bridge language in translations. That’s a fact here in Europe, not just potential. It is not necessarily ideal, because English is in many ways a very odd language which can be very imprecise and offer a lot of choice to the translator. But from a practical point of view, if you want to translate from, say, Latvian to Portuguese, it is much more likely that you’ll end up going via English than finding someone who knows both languages.

If you were giving advice for editors in the Anglophone marketplace looking to buy translated fiction for their magazines or collections, what would you tell them?

It very much depends who they are. If you are an editor at Tor you not likely to buy translated fiction except via a deal with an agent at a major book fair. A small press magazine, on the other hand, can actively seek out stories in other languages. Albedo One in Ireland has done so by going to conventions such as Eurocon and making friends with writers from other countries. Pierre Gévart, who edits Galaxies in France, uses online translation tools to get a ‘first pass’ view of submitted foreign language stories to decide whether they are worth translating. I’m sure that other editors have their own methods.

Esli Magazine (, “If”) is probably the oldest Russian sf magazine. Founded in 1991, but really distributed since 1993, it has a print run of 14,000 pocket sized issues a year. If you had to compare it to French magazines, Esli is clearly the equivalent of Bifrost or Galaxies, publishing works by both Russian and foreign?mostly English?authors. A new writer has little chance of being found in its pages. That said, the quality of the stories is undeniable making this magazine a must-read for Russian SF fans. We note in passing that in 2006, a good part of several issues were dedicated to French authors. Jean-Claude Dunyach, Roland C. Wagner, Serge Brussolo, and Serge Lehman among them, showing that anything is possible . . . It is also worth mentioning that while Russian publications generally have a relatively poor appearance, the covers of Esli are often quite good. It is possible to subscribe to it in France, but you have to do so through the Finnish site Ruslania.

January-April Favorites

In “Ghostweight,” by Yoon Ha Lee in the January issue, Lisse and the ghost that is stitched to her resurrect a mercenary war kite to wreak vengeance upon the Imperium for the slaughter of her people, though Lisse is unaware of the dangerous ties to the tragedy held by her lifelong ghostly companion.

There was a great deal to love in “Ghostweight.”  The idea of being able to speak to one’s ancestors for guidance is very tantalizing, and the relationship that develops between Lisse and the ghost is very tender.  The author uses the tie between Lisse and her ghost to introduce tremendous tension towards the end of the story, tension that really plucks at the heartstrings.

When Lisse remembers that, “she tried to bite one of her fathers…” the author skillfully kills two birds with one stone.  It implies a much different family norm without weighing the work down with backstory. It also gives the story an exotic feeling.  Cultures all over the world have very different ideas of what constitutes marriage and family, but the vast majority of fiction that I’ve read uses a traditional Western norm.

When one pictures a magical aircraft, a gigantic kite is not something that immediately leaps to mind.  Lee’s descriptions of the war kite made it interesting and easy to visualize.  The way in which it was powered added tension and risk to the story.

In “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees,” by E. Lily Yu in the April issue, a small village boy picks up a rock, throws it at a wasp nest, and unintentionally creates an anarchist revolution in another land.

Handled differently, a story about sentient insects would have fallen flat considering the number of computer-animated movies on the subject.  I feel that if one is going to anthropomorphize an animal, one needs to be very well-acquainted with the animal’s behavior.  I noticed in her author’s biography that she keeps bees.  I think her expertise and understanding of the insects kept the story from becoming campy or cliche.

Her prose was elegant and easy to read.  I loved how a very small action, throwing a rock at a wasp nest, began a sequence of events with tremendous consequences.  The story developed very organically, with a very unexpected ending.

In “Three Oranges,” by D. Elizabeth Wasden in the February issue, Stalin orders his Parisian operative back to Russia, and he must return with the Three Oranges, fruit imbued with mystical power.

“Three Oranges” was magical, and reminded me very much of an Impressionist painting in which detail is hinted and implied rather than being bold and clear.  It also had a very complex protagonist with complicated motivations, further entangled with the madness that ruled Stalinist Russia.

I am developing a fondness for Russian folklore, and I’ve noticed that the stories never really turn out the way one would expect.  For example, the tale of a Russian soldier with an extremely kind heart ends with him wandering the earth for all eternity, unable to enter the gates of heaven, despite having done virtually nothing that would be perceived as evil to the modern Western mind.  The unpredictability of Russian stories makes them entrancing, and “Three Oranges” had the same sort of feel to it. I also noticed that my favorite Russian-born author, Ekaterina Sedia, left a note in the “Three Oranges” comment section.

January-April:  Weaker Stories

I rarely read a story whose premise itself is flimsy.  I liked the premises of ”Matchmaker,” by Erin M. Hartshorn, and “The Book of Phoenix,” by Nnendi Okorafor, but both had problems with the authors’ realization of their ideas.

In “The Book of Phoenix,” from the March issue, Phoenix, a genetically-engineered woman of African descent, is at a loss to explain the suicide of her best friend.  Trapped inside Tower 7, studied and prodded by scientists, Phoenix seeks the source of her friend’s sudden distress, unaware that her search would lead her to live up to the meaning of her name.  Literally.

I found that I liked Phoenix and I could clearly feel her loneliness.  I love the African folklore references and the cosmopolitan nature of Phoenix’s understanding of the outside world.  The power she develops is very interesting.  But, a few problems lessened the story’s impact for me.

Her friend seemed like a fairly well-adjusted guy, all things considered, so whatever he saw that made him commit suicide had to have been earth-shattering.  Without giving away any spoilers, let me say that, though horrific, her discovery of the source of his distress was a bit of a disappointment.

Some of the elements of the story were a little clumsy.  Her friend’s method of suicide was eating an apple rather than his usual diet of crushed glass.  To me, that felt a little like the author was saying, “Look, I’m doing the opposite of normal,” rather than creating an unexpected, but understandable reversal of the audience’s expectations.

In “Matchmaker,” in the April issue, a dutiful Jewish daughter visits yet another shadchen (matchmaker) at her mother’s behest.  Her mother fails to mention the matchmaker wasn’t human.

I could personally sympathize with the protagonist’s predicament, having felt the pressure from a very staunch, traditional family member.  I also liked the notion of there being a Jewish community on a spaceport with alien converts.

It had a number of infodumps and was frequently guilty of telling, not showing.  I would have liked to have seen a demonstration as to why the protagonist remained unmarried.  Cultural pressure is clear and well demonstrated, as is her mother’s desire that she marry, but other than talking about her being plain, the lack of demonstration makes it less important to the readers as to whether she finds a mate or not.

Considering a match to a non-human is a critical part of the story, readers really have to feel sorry for the protagonist to be willing to empathize with her mating with a bad-smelling alien she doesn’t love.  To me, the stakes weren’t high enough for the protagonist to consider it.

Another issue subtly undermines the tension, but I think it could have been used to increase it.  Citizens of the space port can select the sex of their babies.  It is not implicitly stated, but is implied that males are more desireable and are selected for.  That should make it even easier for a girl to find a husband when there are more males than females.

I feel the author could have used this to ratchet up the tension even more.  If readers had seen a picture painted of a sympathetic character who has qualities to make her so undesirable to the desperate male population that her only recourse is to consider aliens, I think I would have felt differently about the story.

Full Review:  May Issue

Both short stories provided a good contrast to the fiction that had appeared in previous issues, and they were well written, with unique qualities.

In “Whose Face This Is I Do Not Know,” by Cat Rambo, A.J. finally decides to stop being a wild thing and move back to being a human.  Tragedy forces A.J. to return to its creator to try to stabilize the rapid shifts in its body’s appearance.

Rambo’s protagonist, A.J., is an interesting creation that no pronoun can really describe, but she is female for the duration of the story.  She is a compelling character that’s clearly defined, for the most part.  Rambo also handled a classic sci-fi premise, the escape of a lab experiment, in a new and interesting way.

It was also written in first person perspective in the present tense, which immediately made it stand out from the crowd.  Personally, I feel it is much more difficult to write in the present tense, and the author managed the risk quite well.

I do wish A.J.’s motivations for returning to the lab that created her were a little more clear.  Is it grief?  Seeking something familiar?  A.J.’s feelings once she has gone back to see Dr. Basil are quite understandable, but I’m left thinking, “Why would you go back to that?”  People return to ugly situations all of the time, mostly because the familiar feels better than the unknown.  I just couldn’t quite tell if this was the case for A.J.

In “The Architect of Heaven,” by Jason K. Chapman, Trent Bishop becomes so involved with his work that he doesn’t even notice the woman he loves has slipped away on a ship bound for distant galaxies.  The only way to find her is to build another ship, pushing technology to the limit in order to find her before she dies of old age.

“The Architect of Heaven” had a solid plot, and its characters were very clearly delineated.  I liked the dialogue, which sounded real and also displayed each character’s personality.  It was a new take on a very old story, that of a lost lover, and damage left behind.

Without giving any spoilers, I think it could have been more compelling if we had seen an example of why Irene DeSart had been worth spending an entire fortune and a lifetime to seek.  I do realize, however, that space in short fiction is quite limited, hence the “short,” but it would have been interesting to see even a small demonstration of Irene’s sterling qualities.

Full Review:  June Issue

In fiction, we begin with “Semiramis,” by Genevieve Valentine.  Two spies are stationed at the Svalbard Seed Vault, where seeds from all over the world are stored and protected.  As temperatures warm and the oceans rise, the loss of arable land incites chaos that threatens the safety of the seed vault, making the spies very nervous, indeed.

The story had characters with which readers could relate, and I liked the different relationship between them and how it is expressed.  I love how their relationship develops without them ever talking openly about it, even to themselves.  The tie between the subject matter and the title was good, Semiramis being the queen for whom the Hanging Gardens of Babylon was built.

Despite the good bones in this story, I didn’t feel an urgent need to find out what happened next.  I believe it was because the lead characters, Lise and an unnamed male, saw lots of terrible things happening, but nothing bad actually happens to them.  The author makes the tension rise with the turmoil that erupts around them, and the risk their occupation as spies imposes should put them in more danger than the average Joe.  Adversity is what shows us what characters are made of, and it is very difficult to pull off an interesting story in which characters simply live.

Though the story is about two people, the author’s view of environmental issues is inextricable from the fabric of the tale.  When an author bases a story on a current political controversy, he or she runs the risk of the setting and premise becoming very dated very quickly depending on how the political winds blow.  This may not matter for a short fiction work in a monthly periodical, but it is something to consider.  (I discuss a similar issue regarding a different story here on my blog.)

In “Trickster,” by Mari Ness, a paralyzed, grieving mother is asked by the Trickster God to slay the God of Silver.  Will her quest avenge the death of her child, or has the Trickster manipulated another mortal to join the wrangling games of the gods?

The story was incredible.  It had an ancient Greek view of the gods, impossibly powerful, petty children that ensnare mortals in their squabbles, toying with them without regard for human pain.  The author managed to weave tangled plot threads together in a cohesive and compelling fashion.  The pain of this mortal mother plucks at the heartstrings, and even if I do not condone her actions, I most certainly understand and sympathize.

Clarkesworld Trends

Having read six issues, I noticed a few trends in the magazine. Several Clarkesworld stories did something that made my job much harder.  It is incredibly easy to leave out a protagonist’s name when an author writes in first person.  Sometimes it’s intentional, to create an impression that the protagonist either can’t or doesn’t wish to be noticed.  Writing a story’s description is difficult without a leading character’s name, and having to re-read a story several times to see if I missed the one time a protagonist’s name is mentioned is quite irksome.

I think there are some things it could do really hook readers in a tough marketplace.  The stories are of decent quality, and several of them are fantastic, but the issues do not seem to yet deliver consistently that are addictive page-turners.  Readers have to feel drawn to protagonists.  They have to care for characters that have wide appeal.  The characters have to take tremendous risks that have consequences for themselves and others.  The should be so drawn in that he or she cannot wait to turn the page to find out what happens.

The authors of the nonfiction articles are clearly passionate about their material, but the readers need a clear hook to see why they should care about the article.  I found that as I read I really only felt drawn to the articles on subjects that interested me.  That seems like a natural thing to do, but think of what would happen if readers are sucked into subjects they would not ordinarily have read?  Wow.

The availability of podcasts seems to be a popular feature.  I love the comment section after each story, which makes it fun to discuss the stories with others.  The magazine is available in virtually any format a reader could desire:  print, electronic editions, subscriptions, and yearly anthologies.  I absolutely love the cover art, which will make or break sales for any type of written work.  Overall, I believe Clarkesworld to be a solid periodical.

It often seems that science fiction that doesn’t focus on the ‘harder’ aspect (the more technological and focused on the machine) loses some of its essence by concentrating on history and forgetting about the sciences, but also gains in thematic depth and sensitivity. The same sense of loss, of alienation from mainstream science fiction, occurs when the text is written in a Latin American environment, far from sf written in English. Yet Argentinean author Adolfo Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel has more metaphysical overtones that go beyond both the simple science fiction story and the latinoamerican one.

In the novel, a scientist named Morel creates  a prodigious machine on a deserted island which replicates not only the shape and sound of objects, but volume, touch, and smell. With this machine the creator records a delightful week with his friends enjoying the paradisaical island. These images, with volume and form, are then repeated in an endless cycle and the island is filled by ghostly holograms.

Years later (but much earlier in the novel) the protagonist arrives on the same island fleeing from justice. There he meets the men and women projected by the machine who don’t notice his presence. The simulation of reality is so powerful that without knowing that he is just facing an image, a hologram, he falls in love with Faustina, a beautiful gypsy woman.

The narrator does not suspect that he is deceived by this machine, and he begins to believe that he is invisible or crazy. This makes him feel that he is less real than what the machine has created. Because of errors and malfunctions in the machine, the island starts having multiple suns in the sky at once, people go suddenly absent, and these phenomena urge him to discover the truth.

The central element in this story is not the improbable machine or how it works, or the fantastic elements, but the exploration of the individual, the simulacrum of real life and the implications of becoming a copy of oneself. This  is closer to Philip K. Dick’s fiction than to the work of other latinoamerican authors.

One topic that intrigues me in this work is the immortality born of an image. The person  is not immortal, but his image continues to act and live forever in a continuous loop, in a reflection of the real thing that becomes the thing. This is probably the topic most related to science fiction. If we could copy with total fidelity an object, is it just a copy or does it become the real one?

But at the same time that this duplicity creates a sort of immortality, death can be also caused by the act of copying, as some tribes believed that photographs steal your soul. The island is then inhabited by its own ghost, by the images that the machine creates not just of the people, but the island itself. The reality has becomes less real than fiction: a simulacrum of a simulacrum. Gilles Deleuze said, “What is essential is that we find in these systems no prior identity, no internal resemblance.”

In the end, the science-fiction device inspires a question of what is truly real, and we end seeing our own lives as if they were recordings that will one day  stop, and will begin again in an eternal loop.

A year ago, I wrote an essay [1] about the fact that writers feel free to use Hellenic
contexts (myths, history, location), blithely assuming they know my culture well enough to do so convincingly. I mentioned that contemporary Hellenic literature is virtually unknown in the Anglophone world beyond Elytis, Seféris, Kaváfis and Kazantzákis – all of whom belong to the thirties. In effect, it is fashionable to pronounce Hellenic paradigms passé along with all other ‘Eurocentric’ sources, without ever having read Hellenic literature of any era. Lest you think I’m indulging in special pleading, this lacuna has been noticed and discussed by many non-Hellenes including Roderick Beaton, a formidable literary presence with a truly deep knowledge of my history and culture [2].

In my essay I also stated that Hellás may be home to the best magic realist alive right
now: Evgenía Fakínou. In my estimation, she’s better than Salman Rushdie, Louis de
Bernières, Laura Esquivel, Alice Hoffman or Orhan Pamuk. Her work does not suffer
from the defects that occasionally mar their often outstanding work – Rushdie’s and
Pamuk’s self-congratulatory longueurs and cardboard characters (their women
especially), de Bernières’ lapses into the generic, Esquivel’s by-the-numbers sentimentality, Hoffman’s arch quirkiness. However, Fakínou’s original language and
culture are heavy strikes against her. Only two of her novels have been translated, into
indifferent English (a common fate, because the two languages are as different as two
Indo-European cousins can be).

Fakínou was born in Alexandria in 1945, to working class migrant parents who hailed
from the Dodecanesean island of Symi (a beautiful but stark place, whose cosmopolitan
wandering people earned their living by fishing, sponge diving and with a formidable
merchant marine fleet that played a significant part in the 1821 War of Independence).
Her family returned to Athens when she was a child. She studied graphic arts and
worked for several years as a graphic artist, illustrator and tourist guide. In 1976, she
launched a children’s puppet theater show, Tin Town, which became very successful.
Think politicized and stylistically circumscribed Sesame Street and you get the picture.
She started writing children’s books first, then novels starting in 1982 – twelve so far,
plus a collection of linked stories.

Fakínou’s books have won several awards and are wildly popular in Hellás: none has ever gone out of print, aided by the Hellenic publishers’ sane policy of small runs. Her writing combines three attributes, each of which would make her work addictive by itself: compelling plots, vivid characters and atmospheric settings. She is a mistress of creating sustained polyphony, a skillful puppeteer whose strings never become visible. Each of her characters jumps from the page, fully alive. Each of her books is distinct; she never resorts to clichés or cookie-cutter tactics, never repeats a successful recipe. In some cases she sticks to one narrator, first or third person; in others she switches between viewpoints – all with the illusion of effortlessness that distinguishes great dancers. To top this, Fakínou has what for me is the quintessential gift of the rare true storyteller: her novels are full of echoes. She seamlessly interweaves history and (usually
revisionist) mythology as she roams through six millennia of my people’s ghost-inhabited, monument-strewn cultural landscape. Yet there is no infodumping, no slowing of the plot momentum to flaunt her knowledge. If her readers are not aware of the background she evokes, the stories are still absorbing. But if they are, her stories are
simply unforgettable: they etch themselves on one’s long-term memory and never fade.
To give you a sense of Fakínou, I will briefly outline the two of her novels that have been
translated in English, fully aware that neither my descriptions nor the translations convey the potent magic she weaves.

Astradhení (Fakínou’s first novel; the word is a rare first name that means ‘starbinder’) starts deceptively as YA. We get carried along on the matter-of-fact, stripped-down voice of its narrator, a young girl whose family has been ripped off their island home by misfortune: her little brother’s death devastated them both emotionally and financially. The transplantation to Athens brings the woes that always beset immigrants: the ridiculing of accents and customs, the loneliness and alienation, the forced homogenization into marginal/ized urban living. So far, so common, if beautifully rendered. But a deep river runs underneath the main
narrative: Astradhení has visions of the young priestesses of pre-Olympian Ártemis who
danced around the open-air altar of the goddess wearing bear pelts. To shake us out of
the easy YA classification, the visions don’t bring her insight, solace or strength. At the
close of the story, an acquaintance of her father starts to rape Astradhení. The final
words are her anguished protestations, girl and priestess fused into one.
Astradhení’s visions are rips in the fabric of time, vouchsafing us glimpses of a (real or
half-dreamt) past when women had power, a place as beguiling as – and far less sugarcoated than – Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Avalon. In that world, Astradhení would have been a seer. Rape, embedded in the overt misogynism of both Hellenic and Byzantine traditions, is a bleeding wound in my culture and the book was notable just for bringing it up (a visual parallel happens in Angelópoulos’ film Landscape in the Mist).

To Évdhomo Roúho (The Seventh Garment) tells how women carry history on their shoulders, like the Karyatids or the wives of folk ballads, buried alive so that bridges
would stand. Three generations of women – Maiden, Mother, Crone – gather to perform an ancient ritual over the death of the last man in the family: the belief is that for his spirit
to cross safely to the Otherworld, the women must line up the garments of the family’s seven firstborn sons, one from each generation (underlining the so far unquestioned requirement for sons). The last garment is missing, which triggers the story’s crisis. Through the conversations and first-person narrations of the three women, we get strobelight views of several epochs of Hellenic history: the War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire; the 1922 catastrophic defeat of the Greek army by its Turkish counterpart that uprooted the Hellenes from Asia Minor, an integral part of their homeland for four millennia; the trials of the refugees, who met a mixed welcome on the mainland; the resistance in World War II, callously betrayed by its ostensible allies; and contemporary globalization, with its atomizing effects. The men these women remember and mourn were mostly loved (though rape figures prominently again) but mostly absent: killed, imprisoned, exiled, forced to emigrate. Several myths are woven into this tapestry: Démetra’s tormented search for Persephóne and also the wanderings of Odysséus, fused with folk stories of sea-gods, both pagan and Christian.

Though Fakínou made up the details of the ritual, it is grounded in the mourning customs of the Aegean islands. The women in her story, unsung singers, maintain the traditions while subverting them at the same time. In the end, the grandmother quietly pierces herself and bleeds to death so that her drenched tunic can serve as the missing garment. The chthonic powers accept it. By doing this she becomes an ancestor, a lofty position previously forbidden to women, and heals several rifts at once, though probably briefly. Fakínou’s books are full of vision quests, awakenings, boundary crossings. All have open endings, with their protagonists poised at thresholds on the last page. At the same time, they make their readers whole by reclaiming a past that might have led to an alternative future. Fakínou is a windwalker, a weaver of spider silk. I’m sorry she is not world-famous, but even sorrier for the dreamers who will never get a chance to lose – and find – themselves in her work.

Links and references

[1]
Being Part of Everyone’s Furniture; Or: Appropriate Away!

[2]
Roderick Beaton, Introduction to Modern Greek Literature
Oxford University Press, Revised and Expanded Edition 1999

Accompanying images
Photo of Evgenía Fakínou by Ghiórghos Asimakópoulos
Astradhení cover, first edition
The Seventh Garment cover, first edition

Recently we told you about the appearance of an Ukrainian science fiction that tended to have its own characteristics and was beginning to aquire its own identity in relationship to its Russian sister, a difficult thing when a lot of Ukrainian authors write and are published in Russian.

Some interesting strucures are appearing favouring this new phenomena, most notably a magazine that’s been around for a number of years, UFO – Ukrainian commentator of the Fantastic ().

Several well known names, like Henry Lion Oldie, are to be found in the table of contents, in addition to interviews, reviews, and most importantly, short stories by new and little-known authors. The magazine, which publishes four issues a year, is of course in Ukrainian. Our knowledge of that language not being adequate explains why we haven’t yet subscribed to it. This said, it says a lot that this magazine keeps going when facing its heavyweight Russian counterparts (Esli, Polden XXI vek, etc.), expecially given the fact that most Ukrainians speak and read Russian fluently.

Let us finish with a slight disapointment: the UFO Website, which has been under construction for too long!

To make a complete survey of Russian genre literature, we must of course discuss magazines. This is why we will begin with Mir Fantastiki, the Russian equivalent of SF Mag or Khimaira. This magazine is the most important (in terms of distribution numbers) publication dedicated to sf and fantasy in all its forms (books, films, games, etc.) in Russia and in the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States). It is a monthly publication and it’s table of content features the following columns:
• “Books”: New releases, both domestic and foreign, interviews with writers, upcoming releases, coverage of literary events
• “Videodrom”: News from the film industry, film reviews, etc.
• “Games club”: coverage of video games, board games, etc.
• “Doors to the World”: in-depth articles on illustrators, books, games, etc.
• “Time Machine” and “Entertainment Zone”: humor, contests, puzzles and two unpublished stories.
Every issue also includes a DVD with a complete feature film, and a variety of features (“Videodrom”, “Library”, “Video Games”, “Games”, “Computer World”, “Showroom”, etc.)
The print run of the magazine is 35,500 copies. It also has a Web presence with a very extensive site at: www.mirf.ru

This double issue contains a mix of stories ranging in quality from Kristine Kathryn Rusch‘s excellent novella to a one-joke piece of flash fiction.  As usual for Analog, many of the stories feature space explorers, scientists and engineers.

At the end of “Death & Dancing in New Las Vegas”, by Ernest Hogan, the reader is informed that this is a sequel to a story published in Analog in 2001.  Perhaps if I had read the first story, the sequel would have made more sense.  It is set in the city of New Las Vegas on Mars, and follows the exploits of a mariarchi band entangled in the machinations of a nanotechnology company.  It sounds like the setup for a comedy, but I’m not sure the story is intended as a comedy.  At least, I didn’t find it funny.  The basic premise-that a world-controlling corporation would go out of its way to influence a mariarchi singer didn’t strike me as at all plausible and I found it hard to understand the significance of much of what happened in the story.

“Energized”, by Edward M. Lerner, is part two of a four part serial dealing with the implications of a global energy crisis.  The second part is far more enjoyable than the first part, as things actually happen in this part of the story.  Various factions struggle to control the remaining sources of energy and indulge in a bit of industrial sabotage to ensure they keep their energy monopoly.  There are still too many characters in the story, and Lerner suffers from the practice of dumping a character’s backstory into the narrative as soon as the character is introduced.

“Coordinated Attacks”, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is by far and away the strongest of the stories in this issue.  It follows a police investigation into a murder and bombing on the moon that is somehow connected to a series of political assassinations.  The police details and the world-building are interesting, but it is the complexity of Rusch’s characters that makes the story come alive.  The strength of  the characterization shows that Analog doesn’t have to restrict itself to one-dimensional characters.  Hopefully more of their stories can combine the same mix of hard sf and complex characters.  The only downside is that given the length of “Coordinated Attacks”, there is still a great deal left unexplained at the end.

“Plus C’est la Même Chose”, by Arlan Andrews Sr., is listed as a special feature (the Probability Zero section) rather than a short story, but it is an essentially a flash fiction piece with an awful unfunny one-joke premise.  I thought professional magazines had stopped publishing these kinds of things years ago.

The main character in “One Out of Many”, by Kyle Kirkland, is a scientific regulator dealing with the implications of a new drug that has mind control properties.  The plot moves forward at a reasonable pace, but the characters and world-building are all pretty flat.  A group referred to as “retros” that seek a return to the good, old days play a key role in the story, but they come across more as a plot device than as a believable movement.

“In A Witness to All That Was”, by Scott William Carter, an unhappy husband and wife team of scavengers discovers a lone survivor on an alien world.  The story is let down by a fairly obvious ending, its struggle to rise above the level of melodrama and paper-thin characterization.

“Jak and the Beanstalk” by Richard A. Lovett, is an amusing tale of an obsessed man who decides to walk up the entire length of a space elevator.  At first the story reads like a non-fiction biography, but then the plot takes a sudden and interesting twist.  The details of the climb are integrated into the story in a manner that makes them seem authentic without becoming tedious.  The quirkiness of the main character makes it a fun read.

“Recipe Collecting in the Asteroid Belt,” by Jeremy R. Butler, is a portrait of boredom and frustration which is neither boring nor frustrating to read. Our narrator always wanted to be an asteroid Wrangler, grew up with his head full of romantic images born of watching old movies or press conferences with veteran Wranglers like Smilin’ Joe Ferese. He trained fastidiously and made it to the asteroid belt—only to find that all the adventure and danger had been removed from the Wrangling trade, and his job was essentially to oversee an automated process (“It took four months to accept that I did more to load a dishwasher than to mine my asteroid”). All he could find to relieve the tedium was to experiment with the different types of algae he harvested for food, in the hope of finding something that produced a sensation. . .anything.

Butler’s prose works in two main ways to evoke his protagonist’s situation. The first is using movies as a constant frame of reference: at first, the narrator’s memories of watching old films featuring Wranglers are strongly tied to his excitement at the prospect of becoming a Wrangler himself. So, when he starts referring to movies in the context of his current boredom (“You know the part in the movie when the rogue cop does his taxes? Or the scene when he throws out his back and needs to stay in bed for a week?”), we see how close to his heart the disappointment has reached. Butler’s second key technique is to use the language of the algae recipes (“Chicago involves a 1% decompression to feel the wind”) in a different context towards the end (“Panic, followed. Then Challenge”), to show in a chillingly understated way how desperate the protagonist has become. It rounds off a story which is deceptively straightforward in its use of language.

“Twilight of the Eco-Terrorist,” by Annalee Newitz, begins with an arresting and powerfully described image: the moment at which Long (whose gender is not given) discovers the ability to separate materials into their constituent atoms—the moment when Long’s boyfriend Lawrence’s car disintegrates, and Lawrence along with it. Long becomes a student of materials science, and of course can accomplish far more than the other students; Long also falls in with an environmental protest group, and that disintegration ability proves useful there as a means of getting rid of polluting cars. But the real object of Long’s researches is to find out how to reconstitute materials, which might then allow Long to bring Lawrence back—and, when the opportunity to do so does arise, the consequences are shocking.

Newitz skilfully documents the single-mindedness of her protagonist: the extraordinary lengths to which Long is prepared to go to retrieve Lawrence; the issues that the character was not prepared to deal with in doing so; and the doubts the Long still feels afterwards. On top of this, there’s an elegance in the story’s construction: Long’s self-obsession in pursuing an objective ostensibly for the benefit of someone else (it seems that bringing back Lawrence is more for Long’s benefit than Lawrence’s), finds a mirror in the protest group, who are more concerned with making cool videos of disappearing cars than they are with the state of the planet, and they’ll happily drop that ‘interest’ if it becomes dull. And the whole concept of disintegrating and regenerating Lawrence works with a metaphorical interpretation as well as a literal one—see it, perhaps, as representing the overwhelming desire to hold on to an ex-lover; it’s the ramifications of that kind of desire that Newitz’s story explores so very well.

Will Ludwigsen’s “In Search Of” (first published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in 2008) is a short piece that takes the form of a second-person address to a homicide detective—it’s the answers to all the burning questions he ever had. The tale begins with the big cosmic questions, moves through various conspiracy theories and historical mysteries, before finally focusing on the man’s life. Ludwigsen’s control of his material is very good here: at first, the structure feels fun but rather inconsequential ; but, as the issues get more personal and poignant, we feel their import, and come to see how the protagonist has tried to hide away from the questions closest to his heart. As the narrator puts it: “Your greatest strength is your desire to ask all the big questions. Your greatest weakness is your fear of asking the little ones.” Ludwigsen’s piece is a fine ending to a great set of stories.

In “The Eater,” Michael J. Deluca takes us back to the dawn of civilization, scant generations after the development of human language. The particular tribe on which DeLuca focuses has an Eater who ventures beyond the confines the village to see what can be found there, and a Speaker who names what the Eater finds. Meki, a boy of the tribe, believes that the Speaker’s roles is the most important; but for his sister (our narrator, whose name we do not learn), it’s the Eater’s work which matters, and she wants to be his apprentice. She follows the Eater on one of his journeys, but did not bargain for what she discovers. Deluca evokes a world in which reality is mutable because the mental frameworks for interpreting it are still being formed, and something can be a threat simply because the words don’t exist to describe it. The characters of the narrator and Meki  may be seen as representing opposing views of whether to value intellectual or sensual experience more highly, or of whether or not it’s best to look for the truth and risk the consequences. Both approaches are shown to have their virtues and flaws in a thought-provoking tale.

The title of Eugie Foster’s story, “Biba Jibun,” means “viva the self,” and the tale tells of a girl learning to put herself first, with mixed consequences. When Rinako’s mother leaves, and her father drowns, she is sent from the countryside to live with her aunt, uncle, and cousin in Tokyo. It’s not an easy transition, as Rinako is shunned by pretty much everyone in her new home and school, apart from her uncle. Then she meets a girl Yumi, who has a sideline working as an enjo kosai, a “compensated date,” accompanying a salaryman to dinner in exchange for a hefty chunk of money. Rinako becomes drawn more and more into Yumi’s lifestyle and way of thinking, while the mysterious figure of a rabbit goads Rinako on in her dreams (“Where do good manners get us? Skinned, salted, and laughed at, that’s what.”) Foster’s portrait of Rinako’s development as a character is well drawn, showing the attraction of Yumi’s world to her, but also how she remains ambivalent towards it when her new selfish focus gets her into trouble—and what it finally takes to push Rinako into making a definitive choice. My reservation, however, is that Foster deploys the supernatural in a way that diminishes the importance of her characterization, which is where I think the story’s real power lies.

The first of the issue’s two reprints, Mike Allen’s “The Button Bin” (reproduced from a 2007 issue of Helix), is disquieting in both its style and content. Searching for his missing niece, Allen’s unnamed protagonist tracks down Lenahan, the owner of a craft store, who (Billy Willett tells him) took Denise. Willett was Denise’s boyfriend, who lost his eyes and legs after what the authorities believe to have been a hit-and-run, the same incident in which Denise disappeared. But Willett tells Denise’s uncle something different—about how Lenahan “put us both deep under but he only kept what he wanted from me. Denise, he kept all of her.”  The narrator confronts Lenahan at his shop, and discovers the man’s strange container of buttons, which are far more than they seem. Allen’s second-person narration brings us uncomfortably close to his protagonist, which works to great effect with the imagery of what happens in the story’s closing stages, and also in the shocking way the piece turns on its narrator to reveal that he’s not the man we had been led to believe.

“Ghosts of New York” by Jennifer Pelland (first published in Maurice Broaddus’ and Jerry L. Gordon’s 2010 anthology Dark Faith) begins with a woman jumping to her death from the burning World Trade Center, only to find herself experiencing the fall (and the pain on landing) over and over again. Over time, the woman forgets everything about her life before jumping, and discovers the ghosts of other jumpers from disasters throughout New York history; she can’t talk to her fellow ghosts of the Twin Towers, but can speak to others, and even move about to an extent—but she’s always pulled back to that fall in the end. Pelland’s tale is quietly written, yet atmospherically so: the condition of the jumpers, with the living not being able to see them, becomes a very concrete metaphor for how people such as the protagonist may come to be forgotten; but the woman’s story also becomes one of coming to terms with loss, and the possible consequences of not doing so.

Want to join us? See this page with info for potential coordinators, bureau heads, and reviewers.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Val Grimm, Editor-in-Chief

You assume the role of an inmate within an offworld prison. Surrounded by unfriendly aliens who appear to have a distinct dislike, yet healthy appetite, for humans, your predicament deteriorates when a routine computer scan congratulates you on being selected for scientific experimentation. Under the careful observation of the reptilian Doctor Sliss, you are to be matter-transmitted to a variety of less-than-hospitable worlds where your mission is to quickly bag-and-tag valuable salvage. As might be expected in a game set within a prison, this new role as Doctor  Sliss’s ‘assistant’ ultimately provides an opportunity to escape.

Although you take the guise of the protagonist, the true heroine of this story is your antagonist, Doctor Sliss. It is not difficult to see why this character earned the game its XYZZY award: It is her wonderfully comic and spirited personality, not that of the player, that suffuses the game; it is mostly her motivations and ambitions, not those of the player, that drive the story forward. In many ways, she is the GLaDOS of this particular facility.

And where GLaDOS had her test chambers, Sliss has her offworld missions. These are a series of Rogue-like expeditions where your goal is to wander through a grid of a randomly-generated terrain collecting a series of randomly-generated objects while avoiding (or hunting) some randomly-generated monsters. If this sounds monotonous, it is, which is a shame, for the game’s title implies that perhaps these chapters were originally the heart of the story. Certainly, a great deal of care and programming went into this multiverse, and its inclusion in the game is at first interesting, but it doesn’t take long to discover that there isn’t much to explore here. Landscapes are minimally described, as are the objects for which you hunt, and you can do little with these objects other than tag or examine them. A few monsters lurk about, some even attack you, but their presence tends to be more than a nuisance than a challenge.

A nuisance rather than a challenge best describes the missions as a whole. This might have been alleviated if there had been a secondary goal to them–say, to tag objects that could directly be used to thwart Doctor Sliss or attempt your escape. Instead, the sole purpose of the missions is to trade in the tagged salvage for money. Granted, you can take advantage of these new funds to purchase items necessary to further the story, but the whole affair feels like the text adventure equivalent of a standard computer role-playing grind. Finally, the procedurally generated content resulted in at least two bugs that I encountered: A sauropod, munching on treetops in on an otherwise treeless mountain summit, cannot be examined or tagged; and there is a condor that swoops into an area, only to disappear from the game a turn later without explanation.

Nevertheless, the missions represent the most amount of interactivity and freedom you will have while playing the game. A majority of the other scenes require either (1) typing in a command suggested by someone within the game, or (2) repeating a single action over and over again. For example, to move the beginning of the story forward, you must literally move forward repeatedly, lest you face certain doom from your inmates or other hazards within the prison. It could be argued that this inability to interact is reflective of the confines of imprisonment, but if so, then I would have expected to have more freedom in my actions outside of the prison; this does not turn out to be the case. Instead, with the exception of one act, we are relentlessly pressed onward as if caught in a textual cinematic.

Despite these shortcomings, “Rogue of the Multiverse” remains a fun, entertaining experience, primarily due to the sharp, comedic wit found throughout the game. Again, a majority of this theater stems from the antics of the award-winning Doctor Sliss, but even the other, minor NPCs have distinct personalities, and contribute to the overall comic escapades (and the author isn’t afraid to sink to a little toilet humor, literally). Furthermore, Pacian’s tight prose in both descriptions and dialogue deftly conveys your predicament: You are an alien on an alien world, and there’s trouble afoot. Add to this a variety of game styles–including the aforementioned missions, an action sequence, the Sims-like ability to decorate your prison cell with in-game goods, and some sly character generation reminiscent of the Ultima IV personality test–and “Rogue of the Multiverse” deserves its placement in the Interactive Fiction Competition.

Miranda is a well-drawn viewpoint character. Her thoughts and feelings are a little bit stereotypical, but they feel authentic in spite of that. The use of the selkie myth is relatively light, which works well in the story. It’s mostly about Miranda and her struggles, not about the selkie per se. The selkie myth is not only a metaphor in the story, so it is a spec-fic piece.

“A Letter From Northern Niaro”, by Alter S. Reiss, is set in China in the year 410.  Shen Xa-Xhu narrates it in a letter to his brother Lian. Xa-Xhu works as a bodyguard for a businessman named Huang Ba, and is traveling to Deep Spring village with him on business. Xa-Xhu gets roped into a tiger hunt there. A child has been killed by the tiger by the time Huang Ba’s group arrives, and a servant is missing. The widow Li, with whom they dine and whose servant is the one missing, tells them of tigers who change into humans and gives them silver bullets. The rest of the story concerns the hunt and its aftermath.

I like the setting of the story, and I didn’t mind its epistolary form. There is something stilted about the story though. The narrator’s descriptions are extensive, and while they often add vivid detail, they also sound overdone at times, as if the elder brother is trying to impress the younger (Lian) with his writing, and I found that distracting. I wasn’t sure if the writer was using a slightly stilted style on purpose or not, perhaps as a way to remind that the correspondents were not writing in English? Those who don’t mind the style will enjoy the story. Others might find it hard to get through.

“Chrestomathy”, by Anatoly Belilovsky, is not really a story. It’s more of a postmodern collage piece. It begins with Pushkin’s duel with Georges d’Anthès in 1837, presented as an excerpt from The Reluctant Revolutionist, by Nabokov (not a real book in our world). In this version of the duel, Pushkin survives. In reality, he was mortally wounded and died two days later.

What follows are excerpts from Nabokov’s novel and other invented works by Pushkin, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe, Nikolai Gogol, and others. It’s very confusing. I think there is a thread in it about slavery—several of the excerpts mention it. Perhaps the this story-collage is meant to map Pushkin’s influence on other writers in a new way? I had to do some quick research just to comprehend the first page, and understanding the rest at any depth would require time I’m just not ready to put in. I’m just not fascinated enough by the game that’s being played here. I come to fiction magazines for stories, not po-mo puzzle pieces. If I had more knowledge readily at hand I might have enjoyed this piece more or found it clever instead of tiresome and impenetrable. Maybe.

This is one of those pieces that strains slipstream to a degree I’m not sure I’m comfortable with. To me, it’s a po-mo lit-fic somethingorother that is not really any species of story. Slipstream is supposed to be for stories, narratives of some stripe. At least that’s my take. Whether this piece belongs in this ‘zine is up to the editor of course.  It’s certainly within the fantastic broadly defined. I’m not sure what to call it or where it belongs. I just didn’t find it very much fun. I might have, with a little more help, or a little more humor.

“Patakis were parables, legends of the orisha; often they elaborated on truths revealed in divination. [. . .] A priestess of Oya held the King Shango a prisoner. She raised the dead to guard him, so he was unable to escape into the welcoming arms of Oshun. To free him to love her, Oshun seduced the dead.”

This engaging story features an interesting thematic link to Michael Jackson. The stream of consciousness style, third person, captures the vagaries of Rianne’s thought process as she works magic tinged with hoodoo.

The disjointed tale “Items Found in a Box Belonging to Jonas Connolly,” by Laura E. Price, published 18 April 2011, moves forward, backwards, and sideways. I got a pencil and paper to parse out this tale, which has some elements of steampunk (in the form of a dirigible filled with female sailors who hunt hydras) as well as serious and allegorical thematic elements about women’s power and dedication of to their children and families.

“. . . I peered over the rail to watch my mother fight a hydra. Her figure was small, as they all were, swooping over the monster and between its tentacles. [. . .] There was one spot–its blind spot [. . .] where a large piece of the ship had lodged. My mother maneuvered over there, followed by Mrs. Martin and Carmella Guntersdottir, the noise of Carmella’s flare gun and the explosion of ribbons in the air told us to prepare for survivors. [. . .]  That was your rescue, Mr. Connolly. Yours and your mother’s.”

Like trying to figure out the significance of odd mementos stuffed in a box, deconstruction ruins an otherwise enjoyable read. I suggest allowing it to carry you along on the journey although you’re not sure where you’re going.

“The Thick Night,” by Sunny Moraine, from 2 May 2011, is a compelling science fictional take on genocide and strife in present day Africa. The personification of a robotic aide worker provides insight into the thoughts of one female survivor, as well as a novel idea about ministering to both her physical and psychological needs.

“. . . The foreign men are pointing into the crowd, speaking to each other in a language Mkali can’t understand. More of the things are climbing smoothly down from the back of the truck now, moving with an unearthly grace . . . as the crowd churns in confusion around her, as the things start to move in among them, she sees that flash of chrome, so clean, diamond eyes again meeting hers, and she feels a cool hand at her back, pushing her gently away and out of the crowd, guiding her toward the lane and the trees, carrying a bag of cornmeal easily on its metal-jointed shoulder.”

“Young Love on the Run from the Federal Alien Administration New Mexico Division (1984),” leaves no doubt as to what this story is about, but Grant Stone manages to put a imaginative twist into this Roswell alien yarn with a satisfying ending.

Flashbacks interspersed throughout the otherwise chronological story, in the unusual second person point of view, present tense, that slips in and out of omniscient present, adds a bit of mystery and suspense to what would otherwise be rote and predictable. It also serves well to convey the sense of “the shared mind” and “the dynamic transfer of consciousness.”

“You pull over, push your sunglasses up into your hair, trying to play it cool. . .

‘Hey,’  you say, and she smiles. Looking at her is like looking at the moon. Suddenly your mouth speaks.

‘So where are you going?’ she says. ‘West. Um,’ you swallow. ‘California.’ Your hands are slick on the steering wheel . . .

His hand tingles a little. It’s not an unpleasant sensation. ‘How do you—’

She shrugs and hands over the beer. ‘We all can. It’s just what we do.’

“The Holder’s Black Haired Daughter” by Kelly Jenninngs begins with a storyteller’s musing about three miners who “left their widowed mother back on Dresden and went way out there by the Drift to one of those raw planets, hoping to get rich as Creezus mining lithium or iron in the asteroids . . .”

The Lord Holder’s daughter, central to the youngest miner’s plans to get rich, has some of her own. As do any colonists who travel far from their homes and young women held at the heel of their fathers, their paths are about to converge.

“She is thinking of her friends who left last year, and the year before; she is thinking of her mother, gone so many years now she cannot remember her voice. Forty-six jumps from here to the Core, far too expensive for casual posts. [. . .] Sometimes she thinks she is the only one her age left on the entire planet.”

The storyteller stopped short of a real ending, and I would have liked a bit more than a hint of what was to come.

Also short but packing a wallop is “After All” by Carol Emshwiller, originally in Report to the Men’s Club and Other Stories published in 2002. Featured as one of the monthly reprint stories, with only a whisper of the speculative, “After All” showcases the author’s use of the first person that immerses the reader inside the characters, who are often as older and as wiser as Ms. Emshwiller herself.

This story, like the very similar “A Safe Place to Be” recently reprinted in Tails of Wonder and Imagination, feels almost autobiographical, so real, it’s painful to read.

“You see, this evening I was sitting in the window of my cottage looking out at my piece of desert with squawking quail in it. (Tobacco! Tobacco!) I was thinking to write a story about somebody who needs to change (the best sort of character to write about), and all of a sudden I knew it was me who had to change. Always had been, and I didn’t realize it until that very minute. So I have to be the one to go on a journey, either of discovery or in order to avoid myself.

I won’t pack a lunch. I won’t bring a bottle of water. I know I don’t look my best but I don’t even want to. My hair . . . I don’t want to think about it.”

I suggest you read the story before the introduction by  Gavin Grant for the full impact. The retrospective on Ms. Emshwiller’s works by Niall Harrison, Ursula K. Le Guin, Helen Merrick, Pat Murphy, and Gary K. Wolfe and a summary of her writing style by Karen Joy Fowler explain her influence, great breadth, and depth of her writing better than I ever could.

“After All,” and the tributes paid to Ms. Emshwiller for her vast contribution to the body of science fiction and fantasy writing, are a fitting end to this group of stories in an ezine that provides a forum for writers who use experimental and innovative techniques to bring their imaginations to the page.

In “Intersections,” by Eliza Victoria, two friends, Isaac and Jacob, are trapped in a different version of their own world after accidentally going through a portal. They studied portals in their world and developed a way to predict them, and as they fake their way through new lives in this new world (a world where Isaac exists but Jacob doesn’t), they try to predict when another portal will happen so they can go home. The story starts in the present, then goes back to the beginning of their predicament and works its way forward, but once it reaches the present again, it’s unclear if we’re now before or after the beginning of the story. They don’t quite seem to line up. The story is about being stuck, about waiting and fighting despair, and the story structure reflects that by not having any forward plot momentum once the flashback catches up to the present. It’s just as stuck as Jacob and Isaac. While this makes sense from an stylistic point-of-view, it’s somewhat unsatisfying for the reader, as we’re stuck in the same limbo as the characters, with no resolution in sight.

“The Mermaid’s Eldest Sister,” by Keyan Bowes, is a continuation of the Little Mermaid. Adel is the son of the Little Mermaid, and he meets his mermaid aunt at the edge of the sea in order to learn the truth about his mother. Her story, told to Adel by his aunt, is essentially a retelling of the Hans Christian Andersen tale, condensed and verbalized, and takes up the majority of the plot. When it is complete, Adel is given the same choice as his mother—and makes the same decision. The idea of this story could easily be fleshed out into a much longer format, and so it feels rushed and undervalued here, as if it deserved more. Adel’s choice comes easily to him; there’s no real deliberation or conflict on his part. His answer is immediate and firm. While this underlies his good nature, it pulls the last wind out of the story’s sails. It starts with such promise, the flush of recognition of a childhood staple brushed off and given new life, but once Adel’s sister rises out of the ocean (and this doesn’t seem nearly as impactful for Adel as you’d expect it to be), everything feels … flat. The majority of the story is simply reminding the reader of the details of the Andersen tale, and new, original plot is relegated to a short, almost tension-free segment at the end.

In “Daughters of Kali,” by Neesha Meminger, a young girl is sent from her village to that of her new husband with only a warning from her mother to “rein it in.” What she must rein in, the girl—who remains nameless throughout the story—doesn’t know. Her new home life is rough—though she loves her husband, he is gone for months at a time to do his job, and his blind old aunt and brother are cruel and heartless. Her husband does not stand up for her the way she desires, and she misses the freedom and independence of her village and family. Her rage against her in-laws and even her husband slowly builds, until it finally takes over when her brother-in-law threatens her unborn daughter and the protagonist becomes cloud and smoke, a spirit rather than a woman. It is then that she learns what her mother warned her against: who she truly is. The title of his story kind of gives away the ending, but it also works to add satisfaction, if not surprise, to the reader’s anticipation, as they wait for her nature to kick in. Kali is the goddess of destruction, “the divine combination of love and rage,” who destroys “only in the name of creation.” The story’s voice fits its setting very well, with an oral storytelling feel, and the only drawback is that after we discover the girl’s secret, we don’t get to see her return to her home and put her new knowledge to use—defending herself against her brother-in-law and putting the old aunt in her place. We can assume these things happen, but it would have been fun to see it.

The final story in the collection, “Cosmic Cacoethes,” by Devyani Borade, reads like a Calvin & Hobbes Sunday comic, one of the adventures of Spaceman Spiff. It’s a young girl’s imaginative, more than a little silly, jaunt through space via her ladybug-like spaceship, ASpaceship. On her quick trip to space before dinner, she has tea with the Man in the Moon, admires Orion’s latest catch, and then heads to Mars, which is purple, not red. Everything on Mars is purple, the girl informs us, and everything has the same name. “There seems to be some sort of fierce sentiment amongst all Martians regarding equality and such-like.” Our young heroine even saves the earth from alien invasion using only the spinach she nicked from the kitchen before she left. The voice is casual and colloquial, like the chatty young girl whose story it tells, and the story as a whole has an improvised feel. It’s the kind of thing you could expect to hear a space-obsessed girl shout to her friend as they race around the backyard in cardboard spaceships. An ode to the imagination of children, to the romance and fascination of space, to the days when all we needed to have a grand adventure were our own minds and maybe a simple prop or two, “Cosmic Cacoethes” makes you smile from start to finish.

“In Orbit”, by Katherine Fabian, is a tale of love, and stories, and truth. ‘Love’ is the sturdy, familiar love between a grandfather and his granddaughter, the mature love that could grow in an arranged marriage, the precarious love between a spider and a fly, the tumultuous love that arrives unexpectedly. ‘Stories’ include Dickens, Jewish folktales, the stories that we tell ourselves, and those we meet whether we mean to or not, all encompassed within this single story. And truth? Truth powers the golems.

The plot of this story is as old as stories, but here it is told with loving attention to detail and set in a less-common culture, a culture of of the logical and internally-consistent Jewish magic so very close to science. The author weaves together all the stories and details into an appealing picture of the life of a young Jewish woman.

I had trouble relating to the first-person narrator in the short story “Updates Available” by Ryan Leeds, but that may have been the point. This story is told from the point of view of an autistic child who has bonded with a robot. In the science fictional world Leeds portrays, autism can be repaired by inserting a chip, although this procedure has not yet been done for the protagonist. To my mind, this kind of concept piece, meant to portray a perception outside the mainstream, must be done with a great deal of deftness and care. This story does not meet that goal. On my first reading, I came away with an interpretation very different than my second, because the beginning does not mesh well with the very different brief payoff at the end. The author’s decision to write such a short piece did help, as I don’t think the effect could be carried for much longer without losing the reader’s attention.

The Fifth Law of Robotics” ()
Nikola Kesarovski ()
in the story collection The Fifth Law, Sofia, Otechestvo Publishing House, 1983

(1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
(2) A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
(3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
(4.1) A robot must establish its identity as a robot in all cases. (, Icarus’s Way, by Lyuben Dilov, 1974)
(4.2) A robot must reproduce as long as such reproduction does not interfere with the First or Second or Third Law. (The Fourth Law of Robotics, by Harry Harrison, 1986)
(5) A robot must know it is a robot. (The Fifth Law of Robotics, by Nikola Kesarovski, 1983)
. . .
(101). Everyone who confuses the simpleminded robots inventing new laws of robotics must be executed immediately . . . ( “The Hundred and First Law or Robotics”, by Lyubomir Nikolov).

Nikola Kesarovski has a background in the hard sciences–he got an M.S. in Mathematics before switching to journalism, science popularization, and fiction. The Fifth Law is his first book, a collection of four SF stories, with strong social and psychological bent. Two of them are set in Asimov’s I, Robot universe. One could call them fan fiction, if it were not for the excellent writing and engaging plots, that set his work on a professional level. Of course, professional speculative fiction writers cannot exist in a small country with a limited market, they have to have real jobs. Indeed, for many years Kesarovski worked at various newspapers.

Kesarovski was the second Bulgarian writer to find himself in the footsteps of the Great Asimov. Lyuben Dilov was the first. He defined the Fourth Law in his novel The Trip of Icarus (1974). That novel was rather atypical for its time. Strictly speaking, it is a space opera describing the travels and tribulations of a giant sublight-speed spaceship crew flying to another star. However, the core of the story is the coming-of-age of Zenon Balov, the only child on the ship, who grows lonely, denied the company of his peers. Dilov mentions the Fourth Law almost as an afterthought. Despite that, he makes the effort to justify it as a necessity to avoid misunderstandings that could rise from the attempts of designers to create as humanlike robots as possible.

On the other hand, Kesarovski makes the laws of robotics a cornerstone of his piece. His story belongs to the mystery subgenre, following a murder investigation in flashbacks. The narrator is the son of a long-retired police detective. His father still muses over his last case that left shattered his otherwise successful police career. In a twist, the son is a robopsychologist, a pupil of the venerable Dr. Susan Calvin. By virtue of his job, he is familiar with the old murder case, even more than his father was.

The victim is a seventeen year old genius, a successful writer named Scott Murphy, with three bestsellers under his belt—not the most realistic character, but he is a little more than a a redshirt placeholder in this story. The murder appears random— Murphy is hiding in a small town, away from fans, trying to finish his next novel, when the killer recognizes him in a restaurant. An “impulsive, iron-strong, bone breaking” hug follows, and Murphy falls dead. There are tens of witnesses, but the detective doesn’t need their help, because the killer admits everything. Furthermore, he is shocked and surprised to have murdered his favorite writer.

At first the police officers are surprised too—how this diminutive 1.55-meter man could crush the rib cage of another person—but their shock is soon replaced by horror as they realize that the killer is a robot who failed to declare himself a robot during the first interrogation. He didn’t know. How many other robots, unaware what they really are, walk around? This is a chilling thought, given that robots practically run human civilization, the father points out.

The rest of the story is told in flashback, as father and son sit on a cliff by a river, pretending to fish. The son—whose high position in the robotics industry is implied here, and confirmed in the second related story—tells it, answering the father ‘s unspoken questions.

This is where the story falls somewhat into the familiar tread of the political propaganda, but even such a story can be written with more or less talent and skill, and The Fourth Law has a good measure of both.

I warn the readers of this review that I will reveal its ending because it is unlikely this story will see English translation.

The killing turns out to be accidental, indeed, but the poor robot is just as much a victim as the writer. Once upon a time there was a talented robopsychologist named Dick Gordon. The similarity with the names of Phillip K. Dick and Gordon Dickson may not be coincidental, because Kesarovski’s characters occasionally refer to Dostoevsky and cite Jean-Paul Sartre. Furthermore, two enforcers that appear later in the story suspiciously resemble Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet. It is strange to find postmodern elements in a story written on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain nearly thirty years ago.

Dick Gordon becomes a subject of corporate fight between the civilian Institute of Psychorobotics and the semi-clandestine Institute of Osborne—a military research facility, named after its director. In a rather stereotypical move, Osborne tries to hire Gordon, and when the scientist refuses, the military subjects him to a forced brain surgery to modify his behavior.

The story shifts emphasis here. The Fifth Law suddenly becomes more relevant to Dick himself than the to poor robots. He is faced with a choice that puts his humanity to the test, because the work for Osborne implies creating robotic weapons. Through Dick, the author advocates a pacifist stance.

Unfortunately for the young writer who would die two years later, just before Dick so suddenly left the academy for Osborne’s institute, he started an experiment aimed to give robots a sense of humor. The experiment was brought to a successful conclusion by Gordon’s colleagues, but his modifications remained buried deep in the code, and gave surprising results: thirty thousand robots could think themselves into humans. At the end of the story Dick is gravely ill but nevertheless comes up with a solution defining a new law that forces the robots to know that they are robots.

The robots forget because of a mistake and unfortunate circumstances, much as in a Greek tragedy. Dick Gordon forgets as a result of malicious intent, making him an even more tragic figure.

The Fifth Law builds upon the heritage of Asimov, expanding further the great gedankenexperiments that the Master carried out in his I, Robot series. The plot is a bit artificial, but to some extent the same was true for Asimov’s original works, in which he went to great lengths to create a paradoxical situation, just to be solved by Susan Calvin with great ease.

The first time I read Kesarovski’s stories during my teenage years—they won my attention with the wealth of informative details. They were a true feast for a hungry reader. Later, when I reread them, I noticed his erudition, and precise prose (probably reflecting his scientific background).

Unfortunately, Nikola Kesarovski is no longer with us. Only a few stories remain because his day jobs didn’t let him write much science fiction, but they are all memorable and thought provoking. “The Fifth Law” is accompanied in the collection by three other pieces. “The Red Drop of Blood”, which opens the book, is based on the assumption that intelligence can arise in the nanoworld (although this word is not used), making a drop of blood a Universe for a nano-civilization. “Absolute Harmony” is about the devastating effect of the perfect painting. In “The Revolt” Kesarovski brings back the son of the old detective from “The Fifth Law”, who must face a robot revolution a day after the death of Susan Calvin. Were the robots true gentlemen (we only see male robots in Kesarovski’s stories), waiting for the old lady’s grand exit before starting the fight for their independence? No, it turns out, their timing has more to do with the self-murderous tendencies of the humans than with respect for the greatest robopsychologist of them all.

The story of the Bulgarian laws of robotics would be incomplete without mentioning Lyubomir Nikolov, known for the Bulgarian translations of J. R. R. Tolkien’s books. He made the final contribution—for now—to this series of laws, adding nearly a hundred of them in his sarcastic short story “The Hundred-and-First Law of Robotics” (1989). Maybe it should have been titled “The Last New Law”, because it called for the cancellation of all non-Asimov laws . . .

Asimov didn’t invent robots—the word was coined by the Czech writer Carel ?apek, and the concept of artificial humans dates from antiquity—but he brought the discussion of their obligations and rights to a new level—and gave us a glimpse of the complicated interplay between humans and these new intelligent species. Hundreds or thousands of stories and novels were written on the subject, with or without an explicit connection to the judicial formalism of I, Robot. This formalism has been studied extensively, and more often than not reading about robots we have learned something about ourselves. “The Fifth Law” has carved a noteworthy place in this milieu.

The works of Dilov, Kesarovski, and Nikolov, give Bulgaria the funny distinction of having the most laws of robotics per capita. Ours may not be the most lawful and peaceful country in the world, but surely we know how to impose order upon our robots.

Nikola Kesarovski on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Kesarovski

Lyuben Dilov on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyuben_Dilov

“Energized” by Edward M. Lerner, is the first part of a four-part serialized story.  In the aftermath of a global energy crisis, various scientists and engineers discuss the ramifications of different methods of generating energy.  Given the length of the story there were too many point-of-view characters for my liking.  The plot also often grinds to a halt as we’re treated to expository paragraphs outlining each character’s past misfortunes and the reasons we should feel sympathy for them.  We are also frequently reminded about how bad it is to force engineers to waste their time attending meetings and dealing with petty accounting matters such as getting reimbursed for travel costs when there is an energy crisis.

The main character in “Take One for the Road”, by Jamie Todd Rubin spends his time talking to his neighbor, who happens to be one of the survivors of a manned mission to Mercury.  The story relies on creating suspense by delaying the revelation of what happened on the mission to the end of the story.  The problem is that the delay feels artificial and the revelation itself isn’t that startling.  The story is also hampered by being overly reliant on flashback and by the fact the main character doesn’t do anything except listen to his neighbor talk.

For most of the story, “Kawataro”, by Alec Nevala-Lee, reads more like a Lovecraftian tale complete with a mysterious fishing village populated by taciturn, grim villagers, than like a typical Analog story.  Something is drowning people in a small Japanese village and there are creepy children following the main character.  Towards the end of the story, it turns into a “this is a possible scientific explanation for a monster from legend” story, which for me has been overdone.

“Stone Age”, by Alastair Mayer, has a lot of expository and unnatural-sounding dialogue, but it was my favorite story from the issue.  It has a simple but engaging plot and the most compelling mystery of this issue’s stories.  Researchers uncover an alien tomb on a distant world and complications ensue.

“Citizen-Astronaut”, by David D. Levine, tells the story of a blogger sent to report on the Mars mission.  I’m particularly fond of Levine’s “Tk’tk’tk”, the inventive Hugo-winning short story, but I was disappointed by this one.  The characterization basically consists of listing people’s nationalities and occupations.  The scientists resent the presence of the journalist who is reporting some of their mishaps, but eventually grow to respect his engineering know-how.  I found the story lacking in surprises and had hoped for something more interesting.

Space travel and engineering problems feature prominently in this issue.  None of the stories are standouts, but if you like hard sf, you’ll probably find some elements to enjoy.

1) What big-picture themes are you most interested in right now? History, climate change, borders—this last one being the theme of the Utopiales this year?

No, not the one of the Utopiales, sorry!  Two themes do interest me these days, and they’re actually quite close to each other: the first is how art can be used as a weapon in the future, or as a way to seduce someone (or at least to communicate), and the second is the connection between death and memory. And sometimes, both themes are intertwined in the same text; considering that these days I find myself writing mainly novellas (which means they’re slightly complicated texts, with multiple layers) it allows me to have several simultaneous angles of attack, and in particular to work on an aesthetic adapted to each text. It’s always a little frustrating, in a short story in particular when it’s very short, to be unable to settle on a specific aesthetic, and that’s something I’m interested in.

2) Do you feel that there are specific themes which are particularly interesting to a lot of writers in French science fiction right now, and if so, what are they?

I think that, in fact, there are some French specificities, because France is one of the countries where science fiction was born; in short, science fiction has existed in France for almost one hundred and fifty years, since Jules Verne, and never stopped being here.

However, we went through lots of phases. First, we inherited a lot from artistic currents like surrealism, for example, or the « nouveau roman », and as a consequence we quite often have texts which slip a little bit. There are examples of people like David Calvo, or others, who do really work on that. And there are relations to the flesh, the body, to sensuality and sensoriality—not the sexuality, I really mean sensoriality—which are probably quite different. French texts are often stuffed with smells, noises, tastes: we are people of the food, the touch, the smell. We’re a country of perfumers, of cooks, and it can be seen in our literature ; therefore, in our science fiction, people work on that sensoriality.

And there are also a few debates (which are maybe a bit Franco-French) dealing with our relation to our information, to the way we handle what’s us (what definites us, or characterizes us), what’s our shell, what’s beyond us—for example, the information attached to us, and the way it’s interfaced with the information of other people. I see that kind of thing in a lot of people’s work these days.

And there is also a last specificity, which maybe has its importance: I see more and more authors, modern authors in particular (people like Xavier Mauméjean, Alain Damasio, Catherine Dufour, Jérôme Noirez), writing in an oratory way. What I mean is that they write with a set of intertwined voices; they’re not trying to develop their own unique voice, recognizable, but they try to adapt a set of simultaneous voices to each text, coexisting. It’s a choir, which almost changes with every text, and though they keep a very strong identity, it gives them a muddled, punk, and extremely energic feeling.

Take someone like Sylvie Lainé, who’s got a pure voice, extremely fluent and personal, like Kate Bush singing a capella, and make a comparison with these oratory authors. With them, you have people performing Orfeu Negro with the Clash backdrop. And this interests me. As a musician, I tend to “listen” to a text when I’m reading.

3) What about themes in Francophone sf outside of France, and in other languages?

Well, I think there are specific themes, for example the future of human beings ; I see that in some short stories I’m reading, here and there. People are wondering what’s the human being of the future. They start with the idea that one can fiddle with things; you can work on the body, either genetically, or by cybernetic association, or by any kind of implant, or by chimera and hybridization. And so they ask: what’s the post-human? And the problem is often dealt with from the point of view of the posthuman.

Sometimes, there are extremely radical texts on that subject; I’ve read “Exhalation”, by Ted Chiang, published in the magazine Bifrost one year ago, which was absolutely admirable. There are also works from the Australian author Greg Egan, hard science texts, dealing a lot with this theme.

But I see that almost everywhere; I know lots of books, too, that explore this idea.

As it’s been more than ten years that this theme is very present in the United States, it’s beginning to be so worn out, in a way, that people are writing post-posthuman; which means they’re already wondering what the narration of a story is, when the characters are no more than posthuman entities, with whom we have but a loose connection.

4) Do you feel that there are themes or stylistic approaches which unify French sf culturally, making it unique to an extent that would be clear in a blind ‘taste test’ of translated work in another language?

As far as I’m concerned, I can tell you that yes—considering that I’ve translated lots of books and been published a lot in the United States (more or less thirty of my short stories have been published in the United States or in England). There, the editors publishing my books and who I’m in touch with tell me that I’m actually a little arty. They say: “You don’t hesitate, from time to time, to come out with a beautiful sentence, when it’s not useful; or to do some sort of camera switch to have a look at a piece of the background which is pretty and seems to be useless, and which takes place just because it creates some sort of aesthetic shock—and that shock, afterwards, leads to some wondering.” People tell me that I work with artistic, impressionist, sensorial touches, where Americans would maybe give priority to the strength of the story, to the narration itself, to the adventures, and where English writers would give priority to the rigour of the experimentation.

What I do like in short stories—in the Scottish, Irish short stories in particular, or in Interzone, for example—is really this work on setting up an idea, and dealing with it through multiple angles at the same time. One isn’t politically correct or politically incorrect, one is politically complete. This political, sociological side (on the societal or empire scale), is to me an Anglo-saxon thing. It is, already, Welles facing Jules Verne, the society facing a group of characters.

We, French, we’re politically elsewhere—we’re the badly-behaved students in the back of the classroom, looking through the window and hiding an apple in their bag to nibble it when the teacher isn’t watching. That’s really how I feel.

I don’t know if I can recognize a text which is a priori French, but I think we do have a particular flavor. And by the way, as far as translations are concerned, this flavor sometimes turns against us, because in some countries, and I mean in the United States in particular, editors and people in general are telling us: “You’re losing time.” And we explain to them that no, we’re not losing time, we tell things in a different way.

One of my short stories, which has been published in England and is called “Déchiffrer la Trame” (Unravelling the Thread), did very well in England—but on the other hand, in the United States some people told me: “We don’t understand how, in a ten page long text, you can lose five pages killing a mouse in the dark. For us, it’s completely inconceivable. This is not how it must be done.”

It’s their narrative: you want to say this, and you build up a speech tending toward this. You don’t go about it with impressionist touches until, at some point, the meaning of the painting emerges from the whole thing.

When you’re in front of a white canvas and you’re drawing something, you can start with drawing broad lines, saying: there’ll be a tree, a house—the way kids do. This is, in a way, the American writing; after a few lines, you’ll quickly see what it will picture. Whereas a French will maybe tend to starting in a corner, then in another one, with a touch here and there, and you’ll have to wait for the 3/4 of the painting to be done for something to appear suddenly, almost in one touch, in one sentence—something that will make you think: “Oh, now I’ve got everything.” It all reveals itself, you see.

And that’s more or less how we tend to structure our stories. At least, that’s how I see it, but maybe I’m mistaking.

5) Do you find notable differences or commonalities between French and Québécois science fiction?

Not really, no. What’s interesting is that Québec is on a perpendicular path: although it is North American, it isn’t American. They have taken on some of the characteristics of American literature, that is certain, in particular because they are more in contact with the Americans than with us —but the differences are noticeable. They’re lucky that they read work appearing in English and are in touch with what is going on in anglophone sf.  They are ‘on the cutting edge,’ yet maintain their own identity. But we, the French, partially because we rarely read in English (I am an editor and have the opportunity to do this, but still find it difficult) tend to keep to ourselves. We are clearly behind on work coming out of the U.S. There are lots of people here who have never read of Justina Robson or Paolo Bacigalupi, a really interesting writer who is revolutionizing fiction in the short story genre. In France, nobody will hear about him until the year after his work appears in English.

The Québécois, on the other hand, do not have this delay, and so their themes are much closer to what is going on in Anglophone sf. At the same time, they have a way of telling stories that is not American, that is not horribly literary in the French way, but is a flavor of their own. This is extremely interesting. I’m going to say something kind of horrible here, but I think science fiction is the literature of empire, from the viewpoint of those crushed by empire. I find the most interesting authors aren’t British authors, but Scots and Irish authors, and that American authors are sometimes less interesting than exiled ones, like Gibson in Canada, or Norman Spinrad, who’s on the margins. Not to mention Australians, who are something else altogether. It is a literature of the margins and the frontiers, a literature of those neighboring or subjugated to an empire. Because it is so close to the United States, Québec is often under siege, sometimes by the United States, and sometimes by Anglophone Canada, and as a result writers there have developed a style of science fiction that is very, very remarkable.

The work of Trudel and Meynard, for example,  spans the gamut of global science fiction, You have this guy writing  the most stringently realistic hard sf and you have the magician, the lover, the stylist, the humanist. When they work together—I had the chance to publish them under their pseudonym Laurent McAllister—you read certain passages and you say to yourself “There, that, that’s it. Everything is there.” Sometimes the Québécois are capable of putting anything in their work. There are those like Élisabeth Vonarburg, for example, who emigrated there, and is perhaps even more Québécois than the Québécois, who brings a kind of withdrawn and distancing vision, ironic, yet full of urgency.

Also, they have the marvelous review Solaris, which provides them a shared space to work and reflect. They’re lucky to have that. Although we in France have more venues in which to work together, we don’t have the joiner mentality, the impulse to work collaboratively as a community. I think that the Québécois have developed a unique literature particular to themselves, and I like it very much.

6) Do you think that if the first step is to finish a story, the second is to get it published, and the third if to get it known, the fourth step might be to get it published in English?

Well, I’m going to cause a fuss saying this, but it seems clear that statistically, I am the French science fiction author most published in the United States or the Anglophone world, and this is because I am the richest. I pay for translations, and I have a remarkable translator, Sheryl Curtis. Although she often works pro bono, as a labor of love, she is also (and rightly so) motivated by the need to pay her bills. Because she is a talented translator, my writing gets published. But I don’t recover my outlay before years pass; I must wait three or four years for a story to earn enough money to refund the price of a translation; I don’t really earn any money otherwise. Now, as two of my collections have already been published, and they are released as ebooks, that costs me nothing but allows us to do more, as I can recoup costs more quickly. And I’m less worried about doing that.

Yet at the same time, I ask myself: if I’m going to have a space opera translated by Sheryl Curtis for the Anglophone market, why not just publish it as an ebook myself, and skip the step of looking for a publisher? I’ve submitted tons of manuscripts in the standard form—one hundred and fifty thousand words along with a plot outline—and even if the book is finished, has won awards, etc., in general the publishers’ response is “This is great; when can we see the rest?” And I say, “When I have the contract, I will pay for translation.” And they respond “No, I can’t give you a contract based on the first hundred and fifty thousand words, I need the whole thing. So now you spend ten thousand dollars on a translation, and later I will give you twenty. Or maybe not. It’s your investment.”

They have no one to read a book for them in French, no one.

Then, if you tell them, “Ok, if you like it, can you translate it?” they’ll say that they don’t know of any translators. There are translators, but they focus on legal rather than literary work, and who could blame them, as no one hires them to? The market share of translated foreign language books published in the United States is something like two percent. One must consider the numbers. It is a closed market.

7) And what’s the market share of translated works in francophone publishing?

The market share of translated works in the francophone publishing world is more like fifty percent, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less. But if you think about it, an average francophone reader, who reads fifty books a year (and that’s impressive) is someone who has read works originally published in half a dozen languages over the course of that year without noticing—English, Swedish (if they like thrillers), Italian, Japanese . . .  I read a truly enormous amount, and this includes work in twenty or thirty languages; without any particular effort, I read work from all of the European countries. That’s not just thrillers, either; you’ve got the Danes, Swedish, Norwegians, Finns, the Italians with people like Camilleri, the Germans—not to mention the English, the Scots, the Irish . . . but that is normal for us. Literature has rather a global scale. In the United States, for the last three generations, they’ve read American books written for Americans, by Americans, who haven’t read anything other than American stories.

I have a problem as an editor when I want to translate stories. When I worked for Bragelonne in acquisitions, I simply could not accept certain kinds of sf novels because they took place in a world in which there was one continent, called ‘America’, and a number of uninteresting islands called “Europe”, “Africa”, or “Asia” peopled by uncivilized tribes. And when aliens arrive, they naturally land in New York, Washington, or Atlanta—and sometimes there’s a Mexican, if they want something exotic. And you can’t publish that in France because people will say “So what? There’s nothing for me in that world, so why should I read about it?”

The Canadians, on the other hand, write space operas with Russian, Indian, or Chinese protagonists, set in a joyous melting pot where the entire world speaks a syncretic pidgin that hardly has any relationship with English. Their approach is different.

In this context, trying to get published in English is a wishful fantasy. The only real advantage is that there are lots of allophone editors who will be able to read you if you do so, because they read in English, but not in French. This is the case in the Nordic countries as well as in Japan and China . . . When one has a story included in Year’s Best SF, one has a good chance to see that story translated in dozens of countries. And this is truly marvelous!

translated by Annaïg Houesnard and Val Grimm

Jean-Claude Dunyach, born in 1957, has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics and supercomputing. He works for Airbus in Toulouse (south of France).
He has been writing science fiction since the beginning of the 1980s, and has already published seven novels and eight collections of short stories, garnering the French Science-Fiction award in 1983, four Rosny Ainé Award in 1992 (2), 1998 and 2008, as well as the “Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire” in 1998 and Prix Ozone in 1997. He also writes lyrics for several French singers, which served as an inspiration for one of his novels about a rock and roll singer in a trashed future, touring in Antarctica with a zombie philharmonic orchestra . . .

Eskapix is a hardcover horror/pulp magazine published at least twice a year. The contents are mixed: short stories, feature articles, sometimes comics. The feature articles are usually about horror, rock music, and spectacular crimes. Several of the short story authors are regulars and with a couple exceptions they have to my knowledge not been published elsewhere. The quality of the fiction of this horror/pulp magazine is usually high and the present issue is no exception. The reader is treated to several well written and interesting pieces of short fiction. Since John Ajvide Lindqvist hit the bestseller lists with Let the right one in in 2004, there has been an increased demand for horror fiction in Sweden. More horror authors have been published and as this makes a magazine like Eskapix less of an odd man out among Swedish magazines, it is certainly to be hoped that Eskapix sooner or later will be able to reach a larger audience on the Swedish-speaking market.

In “Pupillen” (The Pupil) by Lova Lovén, blind masseuse Amanda receives a customer who frightens as well as fascinates her. Stylistically the story holds up well, but somehow it fails to engage the reader. Amanda’s visual impairment is skillfully employed as a means to keep the reader unaware of exactly what is happening, but it could have been used more effectively to build suspense and the story would probably have benefited from being told at greater length. Moreover, a change of narrative perspective robs the ending of some of its impact.

After a couple of grim winters, it is not difficult to visualize the enormous pile of snow into which a small child burrows in the beginning of CJ Håkansson’s “Jag bor här” (I live here). Using small, simple strokes Håkansson paints compelling and persuasive portraits of his characters and elegantly, step by step, turns up the sense of horror and uneasiness, and plain wrongness. The ending is a classical one, perhaps a little bit predictable but without marring the overall impression. It’s not easy to make the incredible credible, but Håkansson pulls it off and once more shows that he is an excellent author who could become a contender for the title “Swedish Master of Horror”.

It isn’t difficult to imagine hearing the eponymous band playing in the background when reading “Vid Helvetets portar” (At the Gates of Hell) by Malin Rydén. As a reader, I feel what the protagonist feels, I am carried away. I see the muddy festival where the gig takes place. This is a very elegant and memorable story, with much food for thought. Rydén describes the setting convincingly and manages to capture the mood of the audience, captures what it’s like to listen to music that arouses feelings. The brief prologue—about how the protagonist, a refugee from the former Yugoslavia, discovers the band which later reunites—feels credible and makes for a forceful entry into the story. Moreover, it is appreciated that Rydén leaves it to the reader to decide whether what happened should be taken literally—as a supernatural story—or be interpreted metaphorically.

The writing in Stewe Sundin’s “Parabellum” is beautiful, vibrant, and engaging. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the plot. It starts out well: Benjamin is returning to his parental home by the sea to visit his old friend Ester, and their conversation hints at some terrible event in the past. Promising, but Sundin does not deliver. It never gets either exciting or interesting; the story remains too vague and hovering. The reader can make guesses but would need something more concrete to go on. A great pity, considering the elegant writing, the plot concept, and the inspiring setting.

“Mättnad” (Saturation) by Susanne Samuelsson is an almost fragmented story, with short sentences that suggestively build a disquieting atmosphere and gradually make us understand the turn of events that led up to the present. This ruthless story is also rather vague, but Samuelsson exploits this vagueness and uses it in combination with some chilling clues to enable the reader to create their own image of the terror being depicted. The abrupt, choppy prose is effective and intense, but would probably not have worked if the story had been longer.

The last story of the issue is an “Eskapistle”. For every issue of the magazine, an illustration is published on the magazine’s website—www.eskapixpress.se—and the readers are invited to submit a very brief short story of no more than 300 words inspired by the illustration. The winning eskapistle in this issue is “Sisters of Mercy,” penned by Hanna Svensson. Despite not having many words at her disposal, Svensson manages to serve enough details for us to fill out the gaps and be profoundly touched by the story she tells.

Eskapix volume five contains more than prose fiction—there is, for instance, an article about the king of B-movies, Roger Corman; an essay on how the depiction of vampires has changed over the decades and centuries; and a lyrical poem. On the whole a very impressive issue of a very good magazine. We have had very few science fiction/fantasy/horror magazines in Sweden; it bodes well that Eskapix is this good.

British writers have featured Malaysia in short horror fiction although their stories are set in an exaggerated version of Malaya (as Malaysia was known before its independence in 1957). British broadcaster A. J. Alan (Leslie H. Lambert, 1883 – 1940)  published fanciful horror tales, which include “The Bayang”, an account of black magic cast by ‘vengeful natives’ in the jungles of Pahang.  The most extensive  and famous writing comes from Sir Andrew Caldecott, British civil servant and ex-governor of Singapore and Hong Kong, who retired from the service in 1946 to write fiction.  Both of his published short story collections Not Exactly Ghosts (1947) and Fires Burn Blue (1948) showcase genteel chillers in the style of M. R James set in the fictional Southeast Asian country of Kongea , based on Malaya. Caldecott’s uncluttered prose enhances the unsettling stories by almost convincing the reader of their anecdotal nature. This is most striking in “Fits of the Blues”, an explorer is cursed with a mysterious eye disease after stealing a prized sapphire from a Kongean tribe, and in “Grey Brothers” an Englishman ‘goes native’ in a mountain valley and worships deadly spider phantoms . The sensationalist treatment of Malaysian settings by colonial writers such as Alan and Caldecott tends to endure, as shown by Ann Goring’s 1990 story “Hantu-Hantu” (Malay for ‘ghosts’), which shares a similar insectoid theme with “Grey Brothers”.  In “Hantu-Hantu”, guests at a dinner party encounter a pair of mysterious siblings who are revealed to be spirit cockroaches in human form.

In contrast to its colonial manifestations,  contemporary Malaysian horror in English is a vibrant and dynamic field made up of prolific Malaysian writers. The best known national name is Tunku Halim, who specializes in extreme horror and dark fantasy. Halim debuted in 1997 with a short story collection, The Rape of Martha Teoh and Other Chilling Stories, and a novel, Dark Demon Rising, which was inspired by Endicott’s An Analysis of Malay Magic . In 1999 Halim published more macabre short fiction in BloodHaze: 15 Chilling Tales, that includes the Fellowship of Australian Writers prize-winning metafictional story “This Page is Left Intentionally Blank”. 44 Cemetery Road (MPH Publishing, 2007) compiles the best of Tunku Halim’s stories written from 2000-2006. International readers can find the darkly humorous “Biggest Baddest Bomoh”, a short story from The Rape of Martha Teoh republished in the anthology The Apex Book of World SF (edited by Lavie Tidhar, 2009).

Apart from Tunku Halim’s work, there are other notable Malaysian horror fiction collections written in English. Retired Singaporean minister Othman Wok penned two short story collections that feature supernatural horror stories, The Disused Well (Horizon Books, 2006) and Unseen Occupants and Other Chilling Tales (Horizon Books, 2007). Dark City (Midnight Press, 2006) by Xeus, features horror and suspense stories with a Malaysian urban setting. The most striking of these is the disguised social commentary of “Trashcan Child”, in which the biological mother of an abandoned infant offers its foster mother a supernatural chance for redemption. The popular success of Dark City generated a second volume Dark City 2 (2007).  Horror fiction also earned critical acclaim in The  2009 MPH Alliance Bank National Short Story Writing Competition. One of the shortlisted stories was “The Hunter and the Tigress” by Zed Adam Idris, about an indigenous tribesman who must destroy a shape-shifting spirit that has been imprisoned as a tiger motif painted onto an earthenware plate.

The appearance of new comics provide the latest direction for contemporary Malaysian horror that promises to steer it away from the subjects of occult magic and shape-shifting entities. Graphic artist John Ho offers seven tales of supernatural encounters in his graphic novel Scary Ever After . Malaysian  independent Gilamon Comics launched the  graphic novel series Major Zombie in December 2010. It is a sly dig at the superhero and zombie apocalypse genres that examines the irony of Major Zombie’s position as a member of the undead who protects the living.

The brief history of Malaysian short horror fiction still roots it in the cultural past of myths, occultism and folklore, but there are enough developments and emerging new writers in contemporary Malaysian horror writing to ensure a budding future.

The first story, “Bullet Oracle Instinct” by K.M. Ferebee, is one such story. It takes place in an unnamed country during an unnamed war. Martin is a journalist, and Wednesday is the photographer with whom he shares a room in a dilapidated, shelled-out hotel. The snipers in the building across the street keep the journalists pinned in the hotel, and time passes. The snipers wait and claim their victims. Soon it is only Martin and Wednesday left in this strange, war-riddled Hotel California from which they can never leave. The writing is captivating, but the ambiguity is perhaps a bit too thick at the end. What is the significance of Martin’s lack of dreams? Is he dead, a ghost? Is Wednesday? Is Wednesday Death? It’s left to the reader’s interpretation, which makes it much creepier, but also detracts from the build-up, the climax. The reader is waiting for a reveal, for Martin to put it together and find the answer, and he doesn’t. He’s trapped, still, by snipers and by his inability to grasp the truth, whatever it may be.

Erik T. Johnson’s “Labrusca Cognatus” is a very short story a father tells his son about his own father, a man who spent his life trying to kill himself because he believed that the right death would grant him unlimited power and riches in his next life. One day the narrator finds his father dead, a strange plant growing out of his heart. As he wonders about this plant, why it has no flower, what it means, what it is, he buries it—along with his father’s heart. This is the kind of creepy folktale you feel you’re supposed to learn a lesson from, but can’t quite figure out what it is. What about the grandfather’s quest for another life would cause a flower to grow from his heart, killing him? What seed is this that grows a plant without a flower? The writing is haunting, the imagery evocative, but the theme, like the plant growing from the grandfather’s chest, never fully blooms.

One of the best stories in this issue is “Gutted,” by L.L. Hannett. Erl doesn’t believe in selkies, but everyone around him does, and when his wife goes missing after confessing to an affair, Erl is pulled into searching the seas for her. In a world where fishermen hunt bloodthirsty mermaids and a wife’s absence can be explained—and believed—by revealing her mythological nature, the truth of what happened to Erl’s wife unfolds in a chilling fashion. From the matter-of-fact violence of the fisherwives filleting mermaids to the Poe-esque fate of Erl’s wife, “Gutted” perfectly blends the sordidness of everyday human behavior with the fantastical.

As suggested by its title, “Frosty’s Lament,” by Richard Larson, is told from the point of view of a snowman and even includes the obligatory references to the song. The snowman loves its creator with the fierce, passionate emotion of a lover, and because of this, it hates its creator’s wife. It was created the day the man discovered his wife was cheating on him, and we watch events unfold through the snowman’s eyes. It watches their lives through the windows, built to be a consolation in a dark time, and is cast aside as soon as it’s no longer needed. Unable to move or affect its fate, the snowman thinks about love, life, and existence, and all the while, spring approaches. A surprisingly emotional story—you don’t expect to be able to relate and identify with a snowman, but Frosty’s lament is same as every one of ours: the desire to have our love returned.

In “All the Lonely People,” by E.C. Myers, Sophie can see faders—people who are slowly being worn away by anonymity and depression until they fade into ghosts, trapped forever in the life that erased them in the first place. Sophie has dedicated her life to helping the faders—helping them find release and escape the fate of becoming a ghost. When Sophie spots a fader named Emily on the train and decides to help her, Sophie’s own life unravels in the process. The concept and writing are stellar, as with the rest of the collection, but we don’t know enough about Sophie’s relationship with her husband Rick or see them together enough for the emotional devastation of her losing him to the ghost state to have the effect it could. Sophie’s own fade at the end of the story is more poignant, helped along by some nice storytelling by Myers, in which a supposed plot device—a man who eyes Sophie’s chest on the train to notify the reader that she’s attractive—becomes much more. The title is also a nice reference to the Beatles song “Eleanor Rigby,” who would have been a fader for sure.

“Haniver” by J.J. Irwin is one of the strongest in a collection of strong stories, and with its first-person narration, mystery, and murky morality, it takes on a noir feel. Mel is a haniver, a hybrid human whose DNA has been spliced with that of a snake. Her creator, Vic, made several hanivers, each a different type. A strange family, but a family nonetheless. But after a few accidents involving hanivers result in the loss of human lives, Vic disappears. Mel traces him to his latest laboratory and discovers Vic has created one last haniver, whose purpose is to kill the rest of them. Irwin unravels the world of “Haniver” in an excellent fashion, dropping tiny pieces of information like bread crumbs, enough for the reader to understand precisely is happening without clogging the story with exposition. The only exception might be Vic’s vague relationship with Paul, but Paul feels like a plot device anyway, so his back story isn’t that important.

“Dogs” by Georgina Bruce is a hard story to summarize. It’s told by a woman who has gone crazy—possibly—after the death of her lover and his dog. She suffers from headaches and nightmares, and her favorite thing in the world is a dog mask she made in art therapy. A mask she can no longer remove. With a narrator as unreliable as this one, it’s hard to be sure what happened in the past or what is happening now. And thus, while the writing is certainly lovely, “Dogs” suffers in comparison to the other stellar tales filling the collection.

Stephen Case’s “Barstone” is an American tall tale, in which a giant named Barstone, whose “momma had been a mountain and his father a thunderhead,” falls in love with a schoolteacher slight and fast as quicksilver. Every time she kisses him, Barstone gets slower, until finally he just never moves again. The earth slowly covers him, and Barstone becomes a hill in a park, which the narrator discovers one day while walking his three-legged dog. He talks to Barstone, learning bits of his story, and then one day he meets the granddaughter of the woman Barstone loved and learns the rest. A quietly melancholy story, as Barstone will never move again, despite the narrator’s urging. Case lets you know precisely what he’s up to by referencing Paul Bunyan, and while there’s no great climax or wrap-up, “Barstone” still sparks a flicker of nostalgia in anyone who grew up on stories about Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed.

The collection takes on a lighter tone with “A Window, Clear as a Mirror” by Ferrett Steinmetz. Malcolm and his wife had a deal: If movie star Dakota Jewel ever knocked on their door, Malcolm was allowed to sleep with her. And if Julianne ever came across a magic portal, she was allowed to go through it. Malcolm comes from work one day to discover that his wife has left him—through a magic portal to the Sunlit Lands with a unicorn. All she left him was a magic mirror, but whenever he asks it “Who’s the fairest of them all?” it shows him Dakota Jewel instead of Julianne. In an attempt to understand his wife and why she left, Malcolm joins the Sweetwater Commune, full of people trying to live like the elves in order to attract a magic portal and go to the Sunlit Lands themselves. When that doesn’t work, he realizes Dakota Jewel is the only person who can help him pass through a portal to the Sunlit Lands to find his wife, and what he learns there changes him forever. The story starts off very humorous and tongue-in-cheek, making fun of fantasy novels and the people who obsess over them and wish they could live with the elves. But once Malcolm meets Dakota Jewel and enters the Sunlit Lands, the story’s emotional core takes hold, and the lessons that Malcolm learns are touching and surprisingly wise.

The issue ends on an absurd note with “Four Household Tales (as told by the Giant Squid)” by Poor Mojo’s Giant Squid, four short tales about a giant squid with a taste for human flesh. In the first tale, the giant squid and his student, Abram Lincoln, encounter a beautiful maiden at a broken bridge. In the second, the squid is on the Titanic. In the third, what happens to the giant squid in Vegas stays in Vegas, and in the fourth, the giant squid re-enacts the famous opening scene of Scream with an innocent babysitter. The tales are written in a purposefully convoluted, silly version of old-fashioned English which is trying to be as obtuse as possible. The overall effect is immensely silly despite the people who get eaten, and so while in that sense this story doesn’t fit at all with the rest of the collection, it ends this issue of Shimmer with a smile.

We’ve got more articles coming down the pipeline, including an interview with Jean-Claude Dunyach, an overview of Malaysian horror, coverage of Congrès Boréal 2011, and a review of Swedish magazine Eskapix.

Want to join us? See this page with info for potential coordinators, bureau heads, and reviewers.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Val Grimm, Editor-in-Chief
Elizabeth A. Allen, Editor

All of the six stories are reasonably well written, but overall the May issue failed to invoke much of a sense of wonder for me.  Some of the stories feel dated in style and content compared to fiction being published in other genre markets.

“Ellipses” by Ron Collins is the story of a writer who suspects his foreign neighbors are up to no good after he sees body-shaped mounds in their yard.  The story’s main plot has a Twilight Zone feel, and it includes a sermon at the end of the story on how it would be great if we weren’t so prejudiced and all got along better.  A subplot involving the adoption of a girl from Mexico feels forced into the story in an effort to ram home this point.  I prefer more subtlety in stories.

Given the writing maxim “write what you know,” it’s not surprising writers are overrepresented as a profession for main characters in stories.  Stories about writers are so overdone that I want there to be a legitimate reason to include a writer as a main character.  (An example would be the recent Ghost Writer).  In “Ellipses”, the narrator’s profession doesn’t add much to the story.

“Blind Spot” by Bond Elam is an old-fashioned detective story mixed with future technology such as memory-altering drugs.  I hoped for more of a sense of irony from a story featuring a detective hired by an attractive blonde woman working for a wealthy “crusty old curmudgeon,” but humor is lacking in the story.  The narrator’s voice isn’t strong enough to carry this kind of story and the characterisation of the protagonist struggles to rise to the level of grizzled detective stereotype.  The main character is basically just a device to let the narrative play out.  The memory altering hijinks that ensue are mildly entertaining, but I found the ending and plot twists mechanical and unsurprising, and the story is overly long for its narrative punch.

“Boumee and the Apes” by Ian McHugh is another story based around the idea that it would be nice if we could all get along better.  A clan of intelligent elephant-like creatures encounter some aggressive humanoids and tragedy ensues.  The intelligent elephants are astonished when they come across tool-using apes.  In some ways, “Boumee and the Apes” is a typical first contact tale but the convincingly portrayed details of the elephant creatures’ clan structure help to make the story stand out.  The likeable protagonist also serves to make the story an enjoyable read.

“The Old Man’s Best” by Bud Sparhawk is the tale of a group of men trying to illegally brew beer on a space station near Jupiter.  Consideration of the technical problems associated with such an endeavour might provide interest for some readers, but it would have been nice to get some characterisation (other than which kinds of beer each man liked) as well.  With such a slight premise forming the basis of the story, I had hoped for some humor.  Perhaps references to “damned tea-sipping Indians” and “whiskey-drinking, hardfighting, tough Scots” were intended to be funny, but trotting out tired stereotypes isn’t my definition of innovative comedy.

“The Wolf and the Panther Were Lovers” by Walter L. Kleine was my favorite story from the issue.  It’s a simple tale set in the old West and involves a card hustler encountering more than he expects – a talking wolf and panther – in a remote town.  I enjoyed the story’s understated sense of humor and it manages to reach a resolution without resorting to farce.

“Tower of Worlds” by Rajnar Vajra is the issue’s longest story.  The story’s setting is ruled by a queen intent on performing genetic experiments on her subjects in the hope of breeding a super army.  The protagonist is forced to undergo such an experiment, but is helped to escape by some mysterious allies.  The prose is fine and there are interesting details about the different creatures, but the payoff for the story doesn’t seem worth the length of a novella.  The mystery behind the exact nature of the story’s setting is left unexplained.  The other main problem is that the protagonist is guided through the plot by his allies.  For most of the story, he reacts rather than acts and makes few decisions himself.

All of the stories in the issue feature competent writing, but it was hard for me to get excited about the ideas presented.

This review is an overview of the February and March issues, picking out my favourite stories from the two. In the pieces on which I’ll be focusing here, Cat Rambo tells of siblings with an uneasy relationship, which might or might not involve supernatural forces; Nalo Hopkinson introduces to a girl with a rather extreme love of plants; and Darin Bradley puts a fantastic twist on the lives of US farming families during the Great Depression.

Starting with the February issue, “Close Your Eyes” by Cat Rambo is a story that explores the limitations of stories as a means of describing human experience. Amber and Lewis are sister and brother: he is terminally ill, with a handful of years left to live, if he’s lucky; she is reluctantly looking after him, whilst working on her series of children’s graphic novels; the siblings’ relationship is rather strained. Amber discovers that Lewis is taking shamanism classes in hospital, and is apparently very good at it; a series of strange occurrences leads her to suspect that her brother is seeking to destroy her. Rambo builds tension very effectively when the tale demands it, but overall, the story refuses to settle into a neat shape. “When life started to act like fiction, you expected it to follow fiction’s patterns. If there was no happy ending,” the narration asks, “how would you know when the story was done?” And the answer given is that you wouldn’t—there are two beginnings and two endings, and an unresolved tension over whether anything supernatural is really happening at all.

Also from the February issue (but first published in Claude Lalumière’s and Elise Moser’s 2006 anthology Lust for Life), “A Raggy Dog, a Shaggy Dog” by Nalo Hopkinson is a wonderfully creepy character study. Tammy Griggs is a flower-arranger who likes orchids: she has tattoos of them all over her body, an apartment full of them, and a tendency to water them by setting off the sprinklers (which also leads her to move frequently). Tammy’s first-person narration is addressing someone or something, though exactly who or what is not clear at first. All is gradually revealed, though, as we discover that Tammy is also after a boyfriend, and the bizarre measures she has taken in her search. Hopkinson controls the flow of her story very well, slowly pulling back to uncover a situation that becomes ever stranger and more unsettling.

In the March issue, Darin Bradley’s “The Dust and the Red” is a portrait of two families in the Depression-era US, viewed through a distorting fantastic lens. In the world of Bradley’s story, the health and fortunes of families are bound up in talismanic objects (a wax doll for the Fincher family, say, or a pearl for the family of the protagonist, young Caroline Lindsay), and the social and economic forces at work on those families manifest in much more direct ways. The metaphoric underpinnings of Bradley’s tale are not easily unpacked, and I’m still not sure that I have grasped everything; but there are some strikingly effective scenes, such as when Caroline’s brother Jonah gambles with the Lindsay family’s fortune (as embodied in the pearl), and it literally puts the house in turmoil, rolling over and over on the spot. “The Dust and the Red” is a darkly atmospheric piece that evokes the harshness of its setting, and the effect that has on its characters.

Also in the February and March issues are the stories “Langknech and Tzi-Tzi in the Land of the Mad” by Forrest Aguirre, “The Speaking Bone” by Kat Howard, and “Rats” by Veronica Schanoes; and the poems “House of Shadows” by F.J. Bergmann, “The Witch’s Heart” by Nicole Kornher-Stace, “Quest” by Jessica Wick, and “The King of Cats, the Queen of Wolves,” a collaboration between Kornher-Stace, Mike Allen and Sonya Taaffe.

This is the situation into which Once Upon a Future emerged two years ago. The challenge of compiling an annual anthology of short science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction stories by Israeli writers was taken up by the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy. The anthology replaced the society’s journal, The Tenth Dimension, which until then had come out three times a year and was distributed to the society’s members. Before I continue, I feel obliged to mention that I, myself, am a registered member of the society, and am personally acquainted with a number of the writers. This did not make writing this review easy for me, but I have done my best to be as objective, and where needed, as constructive as I can.

I must admit that when I first heard that the anthology was coming out, I was not quite sure what to expect—especially because I was rather fond of the journal it replaced. However, having read this year’s anthology, it seems to me that the choice to focus on a single annual publication turned out to be a wise one after all. The society’s new agreement with Odyssey Publishing House in the production of the second issue of the anthology seems like a step in the right direction, too, towards establishing its status as a serious anthology.

The twelve stories which made it into the second issue are a mix, ranging from hardcore science fiction to fantasy and even horror. Most of the stories manage to find a voice that is distinctly Israeli, and avoid the clichés that made Israeli science fiction and fantasy very difficult to enjoy in the past. For example, archetypal humoristic or over-patriotic characters which used to frequent many works have been replaced by much more complex and current ones. Also, though some of the works touch on historical events, they do not focus on them but on everyday life. In this regard, the first three stories stand out, as they are the only ones which are not set in Israel and which do not discuss anything particularly Israeli in any way. They are not any less enjoyable, but they do take away from the unifying characteristic which might otherwise have been attained.

In “Generation E: The Emoticon Generation,” by Guy Hasson, a concerned father decides to use his skills as a reporter in order to answer a question that has preoccupied the minds of parents for countless generations: “What are my children up to?” When he ‘borrows’ his fifteen-year-old daughter’s cell phone and tries to read her text messages, he finds them written in long sequences of unintelligible icons. Not only is the protagonist not ‘hip,’ ‘cool’ or in any other way in touch with his daughter’s generation, they do not even seem to be speaking the same language. In an attempt to overcome the generation gap, he sets out to investigate the icons’ meaning. The results are thought-provoking, amusing and disturbing all at once.

Hasson creates the kind of story that sends you to your favorite search engine to make sure that it is just a work of fiction. Part of this effect derives from the author’s choice to write it like a journalistic column. I liked the tone, the flow and the balance of the work. The father’s half sarcastic, half appreciative voice is convincing, amusing and very readable. The social critique was nicely transmitted—clearly but not too forcefully.

Finally, only two things bothered me: as the anthology’s editor wrote in the story’s introduction, “it is set in the United States, but it is relevant everywhere.” I completely agree with this observation, which makes me wonder, why did it have to be set in the US? I grant that it is the author’s prerogative to decide where to set his stories according to his creative vision, and that the narrative works as it is. But watching our own teenagers, here in Israel, I could not help but feel that the story could have been just as successful, and perhaps even more powerful, had it been set here. Having said that, if “Generation E” was written with an international audience in mind Hasson probably made the right choice. Another minor problem is the story’s closing sentence. In my honest opinion, this sentence adds nothing and even seems somewhat awkward. Aside from these two critiques, the piece is a tasty appetizer for the rest of the collection.

“Second Contact,” by Yoav Landsman, is good old-fashioned hardcore science fiction, complete with spaceships, a ‘Starfleet,’ and aliens on the side. It depicts humanity’s first contact with aliens and the ensuing reaction to it, leading up to the second encounter. I do not normally go for hard science fiction. I tend to be easily bored by longish technical descriptions of different technologies, planets, and endless parades of names. I find it even worse in stories written in Hebrew, in which such descriptions very easily become cumbersome. For this reason, it was not without reservations that I began to read this story. As I anticipated, it was not easy to follow. The timeframe was not initially clear, and relatively quick transitions between perspectives, along with liberal use of made-up names, did not help much either. In this respect, I feel the “Second Contact” could have benefited from a little more intrusive editing—especially the kind of trimming that would have helped make a very good story excellent.

Despite the problems noted above, as the plot progressed, the author’s technique became clear, and as it did, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I became thoroughly immersed in the story. Landsman’s take on the all-too-familiar theme of first contact is delightfully grim, and at times, surprisingly vicious—and not in the way one would expect. This, in itself, made me like the story. The futuristic technologies felt believable and well thought out, as did the characters and their distinctly human reaction to the depicted events. Finally, I think literary works are measured not only in terms of their authors’ technique, but in terms of what they leave you with—that is, if they leave you with anything at all. “Second Contact,” stayed with me long after I finished reading it. It made me think. What is more, I suspect it made me think precisely about what the author intended me to think, and I cannot help but appreciate that. As I said, I don’t normally like this kind of sci-fi, and it is highly unlikely I will change my mind. However, I know I will definitely look to see more of Yoav Landsman’s work in the future.

Having enjoyed the previous story as much as I did, I was happy to discover that the next one, “Voices,” by Keren Landsman, takes place in the same world as “Second Contact.” This perhaps has something to do with the fact that Keren and Yoav Landsman happen to be married. I can only imagine what it is like to have two sci-fi writers in one house and have the opportunity to share the creative process in this way.

Though “Voices” picks up, as it were, where the previous story left off, it is very different and stands on its own. Keren Landsman focuses on the human aspects of space communication based on telepathy, as has been established in the previous story. The same fears and grim atmosphere pervade in this story as well, as it depicts the relationship between a spaceship captain and his spouse, a communications officer, in charge of the ship’s telepath and communications. The story, on the whole, is very well written, and the depiction of the communications officer’s bond with the female telepath is especially fascinating and engaging. The question of whether the telepath should be regarded as a sentient human being or merely a part of the ship becomes a moral question, and the author presents it elegantly, avoiding the temptation of choosing sides. Though “Voices” does not put the same emphasis on technology as “Second Contact,” it incorporates it quite seamlessly. In short, “Voices” reads loud and clear.

My only reservation regarding this story has to do with its ending. It is very difficult to explain this without providing spoilers. Therefore, all I will say is that it seems to me that the heroine’s choice, after having gone through everything she did, seems somewhat unlikely. This is a shame, because except for this, it is one of the strongest in the anthology.

As I have stated above, “Generation E,” “Second Contact,” and “Voices” do not present a local perspective, and in this respect, they form a trio which does not quite blend with the rest of the works in this volume. This is not so much a judgment as an observation. Also, the absence of an “Israeli angle” is less marked in the latter two stories, because they are set in space, and their protagonists have no clear nationality. This makes sense because they deal with issues that have to do with the nature of human nature in general. Just to be clear, the question of locale and nationality is not central to the rest of the stories, and yet, each in its own way, they show how science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction can be written and set everywhere, even in Israel.

Yael Furman‘s story, “A Stone in His Hands,” is one of the best works in the anthology if not the best. It tells of a strange museum, populated by living statues, and run by “the curator,” a mysterious artist and art collector. The curator makes everything in the museum operate like clockwork to his own satisfaction, as well as that of the visitors and even the statues. However, the museum’s peaceful routine is interrupted when a suspicious couple decides to investigate the mystery of the lifelike statues, and reveal their secret at any cost.

In the hands of a less capable writer, the story could have very easily fallen into the traps of cliché. Though at times it does come dangerously close to doing so, the author has managed somehow to maneuver elegantly away from all the danger zones, while keeping the plotline flowing steadily towards the surprising conclusion—and it was truly surprising for me. The characters were engaging, and the fact that the living statues are not the story, but merely characters in a narrative, which is itself touching and not unpleasantly macabre added to the work’s overall quality. The imagery in “A Stone in His Hands” makes the narrative so vivid it flows almost like a movie, and I could easily imagine it becoming one. In conclusion, this is the kind of story I would happily read again and again. Well done.

“The Femmedohickey,” by Tom Sivan, is a humble sci-fi story about a young woman who goes with a friend to fix her car at a “do-it-yourself” garage. This (sadly) fictional garage is run by women and equipped with advanced technologies, which allow its customers to fix their cars by themselves without having to be subjected to the dubious pleasure of communicating with male car mechanics. I truly love such stories, because I believe science fiction does not have to be all fireworks, super-everything and epic adventure. It seems to me that science fiction and fantasy writers all too often forget that ninety-nine percent of the time and for ninety-nine percent of any population, life is not epic. This does not mean, however, that it cannot be magical and every bit as satisfying to write and read about.

Besides having a very cool name, Sivan’s story is also well-structured, its energy persistent throughout, and (like the garage it describes) it delivers the required technical information in a clear, precise and friendly manner. The descriptions of the relevant technologies are just sufficient to transmit the idea, without overburdening the readers. All in all, it is a fun, fluent and even empowering read. However, and despite my appreciation for ‘humbler’ stories, I still would have loved to see the author do more with “The Femmedohickey”—perhaps add more tension or dilemma.

Issues like gender roles and perception, as well as women’s self-empowerment, have been at the center of many works, and there is a lot more that can be done with the ideas Sivan presents in the story. It would be nice to see the story expanded upon, and I believe it would work very well as a chapter or a scene in a larger narrative. It might also be worth mentioning that though the author’s feministic message comes through, and though this problem is much more acute for women than for men, there are many men (myself included) who neither feel confident about fixing their cars nor enjoy the experience of a visit to the garage for much the same reasons as women do not.

In “Podix-Joy,” by Raz Liberman, nanotechnology has enabled a company named Podix to develop the ultimate tool to help people understand what makes them happy. At first glance, the product seems ideal, after all, who does not want to be one hundred percent happy? As Liberman’s main character finds out, however, coming to terms with what makes one happy is not always easy.

Once again, though the story is science fiction, it is very down to earth. The application of advanced technologies is manifested in everyday-life, rather than in an-epic-confrontation-between-good-and-evil-which-will-decide-the-future-of-mankind. . . The way in which society reacts to technology and interacts with it is also natural and convincing.

In terms of technique, “Podix-Joy” flowed very well, and was just the right length for its premise. The main ideas were introduced clearly and naturally, were developed nicely and led steadily to the conclusion. The plot itself was amusing and even a little romantic. In my opinion, though, the story could have done just as well with slightly more subtlety and a little less reference to the Reuvenov sisters, which after the third time felt overdone. All in all, a very nice and enjoyable contribution to the anthology.

In “Soul Mates,” by Lili Daie, two six year-old twins, a boy and a girl, suffer from a mysterious medical condition: a shared consciousness. As a result whenever one is awake, the other one falls asleep, and vice versa. The children’s parents have all but given-up hope of finding out the origin of the problem, let alone a solution to it. The story provides a look into the family’s life, and provokes some very interesting questions regarding the nature of identity. It is very distinctly a Lili Daie story, in terms of technique, themes and aesthetic devices. It is rich in language and content, and contains satisfying descriptions of complex ideas and situations. The plot is challenging, intricate and beautifully woven. The reader witnesses how consciousness slips from one protagonist to the other, and how the children handle the situation and fill the blanks in their life. Daie aims very high, cutting herself no slack, and still manages to deliver. It is very plain to see that she has carefully worked out every aspect of the story. As a reader, it feels good to sense that an author has invested so much in you.

The only thing which dampened my enjoyment of “Soul Mates,” is that it became rather clear quite early on with which character the author identified more. This, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing, except that it does take away from the suspense, because it makes the ending a little predictable. Having read some of Daie’s previous publications, I believe she could have avoided this with ease.

“Drops of the Night,” by Hadas Misgav, is beautiful and rather unconventional. In its own way, it is unique in the anthology and adds a very different tone to it. The story is not only set in Jerusalem, but also told by Jerusalem—no mere feat, which Misgav handles very well indeed. Misgav shows the kind of mastery of Hebrew which is sadly too too rare these days. The old and poetic language makes this insight into the thoughts of the city quite satisfying. Despite the beauty of its language, however, I could not help but feel that the story itself could have been further developed. As it is, though it has a very clear conclusion, I finished reading wondering where the rest of it is? What happened next? I mean this both as a critique and as a compliment.

Reading “Since Permission was Granted,” by Hagai Averbuch, I could not help but think of Lovecraft. A man loses his way while wandering the streets of Jerusalem after dark and finds himself the target of supernatural forces, as old as the biblical flood. Averbuch’s use of scripture is convincing and nothing short of fascinating. Also impressive is the eerie atmosphere of the old city, which Averbuch sets up skillfully. Anyone who has ever walked the streets of religious neighborhoods in Jerusalem, and knows first-hand the mysterious alien quality they can posses, would especially get goosebumps. The language of the story is very rich and beautiful, too. Thus, both the locale and the style make this the perfect choice to follow Misgav’s story.

What I did not understand about “Permission” was the author’s choice to use old-fashioned Hebrew in a story which presumably takes place in the present, and involves characters who should be roughly in their thirties. Though this sort of language fits the Lovecraftian quality of the story, there seems to be no call for it in terms of the plot. What I also found problematic was the relative decline in the story’s energy towards the end, where it should be at its strongest. This decline could probably have been solved by shortening the last two scenes before the finale.

“Soup with Croutonies,” by Rotem Baruchin, is a lovely sensitive fantasy story, which everyone who has ever loved their grandparents will identify with and appreciate. I can’t say it is a little story, because there is nothing little about it. It follows the life of the heroine, Roni, from infancy to early adulthood, focusing on her relationship with her grandmother, an immigrant and survivor of the Second World War.

Like Roni’s grandmother, Baruchin skillfully and confidently blends everything in just the right measure – the relationships between family members, the sweetness of childhood and the bitterness of adulthood, Israeli historical events and everyday events which would be familiar to any Israeli, and of course, a smidgen of magic. This is the kind of story you want to take time to read slowly and thoughtfully, to eat rather than gobble up. One of the things I found very appealing about the story was its structure, particularly the transition between the different stages in the protagonist’s life. Baruchin’s approach to magic was also charming. In its own quiet way, the story blurs the line between the self and the magical. Where does the ‘true’ self end and magic begin—if magic is indeed separable from the self for people endowed with magical powers?

As its name hints, Lavie Tidhar‘s story, “The Funny Pages,” is based on comic book motifs, namely, superheroes. In this story, Israel has its own superheroes and villains, and Dr. Meshuge (Dr. Crazy in Yiddish), the megalomaniac evil genius, has come up with a new plan that may change the face of the Middle East forever. It may also undermine the nature of the relationship between super-powered individuals and the rest of society. “The Funny Pages” successfully combines universal and Israeli archetypes in an amusing and provoking manner.

Tidhar’s super-powered heroes and villains combine classic superpowers with original ones, and I especially liked Orchestra, whose super-powers you can probably imagine. Also interesting was the way in which the author describes the relationships between super-powered individuals, who are at once divided into factions and united in their special status. The apparent arbitrariness and futility of the struggle between their two factions, with the Israeli-Arab dispute in the background is provocative, but in a good way. In conclusion, the story flows nicely and without a glitch from start to finish, living one thoughtful yet amused. I wonder what it would be like if it was actually made into a comic book. . .

“Turret,” by Nir Yaniv, takes place in the same world as his novel, The Tel Aviv Dossier, co-written with Lavie Tidhar. To be honest, the story went straight over my head. . . with a tank! That takes some doing. It opens with a collision between a flying tank and a helicopter, and continues with a post-apocalyptic Tel Aviv in which a mountain has sprouted out of nowhere. This story is quite surreal, and I am not at all sure what to make of it. On the one hand, it is very confidently and beautifully written. Its structure is unconventional, with special reference to the time-flow of the plot. The combination of the morbid and the humorous in “Turret” is like candy-flavored poison and grants the story a very special tone and an eerie disorienting quality. People who like their sci-fi or fantasy a little on the dark-side are likely to be interested in this story.

On the other hand, “Turret” does not seem to me to be able to stand on its own. I have not read Tel Aviv Dossier and it is quite possible that if I had, much of what seemed unclear and inconsistent about the story would have been clarified. From a quick websearch it appears like that may be the case—at least to some extent. However, I believe this is not the kind of story that the author can presuppose its audience will have any previous information about its world and the preceding events. My feeling is that with some more intrusive editing the story could have soared like a missile, but in its current form, it simply flies off course and disappears.

Title: Once Upon a Future #2

Editor: Ehud Maimon

Publisher: Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy in cooperation with Odyssey Publishing House

Publication Date: September 2010.

ISBN: 0057400000727

Price: 84 NIS (paperback); Distributed for free to ISFSFF members

Online Price: 42 NIS

The most I could glean is that the Granny’s mind was uploaded into a “house” that contains “the husband” and a bunch of other wives who take turns being embodied while the others exist in some ether. No one dies, even when the pregnant Granny shoots her mother, leaving a bloody mess and seriously disturbing the other wives. The body, or what’s left of it, is preserved for future cloning. Short scenes, which do not seem related to each other, only lend more confusion to one of the most puzzling pieces I’ve read in a long time.

There is a snake and a dog that might be eaten since there isn’t much food in this post apocalyptic world, but the symbolism escapes me. Selkies annoy the dead/undead granny, and there are numerous references to geopolitical conflicts including hearings at the Hague and Somali pirates.

I believe Mr. Grant is trying to portray the Earth as a house full of widows, perhaps goddesses or other mythic creatures who, despite tragic events, try to care for the children, meaning all earthly beings. Or perhaps I’ve totally missed the point.

“The wives had been leaving her alone with the baby. It was nearing Lenkya’s time to reach back into a body and they all wanted to be with her. It was a time of mixed feelings. They loved embodiment but they also enjoyed disembodiment—circuitry-situationalism, as named by Gray—slipping through the house seams, gliding out to ride the farmers, looking after the children.”

[. . .] But here she was, eighty-three years old and still dealing with her mother. It wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to talk about baby names with the husband. She wanted to compare bone loss with her friends. She hadn’t kept up with the obits—who knew who might be dead? Instead it was her mother, always her mother. Dead, but not taking it. Imagining reintegrating two-hundred-plus iterations gave the Granny a headache. Maybe it would keep her mother busy for a while.”

Conversely, “The Yew’s Embrace” by Francesca Forrest, published 21 February 2011, is a tightly written parable with powerful allusions and a strong mythic element. The old king is killed and the conqueror takes the queen as his wife. A nurse is charged with killing the former king’s infant son. During her torture and execution for the crime, she is rescued by the gods and transformed into a yew near the stream where the child was murdered.

The wrath of the gods-and of the nurse wrongly accused-is directed not only toward the real murderer, but also to the new king’s son in a story with no happy ending, but rather a condemnation of war, the taking of innocent life, and the victimization of women and children.

“Who can understand the gods? [. . .] Now birds with red streaks on the men’s shields, and we hope my sister’s supporters will outnumber those of the king. [. . .] We live in a time of miracles, and yet still blood continues to be spilled, and it runs into the cracks in the flagstones.”

“The Last Sophia” by C.S.E. Cooney, published on 7 March 2011, sits thematically  between the odd, largely symbolic meanderings of “Widows of the World” and the powerful, compelling narrative of “The Yew’s Embrace.”

Written in the same elegant yet disjointed style as her “Household Spirits,” recently published in this ezine, Ms. Cooney blends traditional narrative, epistolary and poetic forms in a story of a human  female who “came under enemy enchantment at the soft age of fourteen “because “for some reason it pleased the Gentries that I should breed their changeling babes. [. . .] and breed them I have, though I had little else to do with them. Since then, it’s been fumes and nostrums, narcotics and elixirs.”

In her rare moments of lucidity, Esther Aidan rambles like a psychotic, writes, recites, and has a nightmare-like reunion with her mother and an aunt. She struggles back to her right mind when her newest daughter is born and is faced with the decision whether or not to give the baby away.

Unlike Mr. Grant’s Granny in “Widows of the World,” Ms. Cooney’s Esther Aidan never completely loses touch with reality and the symbolism, though abstract and disjointed, conveys a clear sense of parallels with the struggles and abuses faced by women.

Both “The Yew’s Embrace” and “The Last Sophia” evoke the feminist spirit of the writings of James Tiptree, Jr. In fact, Ms. Cooney’s story is thematically similar and as equally disturbing as “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light,” written by Tiptree (as Racoona Sheldon) herself, in which a mentally unstable young mother is further damaged by the treatments meant to cure her, then blamed, abandoned, and brutalized when she tries to escape.

Childlike voices and omission of question marks and other creative punctuation in “Trouble,” by David M. de Leon, published 14 March 2011, blazes a novel path for an otherwise straightforward story of young love and loss among kids from different planets, one of whom is a relocated orphan.

Though the lack of dialogue tags for characters whose speech patterns were so alike made it difficult at times to figure out who was speaking, there are very evocative portions of narrative including these excerpts:

“She was gone in a week, refugees don’t stay long when they don’t have kin, once they’re healed someone’s got to take care of them and there’s no one on Chauhan to take care of anybody. I should have known and I guess I did. [. . .] I kissed her as she left and it was short and awkward and I don’t know if she just let me because she’d never see me again. It took me hours to tell myself I’d kiss her and I did and after that I didn’t know what it was supposed to mean. [. . .] Just sit with it a little. Sit with it so when its not there anymore you can remember it and you can wonder what it could have been.”

“Rising Lion—The Lion Bows” by Zen Cho, published 21 March 2011, is ostensibly about a Chinese dance troupe engaged by a hotel in Britain to exorcise a ghost in one of the rooms. The omniscient narration distracted me at first, but the performance was so well executed I thoroughly enjoyed the read.

“As the lion danced an enchantment began to fall on the room. It was as though the dance had made the years turn over on themselves all at once, so that the dust of centuries began to settle on the furniture in a matter of minutes. Outlines grew hazy and the room grew dark, matching the blue-black evening sky outside. Only the cabinet glowed golden, the figures on its doors standing out in sharp relief, so vivid that they seemed about to move. [. . .]

The lion blazed through the room. [. . .] it was not human anymore. The spirit that slumbered in the lion head had awakened. It was a single, strange, live creature, and the beat of the drum was the beat of its heart.”

Metaphors pop like Chinese fireworks in this deftly written story. I won’t give away the ending, but like other stories in this installment of Strange Horizons, it jabs at colonialism and historic geopolitical events, yet finishes on an upbeat note.

“Plumage From Pegasus” by Paul Di Filippo is a tale of writerly neuroses that still manages to be funny. In a world in which anyone can write and publish anything, it’s readers that are in short supply. How to cope with a reader shortage? Automate it! I found this story extremely creepy in its implications. The resulting robot personifies the worst parts of Internet culture, where you only ever have to talk to people who agree with you. I also wondered about the Uncanny Valley while reading this: wouldn’t the humanoid robot be physically disturbing as well?

Robert Reed provided a two-story set for this issue. “Stock Photos” must be read first. “The Road Ahead” happens just after, or possibly just before. Regardless, start with “Stock Photos” and see if you can puzzle it out. (You may even want to skip the rest of this paragraph.) These stories describe a system to predict which people will be important in the future, whether for good or evil. What would you do with that knowledge? Support scientific discovery? Stop wars? Or maybe take photos of them, so when they make the news in a month or a year you’ll be poised to make lots of money for your images, tabloid journalism at its most exploitative. But is that all that’s going on? These stories leave many things unanswered, and you’ll be thinking about them for a while.

“Agent of Change” by Steven Popkes and “Fine Green Dust” by Don Webb both consider the effects of climate change. Anthropogenic warming is drastically altering Arctic ecosystems. Popkes describes what might happen if a giant whale-eating reptile is driven from its hiding places in remote Arctic waters through a series of excerpts from military logs, CNN, web sites, and of course the Weekly World News (spotted with Bat Boy!). Several subplots wind through (and under) the techno-epistolary format, but it all comes down to making money in the end.

Webb takes an entirely different angle with his story of life in his home city of Austin after the temperature rises. Nobody is happy there except the ubiquitous green geckos. Maybe it’s time for the reptiles to rule the world again. The most interesting part takes place between the closing and the beginning paragraphs: the first-person narration allows for some playing with time and order. Did the protagonist decline the offer to leave his current life behind by escaping into the heat, or did he try and fail, too old or too inert?

Another pair of stories, by Chet Williamson and Kate Wilhelm, are bound together by music. In “The Final Verse,” a horror tale by Chet Williamson, the fantastic assumes a larger role, and the music has a sinister aspect. The hunt for the never-recorded final verse of an Appalachian murder ballad takes the protagonist deep into the hills. It is written in a folksy uneducated language that fits the narrator, but may still drag on the reader. This story reminded me of Manly Wade Wellman’s work, though the protagonist lacks both Silver John’s honor and his cunning.

Like most of Kate Wilhelm’s work, “Music Makers” is primarily about the people and their interrelationships. The fantastic element is necessary to the plot, driving the interactions, but understated. Wilhelm quietly explores predestination: if you are pushed into a role by forces beyond your control, might it still be exactly the right place? I won’t say this story couldn’t happen anywhere but New Orleans, but if it were set elsewhere it would be a far different tale. The lush garden setting reinforces the lush music and pushes the relationships between musicians live and dead into a satisfying form.

Albert E. Cowdrey’s story “The Black Mountain” is also set in New Orleans, but instead of gardens and Southern cooking, it mines the city for corruption and abandoned buildings. The protagonist fights to save the Onion Dome Cathedral (not a real building, but possibly patterned on one), built a century ago by an obscure Eastern European sect (also fictional: called Narodniks, but unrelated to the Russian revolutionaries). In this account of historical preservation gone awry, we find the same kind of consequences to disturbing the dead that I’m used to seeing in Egyptological horror stories of mummies. There are no walking corpses here, but the actual encounter is sufficiently chilling. And then: once you’ve saved the supernaturally dangerous cathedral, what do you do with it?

The post-Singularity story by Ken Liu, “Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer,” is about a girl with a Klein bottle bedroom and a twenty-dimensional father but a mother who remained stubbornly in a three-dimensional body much like the original. The Singularity won’t take away what makes us human, and that includes the trials and traumas of childhood: school friends, homework, woefully-out-of-date parents. But even veritable dinosaurs may have something to offer. Liu has thought about what family relationships might be like, about how people might interact within a virtual environment, and outside it. Small touches, like redesigning a child’s bedroom, add depth and feeling.

S.L Gilbow uses “The Old Terrologist’s Tale” to make a point about art and perfection and beauty, using planetary engineering as the medium. This story bothered me in a way that most readers may not care about. I’m an ecologist, and familiar with planetary geology, plate tectonics, global climate patterns, biomes, and so on. The advanced engineering in the story could perhaps produce the kind of static world described, where weather and seismic activity and everything else can be completely controlled at the cost of a great deal of energy, but these would be more like paintings than planets. I’m fairly tolerant of scientific inaccuracies in service to story, but just couldn’t get past the worldbuilding here.

“Signs of Life”, by Carter Scholz, revisits a favored SF topic: introns, those seemingly useless chunks of DNA that we all carry around. I put this kind of story in the same mental class as the “We only use 10% of our brains” stories: potentially interesting, but usually not good science. Scholz, though, has done some homework and has some new ideas. He offers up a setting that will be intimately familiar to anyone who has worked in a biology lab: the class structure, the competition, the pressure to publish. The protagonist, a database technician in a genetics lab, has either made a huge discovery or had his second nervous breakdown, or both.

I haven’t read any of Scott Bradfield’s Dazzle stories prior to “Starship Dazzle,” which may have affected my perception of this one, but I was unimpressed. Dazzle doesn’t seem to fill any role, have any purpose. The story opens with Dazzle talking NASA into sending him into space. Why? No idea. Dogs in space have a long and unhappy history, and if I were a talking dog that’s something I would try to avoid. Without understanding why Dazzle wanted to go into space in the first place, his later longing for home doesn’t have much impact.

Then Dazzle gets involved in advertising, makes First Contact, and learns that aliens can be even more pathetic than people. He comes home, and then everything is forgotten. This exercise in cosmic consumerism has fabulous descriptive language — “Strapped into the poorly padded bucket seat, he rattled amongst the steel-framed dashboard components like a set of false teeth in a broken doll” — but the story didn’t appeal to me. I appreciated many of the individual components, but not the aggregate.

In “Rampion,” Alexandra Duncan uses strong sensory details to bring to mind the setting, southern Spain during the Umayyad caliphate, before the Reconquista: “I navigate by the jutting stones, the smells of marzipan, meat — fresh lamb at the halal butchers, jamón serrano at the Christian shops — and the waft of dark water steaming from the sewers. The fishmongers, newly fetched up from the Guadalquivir, shout over each other. Their voices mix with the clang of steel, the rush and tang of the forge-fire consuming the air, and above all, the distant cry of the muezzin calling us to prayer.” The rampion is sometimes known as the rapunzel, and figures in the folk tale of that name. Here, the folkloric inspiration is spun into a lovely tale of political intrigue, murder, and romance.

While two of the stories didn’t work for me, that lack was more than made up for by “Music Makers” and “Rampion,” and the fun of pondering Robert Reed’s tales. There should be something to please everyone here.

Edited by Joshua Palmatier and Patricia Bray, this anthology of fantasy stories has a fun concept that acts as a connective thread: all the stories take place, at least partly, in a bar. The same bar. And not just any bar—the Ur-Bar, run by Gilgamesh himself, historical king of Uruk and hero of Mesopotamian mythology. The stories begin in ancient history, when Gilgamesh takes over management of the bar, and move through time. They’re all set on Earth, though the introduction admits it could be an “alternate Earth,” but due to the bar’s magical, time-traveling nature, the anthology becomes a trip through the world’s civilizations and mythologies.

“An Alewife in Kish” by Benjamin Tate begins the anthology in Kish, an ancient Mesopotamian city-state. The story sets up the premise of the anthology and introduces Gilgamesh, who will play a part in every entry. Kubaba, the alewife, has been cursed by the gods for her hubris—she must serve in this alehouse for eternity, never able to set foot outside of it. As cities rise and fall, the alehouse will move to another place, but always Kubaba will be trapped there, imprisoned by the curse. But then a large, strange man enters her alehouse one day, and when Kubaba hears his story, she realizes he could be the key to her escape—someone willing to take her place. The dialogue occasionally falls into the trap of sounding clunky and unnatural in its attempt to fit its historical time period, and the story feels a little rushed and stilted when it starts, but settles into itself as it goes. Gilgamesh’s tale is also a bit over-the-top, but that’s forgivable as his dramatic language is part of the method of oral storytelling. “Alewife” fulfills its purpose in setting up the concept of the anthology, but on its own would be one of the weaker stories on offer.

In “Why the Vikings Had No Bars” by S.C. Butler, we move to Viking country, specifically, the settlement of Hedeby in Daneland. Gilgamesh—now called Gisl—introduces the locals to al-kuhl, a clear Arabian liquor unlike anything they’ve ever tasted, but underestimates the effects of hard alcohol when combined with a warrior’s desire to reach Valhalla. Odin’s interference doesn’t help matters much, and soon enough everyone’s favorite aspect of bar stories—the brawl—kicks in. As the title suggests, this story has a lighter feel. A sly humor is woven throughout the story, though by the end it’s shifted to a much darker tone. The writing doesn’t suffer from the attempt to sound historically appropriate, as Tate’s offering occasionally does, which makes the story easy and enjoyable to read.

We then move to Italy during the height of the Holy Roman Empire in “The Emperor’s New God” by Jennifer Dunne. Otto III, Emperor, has received a vision that he will be the greatest Emperor the world has seen; he will rule all. The catch is that he must first conquer all, and Otto is a scholar, not a soldier. So he seeks out a mysterious bar in Venice, where gods and men still meet, and appeals to Mars for help. It’s an interesting spin on the life of Otto, who was known for being an extremely devout Christian, but the last third of the story loses its compelling grip on the reader. The trouble is a feeling of imbalance. At the beginning of the story, much time and detail is spent on Otto sneaking into Venice, settling us firmly into this time and place, but the latter part of the story whisks through time, and we lose our connection with the narrative and with Otto.

Set in Scotland, “The Tale that Wagged the Dog” by Barbara Ashford is the most absurd entry in the anthology, and a whole lot of fun because of it. It’s very funny, crude, and even quotes Billy Joel.  In an unusual tavern, dead heroes such as William Wallace (whose body parts tend to drop off) and Robert the Bruce hang out with faeries, a selkie, and a man who has been turned into a dog. The main character and narrator, Tam Lin, is said dog, and the tale is about his quest to become a man, which according to “Gil,” the bar’s proprietor, takes longer for some people than others. Tam Lin hopes it doesn’t take too long, because after all, he’s “just like other men. Only more so.” In Scottish mythology, Tam Lin was rescued from the Faerie Queen by his true love, Janet. “The Tale that Wagged the Dog” picks up where the ballad leaves off, only Tam Lin has not escaped unscathed. He’s not the most noble of heroes, but his opinion of himself is unmatched. As this story is written by a woman, it’s possible Tam Lin’s frat boy approach to life, and his claim that he’s more manly than most, is a scathing bit of tongue-in-cheek gender commentary, a view that makes the story even more amusing. By the end, though, we can see the beginning of character development. There’s hope for Tam Lin yet.

“Sake and Other Spirits” by Maria V. Snyder moves us to feudal Japan for a story about feminism. Azami works for Gilga-san in his sake-house, hiding from her past. She fled a forced marriage and longs for independence and freedom, two things a woman can never have. When a kappa, a water vampire, takes up residence in the local lake and begins killing traders, the skills Azami learned in order to be a samurai’s wife may help her save her town, earn her freedom—and find love. “Sake and Other Spirits” is a modern but entertaining take on its era. Azami is smart and skilled, and Gilga-san’s fondness for her is endearing. The story includes arrogant samurai, a sword fight, and a sweet romance that is resolved a bit too easily, perhaps, but then, there’s only so much room in a short story. Azami triumphs because she listens to Gilga-san’s wisdom – which the elders of the town and the samurai will not do, because he’s a foreigner—and because she is not shackled by a “delicate male ego.” Snyder does fall into the trap of giving historical women modern sensibilities, but then, who are we to say that some women in patriarchal societies didn’t think this way?

Kari Sperring takes us to France during the reign of Louis XIV for “The Fortune-Teller Makes Her Will,” a story about a witch-hunt, love, and sacrifice. Thaïs is a maid for the Madame, mistress of the king, who uses the services of a fortune-teller who summons “angels” to speak through her daughter Madeleine. When the witch-hunt begins and Paris is scoured for those dealing in witchcraft or magic, the fortune-teller is arrested, and eventually so is innocent, beautiful Madeleine. The Madame, of course, will do nothing to save the young woman, despite the fortune-teller’s plea, but Thaïs thinks there must be a way. Monsieur Gilles, proprietor of a mysterious cabaret, might be able to help. Thaïs is a great character, a cynical maid who occasionally dresses in men’s clothing and makes extra money by writing scandalous ballads about her mistress and the courtiers she entertains.

“The Tavern Fire” by D.B. Jackson explains the source of a mysterious, historical fire that raged through Boston in the years just before the Revolutionary War. The story is told through the eyes of Tiller, a slightly mentally handicapped young man who finds odds and ends that people have lost or thrown away and sells them. One day he is given free food by Mary, a surly tavern owner, and plied with questions about Janna, who runs the Fat Spider Tavern with Gil. Janna, a former slave from the Caribbean, is also a witch, and Mary needs a love spell. The consequences of this spell are much more devastating than anyone—except perhaps Gil—could have anticipated. Janna’s dialect is well done, but perhaps a bit heavy and distracting over the stretch of the story, as some sentences seem to be made up of more apostrophes than letters, which is hard to read. Tiller is also handled well, which is impressive as characters like him are hard to pull off, and there are hints that he has some magical ability of his own. Compared with the rest of the anthology, “The Tavern Fire” isn’t a stand-out story, but by no means a bad one.

We then move to gothic, Victorian Europe in Patricia Bray’s “Last Call,” a continuation or spin-off of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In this story, we follow the career of George Harker, monster hunter, and the two meetings with Guillaume the coffeehouse proprietor, that bookend it.  “Last Call” starts in London, moves to France, then to Scotland and Switzerland, covering the decades of George’s career and life. The jumps in time and lack of a solid, overarching plot make the story a bit scattered, not as cohesive as others in the collection. George’s last conversation with Guillaume is bittersweet as they discuss the curse of immortality, and the first-person narration evokes thoughts of Dickens and Stoker. There’s even a cameo by Mary Shelley. Despite this, however, “Last Call” is one of the weaker entries in the anthology, notable more for its allusions than its storytelling.

In contrast, “Alchemy of Alcohol” by Seanan McGuire is a rollicking good time, set in San Francisco at the turn of the century. Mina Norton, the alchemist proprietor of Norton’s, is pulled into a magical feud when the Summer King drops the body of his wife, the Winter Queen, on the bar and begs Mina to wake her up a few weeks early. “The tedious thing about magic,” Mina tells us, “is the way it insists on existing. There’s far more of it than the world’s assort­ment of magicians, alchemists, shamans, and sorcerers could ever make use of, and so it gads about manifest­ing in inconvenient places.” The story cheats a bit when it comes to the anthology’s premise: Gil sleeps through the entire thing in an upper room, and while the events take place in the bar, its mystical properties never come into play. Mina has mystical properties enough of her own at hand to handle the situation. The story possesses a sense of humor, and it also involves a Golem named Andy and a bang-up magic fight as the Summer King and Winter Queen defend their titles and their lives. It even comes with cocktail recipes at the end, so you can partake in a little alcoholic alchemy yourself.

In “The Grand Tour” by Juliet E. McKenna, two young English gentlemen traveling in pre-WWI Austria encounter a group of angry German youths. They get jumped, beaten up, and stagger to a tavern for help, where the large, enigmatic barman dispenses some strangely knowledgeable advice. Readers familiar with Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility will recognize the last names of heroes Eustace Ferrars and Harold Brandon. As presumed descendents of Edward and Eleanor Ferrars and Colonel and Marianne Brandon, Eustace and Hal live in Devon, and at the end of the story, it’s noted that Eustace even marries a Dashwood girl. The writing suffers from the occasional distracting adjective (“obdurate engine,” “repellent spittle”), but these are balanced by sentences like, “Hal swung with all the pugilistic science of an English boarding school education.” The sudden leap to the present at the end of the story, in which a family vacationing in England walks through the historic Brandon estate—now a museum—and learns about Eustace and Hal’s impressive, philanthropic political and military careers, is a bit jarring. It’s a heavy-handed way to go about it, but effective in showing that Eustace and Hal’s experience in Austria, and especially Gil’s words, had their effect.

Laura Anne Gilman’s “Paris 24” follows a team of young American fencers in Paris for the 1924 Olympics. They hunt down this amazing bar they’ve heard about, a place you should go before your event for luck. The bar is, of course, run by Gil, who feels drawn to Richard, the youngest of the fencing team, and wants to grant him his desire. The question is what Richard’s desire will be, what with the Games and the looming threat of war. It’s a quiet story about one young man on the cusp of adulthood trying to figure out life, and the small nudge he is given by an immortal demi-god. Another entry that tends to blend in with the landscape of the anthology, not standing out in any way.

The main character of “Steady Hands and a Heart of Oak” by Ian Tregillis is Reg, a sapper, one of Her Majesty’s Royal Engineers who disarm and disassemble unexploded ordnance during the London Blitz. Reg has the Sight—the ability to see how things work and thus manipulate those workings. He’s mostly used it to get what he wants in life, but after performing a near-miraculous bomb disarmament, Reg finds himself in a bind. A girl he doesn’t love is pregnant with his child. His captain doesn’t want to promote him despite Reg putting in his time. Another bomb, one only Reg could disarm, lies waiting in the rubble of a chemists’ shop. The strange, clear liquor of the large barmen Gil makes Reg’s Sight expand, grow stronger than it ever has before. Suddenly Reg can see all his futures—and none of them are good. Except, perhaps, one. “Steady Hands” is a fascinating look at the life of a Royal Engineer, the terror and skill involved in making unexploded bombs safe. Reg isn’t all that likeable, but that’s the point—his final choice is perhaps the only selfless (or at least somewhat selfless, because even this choice is heavily influenced by his own legacy) thing he’s ever done. Tregillis’ strong writing supports the story, making for an utterly compelling read.

“Forbidden” by Avery Shade introduces  a time-traveling woman to our mystical, time-traveling bar. G5S36 has come back in time to 1987 to collect genetic samples of species that no longer exist in her time. She comes from a sterile, safe, regulated environment, so the wildness and difference of America in the ‘80s is overwhelming and exciting for her. The interior of the bar overwhelms her senses, but the longer she sits there, and the more she talks with the bartender, the more she starts to realize that she doesn’t want to go back to her world, to the future of Everyman, where everyone looks the same and thinks the same, and if you don’t fall in line with everyone else, you disappear. Perhaps she can stay here, in this unregulated decade, where she can have the life of her choosing and be Rebecca instead of a number. “Forbidden’s” future sounds like every dystopian movie you’ve ever seen in which the characters wear white jumpsuits and have every aspect of their life controlled for the greater good, and G5S36/Rebecca’s tendency to refer to herself as an addict seems to have little basis. But the voice is good, and Shade does an excellent job of providing an outsider’s view of our world, how every aspect of it is a sensory assault—and the sheer intoxication of the little freedoms we take for granted.  You can’t help rooting for G5S36 to become Rebecca.

“Where We Are Is Hell” by Jackie Kessler takes us to the after-life. Tracy is lost in a never-ending maze of corridors, darkness, and doors. She’s been there so long that she doesn’t remember her life, barely remembers her name, has given up hope of ever escaping. But still she opens doors, until one door opens on a bar. As Tracy talks to the intimidating bartender, she begins to remember her life, who she is—and why she is here. The bartender tells her she has one more door to open—the final door, which leads to either Heaven or Hell. Of course, there is another option…  A compelling and evocative story—Tracy’s journey through the doors does a fantastic job of making you feel the darkness and hopelessness and interminability. Once Tracy enters the bar, the mystery of her existence is quickly answered, but Kessler’s version of Gil is interesting—he’s the first incarnation to offer someone his place, to acknowledge his need to escape as well. Tracy’s starry-eyed love for her fiancé takes on a somewhat saccharine aspect toward the end of the story, mostly through the sheer emphasis put on this part of her personality. It’s all we really know about Tracy, that she loves Paul (to be fair, it’s almost all she really knows about herself), and it’s the driving factor in her decision. Its importance to the story is undeniable, but the focus on this one part of her character makes her feel shallow and one-dimensional.

The anthology closes with “Izdu-Bar” by Anton Strout, the obligatory zombie story. In a post-apocalyptic world overrun by zombies, Bouncer Billy works at a bar. Billy doesn’t possess a shred of care or concern for his fellow humans, and he only lets in the lone traveler after dark because he plans to steal the small, wiry man’s guitar later. A guitar like that, in pristine condition, would be worth a lot of money. The plot contains a great, if slightly predictable twist, and Strout’s take on Gil’s bar plays up the magical aspect, as though the bar has fused with Gil’s soul and responds to his mood. Billy has a distinctive voice, and making him unlikeable makes the ending a bit more palatable; we’re actually rooting for the zombie. Strout plays to the cult of zombie lore with the title—IZDU stands for the International Zombie Defense Unit—and the evolution of zombies is an interesting idea, if only for the how aspect. They’re dead; how do they evolve? And yet, in the world of “Izdu-Bar,” they do.