Distillations: Short Fiction Reviews, Jan. 1977

From Locus, January 1997.
Copyright 1997 by Mark R. Kelly.

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Realms of Fantasy 10/96, 12/96

Terra Incognita issue #1, Winter 96/97

Interzone 11/96

Asimov’s 2/97

Quicker Than the Eye, Ray Bradbury (Avon 0-380-97380-4, $22.00, 261pp, hc) November 1996. Cover by Bernie Fuchs.

After attending the World Fantasy Convention earlier this month, it seems appropriate for me to begin this column with some fantasy short stories. My occasional protestations that my tastes are more aligned with science fiction than with fantasy or horror carry only limited weight considering that Locus is a magazine whose purview includes the entire tri-genre spectrum of SF, fantasy, and horror (and I am, after all, the only short fiction reviewer here). But more to the point is the fact that there isn’t, actually, much difference between a lot of what passes for SF in many of the short fiction magazines and the kind of fantasy found in, say, Realms of Fantasy, which does manage to avoid, for the most part, the stock clichés of dragons and elves and vampires and werewolves.

Which isn’t to say that in the most recent couple issues there isn’t a mummy and appearances by death and the devil. No confusing these stories with SF.

The highlight of the October issue is William F. Wu’s "Nairich", an atmospheric ghost story set in San Francisco in 1906. Charlotte Eng leaves an uncomfortable position in Chinatown and climbs Telegraph Hill to the house where her parents once worked as servants. She’s given a job by Mrs. MacGrewar, a Scots lady who remembers Charlotte’s parents but who warns her that the house, Nairich, is possessed by spirits, specifically that of the late Cpt. MacGrewar. Charlotte gradually pieces together the story of how Cpt. MacGrewar died, and how her father was involved, and learns something about an episode of Chinese-American history, the "coolie" trade, and of the tragedy that could occur when that trade was made illegal.

As expected from the year in which it is set, the story culminates with the big earthquake. As Charlotte attempts to rescue Mrs. MacGrewar she makes a surprising discovery, or two discoveries, which solve all the mysteries of the house and its occupants. If this denouement is a bit contrived—you’d think part of it, at least, would have been mentioned when Charlotte learned about the captain’s death—the story’s historical depth, and the author’s clever presentation of a double twist, more than make up for it.

Charles de Lint’s "Shining Nowhere but in the Dark" is a curious story about dreams and fate and death. Jenny Wray gives some change to a panhandling girl and then meets the girl again that night, first in her dreams and then in her bedroom--or is it still a dream? The girl is revealed as one of the three fates, the ones who spin, weave, and cut the threads of peoples’ lives. Does this mean Jenny’s time has come? Jenny seeks advice from a friend knowledgeable in the occult, but it isn’t until she confronts her own past, her guilt at having survived a family massacre, her feelings of what makes life worth living, that she reaches a proper accommodation with her fate. The story avoids resolving simplistically, but comes off a little too feel-goody.

A less traditional fantasy is Geoffrey A. Landis’s "Hot Death on Wheels", about a 50s hot rod driver who gets a comeuppance when he encounters Death on a remote desert highway, ready to race. Their high-stakes encounter, informed by authoritative knowledge of old cars, is told with the imaginative exaggeration of a tall tale.

Don Webb’s "The Beautiful Wassilissa" is an elegantly written fairy tale that transposes traditional elements of Russian folk tales into a symbolic present. The title character is a young girl whose mother dies and whose father (who has gone away into the city of skyrises) soon strands her with a stepmother and two stepsisters in the woods. To get rid of her, the stepfamily sends Wassillisa on an errand to Baba Yaga hut. But Wassilissa has a Russian doll left her by her mother, and with it she more than meets the challenges of the crafty old witch.

The December issue opens with William Nabors’s "Where’s the Luck?", a roundabout narrative by a rural Texas woman thinking about how to explain to the sheriff that she shot her husband. Told in steep vernacular, it involves a quarter, a cat, and a final macabre image. Also rural American in setting is William R. Eakin’s "The Secret of the Mummy’s Brain", in which an overweight convenience store clerk in Redgunk, Mississippi, is watched over lovingly by a mummy in the back room of Uncle Joe’s Corner Liquor Store and Gas. The story works against the melodrama suggested by the lurid title, thoughtfully suggesting an analogy between the hidden, bound up life of the anxious clerk and that of the mummy.

A. M. Dellamonica’s "Love Equals Four, Plus Six" is a charming story that’s SF if we allow telepathy, and telepathic invasion of dreams, to be SF. Violet, wife of mathematician Cray, gets a phone call telling her that Cray, on a trip in London, has been injured in a car accident and lies in a coma. Violet, who has just found out days before that she is pregnant with their child, is subject to catnaps, and in her naps she finds herself in a bar called the Abacus, surrounded by people and things with mathematical names: a person named Pi, a drink called Equilibrium, streets named Add Route and Multiply Way. As she sets off for London, her dreams parallel her quest to find and identify her husband. She wonders if her husband’s quixotic determination to prove that telepathy exists has paid off—could that explain her dreams? Dellamonica admirably sustains the mathematical metaphors in the dream world as the story reaches a clever, sweet payoff.

Calvin Horne’s "The Stover Cut" is an otherworldly tale about barge operators on a network of canals in some unidentified, marshy land. Gus has worked the Roekill canal for 25 years with his wife Opal, but he remembers his trips on a certain dangerous canal, the Stover Cut, vividly. The story has the familiar parameters of an adventure tale, except that the danger Gus faces is an incursion from another world, a temptation, perhaps, from the devil. Margaret Ball’s "Coyote Woman" concerns an anthropology researcher up for tenure at Laguna College whose efforts at translating Navajo folk tales are criticized by a talking coyote sitting outside her window. Meanwhile, her sister lies dying in a hospital and her competitor for tenure engages in sabotage. The story is nicely told but too one-sided, the researcher’s situation unreasonably unfair and her exit, in turn, too escapist.

Jack McDevitt’s "Holding Pattern" sets up a classic Twilight-Zone scenario. Josh Remick has moved to a house in rural Georgia that stands on what used to be an airstrip. During thunderstorms he hears the sound of an airplane flying overhead, and he soon learns the local story of the kid who, 30 years ago, crashed at that airstrip trying to land in fog. He does some further research, listening to FAA tapes of the landing in which the tower operator is heard reluctantly turning on the airstrip lights to allow the pilot to land. As a half-serious stunt, Josh throws a party for the townsfolk during the next storm and has everyone line their car headlights along the runway. But the result isn’t what they expect.

And so Josh tries something else, and almost inadvertently stumbles upon the correct resolution to the mystery of the lost pilot. The story not only surprises by confounding the predictable resolution, it demonstrates that there’s always more than one story going on in any given situation. McDevitt’s story doesn’t reach the obvious conclusion, it reaches a better one.

Paralleling Realms of Fantasy’s efforts to stand above the clichés of fantasy, a new SF magazine explicitly distances itself from the common images of science fiction: Terra Incognita, subtitled "a new generation of science fiction". The editorial by Jan Berrien Berends explains that the magazine’s focus is Earth-based science fiction. The motivation in part is to correct the misunderstandings of too many intelligent readers who steer clear of SF under the apprehension that SF is about "people in silly uniforms...laser guns and aliens"—that is, escapist and irrelevant.

This is a real enough attitude, and it’s easy to feel a degree of sympathy with it--how often does an acquaintance, learning you’re an SF reader, assume you therefore attend Star Trek conventions? But it’s not true that there’s any shortage of SF, especially short SF, that is set on the Earth. At short lengths, outer space SF is in the minority, which leaves one to wonder if Terra Incognita is offering anything other than a novel PR approach.

The answer is well, not really. The stories are fair, about what one would expect from a semi-professional magazine; stories, mostly by name-brand writers, which one realizes probably didn’t quite make the cut at Asimov’s or F&SF, usually for apparent reasons.

The opener is L. Timmel Duchamp’s "Ms Peach Makes a Run for Coffee", and it’s set in a near future in which Things Have Gotten Worse. Ms Peach works at the Auvergne Preparatory Academy for Women, where competition for retaining a job can depend on avoiding the slovenliness that results when power outages occur during the night. During school break she hears a rumor that someone is selling real coffee across town. She spends preciously allotted minutes on the phone with her daughter planning how much money they should invest. After classes Ms Peach sets off across town, only to encounter a police barricade and helicopters dropping tear gas in her path. She wonders if it isn’t it crazy to face such danger for the sake of coffee—but goes grimly on.

There’s no closure to Ms Peach’s plight, just the implication of continued oppressiveness and futility. The dystopian scenario is portrayed effectively enough, but it’s entirely familiar, as much a cliché as the spaceships that this magazine snubs.

Similarly, Kandis Elliot’s "Judgementality" presents an interesting situation but resolves unsatisfactorily. It’s about an editor for an alternative newspaper, the Street Beat News, in Madison, Wisconsin. He grumbles about the degeneration of the city around him, and complains about a coworker who grumbles even worse. One day the editor notices that some of the regular street people aren’t around anymore. Then he witnesses the apparent disappearance of other people on the street, and formulates a hypothesis for what is going on. The story’s strength is the colorful descriptions of street life, but as SF it does no better than to offer a lame notion about alien abductions, a notion implicitly confirmed by story’s end but given no rationale whatsoever.

Two of the shorter stories at least offer cleverer notions. Eric Sonstroem’s "Jukebox City" is set in an awful near future in which everyone is wired for sound. When a character experiences a brief period of relative sanity, he’s quickly cured. But the one-note idea becomes wearying in just a few pages. Darrell Schweitzer’s "Believing in the Twentieth Century" is about time travelers from 30,000 years in the future who come to the 20th century, when people believed things rather than knew them. Sure enough, they discover that such things as astrology, telepathy, and UFOs really seem to exist, despite their rational impossibility, just because people of the era believe in them. One of the time travelers becomes the victim of his own incredulity, in an ironic conclusion, but the story is never as funny as the notion suggests it should be.

W. Gregory Stewart’s "The Monitors" is the best story in the issue. It presents an interesting (if not fully rationalized) premise, complicates it in unexpected ways, and reaches an arresting, ironic resolution. The premise is a variation of the old SF theme about maintaining clone-backups for rich and powerful people. These clones are hooked up via "psynch" to their Primaries so that they experience every event of their Primaries’ lives. Two of the monitors, whose Primaries have met and fallen in love, notice each other in their common quarters and fall in love themselves. But then one of the Primaries dies and the monitor has to "go up" to take the Primary’s place. What can they, the monitors in love, do? The scenario begs some questions about the practical details of the monitor setup, but given the premise, the story develops a truly strange love scenario with a spooky ending.

Michael Ford’s "A Striving After Wind" has no problem with its resolution, but it does have a problem in the premise it wants the reader the believe. It starts like an Analog story about tornado chasers. One of them meets a thunderstorm buff and they form a partnership. The storm buff, Stan Jordan, tells the story of his ten year old son Josh, who two years before built a contraption to build up electrical charge in his body, leapt off the roof, and literally floated away up into the clouds. And has been there ever since. Now Stan wants the narrator, who once experienced a floating sensation while running through a thunderstorm, to use the same contraption, go up and find Josh. The story fails the most elementary reality checks. Even if one really could float into the clouds as described, could one really survive for two years? The characters in the story never wonder about it.

In light of these comparisons of fantasy, SF, and clichés, it’s pertinent to note that of the five stories in the February Asimov’s, four are clearly SF, and of those four, only one is set off the Earth. Asimov’s often runs stories in which the boundary between genres is blurry, but in this month’s stories the genre distinctions are fairly clear.

"One Good Juror" by Mary Rosenblum and James Sarafin is a story notable for its speculation on the future of the American system of justice. Taxpayers have become unwilling to pay for extended trials and endless litigation, and have given corporations relief from the cost of safety measures that benefit only a minority of consumers. Lawyer Erin Mendel steps into a product liability case involving plaintiff Ephraim Polk, a designer of newsmedia collages, against NeuroTek, Inc., the manufacturer of a cerebral implant that has caused Ephraim to lose pieces of his memory. By the new rules, NeuroTek is liable only if it can be proven that building safety measures into the implant’s design would not have increased development costs.

I liked this story better than most Rosenblum stories because it has a good, solid, SF’nal premise to it. The title refers to the fact that, among other reforms, the verdict will be determined by a single juror (chosen out of an initial pool of twelve). The reforms proposed by the story are plausible in light of current political trends, if not always rational in themselves (e.g., how is relying on a single juror saving taxpayers money over twelve?). The trial scenes are well dramatized, and the story effectively builds the sort of tension that comes with a trial situation. On the other hand, Rosenblum can’t avoid a few melodramatic touches, including an unlikely romantic flourish at the end.

James Alan Gardner’s "Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream" is a bizarre alternate history that begins with Anton Leeuwenhoek brought before the Supreme Patriarch Septus XXIV on the charge of disputing a passage of scripture (in the Gospel of Susannah) regarding serpents in the blood. Leeuwenhoek has looked at blood and seen animalcules, but not serpents, however tiny. But when Septus XXIV looks—he thinks does see them. The next two sections describe a meeting between Charles Darwin and Queen Anne VI, and a 1950s McCarthy hearing into a medical drug that would ameliorate the differences between the people who do have "snakes" in their blood, and those who don’t. The former are the Papists; the latter, the Redeemed, and the schism between them serves as an analogue to any number of religious, racial, and ideological battles where perceived differences matter more than objective evidence. Gardner even offers a biomedical rationale for something called "serpentine analogues", and by the end of the story you’re wondering if this is all made up or if any of it is real. The uncertainty underlines the story’s theme about the subjective nature of truth, and the great social and political consequences that are determined by what people wish to believe.

Phillip C. Jennings’s "The Runaways" is set on Hidalgo, an asteroid of irregular shape that’s been colonized courtesy of a Higgs generator and a buckylayer to keep in the atmosphere. Peder is an adolescent, one of a group in a hospital on Hidalgo who are treated with a new medication, a drug called Cra 103. The drug makes them smarter and increases their sex drives. Peder and his group escape from the hospital, and as they journey toward the opposite pole of their planetoid, they learn who they are—rejected first children from the powerful on Earth, where couples are allowed only one child each—and what role Hidalgo plays in the politics of the solar system. Their journey to enlightenment is fascinating, full of philosophical asides as their intellects blossom, though the story is told in Jennings’s usual economical style that works against the expansive sweep of the story’s scope.

Robert Silverberg’s "Call Me Titan" is a tribute to Roger Zelazny in which one of the pantheon of Greek elder gods, Typhoeus, a creature 400 feet high with dragon heads and eyes that spurt flame, is awakened from his cell at the base of Mt. Etna by a new eruption. He quickly adopts human form, and sets out to fulfill the reason for his existence, to avenge his family against Zeus, who destroyed them. But he’s dismayed to discover that people in the 20th century file knowledge of his kind under "mythology," and that in fact Mt. Olympus is barren and neither Zeus nor any of his family is to be found. Then he does find another of his kind, a beautiful woman on Mykonos who is the goddess Aphrodite, and she has some suggestions on Typhoeus’s mission and the opportunities for living as a human. The story recalls the themes of some of Zelazny’s early works—godlike beings trapped among mortals—and offers a peaceful resolution to the problem of deploying vast, restless energy.

"Passing the Torch" by Uncle River concerns Esther Pernion, an 82 year old woman living alone in rural Arizona. She thinks that she’s had another stroke that morning, so that at first she’s only vaguely aware that a crisis is ensuing in the world around her: something about mass arrests. Her paranoid neighbor Prabaht helps with her chores and rants about Jesuit conspiracies. Ether’s 16 year old great-grandson Peter shows up on his motorcycle, and her thoughts focus on him, on the world that he is inheriting. He brings more news: government officials have cracked down on "known criminals," and the result has been chaos, or at least mass confusion, followed quickly by official denials of responsibility. The story is only slightly SF; in fact it rings eerily of political themes straight out of current newspapers, including the legalization of marijuana for medical uses. Esther’s meditations on the subjective and the objective and the "spirit realm" of the trees and hills add a slightly fantastic riff, but the true theme of this warmly felt story is the problem of retaining human values in a changing world, and that is as science fictional a theme as any.

The profile for the November Interzone is the same as for Asimov’s: five stories, four SF, of which just one is set off the Earth. (And as in Asimov’s, of the other three SF, one is an alternate history.)

The lead story is the latest in Kim Newman and Eugene Byrne’s alternate history series in which the USSA is communist and Russia is capitalist. The narrator of "Citizen Ed" is Joe Costa, who comes home from the war with the Krauts to become deputy sheriff of Plainfield. He learns the realities of justice and party politics when he realizes that Ed Gein, the local butcher, is behind a series of disappearances of farm animals and old ladies. Ed, in fact, dresses up in the skin of his dead mother while butchering animals, and some of the missing ladies turn up as corpses showing evidence of necrophilia. But--Ed’s a party member in good standing; he makes sure party officials get the choicest cuts. The local party committee decides that such crimes as grave-robbing are impossible in a socialist state, and therefore must be the work of subversives. So Joe has to cooperate in finding and rounding up subversives, while Ed carries on his gruesome work.

The story’s not a grim one, despite the subject matter; the authors have a bit of fun leavening the gruesome subject matter with sly references to characters named Harry Truman and Norm Bates in incidental roles. It nevertheless achieves an almost Kafka-esque intensity as an elaborate illustration of the abuses of a party system in which truth is predefined at variance with the facts.

Sylvia M. Siddall’s "The Conflagration of the Gryffe" brings the sexual and erotic themes that have marked such previous stories as "Housewife" and "Written in the Flesh" to the sort of planetary romance story that Eric Brown and Keith Brooke write (a type of story you don’t see much in the US magazines). The setting is (apparently) another planet, among colonists who call themselves "mankind" though they are perhaps not unaltered human stock. Sven returns home from college and gets reacquainted with his younger half-brother Timon, whose special affection for Sven culminates in a night of sexual love. Timon has become obsessed with folk tales about the Gryffe, creatures slaughtered long ago along with another race called the Brachis. Now he’s found an egg in a remote cave, and apparently quickened it with his touch, that he thinks is a Gryffe. After it hatches a cat-like creature with wings, Timon flees the household with it. Sven tracks him down months later and finds Timon pregnant and watched over by the Gryffe. Sven is a sort of hermaphrodite, or maybe most people on this planet are (which is why, it is suggested, homosexuality is illegal). In any case, Sven finds himself faced with the prospect of guiding the pregnancy to completion, and the uncertainty of what kind of creature is waiting to be born. The story ends with an expository lump on the relationship of the three races, Gryffe, Brachis, and "mankind", explanation which is too little too late to clarify the significance of what is otherwise an odd, potent drama between two brothers.

Brian Stableford’s "Worse than the Disease" is a vignette about the age of recreational disease, extrapolating perhaps on the callousness of people who spread STDs today. Stableford suggests that problems will not go away when the cures are available, because diseases do affect people differently, and psychological damage lingers. It’s an intriguing notion, but not a fully fleshed story.

Ben Jeapes’s "Cathedral No. 3" is set in Coventry, where a terrorist nuclear explosion has devastated the city and destroyed the cathedral built to replace the one destroyed by the Luftwaffe in 1940. A Muslim journalist encounters the dean of the cathedral among the ruins, and they discuss the speculation that the terrorists were Muslim. The dean is ready to forgive them—but the journalist finds his gesture hollow. The story bravely challenges a familiar level of piety, but only to reach a different kind of piety.

The fantasy in the issue is Don Webb’s "The Literary Fruitcake" (which also appears in his small-press collection A Spell for the Fulfillment of Desire), a small gem about the literary career of that traditional holiday food that is passed on as often as it is eaten. This particular fruitcake started as a gift to Charles Dickens from the Queen, and then was passed intentionally or not from one noted literary figure to another over the decades: Stoker, Blackwood, Stein, Hemingway, and on and on. Now it has come into the narrator’s hands, only to be stolen, and the result of this is an amazing transformation of the author’s home city of Austin, Texas.

Ray Bradbury’s new collection Quicker than the Eye contains 22 stories, of which 10 are original and 3 others appeared in the magazine American Way and so are not likely to have been seen by genre readers. The high original content is not the warning sign it might be (i.e., they are stories that didn’t sell elsewhere) if one takes Bradbury’s comments in the recent Locus interview into account, that the stories were all written over a relatively short period of time ("during the last year" he said, in May ’96, though three of the book’s stories were published in magazines in 1994). Thus, Bradbury probably placed about as many as he could in the brief space of time before the stories were gathered into a book.

In any case, Bradbury is a writer, unlike some others, whose stories benefit from being read together. Their premises are sometimes slight, not always fantastic; they are buoyed by Bradbury’s characteristic energy and joie de vivre, a mood that persuades more effectively by being sustained between stories than it would in reading each story in isolation.

There’s a fairly high nostalgia content in many of the stories, as in "Remember Sascha?", in which the circumstances explicitly evoke Bradbury’s early career living in Venice, California, working hard as a writer. In the story he’s Douglas Spaulding (the author’s Dandelion Wine counterpart), whose wife Maggie is pregnant with their first child. Sascha is their pet name for their forthcoming offspring, and they speak with Sascha, speculating on the circumstances of his birth. "Hopscotch" portrays two young people in love who sneak out of town to spend a day in the countryside; a scrawled hopscotch game on the sidewalk becomes a symbolic key to the future. In "Bug" the author encounters a famed high school jitterbug dancer on the streets of Hollywood, and gives him a chance to reaffirm his charm and skill.

"The Other Highway" is an old, overgrown highway lying alongside the freeway leading out the city. It attracts Clarence Travers and his wife on a family outing. They find a small town marooned by the march of progress and are briefly attracted by the idea of moving there. The best of the nostalgia stories is "Exchange", in which a man (William Henry Spaulding) on a cross-country train trip stops in his boyhood town and goes to the public library, where the same watchful librarian, a woman he thought of as Mrs. God, still presides. She lets him in at closing time and they revel together in the memory—and revisitation—of classic stories. It’s a charming and evocative counter-example to the Thomas Wolfe rule about not being able to go home again.

Other stories involve more conventional SF or fantasy notions. "Zaharoff/Richter Mark V" reveals a secret history of the world run by architects. How else to explain the human perversity of building and rebuilding cities that keep getting destroyed? The story is obviously inspired by Bradbury’s experience with the latest big southern California earthquake (in January 1994). "The Ghost in the Machine" slyly sets up a Frankenstein scenario, in which villagers in an 1853 town talk fearfully of the "madman" up on the hill, then reveals that the madman’s creation is a device with two wheels meant to replace horses. The wonder of how such a thing could work (the word "bicycle" is never used) matches Bradbury’s own well-known enthusiasm for the machine. "At the End of the Ninth Year" (a reprint from American Way) is a romance generated by the SF-like observation that every cell in one’s body is replaced within a period of nine years. So after nine years, is anyone still the same person? The question triggers a crisis for a comfortably married couple.

Two more stories have macabre elements. "Free Dirt" (another reprint from American Way) is the offer at a cemetery in the middle of town where a man in a pickup stops to talk with the old gravedigger. The old man talks knowledgeably about the problems of digging graves in different weather, and rhapsodizes about all the amazing detritus to be found in the pile of excess dirt. The story’s creepy finale is almost anticlimactic. In "The Very Gentle Murders" an old man wakes in the night feeling his wife’s hands at his throat. He pushes her aside and makes a joke of it the next morning, a joke which escalates into a macabre game of attempted murder by each partner against the other. There’s no fantastic element in the story, but there’s much black humor, and the same slapdash inventiveness that marked such early Bradbury stories as "Usher II".