Forgotten Friday Spotlight: Thomas Disch, Camp Concentration

Two weeks ago, American author Thomas Disch took his life in his New York apartment. He was 68 years old. Although there were many obituaries written in the time that has followed, for quite a few of us in our thirties and younger, Disch and his best-regarded works, such as 1968's Camp Concentration, had become quite obscure. Although I had heard of him, I really didn't know much about him and kept putting off buying this book until after his tragic suicide. I am kicking myself for not having done so sooner, because this is a book that hits so many of my "sweet spots" as a reader.

This will not be a formal review, as I am not writing any of those until I finish with the one I agreed to write for another venue (soon, though, I'll be able!....I think). I will not elaborate on length how scary the milieu is, how easy it was for the governmental agencies to start influencing events, or how people were treated like guinea pigs and given a fatal drug that temporarily increased their mental capacities for concentration. Nor will I cite passages written in a first person PoV detailing Louis Sacchetti's thoughts and his progress throughout the novel. No, not this time, although this is a book that begs for such citations to be given out for others to be drawn to it. Neither will I spend much time elaborating on Disch's strengths as a prose writer and how darkly beautiful the prose was in places, as that would mean I would be breaking my promise to myself not to review a work at length before I finish this lengthy one I'm working on.

But suffice to say, if I had written all of this out, there would be many here who would want to read this book and to go out and buy it. Or perhaps they would re-read it. Nevertheless, I'm hoping I left just enough hints here for you to be curious enough to go out and read Camp Concentration in the very near future.

2008 Shirley Jackson Award Finalist: Zoran Živković, Twelve Collections and the Teashop

In a day and age where it seems that even speculative fiction writers aim to pack as much descriptive verbiage into their stories as possible (often with deleterious consequences), it is refreshing to read stories written by authors who go in the opposite direction; their stories place a premium on the readers' imaginative abilities to unpack meaning from just a few scant words.

Serbian author Zoran Živković is one of those blessed few authors. Ever since I read his first novel released in the US, The Fourth Circle, back in 2004, I have marveled over how much depth there is to be found in stories that rarely go past 20 pages. In Twelve Collections and the Teashop, a 2007 limited-edition UK release (no known US release date), Živković has written perhaps one of his best "story suites" to date.

In the introduction, Michael Moorcock discusses how Živković's writing reflects an older European fabulist tradition, one that was lost in the West with the rise of the Naturalists/Modernists and their (over)emphasis on verisimilitude. Moorcock posits that Eastern European authors such as Živković, who came of age during the police state mentality of the Iron Curtain years, learned that being too specific was a risky matter and that much could be done with everywhere cities and such-and-such people. While this deliberate vagueness might annoy those who prefer focusing on the facts and not the vision behind the story plots, others have found the dreamlike qualities of such tales to be intoxicating, sucking one into reading and then considering what might be transpiring rather than just what really is happening there.

Twelve Collections and the Teashop is a double novella, consisting of twelve thematically-linked stories on some rather odd (and sometimes sinister) collections and one that revolves around a teashop. In these stories, mundane features are transformed by just a few subtle foreshadowing clues, such as color or smell. Take for instance the opening story, "Days," and its Prince-like purple phase:

When I entered the pastry shop, a purple wave swept over me. Almost every surface was in some shade of this color: the wallpaper, curtains, rugs, tablecloths, chair covers. So were the shades on the lighted table lamps. The muted light gave even the air a purple tint.

I squinted and looked around. Not a single one of the six small round tables with three chairs was occupied. The pastry chef was standing behind the display counter, wiping a glass with a purple napkin. His apron was inevitably of the same tone as everything else. He seemed more stocky than stout, and a thick, cropped beard and mustache compensated for his shiny bald head. (pp. 3-4)

The repetitive mentions of purple suffused throughout the shop, when juxtaposed with the rather commonplace chef serves to point out a dissonance between the "realness" of the characters and the otherworldiness of the pastry shop itself. As this story progresses and the reason for the "purpleness" is revealed, there is a hidden commentary of sorts about the PoV character and his/her reaction to the revelation by the pastry chef regarding the specialness of his pastry skills and the reason why things are so purple. Živković does not beat the reader over the head with this; he merely insinuates more levels are to be found within a few words. It is up to the reader to consider things even further.

From this opening story, the remaining eleven collections deal with disparate things such as final stories, words, and dreams. These are some of the most "human" of collections and Živković illustrates these via the characters' desires, temptations, and moments of hope and/or despair. Often, as in the case of the story "Clippings," there is a focus on the struggle between order and disorder, on the things that unite and on the heralds of entropy:

After several weeks had passed with still no letter, Mr. Pospihal concluded dejectedly that a great conspiracy was at work and, alas, he alone could do nothing against it. Disorder had triumphed over order, and all he could do was stand by helplessly and watch.

Overcome by frustration, the first thing he did was destroy his collection. As with everything else in his life, he did it systematically. He took a large pair of scissors, sharpened them a bit and then cut all the articles together with their purple folders into small pieces of the same size. And then, for the first time in his life, he did something unreasonable. He ate this plastic-coated confetti slowly and determinedly, even though the taste was quite abominable. (p. 58)

In a very real sense, it is this conflict between the ordered natures of these collectors and the often-chaotic elements around them that makes these twelve stories a delight to read and then to ponder afterwards. In the final story in this book, "The Teashop," another facet of this conflict is revealed, as Miss Greta is choosing teas from a rather odd menu:

She didn't have to open the long, thin menu with a cover of the same green. In the afternoon she always drank chamomile tea. Suddenly, though, she decided to make an exception. The circumstances were unusual and there were so few deviations from daily routine in her life. She shouldn't have been there at all, but since chance had brought her to the teashop, why not make good use of it? An impish desire filled her to do something reckless in a place where no one knew her. She would order the tea that seemed the most unusual.

The menu had four densely-filled pages. She'd never heard of most of the teas and had tried only a few, even though she'd been drinking this hot beverage in the morning and afternoon regularly since childhood. Reading through the splendid selection, she wondered with a tinge of sorrow why she limited herself to the humdrum. This had once seemed a virtue, but now she could not remember why. She shouldn't be inhibited, at least as far as tea was concerned. Now was the chance to make up a little for what she'd missed, albeit belatedly. (p. 87)

Temptation can be quite a terrible thing to witness and in a great many stories, it begins the road to ruin, or at least to transformation. "The Teashop" is a fitting close to an excellent "story suite" whose stories and their conclusions will leave most considering things well after the final page has been turned. Most highly recommended.

Publication Date: April 2007 (UK), Limited-Edition Hardcover

Publisher: PS Publishing

Andrzej Sapkowski, La espada del destino (The Sword of Destiny)

Last July, I read and reviewed the English translation of Andrzej Sapkowski's The Last Wish. I found that collection of interconnected short stories starring the genetically mutated, magically enhanced Witcher Geralt de Rivera to be a delightful read that surprised me with the depth of human emotion that Sapkowski managed to work into stories that originally were intended to be more of spoofs of 1980s era Adventure Quest fantasies than being a serial entity in and of itself. Being the first of two collections before the five-novel story that followed, The Last Wish held a lot of promise for further developments of an enigmatic main character and of Sapkowski's own vision.

However, I was dismayed when I learned earlier this year that Sapkowski's UK publisher, Gollancz, decided to skip the second collection, Miecz przeznaczenia (The Sword of Destiny in English translation) and go straight to the first volume of the five-book Saga, Blood of the Elves (release scheduled for September). I became even more frustrated when I learned from Polish readers that this second collection contains the backstory for the main events in the Saga and that reading the Saga without reading this collection would be more confusing. So when I finally found an online dealer who carried this collection in Spanish, I went ahead and purchased it. Despite having to pay extra due to the import costs ($60), it was well worth the money spent.

La espada del destino contains six novella-length stories, ranging from 34 to 63 pages each, in a 287 page volume. As with The Last Wish, events in the earlier stories are referenced later in the collection, often with poignant connotations that deepens the previous tales and which contain some foreshadowings for the novels. While some of these stories, especially the first, "Las fronteras de lo posible" ("The boundaries of possibility") contain the plays on fairy tale/fantasy quest motifs (such as the hunt for the rare golden dragon in this first story), the book concentrates much more on the human dynamics, particularly between Geralt and the sorceress Yennefer. Their interactions drive the stories and give them a depth and roundness that makes for a thoughtful, reflective reading that lingers well past the stories' conclusions. The passage below is from the second story, "Esquirlas de hielo" ("Shards of Ice"), where Yennefer is speaking to Geralt:

Emociones, caprichos y mentiras, fascinación y juego. Sentimientos y su falta...Dones que no se deben aceptar...Mentira y verdad. ¿Qué es la verdad? ¿La negación de la mentira? ¿O la afirmación de un hecho? ¿Y si el hecho es una mentira, qué es entonces la verdad? ¿Quién está lleno de sentimientos que le arrastran y quién es la cobertura vacía de un frío cráneo? ¿Quién? ¿Que es la verdad, Geralt? ¿En qué consiste la verdad?

-No lo sé, Yen. Dímelo.

-No - dijo, y bajó los ojos. Por vez primera. Nunca antes habia visto que lo hiciera. Nunca-. No - repitió - . No puedo, Geralt. No puedo decirtelo. Te lo dirá ese pájaro, creado del roce de tus manos. ¿Pájaro? ¿Qué es la verdad?

-La verdad - dijo la milana - es una esquirla de hielo. (p. 92)

"Emotions, caprices, and lies, fascination and play. Feelings and its lack...Gifts that one ought not to accept...Lies and truth. What is truth? The negation of a lie? Or the affirmation of a deed? And if the deed is a lie, what is then the truth? Who is full of feelings that drags him and who is the empty cover of a cold cranium? Who? What is truth, Geralt? In what does truth consist?"

"I don't know, Yen. Tell me."

"No," she said, lowering her eyes. For the first time. Never before had he seen her do that. Never. "No," she repeated. "I cannot, Geralt. I cannot tell it to you. The bird will tell you it, created from the rubbing of your hands. Bird, what is truth?"

"Truth," said the kite, "is a shard of ice."

This passage of searching, amplified by the conflicted feelings shared between Geralt and Yennefer, is echoed later in the final story in this collection, "Algo más" ("Something More"):

- ¿Geralt?

- ¿Sí?

- ¿Recuerdas nuestro encuentro en las montañas de los Milanos? ¿Y aquel dragón dorado...? ¿Cómo se llamaba?

- Tres Grajos. Lo recuerdo.

- Nos dijo...

- Lo recuerdo, Yen.

Le besó en el lugar donde el cuello da paso a la clavícula, luego apoyó allí la cabeza, le acarició con el cabello.

- Estamos hechos el uno para el otro - susurró - . ¿Puede ser que predestinados el uno al otro? Pero nada saldrá de todo esto. Una pena, pero cuando llegue el alba nos separaremos. No puede ser de otro modo. Tenemos que separarnos para no hacernos daño el uno al otro. Nostotros, predestinados el uno al otro. Hechos el uno para el otro. Una pena. Aquél o aquéllos que nos crearon el uno para el otro debieran haber tenido cuidado de algo más. La mera predestinación no basta, es muy poco. Hace falta algo más...(pp. 256-257)

"Geralt?"

"Yes?"

"Remember our encounter at the Kite Mountains? And that golden dragon...? What was he called?

"Three Jackdaws. I remember it."

"He said to us..."

"I remember, Yen."

He kissed her at the place where the neck joins the clavicle, place where the head is supported, he caressed her hair.

"We are made one for each other," she murmured. "Can one be predestined for another? But nothing will come of all this. Sad, but when the dawn arrives we shall separate. It cannot be any other way. We must separate in order for us not to hurt each other. Us, predestined one for the other. Made one for the other. Sad. It or those who created us one for the other ought to have had care for something more. Mere predestination is not enough; it is very little. It needs something more..."

It is for poignant, moving passages such as this, which arise from previous character interactions, as well as a mysterious young Daughter of Surprise, Ciri (who appears in "La espada del destino" - "The Sword of Destiny") that the promise of The Last Wish is fulfilled and even more is expected from the upcoming Blood of the Elves. Hopefully in the near future, this collection will finally be released in English translation, as this is one of the finer story cycles that I have read. Highly Recommended.

Publication Dates: 1993 (Poland), 2003 (Spain); current edition, May 2008.

Publisher: Alamut

Tom Corwin, Mr. Fooster: Traveling on a Whim

Certain books capture our imagination by paradoxically permitting us to give free rein to it. Often short and labeled as "children's literature," tales such as Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon, Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, and (to a lesser extent) Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull are written in such a way as to lull the uncynical reader into participating in the fantasy, until bam! the writer has worked in something profound in the midst of childlike (but never, ever childish; a mistake many writers make in trying to capture such a tone in their stories that younger audiences might read) wonder and imagination. Like that ghostly afterimage people often see after staring at a bright object too long and then turning away, these stories often leave us with much to consider long after the last page has been turned and the book closed.

Almost three months ago, I was sent a curious little book from a small imprint of Random House's, Flying Dolphin Press. It was called a "visual novel," and the title was Mr. Fooster: Traveling on a Whim. Intrigued, I started to read this tiny (barely 100 pages) book. Here is what hooked me:

Mr. Fooster has a long list of things he likes to do. One is dreaming. Another is looking for arrowheads. On this Tuesday morning he did neither. He simply put an old wrinkled letter back into its envelope, placed it into his coat pocket, and headed out the door with no particular place to go.

As he walked, his mind began to wander. How was it that prophets could manifest things and he couldn't? How come mandarin oranges came in perfect little segments without any mechanical engineering? Why was it that bubbles bobbled to and fro, yet always found their way back to a perfect sphere?

I began to recall times when as a child, I would watch mud harden and wonder how if I were to dig deep enough, the soil would be clay. How could I make this into modeling clay?, I wondered then (and still do). Why do cracks form in the hardening mud? What would happen if ashes from the charcoal grill were added to it? What if...?

And there I was, lost in a world parallel to that of Mr. Fooster's. As he traveled on that driving whim of his and encountered all sorts of fantastical (and decidedly scary objects if they were in another medium) beings, his questions, ponderings, and wanderings began to create the faint, hazy outlines of something greater than what was being stated in this tale. Like Sendak's wild creatures or the places that Harold's purple crayon takes him, Mr. Fooster's wanderings began to act as a conduit for my own imagination to walk about, to stop and puzzle at strange oddities, before accepting them wholeheartedly and moving on, just as I did as a child.

Craig Frazier's illustrations add much to this whimsical tale. Drawn in sepia-like tones, there is a sense of warmth there within even the strangest of illustrations. These illustrations serve as a perfect complement for the scenes being depicted and they help with the immersive qualities of Corwin's tale. When I reached the last page and saw that Mr. Fooster's whim had taken him to a simple and yet profound conclusion, I found that for me, the story was left hanging there, until the next time that I myself might have a whim of my own and wanted to explore mentally as Mr. Fooster did physically. For those who like to indulge in such "flights of fancy," Mr. Fooster: Traveling on a Whim will make for a wonderful, magical experience that will conjure memories of rainy day dreams and proddings of rain-refuged earthworms wriggling on the wet ground, of wondering just how many beauties and mysteries one can discover on this planet. It certainly is a book that I will add to my small canon of works to be re-read periodically whenever life's burdens threatens to weigh me down. Most highly recommended.

Publication Date: June 17, 2008 (US), Hardcover.

Publisher: Flying Dolphin Press

P.S. For an audiobook/book trailer experience of the book, click on this link.

Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy

Every few months, the cycle begins anew. Someone out there somewhere, someplace, asks "What makes this work a fantasy?" He or she ponders it for a bit, like a cow chewing its cud, then the thoughts are spit out, perhaps onto a blog or into the middle of a forum discussion. Others read it and react, "No!" or "Yes!" or "Yes, but..." Names are tossed about as example of the X but not Y "qualities" of "fantasy." "Yes, Borges is." "No, he isn't!" "Yes, yes he is!" And so it devolves into the claiming of authors as being X, Y, and Z or X and Y but not Z, or Z but not X and Y, and by the time the poor, baffled reader deciphers what is being argued, he or she is left wondering if anything was really accomplished.

Sometimes, however, someone dares to go a bit further, to ask tougher questions, such as "How is this story interacting with the world about the reader?" Occasionally, these questions lead to further explorations that reveal a lode full of fruitful results. These rare works contribute to the growing historiography of literary studies, studies that leave the reader not just knowing more, but also armed with an interpretative set that can be applied to other works. Farah Mendlesohn's recent book, Rhetorics of Fantasy, has the potential for being such a book.

Instead of engaging in a rather Quixotic attempt to define a hard and fast set of rule for "what is fantasy," Mendlesohn instead is more interested in understanding the construction of the genre, namely its language and the rhetoric employed, in order to provide critical tools for further analysis (Introduction, xiii). She argues that more is to be gained from examining the various ways in which a dialectic between the author(s) and reader is created; as it takes an implicit understanding of what the author is constructing and what the reader will digest for a true "sense of wonder" to be constructed out of mere words. This idea appeals greatly to me, as too many comments on the structures of fantasies fail to note this dialectal event by which an author creates scenes that contain expectations that the reader desires to see fulfilled. It is a case in which the actual creation of a form is often neglected for looking just at the already-constructed forms themselves.

Mendlesohn posits that there are four main types of fantasy: portal-quest, intrusive, immersive, and liminal, with many works utilizing elements of each of these four. Each type or form has its own semantical relationship between character, plot, setting, as well as how reader expectations shapes these relationships. Mendlesohn structures her book into five sections, devoted to each of these four types and a final section for those works that exist on the peripheries of each of these. It allows for a lengthy exploration of well over one hundred novels along their "genetic" kinships, as well as noting those books that do not meet the criteria.

Portal-quest fantasies are perhaps the most easily recognizable of the fantasies and are defined as being stories in which there is a "safe," non-magical origin point and a wilder, more "dangerous" and magic-filled realm on the outside; the two never meet and any magic that occurs in one place cannot be transported into the other. Stories as diverse as the Narnia tales Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant novels utilize this aspect of fantasy, although each has its own unique characteristics that Mendlesohn does examine at length later. I found this to be the least objectionable of the four types.

Immersive fantasy are those fantasies in which the fantastic is presented as being mundane from the characters' points of view; it is there, it is accepted, it is wholly "natural." An interesting example of this is the magic realist subgenre, in which not only is the "magic" accepted, but that it symbolizes very real socio-political trends, especially in Latin America. One little quibble: considering the stated claims by Gabriel García Márquez and others of the "Boom Generation" that William Faulkner was a huge influence on their styles and approach to fictional writing, Mendlesohn devotes only a few passing sentences to Faulkner and none at all to Flannery O'Connor, who likewise utilized such tropes as the decaying/changing dichotomy and the spiritual lusts of the populace to create stories that influenced the shape and direction of the Southern Gothic.

Intrusion fantasies, where the fantastic intrudes upon the mundane world in a threatening fashion, presents some frightening possibilities for the reader and I felt that Mendlesohn did her best work here and in the liminal fantasy section in laying out the parameters for the "fuzzy set" of attributes of those stories that would belong in this field. Finally, the liminal fantasy, is perhaps the hardest to describe, not just because of its relative paucity of members, but rather because it involves presenting the fantastic as something that the characters choose to forego and to leave outside of the narrative. Mendlesohn cites M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart as an example and I agree, as it is the characters' choices not to reveal what magic they have experienced that creates great plot tension.

Rhetorics of Fantasy does an outstanding job of laying out the parameters for future explorations. I found myself not only agreeing with Mendlesohn's conclusions the majority of the time, but I also began asking questions that this book chose not to cover. Namely, if rhetoric is what drives author/reader interactions in a way akin to an unspoken, unwritten contract, of what substance is the "fantastic?" That is a question that has gnawed at me for some time. When did the "fantastic" emerge from actual belief and understanding of the world around? Perhaps Mendlesohn or another will take up that question and relate it to the development of material cultures and how various cultures address such speculations. Regardless, Rhetorics of Fantasy covers its purposes well and ought to serve well those readers who desire to go further in asking questions. Highly Recommended.

Publication Date: April 30, 2008 (US), Tradeback.

Publisher: Wesleyan Press

Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi

Despite having a reputation (especially in Anglo-American circles) for being a very dry, detached, "intellectual" writer who concentrated so much of his writing energy on labyrinths, mirrors, and doubles, Borges was known in his native Argentina for writing a much wider variety of stories. While I'll discuss his early fictions, much of which was influenced by the tone that José Hernández used in his epic poem, Martín Fierro, at a later point, I do want to note that Borges spent over 30 years of his life collaborating with fellow Argentine author Adolfo Bioy Casares on a series of stories. Most of these tales, published under the pseudonyms of H. Bustos Domecq and B. Suártez, were satirical works that parodied the increasingly popular género policial (crime fiction) stories that were becoming the rage in Argentina (as it had in the US and Britain in the late 1930s). Despite the nature of these stories, one can also detect Borges and Bioy Casares' appreciation for the crime fiction genre itself.

Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi (or Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi, as I read this in the original Spanish) deals with six interconnected stories that take the structure of a Holmesian mystery and inverts it to a degree. Instead of a super sleuth who notes precisely physical evidence that others have neglected, Isidro Parodi, or "prisoner in cell block #273," solves all of his clues behind bars. Imprisoned for 21 years for a variety of crimes including embezzlement, Parodi happens to overhear police officials and other socialites discussing a crime that they haven't been able to solve. Wh.ile the obstinate and rather obtuse police officials bear a family resemblance to their peers in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's mysteries, here in these stories, Borges and Bioy Casares turn them into a caustic and often hilarious caricature of Argentinean society of the early 1940s, full of creído and prompousness.

It is for this juxtaposition of an imprisoned criminal sleuth and the foibles of his society that makes Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi a delight to read. Each of the stories builds on the ones that preceded it, until by the final story, there is a tapestry of vividly-drawn characters. Borges and Bioy Casares combine their talents for interesting, ponderous crimes with their wickedly-executed characters to create six stories that work equally well as crime fiction and as satire. Highly recommended for those who are Borges completests, crime fiction lovers, and those who have read and enjoyed Bioy Casares' excellent La invención de Morel

Paul Kincaid, What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction

Imagine that you are holding an unfamiliar book. Curious, you open it up and start reading. Almost immediately you are greeted with strange, sometimes unknown words. "Fuligin" and "grok?" What the hell? Is this something unusual, or are these but clues that what is within is not mimetic?

In the opening section to What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction, Paul Kincaid's latest collection of essays, such scenarios as the above are discussed and analyzed. What is "science fiction?" What does the science fiction reader do when reading tales that contain night unimaginable technologies or creatures? These questions and more he addresses concisely, arguing that far from confusing the reader, such words as the disinterred "fuligin" in Gene Wolfe's series The Book of the New Sun and the neologism "grok," found in Robert Heinlein's A Stranger in a Strange Land, serve to focus the reader's attention even more to what is transpiring in the text, thus making the "weirdness" of the story not something incomprehensible, but rather it permits such stories to be interpreted in a fashion unlike those that would be employed for processing terms and themes for mimetic fiction.

Although the "Theory" opening section sets the stage for this collection of Kincaid's essays on SF that range from the mid-1980s to the present, it itself is rather short, being less than 10% of the book's content. However, the topics covered in this section appear in various guises throughout the remainder of the book. For example, in his "Practice" section, such issues of definition and application are discussed at length in essays such as "How Hard is SF?" and "Mistah Kurtz, He Dead." In the latter essay, Kincaid explores how word usage and symbolism contained in stories such as Heart of Darkness reveal much about the concerns, fears, and sometimes even the hopes of British SF writers vis á vis American SF, for example.

For the most part, Kincaid covers his topics well in his essays. His sections on Christopher Priest and Gene Wolfe in particular will be of great interest for those eager to gain even more insight into their methodologies and approaches to crafting tales. But there are a few weaknesses in this collection, some of which are inherent in the nature of such a collection of essays over the years. In places, Kincaid seems to be repeating himself, although originally the essays were written years apart and often in different publications. In addition, the disparate foci of these essays can create a herky-jerky aspect that is much more noticeable when one reads the collection in rapid-fire order than in pieces over a longer period of time.

But these are minor concerns. A much greater one is that of the latter third of the collection. While Kincaid does an outstanding job dissecting what makes much of British SF tick, his section entitled "...And the World" is rather sparse and lacking in comparison. This was most noticeable in the essay "Entering the Labyrinth," devoted to exploring the themes in Jorge Luis Borges's writing. Kincaid covers the basics well, such as Borges's well-known love for Anglo-American literature and his use of labyrinths. However, there was so much that was barely-discussed or ignored here. For example, the very real influence that his native Argentina had on Borges is given very short shrift. Stories like "The South," (which Borges himself has claimed was one of his best and most representative works) are neglected. While labyrinths and mirrors and the use of golems to represent the intertwining of artifice and reality did constitute much of Borges's interest in Ficciónes, Borges throughout his career did much, much more. He was a poet of some importance in the Spanish-speaking world and while most of his poems were not translated into English until late in his life and afterwards, they contain quite a few themes (loneliness, despair, reflections upon his family past, etc.) that intersect his prose in intriguing fashion.

Other non-British SF authors get even less attention in Kincaid's essays. While Steve Erickson is covered nicely, there is a relative paucity about the American-based New Wave writers such as Ursula Le Guin. The social/anthropological concerns in stories such as hers would have made for an interesting test of Kincaid's "Theory" section's statements regarding how SF readers process SFnal text, but outside of brief mentions here and there, not much is explored. How characters view their (material) cultures and how they interact with it, long a concern of Le Guin (as well as others, such as Doris Lessing in some of her stories), would have made for an interesting parallel with how readers interact with SFnal texts, but unfortunately this is barely addressed.

On the whole, I found What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction to be a thoughtful exploration of a rather difficult subject to cover at length. The fact that the organizational structure (collected essays rather than a single book-length post) and "blind spots" (much more on how non Anglo-American SF has developed) combine to create a sometimes spotty read is not as much of a condemnation of this otherwise excellent book as this illustrates just how vexing it is to cover a subject that is itself almost impossible to define precisely. Even with its flaws, Kincaid's book serves as a very good exploration of SF hermeneutics. Highly recommended.

Publication Date: March 21, 2008 (UK), tradeback.

Publisher: Beccon Publications

2008 Premio Alfaguara winner: Antonio Orlando Rodrígez's Chiquita

Ever since it was revived in 1998, the Premio Alfaguara has become one of the more visible Spanish-language literary awards. Sponsored by the publisher Alfaguara, who has agreed to publish the winner and to pay $175,000 as prize money, the Premio Alfaguara is chosen by a panel of five judges (rotating, with some of the more famous Spanish-language novelists, such as Carlos Fuentes, serving as judges) from submitted manuscripts that do not contain the author's real name or the true title of the story.

I have read every single one of the revived Premio Alfaguara winners and without exception, I have found each to contain memorable scenes, outstanding prose, deft characterizations, and in a few cases (especially with Xavier Velasco's 2003 novel, Diablo Guardián) traces of the fantastic/supernatural. Yet none of them "feel" like the others. From a half-crazed Cuban ex-soldier who sees a tiger stalking him (Eliseo Alberto's 1998 co-winner, Caracol Beach) to an analogue for the Odyssey (Manuel Vicent's 1999 winner, Son de Mar) to Velasco's demonic guardian angel to last year's winner, Luis Leante's tragic love story set in the Sahara of the last days of Spain's control of the Western Sahara, Mire si yo te querré, each of these stories has its own unique approach towards telling a great story.

The same holds true for this year's winner, Antonio Orlando Rodríguez's Chiquita. Based on an actual person, the diminutive Cuban Espiridiona Cenda, Rodríguez has written a faux biography whose subject, the 26 inch-tall Cenda (known best by her stage name of Chiquita), and her work as a freak show feature attraction in the US during the late 19th and early 20th centuries serve as a fitting contrast for the tumultuous time in both Chiquita's native Cuba and the United States. Through her fake biography, we learn not just about she co-existed with her co-stars, but also about how her Cuban ancestry was played up during the buildup to the Spanish-American War of 1898. We see the Cuba that José Martí immortalized in his poetry and his political tracts written in exile in New York. We get a picture of the US that contains many conflicting and odd angles, from how the denizens of each city on these traveling tours would react to Chiquita and her co-stars, to how the US itself was changing from a rural to an industrial economy during the last years of the 19th century.

Rodríguez is never heavy-handed with these depictions. They exist on the periphery, with the grotesque serving as the focal lens for turning a carnivalesque warped mirror on the crowds gathered together to view the freaks. The prose is direct and to the point, but not at the expense of constructing vivid images of what is transpiring. Chiquita herself feels as though this were indeed her memoirs and not Rodríguez's fictionalization of events from her past. As a historical novel, Chiquita exists on so personal of a level as to make the historical elements just part of the attraction. Yet another deserving winner for the Premio Alfaguara. Highly recommended for those who can read Spanish, as I am uncertain when or even if this will ever be translated into English.

Publication Date: May 9, 2008 (Latin America, Spain, US), tradeback (Spanish).

Publisher: Alfaguara

Anthology Reviews: Paper Cities

Cities have fascinating and often troubled histories. So much so that the older cities begin to secrete layers of historical clashes and cultural shifts, with elements of the old mutating to fit the needs of the present. Prod a bit under a city's surface and you are bound to turn up a few skeletons and other rotting vestiges of the older cultural orders. Perhaps it might be best to say instead that if one digs deep enough, one will find all sorts of mythical alligators lurking underneath the surface layer.

This comment of mine regarding Ekaterina Sedia's The Secret History of Moscow can just as easily be applied to a recent anthology that she edited, Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy. A city is not a monolithic entity; it shifts and warps the viewer's perception from one street corner or block to the next. If New York's Brooklyn and Bronx neighborhoods differ so much that each has its own accent, why can't there be wildly different cities of the fantastic? As Sedia herself notes in the Editor's Note:

I selected these stories because they share the insight into the cities as living entities, benign or sinister, that can shape the existence of their inhabitants. And they share the passion for those agglomerations of flesh and inanimate matter, with all their foibles, glories, and hidden truths.

In addition, these stories typically do not represent the facets of the subgenre "urban fantasy;" werevolves and vampires in a modern "real" city do not constitute a major part of what transpires in this anthology of 21 stories. What does happen is that in cities real and imagined, with stories that sometimes stretch for many years or historical periods, people interact with these amorphous entities of brick and mortar, or stone and cement, or perhaps wood and iron and tin, all to create vistas that can be exciting or terrifying.

Forrest Aguirre's "Andretto Walks the King's Way" sets the tone early by describing a rural traveler's travels into the city. With its shifting perspectives and Andretto's perplexity on full display, by the time the story concludes, one begins to get the sense of the mysterious allure that cities can have for those who grow up in the countryside. Hal Duncan's "The Tower of Morning Bones" is set in yet another fold of the Vellum, mixing other mythologies together to create a story that is dense, but ultimately rewarding for those who engage the story.

Other stories that I thought were highlights of this collection were Ben Peek's "The Funeral, Ruined," Michael Jasper's "Painting Haiti," and Catherynne M. Valente's excerpt from her upcoming novel, Palimpsest. In each of these tales, there is a beauty to the prose, one that offsets what is transpiring within the stories, creating a dissonance that enticed me to pay even closer attention to what was occurring. The other stories were only a small step behind these in quality, as I do not recall a story that disappointed me.

Paper Cities is an excellent anthology whose stories ought to appeal to a wide range of readers, especially those curious about "urban fantasy" but who may be uncertain if any of the authors who write in this amorphous field might be worth reading. Like real cities, each city presented has its own facets, its own charms, and its own dangers that the characters come to experience. Highly recommended.

Publication Date: April 1, 2008 (US); tradeback.

Publisher: Senses Five Press

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, Steampunk

Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term for Powers, Blaylock and myself. Something based on the appropriate technology of the era; like "steampunks," perhaps ...

- K.W. Jeter, letter to Locus magazine, April 1987

Although Jeter's letter is widely considered to be the terminus a quo for the usage of the term "steampunk" to describe those tales that utilize and (often) subvert Victorian Era steam-based technologies to create fantastical, adventuresome tales, steampunk-like stories can be traced back at least four or five decades, to the inventor/adventurer/conqueror pulp fiction called "Edisonades" and to the reactions to the oft-jingoistic, racist undertones of such novels. It is this juxtaposition of 19th century positivist attitudes towards technology and our more recent concerns with social relations (among a great many other things) that makes steampunk fiction a very popular and creative literary cousin to the cyberpunk movement of the 1980s.

In Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's just-released anthology, Steampunk, the editors begin by noting the influences on steampunk, its various forms and foci, and how interest in all things steam-driven has created a subculture that revels in brass knobs and gears affixed to their computers or other everyday appliances. Since steampunk doesn't have the attribute-defining problems that New Weird fiction does, the editors instead have structured this anthology differently from their February The New Weird anthology. There is an introductory article written by Jess Nevins that explains the 19th century origins of steampunk fiction, which goes into detail describing the rise of the Edisonades and how by the 1960s, authors such as Michael Moorcock had begun writing stories that took the the Edisonades' entrepreneurial spirit and subverted it, creating tales that were much more complex in their focus and which contained quite a bit of ambiguity in regards to the notion of "progress" being sacrosanct. This article sets the stage well for the 13 stories/excerpts that follow and for the two concluding articles written by Rick Klaw and Bill Baker.

The stories chosen represent a cross-section of authors who are primarily known for their steampunk fictions (Joe R. Landsdale, James Blaylock, and to a lesser extent, Paul di Filippo) as well as those whose works utilize steampunk tropes on occasion (Michael Chabon, Ted Chiang, Michael Moorcock, and Jay Lake, among others). Although some of the more famous steampunk writings do not appear here because they are novels (such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine), the stories that do appear in this anthology are very strong choices.

I usually don't spend much time reviewing individual stories when I comment on anthologies, since I am much more interested in seeing how "well-glued" the anthology is rather than elaborating at length on each of the stories. However, I do want to point out that in each of the stories presented here, we see evidence of the various motifs that Nevins discusses in his introductory article. We see the use of an industrial golem in Ted Chiang's brilliant "72 letters." In an excerpt from his 1971 novel The Warlord of the Air, Michael Moorcock explores questions of whether or not gadgetry employed for destructive purposes is something that ought to be glorified. Some of the tales are funny or satirical, such as Paul di Filippo's "Victoria," while others contain gruesome warnings, such as that embedded in Jay Lake's "The God-Clown is Near."

As I read each of these tales, I could not help but to reflect back to not just Nevins' introduction, but also to the closing pieces by Klaw and Baker. In their pieces, the two discuss what it is about steampunk that creates such a lasting impression on the reader or upon the movie/TV viewer who enjoyed shows as diverse as the old Jules Verne-based movies from the 1960s to the original TV version of The Wild Wild West. As I read these stories in light of the point raised by these articles, I could not help but to remember reading one of the last major Edisonades, the reworked and updated Tom Swift novels released in the 1980s, and thinking about how there was so much that appealed to me then but which now leaves me feeling uncomfortable with the underlying assumptions behind writing such tales. Reading these steampunk stories served to highlight their distinctions from the earlier Edisonade form, while they still managed to capture some of the energy and spirit that makes such works exciting reads. Based on this, the VanderMeers' latest anthology works both as a historical piece that concisely tells the origins and importance of the steampunk subgenre and as an enjoyable set of tales that ought to appeal to a wide range of readers. Highly Recommended.

Publication Date: May 1, 2008 (US); tradeback.

Publisher: Tachyon

Thoughts regarding Scott Bakker's Neuropath

This shall not be a typical review for me. Unlike virtually all others who have received review copies over the past few months, I have known at least some of the details of this story for almost four years now and instead of focusing directly on the story itself, I would rather concentrate on its genesis and some of its possible implications.

When I met Bakker at a Nashville booksigning in June 2004, he said to a small audience that consisted of some of his old grad school buddies from Vanderbilt and a couple of others (including myself) that he had recently begun writing a near-future thriller based on a dare from his then-fiancée Sharron, who preferred that genre over the epic fantasies that he enjoys reading/writing. But early on, from what I recall from a few email conversations and interviews that he did with me and with others, he decided to mix in elements of his Ph.D. dissertation and craft a tale that would be provocative, unsettling, and if the reader were willing to commit to the Argument that he presents in the book, something that might be harrowing for a year. Needless to say, all of this interested me, especially in regards to questions revolving around choice, free will, and the possible illusory natures of both. While we disagreed then (and now) on some of the particulars (I am much more optimistic about matters regarding both), Bakker's questions sparked quite a few thoughts that occupied my waking and sometimes sleeping hours.


Fast-forward to February 2006. Bakker had just completed a complete revision of this thriller, called Neuropath, and he asked me and Jay Tomio if we would like to read the draft while he and his agent would attempt to sell this story. He warned us beforehand that it was a "difficult" story and one that likely would not be appealing to the majority out there due to its visceral qualities and its disturbing questions. Undaunted, I agreed to read the draft.

The draft was everything he said and more. It is a very bleak novel, with its few lighter moments serving only to set up even more devastating revelations. And unlike most thrillers, there was no catharsis at the end. Instead, the ending is so chilling, so personal in a sense that I was sucked into imagining myself in the place of the protagonist, Thomas Bible. There was no redemption, no "saving moment." Instead, it closes with a realization that the traumas endured, the horrors realized, all of those were but the stripping away of protective layers; I felt exposed afterwards. Made for quite a downer for a couple of days, as even my dreams dealt with the implications of what was shown in that novel. Totally unlike 99% of the other novels that I've read over the course of almost 30 years of reading.

Bakker was correct in noting that this would be a tough sell, as it took well over a year to find publishers that would release the book. Talking about matters involving the manipulation of the mind (and therefore the body) does not make for a pleasant read, regardless of how well-written and plotted the novel might be. Considering that Neuropath utilizes some of the tropes of the thriller genre, perhaps it might be best to discuss how well it succeeds on that level.

The few thrillers that I've read tend to be short, sharp staccato bursts of dialogue and action that moves at a fast clip to a (somewhat) telegraphed conclusion. Neuropath on the other hand, while it nails the tense, frightening scenes that drive the early portion of the novel, might be odd and disjointed to thriller fans because there is so much exposition. Those who don't want to think while they're reading a plot-heavy novel probably will find Thomas Bible's reminisces about his friend-turned-FBI suspect Neil Cassidy to be rather long and distracting from the plot. For the first 200 pages of this 300 page novel, Bible's thoughts, his self-denials, his worries, his fears dominate the book, creating a sensation of a sputtering start perhaps for those who desire a head-on adrenaline rush.

However, the final third of the novel is packed full of surprising revelations, horrifying actions, and a twist ending that does serve to provide a definitive end to the action, if not to the implications that led up to that action. It is a suitable conclusion, but not necessarily the one that most readers would want, but it does flow quite nicely with the "Argument" between Bible and Cassidy that is threaded throughout the novel.

It is strange novel to review. It meets its purposes and is written well. It creates an emotional connection with the reader, but through appealing to the fallacy of reason than by any real attachment to the characters. There is nothing cathartic about its conclusion to offset its disturbing implications. It is not a story that will make someone feel better for having read it. But it is a tale that does make a strong connection and as such, if one engages in the "Argument," it might be a moving book, but if one fails to engage in that "Argument," the book and its premise will be utterly unappealing. Therefore, I can only recommend Neuropath, despite its merits and despite my personal appreciation of what Bakker has accomplished here, to those who are willing to engage their minds with what is transpiring in the text.

Publication Date: May 2008 (UK); June 2008 (Canada); unknown US release date

Publishers: Orion (UK); Penguin Canada (Canada)

My Amazon review of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's El Juego del Ángel

It just went live. Thanks again to Jeff VanderMeer for arranging all of this. It's been a pleasure working on this and I hope the review will sate the curiosity of those reading it.

Strange Horizons review of Joe Abercrombie's Last Argument of Kings

My Strange Horizons review of Abercrombie's third book just now went live.

Toby Barlow, Sharp Teeth (Shirley Jackson Finalist)

Of ladies, cavaliers, of love and war,
Of courtesies and of brave deeds I sing,
In times of high endeavour when the Moor
Had crossed the sea from Africa to bring
Great harm to France, when Agramante swore
In wrath, being now the youthful Moorish king,
To avenge Troiano, who was lately slain,
Upon the Roman Emperor Charlemagne.

- Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, Canto I (trans. by Barbara Reynolds)

Let's sing about the man there
at the breakfast table
brown skin, thin features, white T,
his olive hand making endless circles
in the classifieds
"wanted" "wanted" "wanted"
small jobs little money
but you have to start somewhere.
Here.
LA
East LA

I love epic poetry and have for a great many years. From the time that a Latin professor of mine introduced my class to the intricate weaving of metaphors and similes of Vergil's Æneid, epic poetry has seized my imagination more than virtually all other forms of fiction. There is something about that notion of a story being "sung," or "chanted" (such as the chanson now known as The Song of Roland) that causes me to pay close attention to the rhythms, to the shifts in voice and of theme, to the often-playful character interactions, to the sheer beauty of it all, that makes for a satisfying reading experience.

But epic poetry has been a moribund storytelling form for over three centuries now, which is why when I read that Toby Barlow wrote his debut novel, Sharp Teeth, in a fashion that would hark back to those ancient forms, I was intrigued. So what if the story involved werewolves, surely an overplayed paranormal/horror staple? None of my favorite epic poets ever really created something "new" when they wrote about the Trojan War, the founding of Rome, or of the twelve mighty paladins of Charlemagne. What each of those writers, from Homer to Vergil, from Ariosto to Tasso, did was to take that source material, hackneyed as it might have been in the hands of a lesser poet and make something meaningful from it.

Did Barlow manage to do something of the same? To a degree, yes, but only to a degree. In his tale, told in free verse rather than in the octaves favored by Ariosto (whose themes most resemble Barlow's and thus will be the epic poet of comparison in this piece), Barlow tells of an ancient band of lycanthropes who shift back and forth from a canine (not lupine) to human state at will, unaffected by the lunar cycle. There is a lost alpha female, nameless, who drives the story; it is her interactions with the dogcatcher, Anthony, that sets up a narrative/character tension that makes the resulting story a real page turner for me.

Mixed in with this saga of deceit and love, of fleeing females and meandering males lost in the gloam searching for their lost leader, are some interesting asides, similar to the ones that Ariosto and others employ to great effect in creating a greater depth to the conflict being played out:

You either trust or you distrust coincidence.
It's either small doses of magic pulling
you to your appointed destiny
or the devil trying to lead you
down to the thorns.
Peabody has no way to know this,
but there is an old lycanthrope legend that got it all right.
The story goes that the universe is run by two simple things,
a prime mover and a coyote.
This coyote is a wily dog born
from ancient trickster bones,
Loki, Hermes, the northwestern Raven of lore,
all glimmer in his aluminum eyes.
And while
the prime move makes
the world simply by
dreaming of its own dreaming
spanning all, shaping all,
the coyote mostly sleeps,
his chin to the ground, one ear perked up,
his body resting in the shade of the prime mover's infinity.
Coyote awakens at something like the smell of bacon
and trots across the kingdom of heaven
hopping down into the world,
sniffing for mischief.
And as the prime mover contemplates
the contemplation that therefore spawns existence,
and time passes without passing,
the coyote sprightly follows the dusty trail back home,
where he dances around the prime mover
eagerly barking and yipping and telling tales
of coincidence wrought, good luck won,
bad luck earned, loose ends that were somehow connected,
all thanks to this little mischief mutt:
the longed-for lover shows up at the bus stop,
the ex-roommate appears with the missing keys,
the thought of a distant friend sails across the mind
just as she strolls by the café window.
"Hey, what are you doing here?" a happy voice sings.
The winning lottos made of birthday numbers,
postcards sent to the dead letter office
but still somehow deliver meaning,
wrong number callers who somehow fall in love,
and the ragged luck of pulling an inside straight
on a last chip on a last bet on a last day.
Coyote wags his tail and brags:
of the taxicab pulling up at the first raindrop,
the wrong turn leading to a better place,
the guilty soul arrested for a different crime,
the critical ally sighted through the ancient hotel's
revolving doors in some faraway destination.
"Hey, what are you doing here?" a voice happily sings.

All this vibrates and shimmers
around coyote as he makes his way
connecting the wonder moments,
for good or for ill
and coming home to tell his story,
wagging, grinning, barking.

But the prime mover simply
revolves on in silence
deaf to everything
moving like a whale
swimming through the
endless blue seas of
its own deep and infinite dream. (pp. 172-174)

In this long excerpt, we see not just traces of the ancient Native American trickster god, Coyote, but also Barlow's use of simile, such as "moving like a whale," to give a ponderous undertone to what is transpiring. It is as much of an aural play as a visual one that unfolds here, deepening the story, causing it to take on universal themes in addition to the more specific ones involving Anthony and his nameless lycanthrope girlfriend.

Those who have read Ariosto's epic and recall the conflicted relationship between the Saracen Ruggiero and the Christian maiden Bradamante will see much in common with Anthony's relationship with the ever-fleeing lycanthrope alpha female. But where Ariosto contains a great many parallels to this central relationship, in Barlow's 308-page story, there is relatively little to compete for the reader's attention. Perhaps this is a welcome change for many who struggle to keep track of all that transpires in tales such as Orlando Furioso, but I could not help but to feel that if Barlow had added just a few more layers to this tale, that it could have been imbued with a similar level of beautiful complexity. As it stands, Sharp Teeth works well as a blank verse epic, as its rhythms are accentuated by the use of verse and extraneous description is excised by a judicious use of epic metaphor. However, the relatively straightforward tale never quite matches the beauty or grandeur of the epic poems it seeks to emulate, settling instead for just a simply told, excellent tale rather than for something that might accrete even more symbolic meanings with each passing re-read. Regardless, this is a tale that I would highly recommend to all readers, especially those already familiar with the epic poets that I referenced above. Well deserving of its nomination for the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel.

Publication Date: October 2007 (UK); January 29, 2008 (US), Hardcover.

Publisher: Harper Books

Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods

This new world weighs a yatto-gram.

But everything is trial-size; tread-on-me tiny or blurred-out-of-focus huge. There are leaves that have grown as big as cities, and there are birds that nest in cockleshells. On the white sand there are long-toed clawprints deep as nightmares, and there are rock pools in hand-hollows finned by invisible fish.

Trees like skyscrapers, and housing as many. Grass the height of hedges, nuts the swell of pumpkins. Sardines that would take two men to land them. Eggs, pale-blue-shelled, each the weight of a breaking universe.

And, underneath, mushrooms soft and small as a mouse ear. A crack like a nut, and inside a million million microbes wondering what to do next. Spores that wait for the wind and never look back.

Moss that is concentrating on being green. (p. 3)

Jeanette Winterson's latest book, The Stone Gods, begins with the discovery of something pristine, inviolate, and pure. It is a primeval pastoral scene, one that stands out in stark contrast to what most readers would see if they were to look out the nearest window. It is a scene of a world just discovered, existing some light-years away from the formerly blue planet Orbus, a place where humans have not wreaked havoc upon the ecosystem. But now that it known to be there, it is time to go and to (de)spoil it.

The Stone Gods begins as a satire of human greed and insecurity. In a place where people are genetically "fixed" to a predetermined age (more and more women choosing to be "fixed" around the age of 12 to please their young flesh-greedy husbands), where artificial intelligent life has emerged to co-exist with regular humans (robo sapiens, heavy on that italicized sapiens), surrounded by visible signs of material constructs standing in place of "true" human feeling, two characters stand in the midst of this maelstrom of cupidity and short-sightedness. Billie Crusoe, her name perhaps an intentional echo of De Foe's hero, and her robo sapien companion, Spike, are assigned to colonize this newly-discovered new planet. But when it is revealed that the mission involves a certain devastating event to occur to make it "habitable" for humans, Winterson's tale begins to take root and to grow beyond its satiric beginnings.

In reading this short 207 page book, I found myself considering Winterson's book from many different vantage points: as a social satire of our increasingly plastic beauty world, as a critique of our failings in regards to our environment, as a look at how we view gender and race in society, and as a devastating commentary about the consequences of our chronic short-sightedness. Winterson's book concentrates much more upon the relating of each of these themes via conversations between Billie and Spike than through any substantive action. The time and locale shifts rapidly during the course of this book, although never so fast as to preclude a full understanding of what is transpiring. Take for instance this one chilling scene aboard the ship about a quarter of the way into the novel. Billie is speaking with Pink McMurphy, another crewmate:

Pink McMurphy was staring at me with eyes the size of moons. 'Did you murder someone?'

'I was campaigning against Genetic Reversal.'

'But why?'

'Because it makes people fucked up and miserable.'

'Y'know, I'd be fucked up and miserable anyway - and if I'm going to be fucked up and miserable, I'd rather be young, fucked up and miserable. Who wants to be depressed and have skin that looks like fried onions?'

'Pink, I just visited you on a professional basis and you wanted to refix from age twenty-four to age twelve.'

'I have pressing personal circumstances.'

'You have a husband who is a paedophile.'

'He's just sentimental. When we go shopping, he always likes to visit the toy store. Men, y'know, they don't grow up - it makes sense that they like girls.'

'It doesn't make sense to me. We have a society where routine cosmetic surgery and genetic Fixing are considered normal -'

Pink interrupted me, patting my knee with a clear, unspotted, unaged and manicured hand. 'It is normal...What was no normal about getting old? It's great that we have Fixing and laser. I'm fifty-eight in old years, but I look and I feel fantastic.' Pink demonstrated her great feel-good fantasticness by bouncing her silicon tits a little higher out of her dress. 'Nobody has to look horrible any more - it's been a winner for confidence.'

'If you're so confident, why do you want to be twelve years old?'

'I told you a hundred times - I love my husband and I want his attention. I'll never get it aged twenty-four. I even had my vagina reduced. I'm tight as a screwtop bottle.' Fortunately there was no demonstration this time. I relaxed. (p. 58)

The majority of the novel consists of conversations such as this one, discussions where the most inane and pointless "developments" are shown to be so utterly ridiculous not by any outright condemnation (although on occasion Billie will step towards the "fourth wall" and seem to address the reader with her complaints), but rather by how others defend such tripe. Add to this a narrative that subtly loops time and place, and what one gets is a culminative effect that would be so damning if it weren't mitigated by what is transpiring within the Billie/Spike relationship dynamics. The Stone Gods as a whole rises above the sum of its (often very funny) parts and becomes a cautionary tale that never loses sight of the human element. Highly recommended.

Publication Date: September 2007 (UK); March 2008 (US), Hardcover.

Publishers: Hamish Hamilton (UK); Harcourt (US).

Jeff VanderMeer, The Situation

Some of the strangest fiction is based on everyday relationships. From the rituals that people do in waking up, to how we hope for a desired outcome (from praying to the various "rain dances" seen during dry spells, etc.), to how we engage in power struggles along the way of developing personal and professional relationships with other people, when we extract these actions from their "normal" setting and place them in an imagined situation, all sorts of strange, unsettling interpretations can ensue.

In Jeff VanderMeer's just released novella, The Situation, office politics plays a central role in creating an atmosphere that is as haunting for how familiar it is for the reader as it is for its modified humans and the rather grotesque objects being produced in this office situation. The story opens with a description of the narrator's manager:

My Manager was extremely thin, made of plastic, with paper covering the plastic. They had always hoped, I thought, that one day her heart would start, but her heart remained a dry leaf that drifted in her ribcage, animated to lift and fall only by her breathing. Sometimes, when my Manager was angry, she would become so hot that the paper covering her would ignite, and the plastic beneath would begin to melt. I didn't know what to say in such situations. It seemed best to say nothing and avert my gaze. Over time, the runneled plastic of her arms became a tableau of insane images, leviathans and tall ships rising out of the whorling, and stranger things still. I would stare at her arms so I did not have to stare at her face. I never knew her name. We were never allowed to know our Manager's name. (Some called her their "Damager," though.) (p. 5)

Many of us have known supervisors that we would never dare think were human or who actually possessed a heart; some I never dared call by anything other than "sir" or "ma'am." Imagining a boss with such metaphorical features as a non-functioning heart as becoming literal in this story helps to draw in those readers who need some sort of "anchor" to fasten themselves to the story unfolding here. But as easy as it would be to develop a tale revolving solely around an employee's precarious position with his/her bosses, it is in the complex, byzantine relationships that the narrator/employee has with his colleagues that makes this story easy to relate with, even as the strangeness of the company grows with each passing page.

Co-workers are often as much of a nuisance as a comfort, when they are not outright being one's enemy. I have worked mostly as a schoolteacher over the past decade and while the politics there differ greatly in some aspects from those of business offices, there is still quite a bit of professional jealousy that transpires between the classrooms as there does from cubicle to cubicle. Add to that the pettiness that supervisors or other colleagues can have from time to time, and the situation can grow quite hairy:

For a while, everything went well. We built the fish by hand and it took shape with a coherent design. I noticed a certain reluctance on the part of Scarskirt and Leer, but in general everyone seemed happy with my efforts.

Then the Manager finally decided to attend a meeting. Ten minutes into the meeting, she burst into flames and stood up.

We all shied away from her as she said, "The fish was to have my face. That is the last design to materialize in my office and none of what you have done since has been sent to me for approval, or is acceptable to me in any way."

This business about approval was blatantly untrue. I had sent her several messages about the changes. I had used her favorite message method: tiny crunchy bats that spurted the long-lost flavors of marzipan, chocolate mousse, and apple pie into your mouth even as you cracked down on the bones to receive the information.

But when my Manager visited my office later, she professed ignorance. She said she had not gotten any of my messages. (pp. 20-21).

Behind this weird design product and the equally strange message delivery system lies familiar territory for a great many workers: turf battles, the desire of superiors to put their own stamp on matters, and the profession of ignorance when it suits the person involved. Perhaps the oddities mentioned in this story are all the more noticeable because many readers might find themselves remembering how the foreman somehow managed to get his/her name added at the last minute to a group project that they had shunted away to another to handle during the formative stages, only to assume control when the process was nearing completion. Maybe this situation is not as far-out as one might presume from a simple glance at the surface features.

For me, the central theme of the story is revealed when the narrator describes how one of his co-workers has changed:

Complicating matters, Mord, I soon discovered, had also become part of their network. Despite all of his promises, Mord had changed once he moved to Human Resources. He was now partially composed of some large furred animal, almost like a bear. He began to emit a musk that someone told me was supposed to have a calming effect on the employees. He retained his hands, but they morphed to become more like those of a raccoon. His eyes had been enlarged and refitted so he could see at night. In the dark hallways of some fl