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Invaders

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Invaders: 22 Tales from the Outer Limits of LiteratureInvaders: 22 Tales from the Outer Limits of Literature by Jacob Weisman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What does it mean to write science fiction? On some level, it means writing stories that get published in magazines featuring artistically-depicted spaceships and robots on their covers. It’s creating content involving science or at least scientific ideas playing out in new and interesting directions. It remains relevant because of the ways science continues to inform who we are, what we’re doing, and where we’re going.

Who’s writing important science fiction today? Things get a bit fuzzier here, because though there are certainly people (a lot of people) doing wonderful, interesting things inside the genre universe, sometimes it seems very few of them bleed out into more mainstream or “literary” waters—by which I mean publishing works in broader magazines or winning literary prizes not named after celestial objects or science fiction editors.

It’s a bit easier to see things going the other direction: important literary or mainstream authors venturing into genre territory. That’s what makes a collection like Jacob Weisman’s Invaders possible. If you think you know science fiction, or you want to get to know science fiction, or you want a new, sophisticated take on some of the angles you’ve poured over in the pulps, here’s an anthology to note.

Invaders encompasses twenty-two short stories, only a few of which are by established genre writers or originally appeared in genre magazines but all of which explore familiar aspects of science fiction in original ways. The tropes are all here—mad scientists, alien encounters, post-apocalyptic wastelands, sex-bots—borrowed from the pages of the pulps and filtered through the imaginations of some of the top mainstream writers working today. (I started to make a list of all the different awards listed in these author bios—because a guy likes to dream, you know?—and had reached forty before the list was complete.)

These stories are better than good. They’re sharp, subtle, and unfailingly well-crafted. Sure, some lack the excitement and straightforward pizzaz you might expect from magazines in which the editors are tasked primarily to entertain. Yet even these, such as J. Robert Lennon’s “Portal,” Max Apple’s “The Yogurt of Vasirin Kefirovsky,” and Kelly Luce’s “Amorometer” are still lovely and mysterious. There are think pieces in here as well, like Rivka Galchen’s “The Region of Unlikeness” or Steven Millhauser’s “A Precursor of the Cinema”. There are also two stories that take what may be the most tired science fiction trope of all, the alien encounter, and make it something new without actually doing anything different but by writing with a style that makes them positively luminous. I’m thinking, of course, of “Lambing Season” by Molly Gloss and “Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover” by Robert Olen Butler.

This stuff is science fiction as literature. These are stories written by artists who have abducted the genre for their own designs. They’re haunting, pristine, and sometimes devastating.

And then there are the pieces that are a whole lot better than good. Even if every other story in this collection had been a dud (and none of them are), four stories in here would still make Invaders completely worth the read. I’m thinking here specifically of Julia Elliott’s “LIMBs,” which tells a smart and heart-breaking story of geriatrics and technological advance, as well as love and aging; Deji Bryce Olukotun’s “We Are the Olfanauts,” a piece about personal sacrifice and the cost of success in a bizarre but strangely believable interpretation of the internet; and “Monstro” by Junot Diaz, which is somehow Akira meets Attack on Titan set in the Caribbean and told with a linguistic flare I could never hope to emulate or capture.

Finally, there is George Saunder’s “Escape from Spiderhead,” which wherever it was published (it was the New Yorker), genre or not, embodies what makes both great science fiction and great storytelling. It’s clean, simple, and as brutally efficient as a razor. I think, from now on, my writing prayer might simply be, “God, help me write a story as good as this one.” “Spiderhead” is the story of an idea just over tomorrow’s horizon taken to its unexpected and yet in retrospect unavoidable conclusion in language spare and merciless with characters simple and agonizingly real.

If you like science fiction that makes you think, and if you like stories told by writers who are masters of their craft, who use language as both a tool and a palette, this is the anthology you’ve been looking for.

If you’re already familiar with great science fiction authors who fit this description but are looking to expand your horizons further, you’re also looking for this book.

Now, my question: would it be possible to do this trick backward? That is, could you create an anthology of “genre” authors, writers who primarily work in science fiction and are not well known beyond it, that contains works of theirs falling outside the traditional boundaries of science fiction? Invaders is an anthology of literary authors writing science fiction; could we have a similar anthology of science fiction authors writing literature? (I think we could, and I can name a few writers who would almost certainly be in it, but I’ll save that for another post.)

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Orsinian Tales

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Orsinian TalesOrsinian Tales by Ursula K. Le Guin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The cover of this one is a bit of a cheat. Orsinian Tales is a slender paperback I found lurking on one of my sister’s crowded bookshelves. The front features a tall, snug castle with a medieval town nestled at is base. It’s pretty clearly a stock image, though a case could be made that it illustrates the penultimate story in the collection. The author is Le Guin, and if you didn’t know who that is the cover helpfully points out she’s the author of the Earthsea Trilogy and the winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards. It’s clearly marketed as a fantasy, though to be fair a careful reader of the back cover would notice that these tales are explained as Le Guin bringing “to mainstream fiction all the power and enchantment” that have made her so well known for science fiction and fantasy. Be warned though, if you pick up this book hoping for the magic of Earthsea, you’re not going to find it in the way you expect.

This is a collection of Le Guin’s literary (“mainstream”) fiction. There aren’t dragons, old gods (despite what the cover says), spells, or enchantments of the ordinary, speculative kind. The stories in this sense are unexpectedly mundane. People grow up, fall in love, quarrel with their siblings, watch their country change, and have long conversations.

Yet to call this mundane or lacking magic because it’s not genre fantasy misses the point entirely. What Le Guin is doing here is something a lot deeper and more beautiful because of, not in spite of its everyday nature. She convinces you of the magic of her fiction—basically showing you the wellspring of her own speculative work—in stories that are straightforwardly not fantastic literature.

There are eleven stories in this collection, and they all loosely follow the history of a vague, eastern European country from the early days of Christianity to a long, indeterminate communist winter in a meandering, non-chronological fashion. None of them seem to explicitly fit together apart from their general locale, though there may have been deeper links that I missed. (Who was the defector of the very first story, and did the castle keep of the medieval murder reappear in the Lady of Moge?) None of them have any hint of science fiction or fantasy tropes. But all carry the magic of simple, real things lifted up and celebrated by the beauty and clarity of Le Guin’s prose.

She’s saying something important here, something she lays out most clearly in the final story of the collection, “Imaginary Countries.” Once upon a time, she seems to be telling us with these tales, stories were written simply to be beautiful. They didn’t have to have a hook or an unforeseen twist. They didn’t have to turn the world on its head or capture the reader with a completely unexpected concept or angle. They only had to be lovely and draw on a magic that was history and humanity itself.

These are what the stories in Orsinian Tales do, and they do it very well. They are stories with magic, but the magic is the deep and dangerous magic of the every day. Deep because it surrounds the characters she creates and dangerous because they’re all swimming in it, surrounded by it, and swept away. Dangerous because we’re in the midst of it as well, and we ignore it to our peril.

Sometimes fiction— especially fantasy— is passing through the looking glass. Le Guin doesn’t do that here. Instead she does something more difficult.

She opens a window.

Against Infinity

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Against InfinityAgainst Infinity by Gregory Benford

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked up Gregory Benford’s Against Infinity at a used book store a while ago and then put it away to save for portable airport reading on my recent trip to Italy. (Pocket editions like this are truly the best books to travel with.) The book was an effective escape, staving off my growing impatience with multiple delays out of Chicago’s O’Hare because of high winds in New York City.

Against Infinity had more heft to it than I expected, and more beauty as well. Benford had been on my list for a while as a practicing astronomer who wrote science fiction, and I hadn’t been disappointed with his Great Sky River. This one was an interesting fusion between an Arctic survivalist story and the wonder and ecological trappings of Dune. On top of this, it offers a scientifically realistic view of what Ganymede and the Jovian system might look like as a legitimate frontier for settlement. The characters are scouring a living on the surface of the moon, clawing for minerals and slowly tipping the biosphere toward something that can sustain life.

Overlain on this is a hunting tale in the tradition of Jack London and the Yukon, complete with super-intelligent biomechanical dogs and a meaningful coming-of-age narrative. A boy is growing up, forging a bond with an older, wiser hunter, coming to terms with his father, and learning his own limits. The object of the hunt that provides the context for this growth is men venturing out of their settlements into the icy, shifting landscape to cull the mutants of the genetically engineered species that have been introduced to help terraform the surface. The actual object of the hunt though—and ultimately the lynchpin of Benford’s narrative—is the Aleph.

The Aleph is an ancient device or creature that pre-dates man’s arrival on Ganymede and continually burrows through or over the surface of the moon, heedless to its pursuit by men, unaffected by any of their weapons or devices, and sometimes killing them in its passage. The concept, especially in the haunting descriptions provided by Benford, is a compelling hybrid of the raw power and immensity of the sandworms of Arrakis and the alien inscrutability of the monoliths of Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey. Benford’s prose becomes positively electric in describing the various ways this enigmatic thing chews through the shattering and slowly thawing terrain of the moon. He can (and does) spend multiple pages on all the glorious details of the behemoth exploding through a hillside, for instance, taking its pursuers unaware.

The first two-thirds of the book hinges on one boy’s growth to manhood and fixation on hunting the immense and elusive Aleph. It reads very much like a science fiction tribute to Jack London: the boy learning the ways of the hunt, training a tracking dog (of sorts), and learning to appreciate the unique bond between man, animal, and the unforgiving wilderness. But whereas a reader of London can take the ecology of Alaska for granted, Benford the astrophysicist gives us a fine-grained detail of the geology and young ecosystem of the moon, a realistic look at what terraforming and its effectives might look like physically as well as psychologically.

But the true hinge of narrative is the Aleph, and the resolution of its pursuit changes the trajectory of the novel about two-thirds of the way into it. After this climax is reached, the narrative jumps in time and expands in scope. The Aleph moves from being a cypher for the great unknown on a boy’s horizon to a much larger unknown of the evolution of humanity. Like the dissected Aleph itself though, this final portion of the novel seems more segmented and less organic than what came before. Benford touches briefly (and a bit randomly) on ideas regarding the evolution of society, including socialism and capitalism essentialized against ecological catastrophe. In this all, the Aleph’s role (and ultimate nature) becomes more vague and less satisfying.

New & Upcoming Writings

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It’s been a good season for placing stories. Besides my latest, “Three Strings,” which appeared in the premier issue of Farstrider Magazine (more on below), I have a handful of short works cropping up in a variety of collections this year.

“The Woodcutter’s Sons,” an arboreal fable, will appear in the first issue of what promises to be the lovely and sylvan Bracken Magazine, I have a short surrealist piece on something that definitely didn’t happen while writing my dissertation coming up in Pulp Literature called “Two Twenty-Two”, and my literary horror story, “Bone Orchard,” is forthcoming in Hypnos Magazine. Finally, I’m quite excited to announce that “When I Was Dead,” a story of the afterlife, will appear in Mysterion, a new anthology of Christian fiction.

It’s a pretty good track record, especially as my fiction writing has slowed down lately. I’ve begun working on a manuscript based on my dissertation for the University of Pittsburgh Press, and whatever room in my life that occasionally was filled by reading and writing fiction has recently been stuffed with the works and writings of various nineteenth-century astronomers.

So far all of these are still forthcoming, but you can find “Three Strings” online now at Farstrider Magazine. It’s fun to be part of the first issue of a publication, especially one that looks as sharp as Farstrider. I mean, just check out that cover:

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It’s everything you want good fantasy to be: comforting, warming, and familiar until you glance into the sky and realize, as Chesterton once pointed out, that “you’ve arrived at the wrong star.” It’s that juxtaposition of the expected and the fundamentally strange that makes good speculative fiction resonate, and this cover captures that perfectly.

“Three Strings” is the first story I’ve written so far that’s based around a pun. (Blame my dad. It’s in the blood.) But it made my wife snort out loud when she read it, so that’s a success in my book. If you haven’t already, take a look.

And while you’re there, you can check out the fantastic review they posted on my novel, First Fleet, which is still available on Amazon.

The Six Directions of Space

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The Six Directions of SpaceThe Six Directions of Space by Alastair Reynolds

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Alastair Reynolds has been a contemporary science fiction author on my list of writers to check out for a while. It was near the end of Christmas break that I visited my local public library and grabbed a small pile of novels that included Swanwick, Moorcock, and Benford, and a very thin volume by Reynolds. The Six Directions of Space, like The Best of Michael Swanwick, was published by Subterranean Press (one of a signed run of 1000), but unlike the Swanwick, it was a disappointment. From everything I hear, Reynolds has done impressive contemporary science fiction, but The Six Directions of Space, though a quick and easy read (actually a novella in hardcover), is not among this.

I kept trying to figure out what was bothering me about the work as I was reading. It was a compelling idea: a reality in which the Mongols had conquered the known world, become a space-faring civilization, and then—after stumbling across alien technology—a galaxy-spanning one. An agent of the Khan is sent to the periphery of this empire to investigate rumors of phantom ships appearing in the sub-space corridors (the Infrastructure) that allow FTL travel. Doing so, the protagonist stumbles across evidence that these conduits linking space actually link together much more.

I don’t like writing bad reviews. But I do like analyzing stories to help improve my own. So I’m going to do that for this one, with the understanding that Reynolds is a very successful writer and that this particular review says nothing about his overall work, from which I just appear to have selected a poor sample.

Finishing this work though (within a day, as it is really quite short) I realized it was a good example of how great ideas can be executed in a way that leaves a story feeling limp and passive, which is how this one felt. I was motivated to keep turning pages to see when the twist was going to come, not because I was gripped or because I had fallen in love with the characters or because the vistas were sharp and compelling. I just read to keep reading. If it was a full-length novel I would have put it down after a couple chapters.

Why? I came up with three reasons, and each of them is something that I continually struggle with in my own writing. Each of them is something that I think often keeps Stephen Case-level writing from becoming, say, Michael Swanwick-level writing.

Here they are:

1. Narrative passivity: Yellow Dog, the main character, doesn’t really do anything in this story. She’s sent on a mission and takes some small initiative near the beginning to get some information, but she’s captured early on. From that point the plot is just stuff happening to her. She doesn’t seem an agent; she doesn’t have to make any hard decisions; she doesn’t develop as a character. She’s carried along by the stream of events, so it’s hard to care about her or what happens to her. Her horse dies. She meets a guy. She solves a puzzle. But none of this seems to matter to the ultimate outcome of the story.

2. Telling but not showing: From the beginning of the story I felt like I was reading not a story but a report. Yellow Dog was telling what happened, maybe typing it up to send to her superiors back on Earth. At first I thought this was narrative method, but even when it was clear this would never become a report it didn’t stop. And because of the tone, there was no tension. To take just one example, when their ship was caught in Infrastructure turbulence and the stabilizing whiskers were ripped off and we weren’t sure if our heroes were going to make it, we didn’t get a description. We didn’t get anything about what this looked like or sounded like or how it make the characters feel. We just got a report, like maybe we were interested in designing a ship with replacement stabilizing whiskers. The writing style made it feel like everything was already predetermined, and it was kept up throughout.

3. And finally, triteness, and here’s a *major spoiler*

*spoiler space*

It turns out that the Infrastructure is bleeding into other realities, and our heroes get lost among them. But the realities disappointingly turn out to be little more than caricatures: a Christian (or at least Western) civilization, a galactic Caliphate, one where monkeys evolved, and one with intelligent lizards. This might have worked in the 1960s, maybe, but now we need more subtly, more piercing realities than these, especially when the final take-away is that even people from such radically different backgrounds can learn to work together.

I have heard lots of good things about Reynolds, so please feel free to offer some alternative suggested reading in the comments, but if you’re looking to get into his work don’t start here.

Shimmer #27

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Shimmer 27

Shimmer is a gem, and I don’t say that solely because they’ve given a home to two of my disheveled little pieces. Shimmer finds itself home to a lot of beautiful strays. It’s a speculative fiction magazine that has carved a place for itself for bedraggled bits of wonder, lovingly polished and arranged. I’m proud to be a part of it, especially this, its latest incarnation.

In the introduction to issue #27, the editor writes that all the included pieces all fit together if viewed from the right angle. (She says something like that.) They’re like interlocking puzzle pieces, but you have to cock your head just right to see how the combined scene flows. I like that, because it’s just true enough. You’ll come away from these stories knowing how they fit together, and I’ll come away knowing the same thing. But we’ll probably know differently.

To me, besides the gilded edges of wonder common to whatever Shimmer publishes, what held these stories together was a sense of loss. An ache. Something departed.

We start with Alix E. Harrow’s piece, “Dustbaby.”

No, we don’t. We start with the cover. Judge this magazine by its cover. The watercolors that Sandro Castelli does for each issue are one big detail that holds Shimmer together and makes it work. They’re lovely and lend a haunting consistency to the magazine’s shelf-appeal.

Now, start with Alix E. Harrow’s piece, “Dustbaby.” I don’t think I’d go so far as to call it an end-of-the-world story, because it’s not among those pieces of ecological devastation or infection or whatever that I’m getting tired of reading. It’s a bit deeper than that, and by that I mean historically richer. We’re back in the Dust Bowl, reimagined. What if the Dust Bowl had been the end, the casting off of a thin crust of tired soil so that something greener and wetter underneath could reemerge? What haunted those hills before our plows passed?

Harrow, herself a historian, does good work here. The images are rich, moving, and disturbing, and we get a reminder that some of the best stories don’t have endings but rather just larger beginnings—part of what’s so much fun about short stories.

(If you like magical apocalypses like “Dustbaby,” you might check out my own “The Crow’s Word,” published in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show.)

My favorite piece in this issue (and yes, I might even be including my own) was K. L. Owens’ “A July Story.” Who doesn’t love a haunted house? And who doesn’t love a house with a mind, a mute tongue, and rooms stretching backward and forward in space and time? It might sound too much like the plot of an episode of Doctor Who, if “A July Story” wasn’t so steeped in character and place.

What makes this story work so well, beyond simply a compelling idea, are the characters: Kitten and Lana, and the place: the Pacific Northwest. Kitten’s a child of the English Industrial Revolution, torn out of time, marooned everywhere and nowhere. Lana’s a young girl from today. Their encounter, dialogue, and ultimate trajectories make a haunted house story a lot more than you expect. It’s also an especially strong tale because it takes place on a deeply textured backdrop of a particular time and space, which Owens makes clear in the interview following. Highly recommended.

Then you get to read my story, which is called “Black Planet.” I explained about this a bit in my interview in the issue (which you only get if you purchase the entire issue), so I won’t repeat that here. But I really like this little piece; I think it’s among the best I’ve written, and it’s for my sister.

The final piece in this work is the shortest, “The Law of the Conservation of Hair,” by Rachel K. Jones, which reads like a prose poem (and in fact might be in actuality a prose poem) about love and alien invasion and loss. Read it at least twice. Favorite line: “That we will take turns being the rock or the slingshot, so we may fling each other into adventure.”

So what about the common theme? Things get lost in different ways. Land, lives, siblings, and loves. Why do we sometimes feel richer for the loss—or rather, for the expression of the loss?

Do yourself a favor and grab Shimmer #27.

A Thousand Acres

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A Thousand AcresA Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ll be participating in a workshop later this summer taking place at the Iowa State Fair and the World Food Awards. Part of the regional event is to give an understanding of locality and food production, and we’ll be exploring a bit of Iowa farmland. One of the organizers, in an email outlining our itinerary, suggested reading the novel A Thousand Acres as an introduction to rural Iowa farm life. I bent my “affirmative action” summer reading program slightly, considering that I need to read more novels by women as well.

Jane Smiley’s work is horrifying and profound. The book starts innocuously enough. There are three daughters (compared by some to the three daughters of Shakespeare’s King Lear), one of whom– the eldest– is the book’s narrator. Their father is a third-generation farmer on a tract of land that has grown over the years– through luck, diligence, and good sense– to a round thousand acres. The book begins with him deciding to retire and divide the land between his three daughters and their husbands. From this simple and sudden decision, a chain of events are set up in which the family slowly and painfully implodes.

The book was incredibly compelling to read, as painful as it was. It kept getting darker, which surprised me. I hadn’t read any Smiley, so I naively assumed this would be about a family’s love for each other and for their land and perhaps a struggle to preserve it. It was a good deal grimmer than that, though it was indeed about the land in profound and troubling ways. The story wound downward through madness, adultery, despair, and ultimately suicide and attempted murder. Along the way a past of incest and abuse was revealed that had slept beneath the surface like the drainage tiles that made the family’s thousand acres sound and productive land.

One of the things that made the work so compelling was the skill with which Smiley balanced her characters. There was no clear good guys or bad guys. There were only people with their own conflicting and often well-intentioned motivations. Whenever you thought the lines had been drawn fairly distinctly, a new wrinkle made you realize things were more complicated than you imagined. For the first portion of the book, it was easy to relate to the two older daughters and their struggle against their overbearing and increasingly irrational father. As the work progressed though, you started to see aspects of the sisters as well that highlighted their own pride and selfishness.

Throughout it all though, the land was a constant theme. The role of farmwife and farmer was highlighted and examined, as were the ideals of farming at the beginnings of large-scale industrialization, as the novel was set on the eve of the 1980s. Whatever ills their father had been responsible for, there was no denying he had made the land productive and was therefore admired by his peers. But the narrator links his dominance of the land with his abusive dominance of his family powerfully in the novel’s conclusion, a understanding that eventually results in her exile and separation from others who can’t see it in the same way.

There’s also hints of different ways to view farming and food production in the character of Jess, the outsider who wants to introduce organic farming methods but is ultimately ridiculed and rejected by his father. Jess is a weak alternative, futile, and– at this point in history– marginal to the way the farms are moving. Indeed, despite the dissolution of the family, it is the ultimate fate of their land that is perhaps the novel’s true tragedy. As dark as the novel got though, I couldn’t help feeling it actually had a happy ending in that the main character woke up. She had lived her life in a kind of captivity, and even though her ultimate salvation meant the loss of both land and family, she found it.

The Girls of Slender Means

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The Girls of Slender MeansThe Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Girls of Slender Means is straightforward and understated, but it’s a story built around a central riddle. The background to the riddle is a single summer in London at the conclusion of the Second World War in and around the May of Teck Club, a sort of group home for poor, young working-class women. (As Spark explains, everyone in England is poor during this period, even those who aren’t). A cross between a boarding school and an apartment complex, the girls go about their lives in a strange twilight between the bombed-out landscape of London on one hand and the growing certainty of peace on the other. This transitional period in time goes along with the transitional nature of the May of Teck inhabitants: besides the few seasoned spinsters, for the rest of the women it is an in-between place, in between girlhood and adulthood and halfway to a job or a career or a husband. No one will remain there for long. They’re all on their way to other places, eventually– a point emphasized by the fact that the narrative of this single summer is interspersed with snippets of telephone conversations as the grown women mull over the puzzle of those days and their outcome.

There are two threads woven against this background throughout the novel. The first is the mystery, more on which in a moment. The second is poetry. Joanna, one of the boarders at the May of Teck and the only daughter of a country parson, gives lessons in elocution, and the snatches of poetry overheard from the upper levels of the large house provides a constant baseline for the day to day activities taking place therein. Poetry haunts the story, sometimes foreshadowing but always giving an underscore to the wistful atmosphere Spark creates.

The second thread is the riddle of Nicholas, an aimless writer and half-hearted anarchist who wanders into the orbit of the May of Teck over the course of the summer. Within the first few pages of the novel, from the sketchy phone conversations Spark drops us into, we learn that whatever else has happened to Nicholas he at some point since this summer has become a Jesuit priest and was been recently martyred in Haiti. The news of Nicholas’s death spurs Jane, one of the inhabitants of the May of Teck that summer who was then an aspiring writer and is now a successful new columnist, to reflect on the events that led to his conversion. And a conversion of some sort it must have been, for he is not especially devout at the beginning of that summer of 1945 when his primary interest in the May of Teck Club seems to be trying to get Selina, one of the Club’s inhabitants, to sleep with him on the roof.

I’m reminded of Gene Wolfe’s short story “Suzanne Delage” in which the only remarkable thing about the story is that nothing at all remarkable appears to have happened even though something remarkable is implied. This novel has the same feel in that we know Nicholas’s eventual fate, but we see only hints of what may have compelled him toward it. Nicholas enters the novel as one drifting through life, wasting his time and perhaps his talents (though he has a book manuscript he is trying to get Jane’s publisher to publish), fascinated by the poverty and the communal life of the girls in the May of Teck Club (as well as the girls themselves). Besides the meandering philosophical conversations he has with particular members of the Club– with Joanna’s poetry constantly drifting down from above– we get only a single glimpse of a spiritual crisis in the sudden and unexpected catastrophe that concludes the novel. The entire explanation of Nicholas’s spiritual trajectory, which is the admitted impetus of recalling the events of this particular summer, remain obscure and out of the picture.

It is a novel lending itself to many interpretations, and we’re left with Jane to make of it what we may. One possible interpretation is that Nicholas is drawn to the Edenic aspects of the Club– their shared innocence of poverty and youth– and that he is driven to a spiritual crisis when the snake in the garden is ultimately revealed in the pettiness and selfishness of the Club’s final moments, contrasted with an example of faith and pointless sacrifice. His reaction here, and his telling realization that “No place is safe,” are perhaps all the answer we get to his ultimate fate.

The book is as slender and wistful as the girls who figure within it. And as mysterious. In the end, there are no clear answers. Nicholas is dead, and Jane is casting her memories back to that single summer in which their lives intersected. The War is over, and against that background of tragedy and celebration one man makes a quiet and secret decision to change the course of his life. We’re on the outside, trying to make sense of it, which is what makes the book so powerful: this is almost always our own perspective, trying to piece together the clues that might tell us something about the hearts of those around us.

The Crow’s Word

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I try not to put real people in the stories I write, especially not the fantasy bits. That doesn’t go for real places though. “The Crow’s Word” is my latest published novelette, which appears in the current issue of Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show. The setting is the town where I went to college and currently reside. If you’re from around here, you’ll recognize several of the places. Those that are not actual places I’ve been to are places that almost certainly exist here nonetheless.

“The Crow’s Word” is a surrealistic piece about a young man, a crow, and Queen Mab. It’s about fantasy bleeding into real life, I think. This story was purchased by the first market I sent it to, which is a personal first for me, though it was mislaid for a while along the way. It’s also my first sale to the InterGalactic Medicine Show, but if the fantastic illustration it garnered is their standard treatment for fiction, I’ll definitely be sending them more pieces. (The artwork is by M. Wayne Miller.)

Check out that guy, his bird, and a fairy queen. Very cool. You can read the story (which is behind a paywall, but supporting the magazine means supporting the writers!) here.

First Fleet

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I’ve dropped some hints before, but here’s the official blog unveiling: the first two installments of my novel, First Fleet, are now available through Retrofit Publishing!

Go to there! See it! They’re doing some pretty exciting stuff over there, and I’m humbled and delighted to be a part of it.

What business have I, you ask, who have never ventured beyond the short story or occasional novella, in writing a novel? I place the blame solely on the shoulders of my editor, who liked one of my published stories enough to contract for a novel based on the premises I started exploring in that first bit. And that first bit, retitled Bones (the awesome cover of which you see above), appears now as the teaser/intro to the novel proper, setting the stage and presenting the initial mystery of the First Fleet. The tone is Lovecraftian horror in space. The plot involves technology used to regenerate soldiers in a war going suddenly very badly.

You can (and should) download Bones. It’s free, and you can get it direct from the Retrofit website or from places like Amazon or Smashwords.

Wake (cover below) is the first installment of the novel proper, which follows the narratives of two women who get entangled in the mystery of the Fleet. I had a lot of fun building these characters and these worlds, as well as the technological systems that support them, and sending them off to solve the Fleet’s mystery. (I talk a bit more about the plot in a recent blog post at Retrofit.)

Besides the process of writing the novel itself, I’ve been blown away by how Retrofit has marketed and promoted this. The editing and formatting has been top-notch, and seeing the covers they designed (capturing perfectly the “old timey” pulp feel of the paperback novels I grew up reading) has been among the coolest parts of the process.

Take a look at the first two installments if you get a chance. If you’re a reviewer and you want a review copy of Wake, please let me know. It’s pulp scifi– with all the pulpy goodness of aliens, catastrophe, military espionage, and space ships you’d expect. If you’ve read my other pieces, you know short-form fiction, veering toward fantasy realism, has been my forte so far. This was an exciting and rewarding (and challenging) departure.

Descent, the second portion of the novel, is done and is due out in April. And I’m working on final edits to the third portion, tentatively titled Memory, as we speak.

Or I will be, as soon as I post this.

And maybe bathe the kids.

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