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Mysterion

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Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian FaithMysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith by Donald S. Crankshaw

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I was interviewing for a place in the graduate program for the history and philosophy of science at Notre Dame, there was a dinner attended by prospective students and a few professors. We had all gone through the interviews and met several of the faculty, and one of the senior professors at the meal that night asked if we had any remaining questions. I had one: I wanted to know about the relationship between the program and the university’s Catholic identity. “What does it mean,” I asked, “that this program is at a Catholic school?”

The professor seemed to appreciate the question. He paused for a minute, and then he gave what I thought was a great response. He said something like, “It means that we take religion seriously. It means we don’t discount it as a significant factor in history.” It did not mean that everyone I took a class from would be a Catholic or a Christian, and it did not mean that Christianity would be the dominant theme in every (or even very many) lecture. (Though it did mean there would be a crucifix hiding somewhere in every room.) But I appreciated his answer, and I thought it largely accurate.

Mysterion is a new anthology of science fiction and fantasy (featuring one of my stories) that takes a similar approach to Christianity. It is not a collection of stories by Christian authors, nor is it a collection of what I would consider “Christian fiction” (fiction written from a Christian perspective with the intention of inspiring or instructing or converting).

Rather, Mysterion is a collection of stories that take religion seriously as a feature of the world in which the fiction lives. The editors, as they explain in their introduction, recognize that Christianity is a big, messy, dynamic, fruitful thing, and one that, as the title of the anthology suggests, still harbors a multitude of mysteries. Rather than tidy, systematic modes of thought or practice, this anthology suggests (and I think the editors were trying to show) that Christianity—as a living, ancient tradition—can be a starting point for good fiction, and likewise good fiction can be an effective lens for examining and even questioning such a tradition.

If the common thread in each of these stories is some form of serious engagement with Christianity, this still leaves for an incredibly broad sweep of approaches, from the brutal (James Beamon’s “A Lack of Charity”) and the grim (Mike Baretta’s “The Physics of Faith”) to the straightforwardly inspirational (Laurel Amberdine’s “Ascension”) or the subtly powerful and historical grounded (Sarah Ellen Rogers’ “Horologium”). The pieces in here represent everything from hard science fiction to humorous fantasy to surrealist and (I’m excluding my own, though you can read a nice review of it here) are for the most part strong and stirring, asking deep questions and sounding some interesting depths.

Whether or not your own background or perspective is informed by the Christian faith, if you’re a fan of the likes of Lewis and Tolkien, some of these themes will be familiar. If you’ve ventured in the deeper waters of Swanwick, Wolfe, or Lafferty, you may have a few additional signposts for this voyage. But the stories stand on their own, regardless of the context of faith. None of them need a grounding in Christianity to work, in other words. For these stories, with the exception of one or two, the faith angle is not the only angle.

The anthology is lovely as a book as well. The volume is solid, weighty, and impeccably edited. I didn’t catch a single typo on my read-through. There’s a helpful short bio for each author in case you’re interested in searching out more of their work, as well as a thoughtful introduction by the editors. The cover art doesn’t seem to correlate with any specific story but rather with an overall aspect of the theme: narrow is the doorway and rough is the path that leads Elsewhere. (Look closely at the rune on the top of that doorway.)

I won’t go through each of the stories, as that would obviously spoil some of the fun of diving into them yourself, but I will offer some highlights. The volume opens with a strong piece by Daniel Southwell entitled “The Monastic,” about a religious hermit on an island in the midst of Lake Superior and of some of the ancient things that still linger there. “Forlorn,” by Bret Carter is a great ghost story with a unique telling that builds toward a satisfying twist.

“Golgotha” by David Tallerman, along with “This Far Gethsemane” by G. Scott Huggins, may have been my two favorite pieces in the volume. “Golgotha” tells the story of an earnest missionary’s encounter with a pagan deity who is more than witchcraft and rumors. It is told in the language of the day with a voice of a sympathetic narrator who provides a balance between the puritanical rigidity of the missionary and the stark reality of what he encounters. And it asks an interesting question about the cost of proselytizing, about what things are lost and what are gained with Christianity and civilization, but from a perspective other than simple post-colonialism. Rather, what if it’s the old god himself asking these questions?

“This Far Gethsemane” reminded me the most of any story in this volume of golden-age science fiction with the trope of introducing a new species and then using it to explore interesting questions about our own. In this case, the trope is pulled off expertly as Huggins tells the story of a human grad student horrified to find that missionaries have already arrived at the planet where she is doing her studies and moreover that some of the local lifeforms have accepted this religion. Even worse, some of them are willing to take the tenants of Christianity to their logical conclusion, even when it flies in the face of their own biology.

There were several good pieces here, and I could easily add to this list F. R. Michaels’ whimsically disturbing “Cutio,” Rachael K. Jones’ haunting “St. Roomba’s Gospel” (a reprint of a story first published in Diabolical Plots), Joanna Michal Hoyt’s timely historical piece “Cracked Reflections” and two I’ve already mentioned, the grimly apocalyptic (and effective) “The Physics of Faith” by Mike Barretta, which would have left a dusty taste in the mouth of one finishing the volume if it weren’t the lovely “Horologium” by Sarah Ellen Rodgers, which was an excellent piece to finish on, leaving one pondering the mystical and historical roots of devotion as well as its costs.

Mysterion is a collection of stories that take Christianity seriously, and as such explores the implications (and not simply the positive implications) of the faith. Whether or not that aspect of the anthology is compelling to you, the stories succeed in showcasing a variety of voices and offering a satisfying read. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy, one for your local library, one for your pastor, and one for all your friends.

Hypnos 5.1

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I tell myself I don’t like scary stories. I definitely don’t like gore. I don’t watch horror movies. I don’t like walking away from a novel or collection of stories feeling like I need to give my mind a shower.

And yet I do love a good ghost story. When I was in grade school, my notebooks were filled with stories of monsters hiding in the dark. Years later, my first novel was born in a science fiction short story. And my most recent published story, “Bone Orchard,” found a home in the latest issue of Hypnos, a journal of the macabre.

Hypnos is horror with class. It has a certain sophistication (my story’s inclusion notwithstanding). As the magazine’s website explains, it wants to be a publication that highlights the strange and the weird lurking beneath the everyday and ordinary. It isn’t horror for the sake of shock value or goresplatter. Rather the stories in here are finely-wrought pieces (for the most part) with the twists and the subtle unsettling wrongness of Lovecraft or Victorian horror. This is about the thing in the attic, the thing in the woods, the thing almost forgotten in the past—not about the serial killer down the street.

There were some genuinely creepy bits in here. We Shall All Eat of the Tree by Lawrence Buentello was horrific in a monstrously Lovecraftian way, and The Spider by Hanns Heinz Ewers was also genuinely frightening. There were stories dripping with atmosphere, with the setting itself providing the depth and unnerving aspects, like Fishhead by Irvin S. Cobb and Old Dominion by Michael Gray Baughan. Especially impressive (to me) though are those stories that can take on the tone and time of another place or culture seamlessly, like Edward Lucas White’s Lukundoo in Africa, James M. Preston’s Dr. Price in colonial America, and Ralph Adams Cram’s Dead Valley in Scandinavia.

There were also a handful a pieces that, though they were still rich and creepy, didn’t feel quite like they had the depth of atmosphere of these other pieces and rather would have been at home in a contemporary magazine where the shadows didn’t lay so heavy. In particular I’m thinking about I Baked Him a Cake by Samantha Kolesnik, Way Station by Jamie Killen, and The Cold Girl by Michael Fassbender. Almost all of the works in this volume were solid, and only one or two felt amateurish by comparison. The issue concludes with a reprint of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Minister’s Black Veil.

It’s an enigmatic production, thick and perfect bound with a cover that makes it look almost like a historical journal. There is no context to the authors within, no bios or links to websites or funny quips about how they live in a cottage in Kentucky with seven cats. They’re all anonymous wanderers who have stepped in out of the storm for a moment to tell their tales. If you want to know more about these writers, you’re going to have to do some digging on your own. Even the editorial that opens the volume, which discusses the comparative influence of Poe and Lovecraft, makes no mention of them.

But perhaps because of this, the issue (and assumedly the proceeding volumes as well) captures an overall tone or mystique more effectively than other speculative magazines I’ve read of late. But trying to define exactly what that tone is is more difficult: an unease, a chill, but one that doesn’t simply frighten with raw horror. Rather a richer experience, a ghost story told around a fire on a perfect evening, with the story lingering over the details of the place and time itself, giving a thick context for the central horrific element.

Take a look. Leave the light on.

The Man With the Aura

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The Man with the Aura: The Collected Short FictionThe Man with the Aura: The Collected Short Fiction by R.A. Lafferty

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Who is the weirdest writer? Obviously that’s a huge question, and the answer will be contingent on both your definition of the word and the scope of who you’re reading. There are probably more than a few unpleasantly strange or shockingly bizarre authors writing fiction right now, though mainstream publishing seems to do a pretty good job of shutting them out for popular audiences. But if you were looking for an author who managed to squeeze in for a while and who isn’t so much macabre or grotesque (though he is certainly that more than occasionally) and rather more like just wonderfully, rollickingly weird, you wouldn’t have to look farther than R. A. Lafferty.

Lafferty is a puzzle, and I’ve written about him on the blog several times before without getting into much deeper analysis. (If you want deeper analysis, check out Feast of Laughter.) I keep writing reviews about him as though I’m writing for an audience that’s never read him. That’s okay though, because that audience is still far too large, and Lafferty seems to bring out the evangelizing tendencies of his readers.

Lafferty’s work– which flourished in scifi and fantasy magazines at the weird height of the New Wave– doesn’t so much straddle all the borders of speculative fiction (horror to fantasy to weird western to science fiction) so much as it seems blissfully unaware that such borders exist. His stories are tall tales, whether set in outer space, the far future, or the living room. They create lumbering, larger-than-life characters with a language more akin to a Native American story-teller (which is why his work does so well read aloud) than prose satisfied with sitting quietly on the page.

The problem with Lafferty though is that you have to look for the guy. His collections are out of print and hard to find. His novels are hit and miss at least on a first read. What’s rescuing him from obscurity at the moment– besides the eloquence and enthusiasm of devotees far more well-spoken than me– is yet another obscurity: the small press. Centipede Press to be exact, which is in the process of releasing all his collected works. (I’ve reviewed volume 1 previously.)

So what does one find in this second volume? For one thing, don’t worry if it’s the only volume you can find, as the stories appear in these collections in no particular order or chronological progression. This volume (like the first) is a grab bag so that, as the editor explains, a reader new to Lafferty can experience him as readers in the sixties, seventies, and eighties did: a large, bright voice stumbled upon in stories scattered through magazines and collections of the decades in no apparent order.

The volume itself is a significant, lovely edition, polished enough to give Lafferty a worthy place on the shelf yet weird enough to fit the contents. There are, however, still some editorial mistakes (or teases). For example, in the section listing first publication info for each story, there’s story listed that doesn’t actually appear in this volume. (The first story slated for volume 3?)

What about the stories themselves? What does one stumble upon in this collection? Wide open vistas. And jokes. In fact, looking down the list of the table of contents for this volume, I’m struck that this might be a common theme here. Not that these stories aren’t serious or well-written, but rather that each of them (or at least most of them) contain a central hidden hook, something that you only catch looking at you and winking when the story has wrapped up. I can’t tell you the punchline for each story (and in at least one of them I simply didn’t get the joke) but I’ll highlight a few of my favorites.

“Land of the Great Horses” is a good place to start. It’s a mosaic tale, told from a variety of perspectives, including a fictional encyclopedia article, about the reappearance of the lost homeland of the Romany, shot through with Lafferty’s celebration of language. Then there’s “Ride a Tin Can,” which combines music with folk anthropology to give a tragic, grotesque, and hilarious first contact story against the background of economic exploitation in the worse sense possible. Another favorite in this collection is “Hog-belly Honey,” which illustrates Lafferty’s unique ability to combine aspects of hard science fiction with a homespun, raggedy narrative voice and give it all the feel of genuine folk medicine and showmanship. Finally, I loved the piece “Great Day in the Morning,” which pokes fun at some of the assumptions of the modernist paradise but doesn’t flinch to go all the way and take such assumptions to their ludicrous conclusions.

I saw a spectacularly disheartening graphic the other day that proposed to break the art of the story down to its component pieces, outlining the different types of general characters and plots and settings like you’d pick them off a menu and use to build your own narrative value meal. The graphic also reminded helpfully of the basic narrative arch: the character experiences conflict or a problem, this conflict goes through climax and resolution, and then the story ends with the character changed in important ways. This is all useful enough, but Lafferty is the sort of writer who reminds that to do really interesting things it’s better to just ignore helpful narrative flowcharts altogether. Or rather, Lafferty turns the narrative flowchart on his head, because it’s not his characters experiencing this arch– it’s his readers.

You start a Lafferty story and immediately realize something is off or strange. This isn’t the world you were expecting. The sense of uncertainty grows as you read it, but you’re drawn along by his voice. And then at some point you abruptly get it: the concept or the punchline or the up-side-down world snaps into focus and the reader (never mind the main character, who might well be dead, dismembered, or eaten at this point) leaves the page changed in important ways.

Yet even that approach is a model Lafferty can discard whenever he sees fit. Some of the stories are simply straightforward and lovely, like the pseudo-biographical piece, “Gray Ghost: A Reminiscence,” which is in the strain of the very best Bradbury. Another, the final in this volume, is a post-apocalyptic tale that may be Lafferty’s world building at the most compelling I’ve seen. In the space of a short story he spins out a tiny kingdom, characters, and ecological tangles that seem in some respects as contemporary as The Hunger Games and as haunting as Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind.

I continually find when I reach the end of reviewing a book by Lafferty that I haven’t really done it justice. Well, then you read some of his stuff and try to explain it. Or rather, imagine this. Imagine a man who no longer exists, maybe your great-grandfather or maybe the person you always hoped your great-grandfather was. Someone a little strange but who has been places you never have (because most of them no longer exist either) and who tells spinning, staggering stories with the voice of an older generation. Someone who has one foot in the American West with its tall tales and the other in the technology that was sprouting like mushrooms at the height of the Space Race. And this man tells stories, and no one ever told him how he was supposed to tell them, so he tells them like he wants.

There you go. Lafferty is a little bit like that imaginary man, raised to the third power, at least.

Free to Learn

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Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for LifeFree to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life by Peter Gray

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was homeschooled a bit growing up. It wasn’t by choice, and I so suppose it wasn’t actually true homeschooling. Rather, I had a “home-bound teacher” who delivered my assignments and lessons for portions of eighth, tenth, and eleventh grades when I was too sick from chemotherapy to attend classes. So this, to be fair, probably colors my perspectives on alternate schooling options: for me, going to public school was always a privilege. It was something I got to do when things were normal and healthy, and I enjoyed it immensely. Public school meant interacting with my peers; it meant a challenge, a chance to meet new people and experience new things. And by the time my illnesses were behind me and I could attend high school consistently for my senior year, it was in truth a long-time goal realized. I enjoyed every aspect of it (at least in retrospect).

So again, this all colors how I see public school. And to be fair again, I’m probably the kind of person that the current paradigm of schooling serves best anyway: introverted, structured, competitive, and motivated. I was always good at school. I found it challenging and stimulating, and I was dutiful enough to work around it or through it when it wasn’t. I played– and enjoyed— the game: honor roll, AP classes, scholarship applications, etc., etc.

But for me growing up, school– with all the structure and adult-directed learning– was school, and what wasn’t school, was free time. That is, my days and my summers were rounded out with lots and lots of unstructured time. I didn’t do organized sports or really any other extra-curricular activity on the weekends, in the evenings, or over the summers. Those times were empty and open, free for reading, exploration, and play. (Yet I was always excited and definitely ready when summer was done and school started again.)

According to the Gray in Free to Learn all this openness and freedom is a very good thing. Indeed, the author goes a lot further than this in his arguments, but we’ll get there in a second. For now, we’ll start with what we agree on: kids need freedom to play, and they learn through open, unstructured play with other kids that’s not directed by adults, ideally play among a wide age range of other children. There is, according to Gray, an assault on this freedom of childhood underway in the constant erosion of free time into structured, measurable, adult-directed activity. This is the paradigm of our school system, but it continually encroaches elsewhere as well in the host of activities and events well-meaning parents push their children into. The loss of childhood play isn’t simply something to be wistful about and something that stresses out both parents and kids– more than this, it stunts one of the best ways kids learn.

This is the theme of the book: that we misunderstand learning in children. We think it’s something that is done to them instead of something they do themselves. By marshaling a wide array of cognitive and developmental studies as well as anthropology on hunter-gatherer groups (which Gray thinks embody the ideal of learning), the author makes the claim that the best and most natural means by which children learn is playing: free exploration, discovery, imitation, and mutual instruction. Our institutionalized public schools have it exactly backward: structured, goal-driven, mandatory instruction is what crushes the naturally curious drive within kids to teach themselves according to their own interests and inclinations.

As an appeal for the necessity of free play in an overly-structured world (a world that is equally fearful for the safety of children and dismissive of their abilities), this book is quite compelling. As an appeal to reform the way we educate, it’s something I could even get behind. But the author is not a reformer: he’s a revolutionary. This isn’t a book about the right balance between freedom of play and the role of structured education. For Gray, there is no proper role for the latter in the lives of children.

My fondness for public education–both in my own experience, in that of my children, and as something I believe can create and foster diversity, community, and opportunity when done right– as well as my role as an educator may make me a biased reviewer. But I think Gray’s view of public education is a one-dimensional straw man, easy to demonize. Moreover, his summary of the history of education, through four general stages of hunter-gathering play-learning, to the rise of agriculture, through the Middle Ages, to Protestant America is simply wrong. The Middle Ages were not a time when stepping out of line would get you burned at the stake, and institutionalized learning in monasteries and cathedral schools did not exist to bring about submission to an ecclesiastical order. These tropes are embarrassing and lack any real historical context. If such generalizations were indeed the case, how is it that institutionalized centers of learning were so often the place from which new, subversive, dangerous, and beautiful ideas so often at odds with secular and ecclesiastical authority emerged? In addition, his history of education takes no account at all of one of the primary roots of Western education: the philosophical schools that flourished throughout antiquity and evidenced a very different kind of learning, a dialectic that challenges the free-play/structural-authority duality he sets up.

Again, I would be the first to agree that kids need more time and freedom to learn by just being kids. Yet the irony is that often public schools provide the best opportunities to play in ways, with tools, and with other kids that many children would otherwise not have. I still remember the “Writing to Read” lab at my elementary school, where pre-literate kindergartners were put in front of computers and encouraged to play at writing. We typed out phonetic stories before we could read. I loved it. We had no computer at home at this point, no way to engage in this kind of exploration outside of the classroom.

The experience of my own children so far in our public school system’s dual-language magnet is similar. Sure, my pre-schooler could stay at home and play during the half-day he’s in a classroom. But in that classroom, he’s playing with kids from other backgrounds who speak other languages. He’s learning to play in Spanish. That’s something we couldn’t give him on our own.

Of course, we as a family probably have the resources to make “unschooling” (the author’s preferred approach) work for our kids if we decided it was best. But what about all the kids who come from families who don’t? What about kids who find their way to freedom through a school library, a teacher who challenges and engages them, the resources of a public school classroom? This remains my primary complaint against the individualistic mindset of the home-schooling movement: it pulls away the energy and passion of those families who really do want to do education well, who want to help make our classrooms places of freedom and learning, who have the resources to help change the system. It takes those children and those parents out of our community schools, and it abandons both the schools and those kids who most need them and who need our help to make the system better. To me it seems like reactions to books like Gray’s become simply another form of white flight: but now instead of abandoning our inner cities because we lack the inclination to build community together, we’re doing the same thing to our classrooms.

Plus, I’m not entirely convinced that play is the only way to learn. Sure, I’d like to chop this book in half and give the second half (the half that doesn’t include Gray’s awful history sections) to teachers, administrators, and parents with the appeal to resist more standardization and regimentation and to take back free play approaches to learning. Yet I’m not willing to completely jettison an approach to education that still has a place for memorization, drills, and learning things that don’t seem immediately appealing to the learner. From my own experience, I know there have been many times I’ve found meaning and wonder in something I didn’t initially want to read but was told to (assigned to) by a teacher. I didn’t want to learn the tedious trigonometric identities (or the Latin grammar or whatever), but I found later that those tools were the grammar necessary for doing elegant mathematics (or engaging the heritage of the Western tradition). I’m enough of a Burkean conservative to maintain there are aspects of our cultural heritage everyone should be exposed to at a young age, an age when they might not even realize why these things are important or want to learn them at the time. I still believe there are or can be “authorities”– teachers, guides, mentors– who can lead children into a body of knowledge and help them absorb, engage, and explore it.

Gray’s book will convince you of the value of free play, which is something we probably need to be reminded of today and continue to champion for our kids. But I won’t follow Gray as far as he wants to go. I think if you talk to many experienced teachers, they would say that Gray hits on one side of the dynamic tension they try to maintain in their classrooms: between children as self-directed learners on the one hand and the curriculum as a tool that has merit above and beyond a child’s particular interests on the other (and, of course, to hell with the standardized tests). I’d prefer to live there, in that more difficult tension, working to find an approach to education that holds both of these in balance.

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.

Dispatches from Pluto

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Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi DeltaDispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta by Richard Grant

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My wife and I lived for a couple years in Oxford, Mississippi, and there was much that I, having been raised in the Midwest, did not understand. This was more than the accent, though the first time I had to get a vehicle inspection sticker I could only stare in incomprehension at the man behind the counter when he asked if I had “tents on my windows.” My confusion must have been obvious, because he repeated it with more insistence. When that didn’t work, he asked if I had windows that were “tented.” If I did, he informed me, we’d have to do a “tent test.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. This was, after all, Mississippi, so I assumed maybe a tent was some kind of slang for broken windows that had been repaired with plastic. It wasn’t until he spelled it out, obviously running out of patience for this clueless Yankee, “TENT, T-I-N-T,” that the lightbulb came on.

I spent most of my time during that period of our lives in the physics department at Ole Miss, so interactions like this didn’t take place very often. My wife, however, taught in the county high school. At our first high school football game, I asked why her incredibly polite and cheerful students were constantly greeting her with the strange call “Muh-Kay!” She explained this was “Miss Case.” (She had spent her high school years in Texas, so she had a jump with me on the accent.)

But Oxford was great. The town was beautiful, the people were lovely, and you could get pimento cheese or fried hotdog sandwiches at the same place you fueled your car. The weather was wonderful, and in the summer there was air conditioning.

In Oxford, we heard stories about a strange place called the Delta, and one day I convinced my friend Chet, who was also the pastor of the tiny Nazarene church we attended, to take a road trip with me through a small portion of it. We must have stuck out like sore, idiotic thumbs: two skinny white men in my blue ’99 Firebird gawking, photographing, and trying to make small-talk with locals in the tiny towns we passed through. But images of that day trip stay with me: especially the tiny town of Friar’s Point on the Mississippi River, a place like a closet that you backed into with nowhere to go; the ruins of St. Cecilia’s Catholic church, empty and decaying; the Seventh Day Adventist we chatted with in the parking lot of a closed historical museum. We drove over the river to Helena, and finished with a gander at the spillway of the Sardis Dam, the largest earthen dam in the world. (Chet has stayed, learning the story of the Mississippi civil rights movement and telling its narrative.)

I thought of that trip reading Richard Grant’s account of his time in the Delta, Dispatches from Pluto. The work is a loose chronological narrative of how he fell in love with an old plantation home in the tiny hamlet of Pluto in the middle of the Delta and convinced his girlfriend to uproot from New York City and start a new life there. To him, it was as though he had discovered a new, foreign country called Mississippi and then an even stranger hidden kingdom within Mississippi called the Delta. (For confused Midwesterners: the Mississippi Delta is not the delta of the Mississippi River. It’s the confluence of the Yazoo River where it runs into the Mississippi, a low, swampy and incredibly fertile land only drained for farming after the Civil War. It makes up the northwest corner of the state, stretching along the western side of the state to Vicksburg.)

Dispatches from Pluto is Grant’s exploration of the culture, history, twisted and bizarre politics, and complex race relations of this isolated portion of our country’s poorest state. Race is a big theme in the book, with Grant (originally from London) continually frustrated and ultimately bemused in his attempts to categorize the relations between blacks and whites in the Delta in any meaningful way through the relationships he builds with his neighbors.

The book is not a travelogue, and Grant is at times frustratingly vague on the actual geography of the Delta. Nor is it a straightforward history or any sort of systematic survey of the social trends or economy of the region. And that’s fine, as the book doesn’t attempt to be this, but a section on “suggested reading” or at least some leads given in the narrative of what Grant’s reading in his attempt to understand his adopted home would have helped an interested reader know where to go to learn more.

Dispatches is instead a colorful, rambling account that makes this strange but charmingly enigmatic backwater come to life through Grant’s own discoveries. More than an exploration of a place you may never have heard of before (with a history and certain traits that are indeed troubling and often horrifying), it’s more importantly a testimony to understanding, hospitality, and neighborliness that transcends regionality and (in some cases) even race. To know a place, Grant seems to be saying, you have to know its people. And to know the people, you need to live beside them. Doing this with an openness and a genuine desire to learn and then writing about what it teaches him is where Grant succeeds admirably.

The Black Corridor

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The Black CorridorThe Black Corridor by Michael Moorcock

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The name Michael Moorcock has been on my list of authors to read for so long that I can’t remember why or when he ended up there. I also can’t quite figure out why he’s so well-known or what kind of writer he is, exactly, and reading several entries on him in various fantasy and science fictions encyclopedias hasn’t helped much. Suffice to say he’s British, he was influential in the New Wave, and his writings are extensive and pretty hard to pigeon-hole.

I grabbed The Black Corridor from the science fiction section of my local library, the last of my Christmas break reading that included Benford, Swanwick, and Reynolds. I can’t remember if there were other Moorcock books there and I grabbed this one because it was short and because the cover was obviously by the same artist who did the cover of my edition of Lafferty’s Nine Hundred Grandmothers or because it was the only one they had. Either way, the description intrigued me.

This was an easy read, but it felt dated. The story is about a single human aboard the first colonizing craft traveling to an Earth-like planet around a (relatively) nearby star. Part of it is a psychological exploration of the emptiness of space, of the long, lonely passage (the corridor of the title) to the first habitable worlds. The environment of the ship is sterile, empty technology, a backdrop upon which the single inhabitant is struggling against loneliness and a self-conscious slide into madness. His only defense is a retreat into routine and rationalism.

Yet this isolated existence, we learn through a long series of flashbacks, is only the culmination of a larger slide into madness. The single ship’s inhabitant is actually the only waking member of a crew (the rest are in hibernation) composed of his family and small group of friends who fled a disintegrating Earth. The end-of-times scenario outlined here is a fractious, nationalistic British apocalypse descending into chaos like in Children of Men. In the midst of this, the main character—who built his fortune as a toy manufacturer—sees himself as an isolated island of rationality against this moral and social decay. Together with his companions, they see stealing the only UN ship capable of interplanetary flight and setting off from Earth in the face of and in spite of a nationalistic, atomic holocaust their effort to save not only themselves but the best of humanity.

Two main trends take place over the course of the novel. The first is the narrator’s constant battle against paranoia and loneliness and his gradual descent into possible insanity. Has he woken the other crew members up? Is he having hallucinations because of his sensory isolation or because of the emotionally-stabilizing drugs he feels forced to take? The second is the gradual revelations of what he had to do to secure the crew’s escape from Earth, what he felt justified to do to get them off the planet. There are interesting developments throughout in what is largely a psychological thriller, but some of the most intriguing take place in the final few pages of the book, when we’re forced to ask the question of why he’s the only one awake on the ship in the first place.

In all, there are lots of subtle and troubling themes touched on here but not explored. Parts of the novel make it seem as though we’re dealing with themes of overpopulation or ecological disaster, but these are never front and center. Technology is not a major motivation here, just a sterile backdrop against which the events play out. Mainly The Black Corridor offers a surprisingly troubling treatment of the inevitably isolating results of a self-justifying rationalism.

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.