Shoulda Put A Rang On It

Right, I am off to sit on a beach in the Indian Ocean with this little lot:

See you on the flip side.

‘Trembling Blue Stars’ by Richard Kadrey

“Space is as ordinary as this street or that hotel. Once you’re over the initial shock of it, space is like anywhere else. It’s life. It’s ordinary. Even tedious, at times, but, like life, punctuated with moments of brilliance.”

“Such as?”

“Seeing a supernova as it happens. Our guests can see a wider spectrum than humans, so I can see the gamma ray fountains streaming from pulsars.”

“What else? Tell me.”

“Trembling blue stars being born in the Horsehead Nebula. Other intelligent races. The guests are slowly introducing us. I’ve met living machines that find us as strange as we find them. They can’t believe that fragile meat has thrown itself out into space.”

A simple story: Arkadi is a cosmonaut; in order to tolerate deep space he has been killed, had his organs removed and been re-animated by an alien parasite (a “guest”); returning to Earth he encounters Valentine, the woman he abandoned, in a cafe; she fails to convince him to resume their relationship. It is told in the first person but mostly consists of dialogue, interpersed with an occassional arch comment such as “Cigarettes are the perfect prop when you have nothing to say.” The dialogue is sharp and the back and forth is enjoyable but this jousting gives way to some depressingly familar battle of the sexes.

There is an overpowering whiff of girl cooties to the story. Arkadi has fled his relationship for space and it turns out space is no place for girls. “You can’t blame me for that. There are basic biological incompatibilities between female neurochemistry and the guests.” This, as Valentina points out, is very convenient. She does get her shots in but she on the whole she is portrayed as desperate, pathetic and unable to define herself except against Arkadi. The final section of story is a race to see just how much she will debase herself to try and win him back: “Take me with you. I don’t need much. I’ll be your rabbit. Give me lettuce and water and rub my ears every now and then.” Arkadi, augmented by the emotional detachment of his guest (a “meat puppet run by a space monster”), spurns her again and considers this an act of kindness.

‘Oh He Is’ by Karen Heuler

I’ve been enjoying taking part in Niall Harrison’s short story club over at Torque Control. This week’s story is ‘Oh He Is’ by Karen Heuler which I thought I would post about now since I’m going to be out of the country on Sunday.

Unfortunately ‘Oh He Is’ does not get off to a good start:

There was a smell in the streets, past the storefronts with the children in their beds, their limbs barely moving, their eyes closed (it was late). The smell was intoxicating, vanilla, pineapple, butter, cinnamon and some spice, some spice. The smell caught at the tips of open windows, waving like a cat’s tail, just a little, before going in. Then it coiled along the floor, at the corners, under the doorways, sipping at each room, exhaling a puff of it, a tease.

There is an awful lot wrong with this opening paragraph and most of it is to do with not knowing when to stop. In the first sentence, the final section in parentheses unnecessarily makes clear what was already implied. In the second sentence, the repetition of “some spice” is presumably meant to conjure up the ineffable but again adds nothing and feels both lazy and clumsy. In fact, the whole laundry list of popular scents is pretty uninspired. The third sentence is fine, although “just a little” is superfluous and over-egging it. Then, in the final sentence, we have the smell “sipping” which is the opposite of what it is actually doing, as is made clear by the very next clause of the sentence.

Taken as a whole the paragraph is trying too hard, it is striving to make an impact but just comes across as cluttered. This very nearly put me off the entire story but I perservered. Then I got to the end of the first section and almost gave up again. This is because at the point it became obvious that ‘Oh He Is’ was a reworking of The Pied Piper Of Hamelin. Now, I’ve got nothing against such reworkings but I really wish there weren’t so bloody many of them (we’ve already had one in this short story club). Revisiting familiar material can be rewarding for both writers and readers but it can also be a sign of stagnation and laziness and, speaking personally, I need a break from them.

I kept going though. We soon return to smell: “She smelled of spices: cumin, perhaps, and lemongrass.” I don’t believe for a moment that she smells like this. In a cheap attempt to add mystery and exoticism to her character Heuler has just plucked two spices at random. We are back to the problem of fabulism, of idle noodling and uncommitted allusions.

And there are more lists. When, at the conclusion of the story, the piper is strangled, “his face flew from scorn to pity to lust.” Even in a fable I find this an unlikely series of facial emotions for someone being murdered. His murderer then “built a cottage next to him and planted herbs and spices at the head and foot of his coffin, starting with lavender, thyme, anise, lemon and rue.” Leaving aside the fact lemon is not a herb (lemon balm is), Heuler is again relying not on the precision of her prose but on an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach.

‘Oh He Is’ is one of those stories which requires its world to be unpopulated. The three characters who live in the town appear to be the only residents and they are allowed to play out their little drama in isolation. This betrays a lack of interest in the world Heuler has created; how it fits together, how it came to be, how it might really smell. Into this void she simply throws anything she thinks might stick.

‘The Show’ by M Christian

Oh, those New York hipsters:

Their first act of Awareness Terrorism – as they called it – had been to alter some dozen or so billboards throughout Manhattan, turning cigarette ads to GOT CANCER? After that, they’d placed OUT OF DISORDER stickers on hundreds of vending machines all over the island.

Woah. For their next act of mindblowing cultural subversion they decide to patch a live feed of them having sex into a giant screen in Times Square. But they chicken out. But in the course of chickening out they get turned on so have sex anyway. But what’s this? They accidently switched the camera on!

This story is as lame as its characters.

Quality: *
Sexiness: ***

‘The Program’ by G. Bonhomme

This is the first story in the anthology that actually reads like a piece of erotica rather than a just story with some sex in it. This overdetermines the story but in a pretty successful manner. The program rewires men to make them better lovers. There is not a great deal of plausibility here but that is not the point and Bonhomme wrings a lot out of not very promising material.

Quality: ****
Sexiness: *****

I did make the mistake of flicking to the back to find out more about Bonhomme though. As an artist it is of course your prerogative to turn in a bio like this:

G. Bonhomme is a thorny rose.
G. Bonhomme dreams of world where all men are sisters.
G. Bonhomme disbelieves in heavier-than-air flight.
G. Bonhomme watches it snow.
G. Bonhomme hopes you are not too totally abandoned.

However, people are likely to think you are a bit of a nob.

‘Love Will Tear Us Apart Again’ by John Bowker

It was always going to be unlikely that a story named after a Joy Division song was going to be particularly erotic. And so it proves. James has a Godzilla fetish; not in the sense he wants to fuck Godzilla, in the sense he wants to be Godzilla and lay waste to Toyko. Enter stage left an ex-girlfriend with a preposterous business model who allows him to realise his desire.

Quality: **
Sexiness: **

One

Everything Is Nice is one today! Hooray! Actually, it was some time last week but I didn’t notice. The year has gone very quickly.

In hindsight I should probably have picked a unique name for this blog rather than one that throws up loads of other references but fuck it, it felt right at the time. And it still does, I’m still beating the nice nice thing to death with fluffy pillows.

The greatest hits of this blog so far as voted for by you, the public:

1) Taking An Ethical Stand
2) Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology
3) Lists, Beautiful Lists
4) Xenopath
5) Dying Earth
6) ‘Hell Is The Absence Of God’ by Ted Chiang
7) ‘Sea Oak’ by George Saunders
8) ‘The God Of Dark Laughter’ by Michael Chabon
9) 2008 Everything Is Nice Book Awards
10) Top Dog

So there obviously is a demand out there for writing about short fiction. I’m not sure that it was a demand that was especially met by those pieces though…

‘That Which Does Not Kill Us’ by Scott Westerfeld

This is a story by Scott Westerfeld, the most significant writer in science fiction, but it is a long way from the young adult novels he is best known for these days.

There was something vulnerable in the sound, and Paul stopped. He’d feel foolish if he let this opportunity pass.
“Look, Eurisa,” he sais to the door. “After work. Do you want to have a drink?”

When you read a passage like this in a contemporary SF story you expect it do be subverted, you expect the predator to become the prey. In fact, with its overtones of horror I wouldn’t have been surprised if the object of desire to turn out to be a vampire (Westerfeld has form). Eurisa isn’t a vampire though, she is just undead; resurrected using future tech following a fatal car crash. Westerfeld subverts the expectation of the standard subversion and instead produces a queasy psychological profile of a man undone by his own issues.

Quality: ****
Sexiness: **

pf

The other day Kim Stanley Robinson said several things, one of which was: “Science fiction. Yay! Historical fiction. Boo!” Why can’t we all get just get along? Well, we almost can:

• Thesis > antithesis > synthesis

Why stop there though? There is a more fundamental synthesis: prehistoric fiction! Dan Hartland reviews The Fire In The Stone by Nicolas Ruddick:

The Fire in the Stone is the first comprehensive study, in English, of its subject (though see Angenot and Kouri’s bibliography of the genre). Nevertheless, on the relatively minor planet of his topic, Ruddick places himself between two poles: between on the one hand Charles DePaolo’s position that prehistoric fiction should be judged on the extent to which it properly adheres to the paleoanthropology of its time, and on the other Joseph Carroll’s that emphasises quality of characterisation and the rigorous attainment of empathy. Ruddick is by his own admission closer to Carroll in this debate, but he neither holds that scientific accuracy, or a thorough simulation of consciousness, is necessary if prehistoric fiction (or “pf” as he calls it) is to succeed. Ruddick simply holds that pf must use the basic concepts of paleoanthropology to enlighten the reader: “Good pf [. . . ] tells us about ourselves today [. . . ] by reminding us of the great journey in time that we have travelled to get here” (p. 3).

‘Value For O’ by Jennifer Stevenson

“Okay. Here we go. Let’s say female orgasm is a fixed value, but the travel, the distance required to move from position one to orgasm, is variable. That’s our first unknown.”

Maths makes everything sexier. The story is told entirely in dialogue as a couple attempt to unravel the mystery of the female orgasm using an extended mathematical metaphor. Rather the disappointingly the answer turns out simply to be cunnilingus.

It’s not actually a science fiction story, it is instead one of those stories that creep in to SF anthologies from time to time purely on the strength of the fact they are likely to appeal. to science fiction readers. I also lied about maths making everything sexier so slightly marked down on that score but it is good, clean fun.

Quality: ***
Sexiness: ***