Dilman Dila's A KILLING IN THE SUN

Once again I am reminded how big a mistake it is ever to snooze on African speculative fiction; Ugandan writer/filmmaker/activist Dilman Dila has a whole sky full of fresh air to blow through the genre, and I'm annoyed as heck that I only heard of him via a Story Graph challenge some eight years after his collection A Killing in the Sun was published.

But, better late than never.

From the very first story, "The Leaf Man" we see that his imagination is both powerful and on point. "The Leaf Man" is a traditional healer and occasional shaman who has been helping his country deal with the malaria problem for his whole career, traveling from village to village on his government-issued bicycle with a passel of herbs and wisdom. Until one day, a foreign corporation talks its way into using his home village as a test locus for their latest Big Science solution to the malaria problem, which not only proves to be worse than the original problem but to get worse with every attempt to solve the new problem. Meanwhile, our Leaf Man has figured out how to keep himself and one starving foundling child safe, only to become a hunted figure. This story alone is a must-read for everybody who thinks CRISPR is going to be the answer to everybody's prayers and monkey's paw? What's that?

Several of the other stories in the collection share a universe in which most, perhaps all, of the African continent has come under the dominion of a very powerful being with either supernatural powers or access to otherwise unknown advanced technology, who has set himself up as the Emperor of Africa and created an Orwellian nightmare in the name of freeing/decolonizing the continent's peoples. All white people (and possibly Arabs, too?) have either been expelled or secretly enslaved; the remaining population all live in giant "pyramids" with thousands of other families and are strictly monitored for conformity to the Emperor's idea of what constitutes truly African culture; but hey, there are personal ornithopters and it seems to be a post-scarcity economy. BUT, among the things that are considered colonial/not-African culture are non-procreative sex and any kind of female empowerment or emancipation, and a standardized skin tone is enforced on everybody by means of a chemical that is both a dye that can be rubbed into non-conforming skin or a drug that pregnant women are required to ingest to make sure that their babies are born dark enough.

Of these stories, the most impactful for me was "A Wife and A Slave" which concerns a man, Kopet, who once upon a time had plans to emigrate with his fiancee to Sweden but just as they were leaving the new African Empire was declared and they elected to stay home -- to his tremendous regret, as not long after their wedding his now-wife, Akello, has taken all of the new emperor's strictures to heart, especially the one about non-procreative sex and how the husband must not have to dress or even wash himself, not even his hands after a meal (which he must eat with his fingers, cutlery being a shameful colonial artifact). The bright and engaged and independent woman he fell in love with, and had enjoyed a healthy sex life with before Empire, is now fully engulfed by her role as Good Wife. The story concerns a series of near-misadventures and an encounter with an escaped white woman who was born into slavery but has dared to try to escape it, on the way to finding out if his marriage is doomed forever. No, your eyes are leaking.

Other stories, such as "The Healer" concern the eternal conflict between Western-style religious beliefs and traditional folk medicine and what happens when one tribe adopts the former and all but exterminates another who still practices the latter (which, because this is speculative fiction, actually works to the extent that it is basically magic, as is also the case in "The Leaf Man). Then there's "Itanda Bridge" in which the military forces a young man, Obil, to dive for evidence from a car crash at the bottom of a river, only for Obil to discover an amazing Lovecraftian secret just a bit downstream from where the wreckage isn't. The title story, "A Killing in the Sun" threatens to feel like a rehash of Jorge Luis Borges' "The Secret Miracle" right up until it totally doesn't because there are Witches Involved. Every story has a recognizable speculative fiction touchstone but does something unique and unexpected with it, usually in such a way as to tug at the reader's conscience and her heartstrings as Dila explores friendship, romance, the love of a father for his children, and the question of how much of a person's loyalty a regime has the right to claim -- except for one story near the end, which comes completely out of left field and turns the bizarre up to 11.

"The Yellow People" could be viewed as just another clever twist on a zombie story, but it could also be viewed as a very clever twist on a serial killer story! It's told from the killer's point of view -- he's a white man who moved to Uganda to better practice his grisly hobby with less chance of being caught or punished --  and that killer racks up a truly epic body count before something weird starts happening with the bodies he has stashed away on his property. I found "A Wife and A Slave" more emotionally satisfying but "The Yellow People" is quite possibly the best and most intriguing story in the bunch - and, no, by the way, there isn't a dud among them. You might wind up liking the collection's final entry, "A Bloodline of Blades" and its struggle between a tradition of assassination and a competing one of music to be better than "The Yellow People"; you might also prefer the creepy delights of "Okello's Honeymoon" as it tells us the story of a young man's near destruction by supernatural forces on his wedding night. Point is, there's something for everybody who loves speculative fiction.

Dilman Dila is definitely going on my "OMG must read everything he does" list. And as I mentioned above, Dila is also a filmmaker. I wanted to embed one of his shorts here, but YouTube won't let me because there's adult content. Do yourself a favor, though, and go check out his YouTube channel. His films are narratively compelling and universally appealing, full of suspense and just enough WTFery to keep the viewer riveted. I especially recommend his very recent Kifaro, which could easily fit in as an entry in A Killing in the Sun as it explores the intriguing relationship between binary computer code and African divination systems through the time-honored story of a man who catches his cheating wife. Give this man a proper film deal already! I want to see what he can do with a feature length.

Or a novel, for that matter.

Kij Johnson's AT THE MOUTH OF THE RIVER OF BEES

"Where does it begin?" she says at last. "Where does it end?"

He is slow answering and she knows he is as trapped in its weird beauty as she. "No one knows," he says: "Or no one says. My dad used to tell me tales, but I don't know that he knew, either. Maybe there's a spring of bees somewhere, and it sinks underground somewhere else. Maybe the bees gather, do this thing, and then go home. There's no ocean of bees anyway." 

No guesses as to what attracted me to Kij Johnson's fantastic short story collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees. My proclivities are well known to you all by now. But I mean, come on, just look at this cover. And yes, I think this bee's mouthparts look kind of weevil-y, but bees come in lots and lots of varieties and mutations and variations and I mean, she's just cute, right?

Johnson first won my devotion with her extraordinary Lovecraftian novella The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe, which took inspiration from Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, a piece HPL neither revised from its early draft nor got published in his lifetime, but which might just be my favorite thing he ever wrote and yes of course at least part of it is because Chad Fifer sold me on the space-faring kitty cats. For her take on this crazypants universe, Johnson gave me a childless spinster just like me as a tour guide, and I'm forever grateful for the resulting adventure.

So my expectations for this story collection were quite high going in, and I'm delighted to say they were more than met! For one thing, Johnson shows mastery in pretty much every sub-genre of speculative fiction here, meaning there is guaranteed something for every reader here. For another, she is that kind of writer best for short stories, a master at quickly sketched world-building that still feels complete even in just a few lines, the better to get on with the storytelling. Not everbody can do that, but Kij Johnson sure can.

I'm not going to discuss every story in the collection, though every one of them has something astonishing or thought-provoking or just plan cool to offer and only one of them is one I'd skip if there's a next time I read this collection because yuck (but yuck, too, can be a testimony to a writer's powers!).

But let's talk about themes for a moment. One is loss; many of these stories are explicitly about losing something, someone, or a whole lifestyle, and how to cope with it (not always gracefully) or, in one notable case, postpone it for a while. Another is animals, anthropomorphized or not. Another is Asia; several of these stories have explicitly Japanese or generally Asian-inspired settings and bear that extra burden of "writing the other" but bear it very well indeed.

Best among the animal stories (though not quite of the Asian) is the delightful "The Cat Who Walked a Thousand Miles" and no, no evocation of that song is necessary, thank you. Our little heroine, Small Cat, does not fall down at anybody's door, for a start. Raised in an abandoned city house and garden in Japan by a large family of feral cats who've developed their own take on fudoki, to which she hopes to add someday, Small Cat sees the downfall of this feline paradise and decides to live out a story from her ancestral fudoki about The Cat From the North, in reverse; instead of coming from the north, she will go north, eventually going as far north as a cat can go without crossing an ocean. Her adventures along the way are by turns exciting, heartbreaking, charming and adorable.

Of the Asian themed ones, "The Empress Jingu Fishes" is a standout. The titular empress is a shaman, blessed/cursed by the gods with complete and perfect foresight. She knows when she gets married that her husband would not live long, so she loved him as well and as fiercely as she could. She knows that he will die while their kingdom is at war with a neighboring one (though not the one the gods had commanded them, through her, to attack) and before their son could even be born. She knows that their son will be a great emperor in his time and will eventually be elevated to godhood. She knows all of this while she sits by a spring and fashions a line, hook and some bait to try to catch a trout that she doesn't need purely to feel at least a tiny illusion of having a bit of free will; she is powerless against the forces that took her husband and will take her son and wants to kill something, but this is her sole opportunity to do so. It's an exquisite tale.

Other stories are closer to our own experience, or seem that way at first. For instance, "Names for Water" seems like a mundane slow burn about a student looking for excuses to skip or even drop her math class and change her major, but turns out to have galaxy-spanning impact and implications by the time its few pages are off the paper and in the reader's head. For all we know, little things like this are happening every time our cell phones ring. But probably not. Kij Johnson is much better at writing realities than the hacks in charge of the one I live in are.

She's also good at 17th century naturalist pastische, as it turns out. "MyWife Reincarnated as a Solitaire - Exposition on the Flaws in My Wife's Character - The Nature of the Bird - The Possible Causes - Her Final Disposition." is just that, both a biting satire on the pompous and patriarchal style of narration fashionable at the time and a delightful poke in the eye of the kind of patriarch who wrote that way, as it tells the story of how his much disliked wife apparently reincarnated as an extinct flightless bird, as the title gives away, but has gotten a last laugh on him right under his nose the whole time. Henry Fielding would applaud. And possibly bite his thumb at Kij Johnson, sir. As such.

Then there's the title story, "At the Mouth of the River of Bees" in which a young woman and her ailing German shepherd find themselves on a road trip like no other, compelled to follow the course of an annual migrating bee swarm so large and long that it blocks major highways for days on its northward course. What she finds at the end of the journey is terribly bittersweet and doesn't have a whole lot to do with bees, but like in my favorite Paul Valery poem, the bee isn't really the point; it's a "tiny gold alarm" there to sting us into taking necessary action. For some reason, I pictured this as a major motion picture starring Dakota Johnson. Your milage may vary.

A final favorite I'll mention, and the story that occupies the biggest chunk of the volume, is the extensively imagined and constructed "The Man Who Bridged the Mist" which takes us either to a fantasy world or a science fiction one -- it doesn't really matter which -- in which a society at roughly the medieval level of technological development must contend with a unique geographical feature if its to extend the benefits of civilization to its outskirts and other side. Not only is there a vast river of water dividing the Empire, but over top of it is another, more dangerous and weirder, river of "mist", but it's not like any mist we've ever encountered. It flows along the course of the water but it's denser than water, dense enough to row boats across but corrosive AF and prone to strange disturbances and, oh yes, home to monsters the locals call Fish but are unlike any fish you or I are thinking about. For a start, the Big Ones could destroy whole towns if disturbed enough to surface. Our fish out of water coming to this mist-river is an architect there to build a vast suspension bridge across it, the first of its kind. The majority of the story concerns this effort of his and of those he hires to help him, including two members of a family whose hereditary duty has been to ferry people and cargo across this river, who won't be needed if this giant construction project is successful. This story I'd especially recommend to people who like reading about logistics and mundane projects like building. I promise you it's not boring for those who aren't into that sort of thing; just that those who are, will especially like this one.

There are also stories about marauding tribes in another fantasy-or-sci-fi setting (and how I love that Johnson is comfortable letting these settings of hers be either, just fine with the ambiguity), a bureaucrat who is being groomed for minor godhood but doesn't want to leave his mistress, a family of foxes who beguile a young husband into madness in order to survive, and an exceptionally brutal Galactic empire and how its tactics for keeping everybody unified actually affect populations at its edges. Like I said, there's not a bad story in the bunch, though if graphic and weird sex isn't your cup of tea, maybe skip "Spar", the slightest of these stories in any case.

All in all, this was the perfect collection with which to wind down my reading year, cementing Kij Johnson as a writer to watch and filling a lot of little moments in between tasks in exactly the way I most want a collection of short fiction to do. The buzz was warranted.

Robin D. Laws' NEW TALES OF THE YELLOW SIGN

Man, do I love me some King in Yellow, Robert W. Chambers' most famous contribution to the Weird Fiction milieu of the early 20th century. "The Repairer of Reputations" is one of my favorite short stories of all time, with its bizarre blend of off-the-wall "predictions" (it was written in the late 19th century, and set in the "future" of 1920 and not a breath of any such thing as a World War, with or without a Roman numeral, appears, for instance), familial/"dynastic" intrigues, unreliable narration, cosmic horror mythology and the titular character himself -- man, that stuff never fails to delight me.

So yeah, I'm one of those people who lost her freaking mind when I realized the first season of True Detective was totally throwing around bits of Yellowiana like "lost Carcosa" and the Yellow King. Wish there'd been more of that. I'd be totally down for TD having continued to explore a world in which, say, some idiot Hollywood producer greenlights a lavish feature film adaptation of "The King in Yellow"* and mass insanity sweeps the globe, and whatnot. Alas.

But I'm not alone, obviously, because here we have it! New Tales of the Yellow Sign brings the Yellow King/Carcosa mythos into the 21st century, kind of like Amanda Downum's Dreams of Shreds and Tatters did last year. Except more so. So much more so.

The stories herein draw a great deal on the alternate history outlined in "The Repairer of Reputations", using it as a jumping off point for re-imagining the 20th century the way Harry Turtledove might if he wanted to write Weird Fiction. Thus, while the World Wars we remember don't happen, variations on them do, but result, not in the rise of the modern secular/democratic nation-state, but in a tightening of the grip of hereditary monarchy, or of totalitarian dictatorship. Or both. The dystopian feel of a Police State is an undercurrent in every page of these tales, giving them an extra helping of dark glamor they didn't really need, being Yellow Sign stories and thus plenty darkly glamorous already, but do just fine with.

There's probably a little something for everyone here. Usually at this point, when I'm writing about a short fiction collection, I highlight a few of my favorites for special praise, but it's been more than a week since I finished this for the first (but I guarantee not the only) time, and I still can't sort out what my favorites were. Which is to say that I liked them all. Laws pulled off a tour de force of expanding and updating Chambers strange little throwaway alter-verse, and I hope to Hastur he's not done doing so.**

*To clarify, the short story collection of Chambers' that inspired all this is called The King in Yellow. One of the matters the KiY mythos, which figures in just three of the stories, covers, is the existence of a play called "The King in Yellow" which basically evokes cosmic otherworldly supernatural forces by its very text or performance and drives everybody who reads it, let alone sees it, insane forevermore.

**And yeah, I know he's busy inventing amazing award-winning games and writing modules for other games and hosting and appearing as a guest on podcasts and whatnot but, hey, he started it. Nyah.

Lucius Shepard's THE DRAGON GRIAULE

One of the coolest things in the 1980s was the surfeit of awesome shorter fiction that came through snail mail in the form of fantastic little digest-sized magazines like Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and many others. Some of them still exist and circulate today, some even in physical form like they did when I was a spec-fic-hungry teenager, but it's not quite the same in this instant-on world. I can read their contents online the second they're published.

But I used to have to wait a whole month between hits. That's just how it was, kids. And believe me, growing up in tiny rural Wyoming, where there are only three malls in the whole state and I only got to visit them and their B. Dalton's, their Waldenbooks, three or four times a year (in a good year) meant that these magazines were my lifeline, yo!

It was in those pages that I first discovered Lucius Shepard. The story was "The Jaguar Hunter." It blew me away, and I promised myself that someday I'd read every damn thing this guy published. But none of it ever showed up in those mall bookstores, and then college happened, and then life happened, and I sort of forgot about him. It happens.

But somewhere along the way, I came across, probably in a buddy's collection of magazines at college, "The Man who Painted the Dragon Griaule" and that story has stuck with me all of these years. So when I found out untold years later that this was just one of several stories about this particular dragon, I dropped everything and got my grubby e-hands on the e-book collecting them all, this book right here. Because wooooooo!

The Dragon Griaule contains that first story I stumbled across way back when, and five more that were brand new to me. They're all of tremendously high quality*, as you might expect. They're also tremendously inventive, taking the idea of a gigantic (as in mile-long and 700 foot high) dragon that has been stunned paralyzed by a wizard's spell and lies in stasis on the ground for over a thousand years while towns spring up next to his body and even on his back, all manner of plant and animal life use his inert bulk as a habitat, and humans do things like scrape off bits of him to sell as medicines or charms or jewelry. All with the dragon fully aware, but unable to move, slowed down so that decades pass between beats of his enormous heart. The Dragon Griaule is a world, an ecosystem unto himself, and is utterly and uncannily alien, throbbing at the heart of every passage in these stories.

The stories in this volume show us the passage of, I'm guessing at least a century, possibly two, in the dragon's half-life, but really start with the killing -- but not the death -- of Griaule. "The Man who Painted the Dragon Griaule" is really a slow-motion dragonslaying, as an artist convinces the city fathers of Teocinte (the chief population center in the dragon's vicinity) to pay his expenses over a decades-long project to paint a mural on the side of the dragon's body, deliberately using all the most toxic pigments to color his paint and laying it on thick so that the dragon is very, very slowly poisoned. This is the story that started it all, and many might say it's the best, but it does have a little competition; it's one of three stories that I found absolutely brilliant and unique (the other three were merely interesting and good).

"The Scalehunter's Beautiful Daughter" focuses on a young woman who, being beautiful and poor and motherless, naturally grows up to be a bit of a tease and a stealer of other women's lovers and generally just kind of a horrible Heather type, but then circumstances drive her to hide deep inside Griaule's body, where she discovers a whole new world of plants, parasites, fungi, animals and even people who have made the dragon's guts and cavities their home. She winds up living there, too -- and discovers that she's there for a reason, because, see, Griaule is aware, and while paralyzed, he's not helpless. Lying there hating, and hating hard, has given his will tremendous amplification and power and subtlety, and he manipulates the world around him according to his alien and inimical whim. Whew!

The limits of that whim are the subject of the other brilliant story, "The Father of Stones," in which a pretty bauble harvested from one of Griaule's teeth is used as a murder weapon in a town somewhat outside the dragon's generally understood sphere of influence, and the accused insists that the dragon made him do it. But the accused is not the protagonist; his lawyer is. Yes, this is not a bog standard pseudo-medieval fantasy world, but one that is fairly advanced, perhaps not quite industrialized, but perhaps on a par with, for this story, the early 19th century or so. The legal system is sophisticated and complex, the economy mercantile, the civil structure fairly egalitarian and maybe even democratic. This lawyer has to work hard to investigate the case, find grounds to defend his client, and grapple with the big question of just how powerful Griaule's evil will is. Can it be borne and imposed via pieces of his body or bits of his secretions?

The other stories explore this last question in interesting ways. A scale from the dragon's back seems to function like a genie's lamp -- rub it and be transported back in time to when Griaule was much smaller and flying free, for instance. In another story, Griaule manages, in a weird, unpleasant and creepy way, to make a baby via a human surrogate. And in the final story, The Skull, Shepard brings the dragon up to modern times**, as dismembered bits of dissected giant dragon make their way all over the world, with the dragon's skull serving as a vehicle to haunt a fictional banana republic and keep on making us puny humans miserable.

The imagination at work in all of these stories is fantastic, taking the idea of dragons way beyond what Tolkein or Martin or even, say, Anne McCaffrey ever did. Shepard does an amazing job of integrating his ideas into the history of our own world -- not in a doofy way like "dragons vs the U.S.S. Nimitz" or "President Reagan meets a dragon" -- and weaving moving human stories around the dragon and his baleful influence.

I will say that it's all a bit heavy going to read all of these stories in one go, like I started to. Some unpleasant themes and authorial ticks (see asterisk note below) start repeating and becoming more noticeable, and I finally had to put the book aside after the fourth story "The Liar's House"

*But all of them have a slight tinge of -- misogyny is too strong a word, especially with the gold standard of Robert Silverberg still polluting my memory -- but a certain unpleasant attitude toward women that came really close to spoiling every story but the original. There is at least one fully realized female character in each story (again, except the first), and one of them is even a protagonist, but none of these women are likable or even trustworthy. They are unknowable alien beings or haughty bitch queens or amoral sluts or (the protagonist) spoiled little teases who have some growing up to do but don't really stop being nobody one would care to know. And I wish I hadn't read the story notes at the end and realized the kind of bad girlfriend stories Mr. Shepard might have told over a highball or two. Sigh.

**Indeed, as I learned in the after-notes, Shepard conceived the idea of Griaule as a sort of monster embodiment of all the ugliness of the Reagan era.

Edith Wharton's THE DESCENT OF MAN AND OTHER STORIES

I'd read a handful of Edith Wharton's short fiction (the most memorable of which "Xingu" especially prepared me for the title story of this book) before taking up The Descent of Man and Other Stories, so I was pretty sure about what to expect from this collection. Wharton is always a graceful and insightful writer, but in her shorter fiction, she's a bit wicked, in the best possible way.

Take, for example, the title story, "The Descent of Man", which concerns an eminent scientist who has decided to have a bit of a joke on the general public by publishing a perfect parody of the kind of pseudo-scientific nonsense that never goes out of fashion, always needs debunked or at least critically examined, and is often just a little bit too believable to make disproving it an easy task. His book a resounding success and the public clamoring for more, the professor faces a dilemma: let everybody down by exposing his satire, thus earning eternal enmity and likely ostracism, or give in to the public demand for more of the same. The title of the story should give some idea of how this goes. Like I said, a bit wicked, in the best possible way, is Ms. Wharton.

Wharton also explores upper-crust divorces and their exquisite discomforts in "The Other Two" as a man who is happily married to a twice-divorced woman keeps running into her prior husbands as he goes about his business, realizing he sort of has them to thank for her skill at making men happy even as he comes to like one of them and learns to tolerate the other, who is, after all, the father of her child. As this story was originally published in 1904, it also shows us that all of these entanglements are nothing new -- and they've rarely been treated so incisively and with such dispassionate amusement as Wharton, herself to later become a divorced though not remarried woman, gives them here.

Another amusing reflection on "modern" family life, "The Mission of Jane" almost reads like a long and drawn-out joke as a couple, disappointed in their marriage, adopts a child in the hopes of improving matters. Their resulting parenthood winds up being an even bigger disappointment as Jane turns out to be an insufferable know-it-all, but does eventually fulfill her purpose after a fashion. One can almost hear Wharton chuckling, genteelly, to herself as the story moves briskly along.

Other entries are almost farcically romantic, like "The Letter", which concerns a last letter penned by an Italian patriot executed by the Austrian regime, a letter which was never delivered to his grieving wife and sister. The tale is told from the point of view of an English adventurer in love with the sister, who in finding the titular letter finds an advantage he can use to discredit the rival for the sister's affections! One can hear the violins all but screeching in the background; sometimes in the foreground threatening to overpower the narrator's voice! Pass zee smelling salts and steer me towards the fainting couch! This together with the ghostly gothic silliness of "The Lady's Maid's Bell" seem more like pages from Vita Sackville-West's juvenalia than the work of the author of The House of Mirth. But hey, she wanted to stretch herself. I respect that.

Even those stories, though, aren't what one could call bad. Indeed, they might be taken as very delicate and subtle satire, which seems more Wharton's style. I'm just not sure.

What I am sure of, though, is that this collection is still a must-read for Wharton fans or those who are curious about her, if at least for its inclusion of the searingly amazing "Quicksand", in which a woman finds herself struggling to dissuade her prospective daughter-in-law from marrying, not because the girl is not good enough for the woman's son, but because the woman sees herself in the girl and also sees that her son would make it too easy for the girl to lose herself and all the qualities the woman admires, repeating the woman's own experience of marriage. It's exquisitely done, painful and challenging stuff, the story most like an Edith Wharton novel in this collection.

So, The Descent of Man and Other Stories is a bit of a mixed bag, but it shows off Wharton's versatility, talent and, perhaps most importantly, that she refused to take herself too seriously. She would have been fun to know socially, I'm pretty sure.

Kelly Link's STRANGER THINGS HAPPEN

I started reading this collection quite some time ago, when it landed on my devices via the Humble Bundle, but as I've discussed before on this blog, I've had trouble fitting short fiction into my reading life, to my detriment. At the time Stranger Things Happen came into this life again* I thought, hey, I'll put this on my phone so I have something to entertain me when I'm waiting for things like friends to show up for social engagements or doctor's appointments or oil changes. Yeah!

Only I have discovered that I'm not in those situations very often. All of my current circle of real life friends are as punctual as I am, for instance. I know!

So anyway, I had dawdled to about the 25% mark in this collection when I hit on this whole Bedtime Stories thing. And I couldn't remember any of what I'd read to that point, really, because my bout of waiting around with my phone were too few and far between. I realize I am probably a huge freak in this regard. That's okay.

All this is a roundabout lead in to the fact that I think I am now an unabashed Kelly Link fangirl. What really did it for me was "Travels with the Snow Queen" which re-imagines Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen" (possibly my favorite HCA, though it's one I've always felt I've understood the least well. Deliciously enigmatic, is "The Snow Queen") in terms of an autopsy on a failed romance and the idea of a business that capitalizes on the need for these, all while still feeling very true to HCA's original story. This is quite a feat since the narration is in the rare and difficult-to-pull-off second person, a la, say, Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night A Traveler...

Other stand-outs include "Louise's Ghost" which tangles the reader in threads of ambiguity as it tells of not one but two characters named Louise and not one but two ghosts, one a more conventional (yet unconventional) haunting and one a bit more metaphorical that only comes into play halfway through the story. Like a good ghost story should be, this one is creepy as hell, but not necessarily in the way the campfire stories it evokes are; more in the way Margaret Atwood's stories of female friendship and female rivalry tend to be.

And some of the stories are just strange, like "The Girl Detective", a weird juxtaposition of Carolyn Keene (who didn't really exist, which still weirds me out) and the Brothers Grimm, and "Survivor's Ball, or The Donner Party" which threatens to get really terribly over the top creepy but stops short of that and settles for merely uncanny.

Link does have some tics that get cumulatively annoying, though; she loves breaking up her stories into discrete and often non-sequential sub-narratives, leaving the reader to struggle to relate them all together at story's end. Sometimes this winds up being more of a struggle than others, as in "Most of My Friends are Two-Thirds Water" which I'm still pretty sure I just didn't understand at all. I guess it's some kind of will-they-won't-they romance? With a fair amount of sex but not between the two who are framed as gonna-maybe-be-lovers? Meh. Maybe it's just because she tries to cram a Philip K. Dick salute in there where it really doesn't fit? Anyway, the night I read this one, I went to bed frustrated.

After all the others, I went to bed enchanted. So, ten out of eleven are brilliant. Not bad!

*Originally, I received a paperback copy from a friend in a book swap a few years ago, but this was right at the time my octuple elbow tendon trouble started making dead tree books a painful proposition, so yeah.

FUNGI - An anthology edited by Orrin Grey & Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The only way I could be more of a target audience for an anthology would be if somebody published one with the theme of insects (preferably if it was not all horror, y'all). If there's one category of life form I find almost as fascinating as insects, it's Fungi. Mushrooms, molds, mildews, stuff that's a little bit of both, do slime molds still count in this category? I'm not as up to date on my taxonomy as I could be. But I know the fungi have their own kingdom now!*

Their place in the life cycle, their vital role in breaking down dead matter into its constituent bits for reuse by other life forms and, very likely, their even more vital role in holding together the vast internal hydraulic system that some scientists refer to as land life's "Hypersea", their astonishing variety and range (the largest and oldest organism currently alive is a fungus, for instance) make fungi really quite fascinating, and quite stimulating to a certain kind of imagination. Like that of a speculative fiction writer or fourteen.

The Fungi anthology collects a range of speculative fiction of a range and variety almost as astonishing as that of the kingdom it riffs on. A few authors are happy to just play new iterations of cosmic horror/inimical alien themes introduced by sub-genre granddaddies William Hope Hodgson and H.P. Lovecraft, but some have truly bizarre new tunes to play on the hyphal strings of their mushroom banjos. As it were.

It's really hard to choose stand-outs to highlight here, and I suspect that every reader will latch on to different ones. Some might like the very first body-horror flavored "Hyphae" by John Langan, in which a decrepit old hermit's truly epic case of athlete's foot is only the beginning of the yuckiness; others will start having weird and creepy nightmares from Kris Reisz' "Pilgrims of Parthen", which discloses that some magic mushroom trips have greater consequences than others. Then there's quite possibly the weirdest weird western written, maybe ever, Andrew Penn Romine's "Last Bloom on the Sage" which depicts a train robbery-cum-political kidnapping against a backdrop of a western U.S. utterly transformed by a wholesale takeover of the ecosystem by various fungi, including some sentient, ambulatory fungi who have to be treated as equals by, if not venerated as somehow greater than, humans. And Richard Gavin's witchy, pagan romp "Goatsbride", a sort of revenge tale in which the ergot madness of early America is explained as a semi-deliberate act subtle of bio-terrorism.

I do have some favorites, though. And, oddly for all that I'm a total genre fiction fan, my favorites are perhaps the least weird, the least fantastic of them all: memoirist Jane Hertenstein's "Wild Mushrooms" is a possibly fictionalized, possibly non-fiction account of one family's obsession with mushroom hunting; Lisa M. Bradley's "The Pearl in the Oyster and the Oyster Under Glass" takes the idea of bio-remediation** and all the hope and promise it embodies and runs with it as it tells the story of the ursine-in-spirit loner Art and his efforts to restore at least small parts of his planet; Lavie Tidhar's "White Hands" is a nifty salute to Jorge Luis Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings -- call it the fungal edition.

Every time I come across a collection like this, I get to wondering why I don't read more short fiction than I do, and can't account for it aside from just not having made a special effort to do so. I've come up with a new idea for changing all of that, and that is why there is now a content tag for this blog "bedtime stories." Short fiction and anthologies are perfect for reading before bed, if you're the type of person who likes to do that, and even more perfect if you are also the type of person who has accidentally stayed up way too late engrossed in a novel.

Therefore, expect more explorations of this kind, here. But first, go grab Fungi and have some fungal fun. You'll probably like different stories than I did; you really owe it to yourself to find out!

*Actually, I think slime molds do, too, but I'm too lazy to look it up right now and this is SO not a science blog. Except when it is. Ish.

**Using organisms -- usually micro-organisms, bio-engineered or naturally occurring -- and subtly tweaked natural processes to reclaim polluted or damaged land and seascapes.

100 Books #63 - Benjamin Rosenbaum's THE ANT KING AND OTHER STORIES

It is said we fabulists live two lives at once. First we live as others do: seeking to feed and clothe ourselves, earn the respect and affection of our fellows, fly from danger, entertain and satiate ourselves on the things of this world. But then, too, we live a second life, pawing through the moments of the first, even as they happen, like a market-woman of the bazaar, sifting trash for treasures. Every agony we endure we also hold up to the light with great excitement, expecting it will be of use; every simple joy we regard with a critical eye, wondering how it could be changed, honed, tightened, to fit inside a fable's walls.

- Benjamin Rosenbaum in "Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes' by Benjamin Rosenbaum"

If you dug all the mixed-up craziness of the "universe without Time" schtick in "The Wedding of River Song" (the Series 6 finale of the Doctor Who revival), then this is the short story collection for you.

It's one of the oddest I've encountered since Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths, and while that oddness is the primary quality the books share, it is far from the only one. Go look for yourself: a few of the stories from this collection have been published elsewhere, in magazines like McSweeney's, and are available online at Small Beer Press's website.

It's all very, very po-mo, but not in that annoying way, though bits of the story quoted above stray into a somewhat precious parody of a certain dialect of academese that I don't miss hearing at all from my college days. No, what we have here is pure, bizarre creativity, as if a Borgesian by temperament suddenly decided to chuck the master's adherence to the cultural touchstones of Western civilization and mysticism and just decided to go gleefully mad.

"Biographical Notes..." is probably the most Borgesian, with its professional constructor of plausible fantasies, who uses the author's own name as a nom de plume, as a hero, but here the action is at least as much in our hero's physical world as in his mind. That physical world is a steampunk dream of dirigibles and gliders and derring-do as he leaps from the one to the other in mid-flight, even as he dreams of an alternate reality in which Brahmanist causality does not hold sway and merely the laws of physics and materialism are true. How would people living in such a weird universe as that fly, he wonders as he clings to the side of the P.R.G.B. Sri Bernard Shaw and preparing to tackle a would-be assassin, or maybe some aerial pirates, or both! And that's just part of it, for in this world, the great colonizing powers on a mission to civilize the clueless of Europe come from Cathay, Gabon, Khmer, the Aryan Raj!* This might not be everyone's favorite story in this collection, but I think it's mine.

And that's just the beginning, kids. "The Orange" concerns an orange, as in a piece of citrus fruit, that actually rules the world**; "Start the Clock" depicts a society in which age is a matter of choice and can be physiologically fixed, its protagonist a girl who has chosen to stay biologically nine years old forever and is never troubled by having breasts or sexual desire but now has to deal with a friend who wants to grow up; "The Blow" depicts a Sam Spade type's bittersweet, limited existence after a blow to the head leaves him half-paralyzed; the title story, subtitled "A California Fairy Tale" concerns a love triangle of sorts, with the lady kidnapped by the titular Ant King while her swain struggles to run a gumball corporation and rescue his love by playing... a video game; "Orphans" re-imagines Babar as an object of human female desire***. And speaking of female desire, there's "Red Leather Tassels," featuring a sex scene between a tycoon's wife and a woodpecker, "like the fluttering of a feather duster... an insistent, passionate feather duster." Some of the funniest stuff I've read in a long time, that.

Ah, but then there's stuff like "The Book of Jashar," which juxtaposes Thomas Pynchon's Oedipa Maas and Philip K. Dick's Timothy Archer in a story of, what else, imaginary Judeo-Christian apocrypha, written in the form of a letter to a small press fiction editor together with an enclosed English translation of what amounts to a Hebraic vampire story, and was a bit too much of a dig in the ribs for me. And "Sense and Sensibility," an oh-so-meta tale of the twee inhabitants of various locales on and in the body of a being known as The Glutton which I could barely endure****. But not every chocolate in the box is going to have hazelnuts, am I right?

All of this, though, good, amusing, annoying, indifferent, all of it pales in comparison to the final story, "A Siege of Cranes," a pulp fantasy dreamscape that is as compelling, emotionally draining and powerful as the rest are merely clever. Were I to get a chance to take Rosenbaum aside and have a little chat with him about his future, I would grab him by the lapels (and if he wasn't wearing anything with lapels, I would force him to put on a jacket so I could grab him by the lapels) and tell him to quit arseing around and showing off and give us more of this, work that bears comparison with Harlan Ellison at his most gut-wrenching and heartbreaking and nightmarish (oh gawd, that chariot!) and true. Because it's all fine and good to be clever, but it's better, isn't it, to write stories that people want to read again and again? Of all of these stories, most of them worth reading at least once, "A Siege of Cranes" is one I think I'll return to, and for which be eternally grateful to Rosenbaum. Worth the price of the whole book, this story.

I took in these stories one by one at odd moments over the course of a good month or so, mostly because when read one after the other, they blend together weirdly and unsatisfyingly. That's the peril of tongue-in-cheek surrealism; when anything can happen, anything can happen, and if you forget what story you're in, you might easily think you're in another and get annoyed at how incoherent it all seems. Best to avoid that (I suspect this might be behind some of the negative reviews of this collection that I've seen).

Many and profuse thanks to Eric Orchard for telling me about this book and its publisher, Small Beer Press. I see now a whole new vista of awesome to enjoy!

*Not the stupid white power Nazi-esque sense of "Aryan". Think of the roots of that race and of Indo-European languages. Yeah. India!

**Too bad it's so short, a complaint one might have about many of these stories. Something else Rosenbaum seems to share with Borges: a certain "lofty laziness."

***Yet another story, "The Fig" reimagines Douglas Adams' famous Vl'Hurg war fleet as an army of little men whose mission is to recover the titular fruit from a cat who stole it from a little girl. One suspects Rosenbaum has a whole stack of these somewhere.

****What did Jane Austen do to deserve all of this, exactly? Seth Grahame-Smith, I'm looking at you as well, of course.