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.