Eric LaRocca's THEY WERE HERE BEFORE US: A NOVELLA IN PIECES

The tension between humanity and the rest of existence that we usually call "the natural world" is kind of implicitly the core theme of all of our stories, so it's a little weird how powerfully affecting it is when someone comes along with a book like They Were Here Before Us: A Novella in Pieces that just rubs that tension in our faces. We're really good at ignoring the harm we do to our environs, and the harm that all the other inhabitants of this world are doing to each other while we're wringing our hands/telling each other it's not so bad over the latest oil spill or waste dump, though, so maybe it's not that weird.

As the first few "pieces" of the novella unfold, the reader gets the feel almost of, say, Patricia Highsmith's wickedly fun animal revenge tales, though a bit more anthropomorphized; the beetle who narrates the opening "All That Remains is Yours to Keep" and the chimpanzee telling us of "Delicacies from a First Communion" both share their stories in colloquial American English from a first person perspective, for instance. But by the third "A God Made of Straw" we shift to the third person and we get our first hints of something more explicitly in the realm of speculative fiction going on, allowing us to ask how it is we have become privy to these creatures' thoughts and feelings and internal dialogue, even as the tension amps way up and the scenes of wanton cruelty start multiplying. And oh look, that bird on the very attractive book cover has elements of the Biblically accurate angel about her, doesn't she?

We're nice and softened up and probably still a little in shock as "Bug and Bird are Happy" begins, suddenly concerned with human characters who happen to have cute nicknames taken from the animal world. But look at that cover again; while Bug is our point of view character in this piece, and as we come to understand the pair's bittersweet relationship and the changes cruel time has wrought on it, well, it's not the beetle who's in control of the situation on that cover, is it? Or is this maybe meant to be the beetle who told us the first piece, maybe being punished for its gloating possessiveness? Could that bird with eyes in her wings be a reincarnation of some of the other pieces' victims, getting their own back before the whole story is told? This "novella in pieces" thing demands that we come up with our own way of putting those pieces together. I wonder how many of us end up with the same contraption at the end?

By the time things wrap up with "When It's Dark Out" all of these themes of cruelty and consumption, of metamorphosis and decomposition and brutality come together for a speed run through a scenario straight out of a story in, say, Cosmic Horror Monthly,  in which a man and his son confront monsters within and without on the way to say a final farewell to a beloved family member. The simple narrative is now elegantly amplified and elevated by the material preceding it, making it feel both claustrophobic and cosmic - a neat trick, that. 

I'll be looking for more of this gentleman's stuff. 

Ha Seong-Nan's FLOWERS OF MOLD (Tr by Janet Hong)

Today I bought a dress with lots of buttons. After I'd done them all up and was about to button the last one, I discovered there was no hole to put it through. I looked in the mirror and saw the back of my dress was wrinkled around the neck. I'd put the third button in the fourth hole. So I had to undo them all and start over. As I was doing them up, I had a thought: When did the button of my life go in the wrong hole?

First of all, let's take a moment and bask in this book cover. Open Letter Books, the American publisher of Ha Seong-Nan's short story collection Flowers of Mold, give good book cover. Some of the best in the business, for my money (so much of my money!). But lest my typical reader jump to the conclusion that I did at first sight, Flowers of Mold is not fungal fiction, nor is it weird fiction. It's down to earth and domestic and literary and grounded. Very, very grounded. And occasionally a bit gross, because...

Whether it's drawing profound metaphor from everyday annoyances like in the passage I quoted above or painting entire word portraits of the wear and tear daily life exercises on things we're all too tired or demoralized to even try to make to last these days, Ha Seong-Nan is the greatest poet of kipple since Philip K. Dick or J.G. Ballard.*

The stories in this collection are thematically linked through various explorations of what we've thrown away or allowed to wear away or destroyed through inattention to detail, both in material terms and in terms of the misused, if not outright wasted, potential of individual human lives, which should make Flowers of Mold an absolutely exhausting and maybe nauseating read, but there are little bits of humor here and there that shine through. We get to watch a lot of people trying to dig up things after misremembering where they've been buried, which is always at least a little bit funny, for instance, and several times Ha lets us enjoy watching everything build to a Mexican shoot-out of a climax with just enough comic timing to let us know that she's in on the joke. But for every little chuckle, we get a lot of weariness and despair even as we wonder if, like Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories a few years ago, we're seeing quite as many individual characters as we think we are. Might these all be about the same thin, pretty but uncertain woman who can't seem to find a place in this world, and the same tired, kind of creepy and washed-up-before-his-time man?

Except, of course, there are a few stories like my favorite "The Retreat" which have a larger cast of characters, tenants all of a run-down building in a middling location who are getting ready to go on the building's annual retreat with the owner when the rumor surfaces that he's probably going to sell the building out from under them and never mind that the fried chicken lady just spent all her money renovating her restaurant on one floor, or that the academy upstairs probably couldn't afford to relocate or that everybody's been faithfully paying rent for years and years. But of course the guy who runs the academy could be our washed-up man, who has, in other stories, to take a job as a store detective-cum-mannequin in a store, a car salesman, a second-rate writer of advertising copy, couldn't he? And maybe the lady on the other floor who makes her precarious living keeping a handful of barflies happy is the same we see mysteriously showing up as a stage magician, a model (several times), a failed gymnast? Even her names (or at least her family name) are similar as we proceed through the stories -- Choi Sun-ae (in "Your Rearview Mirror"), Choi Jiae (in the collection's title story "Flowers of Mold"), Choi Myeong-ae (in "Toothpaste")... or maybe they're sisters? "Choi" isn't the rarest surname in Korea, but this still feels like a deliberate choice. See what I did there.

Meanwhile, don't crack this one open too close to mealtime, unless you've got a very strong stomach. Ha is a poet of kipple, but also of just plain refuse:

The foul stench came from the dumpsters. Uncollected garbage was piled around like pyramids around the apartment complex. At night, rats came out to gnaw at the trash. Liquid leaked from the bags and flowed down the asphalt and hardened in chunks. To avoid getting his dress shoes dirty, the man leapt over the stains like an athlete competing in the triple jump event.

And this isn't even from the story in which we meet "the man" as an anthropologist of garbage, whose sorting through his neighbor's trash has given him the kind of insights into their inner lives we mostly associate with hackers and spies. That's in the title story, "Flowers of Mold." Our garbage vaulter populates a later story, "Early Beans," the title of which I'm still struggling to correlate with its story, which explores the descent into corruption of a human soul as much of the mere stuff with which he interacts as his day goes way, way off track long before he gets on a train. 

But lest I still Ha as merely an artist of decay and abandonment, she (and translator Janet Hong) has a way with livelier things, too, as our triple jumper gets caught in a flood of small energetic bodies bursting out of a school at dismissal time:

Each child was like a lightning strike. With lightning, there are no warnings. There are only two ways to avoid getting electrocuted: you have to lie flat on the ground or put up a lightning rod. He drove with his foot resting on the brake pedal to ward against this human lightning, which could strike any time from the alleyways...

I'll never head-on-a-swivel through a school crossing in the afternoon without thinking of this passage again, I'm pretty sure. 

And speaking of things I'm not going to forget in a hurry, there's one story that needs a definite trigger warning, the collection's second, "Nightmare" in which not only the story's other characters but the very environment itself all seem bent on making its very young protagonist disbelieve the sexual assault that is the story's inciting incident. 

The world Ha shows us is thus very squalid and, no story ends on what we'd call a hopeful or inspiring note. Indeed, I can imagine some readers being dissatisfied that many of these stories do not resolve so much as just stop, often on an arresting single image or the sight of a van load of people driving off to a hinted-at destiny we don't get to witness, but I'd argue that these non-endings give the collection more verisimilitude, as well as reminding us that it's not just the achieving heroes and the problem solvers who are always deserving of our admiration, but also the ordinary schmoes slogging through it all, like Dick's boob-heroes or Ballard's passive observers, barely making it through by chance as much as anything, but still intending to schlep through it all again tomorrow, not so much out of the hope for better things as out of the uncertainty that there's any other way to be. 

Not the worst note to begin a new year on. 

*Her characters, however many there are or aren't, all seem like they just emerged from the building in Ballard's High-Rise and at least one of them totally returns home to that building at the end of his odyssey, anyway!

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.

Polenth Blake's WERECOCKROACH

"Once this is over, I'm sure people'll want goot things to read. Distraction is good."

Personally, I'd be hitting the cute animal videos. It wasn't that I didn't like books, but you never know if a book will be good all the way through. A fun mystery has a weird rant about why women are all liars or that cute gay couple ends up being thrown in a meat grinder. That's not as comforting as watching cats sit in boxes.

 Rest assured, none of those terrible things happen in this novella, which is even more comforting and as fun as watching cats sit in boxes, especially if you understand that cockroaches are so much like cats that they spend a lot of time sort of comfortingly stroking each other with their antennae in their down time and, if something grody happens like being picked up by a disgusting yucky human being, they immediately freak out and need to clean themselves thoroughly to get rid of our cooties.*

Being as I am the kind of person who writes sonnet cycles about brand inspectors trying to manage small herds of cow-weres**, having at one stage of life kept a small family of Blaberus craniifer as pets in a college dorm room, and being also the kind of person who enjoys various portrayals of insects in literature, Polenth Blake's Werecockroach feels like a Christmas present from a complete stranger intended specifically for me. So of course right off the bat, I have to share my only complaint, and that is that Werecockroach isn't about 700 pages long. Good thing my beloved Clark Thomas Carleton wrote me another volume of his Antasy series, coming soon to a blog near you.

Werecockroach, at just 79 pages, is a light little whisp of a thing compared to the lit-chonks I tend to review on here, but its subject matter and wonderful cover of course made it a must whatever its length. And a lot gets packed into those 79 little pages; it is light in form rather than content.

We have but three characters to manage, but what characters they are. Rin is a agendered asexual aromantic person*** whose last residence burned to the ground before our story even gets going, who has managed to locate a new living situation in London, with two young men who strike Rin right away as rather unusual people in their own rights, though at first they merely come off as a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist and a roommate who is way more tolerant of the theorist's eccentricities than is quite usual in modern day London. And the flat they're willing to share with Rin is very small and tight, with narrow corridors and rooms into which a bare minimum of furniture just barely fits, but that's fine with Rin, who has few belongings to stash, now, anyway.

Before long Things Happen that would ordinarily be the entire focus of a big fat novel, but here just serve as a reason to drive our three new friends out of their overly cozy living quarters and out into the big weird world which quickly exposes, well, the title gives that bit away (which is why I'm keeping the Things That Happen secret). How Rin reacts to the discovery that makes this title make sense is not what you're expecting; nor is how a whole group new group of maybe-friends talk, which is 100% hilarious and was just what I needed this week as the last of this wretched year 2020 And Some Months dwindles and seems to be fixin' to drag the wretched year of 2020 And Some More Months in on a gust of apocalyptic winds here in Casper, WY, USA.

Suffice it to say that I feel like Polenth Blake is maybe my new best friend, or at least someone whose work I'm always going to be on the lookout for. Hiss!

*Yes, these are actual observations made once upon a time by Your Humble Blogger.

**That being, of course, a being that transforms from a bovine to a human at the full moon.

***Whom I imagined sounding exactly like Abigail from Unwell.

Kim Bo-Young's I'M WAITING FOR YOU AND OTHER STORIES (tr by Sophie Bowman and Sung Ryu)

There is only one story in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and it's a humdinger.

There are only two stories in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and they're both humdingers.

There are four stories in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and they're all humdingers.

There are nine stories in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and they're all humdingers.

There are 37 stories in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and not all are humdingers but are still very good indeed.

There is only one story.

I sound gimmicky as hell, but those are the kind of thoughts that kept running through my mind as I marveled at what South Korean speculative fiction hot shot Kim Bo-Young and her two translators have achieved here. Including making me marvel at the porousness of the boundaries between the stories within it, how they relate to each other, and how the whole came together as, originally, an engagement gift written for a friend.

I suppose most usefully this book is talked about as a collection of four stories, though the first "I'm Waiting for You" and the final "On My Way to You" are really two point-of-view chapters in a shared story, with the middle "The Prophet of Corruption" and "That One Life" serving as a story and its sequel, though perhaps since "That One Life" is much shorter and more contained, it's really a story and its coda. But even so, not only do they all feel like they're set in the same story universe, they feel like they chiefly concern the same two characters.

I'll explain.

"I'm Waiting for You" and "On My Way to You" are each epistolary stories of 15 letters each*, with "I'm Waiting for You" presenting a bridegroom's and "On My Way to You" his bride's experiences as the pair each struggle with the consequences of fateful decisions that displace them in space and time. Our bride embarked on a trip to Alpha Centauri before her wedding that will delay that momentous day by a few months, in her subjective time, but nine years would go by back on Earth. It's the ultimate escape from her family (and there are suggestions that it's an abusive one); they are emigrating to Alpha Centauri and she's riding out with them and then coming straight back because doing so qualifies her somehow for better jobs and there are tax advantages as well, so on paper this seems like a great idea. 

Our bridegroom, for his part, has decided to shorten those months with a spaceship journey of his own, on a sort of voyage to nowhere that is undertaken solely so that people like him who have been Left Behind Because Relativity can keep up with those who have left them. As the bride explains it, 

...you came in with an armful of pamphlets on interstellar marriage and said that if you saved up for about four and a half years, you'd be able to buy a ticket to take what they call the Orbit of Waiting. You explained that it was a ship that circled around the sun at the speed of light so that the passengers could get to the same time as other people traveling in from other stars.

This is already plenty weird and engaging even before things inevitably go wrong on both trips, and not just messages go astray and get out of sync. Poignantly, our groom returns to Earth several times in his struggles to re-sync with his beloved, only to see destruction and decay advancing to the point where he is only able to return to his lonely time-delaying journeys, ultimately aboard a one-man ship, through improbable luck and what sometimes feels like divine help. Which, I'll get to that. 

Meanwhile, in "On My Way to You" his bride has her own struggles more or less re-enacting the story of Aniara, except instead of cults and existential despair she encounters class war and megalomania as the captain of the ship she is rescued by devises a scheme to keep visiting the disintegrating port in Korea, seeding it with families each time until there's a population there that will regard he and the upper echelons of the ship's personnel as gods and will rebuild civilization per His direction.

The other story-pair at first seems to have nothing to do with these most star-crossed of lovers, concerned as it is with a sort of speculative fictionalization of Buddhist ontology. We find ourselves among a protean collection of characters in "a" bardo rather than "the" Bardo that we have occasionally encountered when western SF writers play with these concepts (cough, Kim Stanley Robinson). Each character (and I'm using the term very, very loosely here, as you'll see) has their own bardo in which they reflect on the lessons learned in their most recent lives in the Lower Realm and regain their memories of all of their other lives, all the way back to when they first divided into a small number of individuals from an original single all-encompassing consciousness. Which they can choose to undo at any time if everbody consents except for those occasions on which somebody's consent really isn't necessary because all of this malarkey about separate entities is really just an illusion anyway. I am me, this grass is also me (and I can divide myself into millions of other little entities that are all blades of grass anytime I want, or reabsorb all of those blades of grass on the ground right now that are also really just me).

Our main character in these is a being called, most of the time, Naban, who being one of the small number of original entities that were the result of the first division, has a lot of power and responsibility. Naban interacts with several others at this level as they try to figure out a source of corruption that has emerged in the Dark Realm (where the bardos are), with "corruption" essentially being defined as "persisting in the belief that separate things are actually separate things". At first it seems that the problem rests with one of Naban's original "children" (also called "students"), Aman, who really digs being their own being, resists merging or sharing, and has persuaded all of their own children that the Lower Realm is real and their separateness is real and Differences Matter -- and seems to be in the process of convincing many of the other Aman-level and even maybe some Naban-level beings of the same. But is Aman really the source of corruption, or, since Naban originally "created" Aman, is the ultimate corruptor Naban? All of this is explored in a series of sort-of-chapters that could almost stand as stories in their own right, some of which, as Naban deals with yet another possibly corrupted entity, take place on a bardo formed as a spaceship that is later docked on an asteroid (and an asteroid impact on Earth seems to have been part of the problems besetting the world in "I'm Waiting for You" and "On My Way to You". Hmm. There are lots of little motifs like this that unite the stories artistically), and have Naban considering the use of lasers and torpedos to get through to that stubborn Aman. Who is Naban. And yet doesn't think they're Naban. Or anything but Aman and Aman's children. Who are not Aman. Except they are.

Really, this story gave me a bit of a headache, but it never gets boring if you're willing to meet it at its level, which is, as you see, incredibly heady and challenging and rich. I had to take a day off after reading it before I proceeded with "That One Life", which takes Naban down into our own Lower Realm, but one in which the corruption from the Dark Realm and the Lower Realm have developed a wicked feedback loop and a whole lot seems to be going wrong. Naban themself is exhibiting this in their very nature in the Lower Realm as they've incarnated as a 15-year-old-girl who is immortal, the better to watch the corruption and decay, and the better, also, to continuously pursue Aman through many incarnations in which Aman is Naban's spouse or child or friend or lover or boss or commander, until one of their fellow entities, Tushita steps in and explains what Naban has forgotten from the previous story and it all sort of works out?

For I am Naban, one who remembers the beginning of time. For I know nothing in the universe is not me. For I know that no one part of a whole is more valuable than another; one is simply larger or smaller. For I know corruption arises when one tries to exclude another from a world. For I am not corrupt now.

I mean, this would be a great lesson for all the people who are least likely to take up a speculative fiction short story collection written by a Korean woman that was also translated by women** (and while both translators have done a beautiful job -- Sophie Bowman helps give both the bridegroom and bride distinctive voices in "I'm Waiting for You" and "On My Way To You" -- I'm really just stunned at how Sung Ryu handled all this to-me-incredibly-unfamiliar material and made me feel, at least while I was reading it, that of course I understood it and it just felt like a neat spec fic story until I was done and it punched me in the brain). But it's not really much fun to read for all the feeling that one has earned some kind of merit for doing so.

At least it's not very much fun until you realize how the piquant Buddhist ontological filling of this speculative fiction sandwich really informs and is almost just another iteration of soft and tasty starship-crossed lovers bread. I find myself now, having read the whole thing, feeling like the bridegroom and bride are Naban and Aman in one of their lives. Possibly more than one of their lives. Because everything is Naban and Aman, and it's only dumb decisions and silly delusions that ever keep them apart, right?

I did not go into this book expecting a giant profound take on St. John-of-the-Cross (Songs Between the Soul and the Bridegroom)****, but I sure did get it!

Clicking around on the internet, I see that Kim Bo-Young has actually been tickling my brain for quite some time, as she worked on a little old hit film that became a TV series called Snowpiercer, and that this is far from Kim Bo-Young's first collection, and isn't even her first collection in English. She's already a Big Deal in Korea, and deserves to be one everywhere else, too.

I think I'll be attempting to merge with some of her other books very soon in This Life.

*And yes, each of these letters feels like it's own little story. See what I did there in that ridiculous introduction to this piece?

**And hey, by the way, August is Women in Translation Month! And bonus: there is an exchange of letters between the two translators (as well as a lot of cool other supplementary material, including a glossary of terms and names in "The Prophet of Corruption" and "The One Life) that gives us a glimpse of their relationship with one another as real life friends, and the interesting challenges posed by Kim Bo-Young's work, including matters of gender and the prayer-like cadences of some passages, that are super fascinating reading for fans of translated literature.

***I wonder how this, my favorite bit from that, in an old translation by Roy Campbell, would come across in Korean: 

Diffusing showers of grace
In haste among these groves his path he took,
And only with his face.
Glancing around the place,
Has clothed them in his beauty with a look.

Best Translated Book Nominees: Christos Iknonomou's GOOD WILL COME FROM THE SEA (translated by Karen Emmerich)

Blogger's note: this is my first read off the long list of books nominated for this year's Best Translated Book Award. I'm going to see how many of them I can read before the short list and eventual winner are announced. They all just sounded too interesting not to try out!

"Back then they sent people to the islands by force, now we come here on our own."

The four linked stories that comprise Christos Ikonomou's  Good Will Come From the Sea are set on a fictional Greek island that, like the rest of Greece (and the rest of the world), is still feeling the impacts of the 2008 financial crisis, and of earthquakes that have been wrecking Athens. But that description, as bland as this book cover, doesn't begin to convey those impacts, which are not abstractly economical (though they are that, too) as much as they are very, very human, in the form of a new kind of migration pattern that proves the source of enough different kinds of agonizing tension to power many more than just these four excellent stories, and not just, as the pulled quote above conveys, because earlier in Greece's history the Aegean islands were where repressive governments sent uncooperative citizens to contemplate the error of their ways with a little help from jailers and torturers.

People who have lived on the island for generations witnessed that and let it form their society and grew accustomed to it, but now are suddenly having to deal with a new, semi-voluntary influx of people who, again, are just as Greek as they are, but because they come from Athens and grew up in higher socioeconomic classes above the natives' own, are referred to behind their backs and, in hostilities (which are many) to their faces as "Foreigners." The "Foreigners", in turn, refer to the natives as "Rats", perhaps alluding to the island's weird cave-riddled geography that the natives know intimately and the Athenians can barely navigate? If I'm being charitable here? Which nobody in these stories is, neither the Foreigners (not even, much, to each other) nor the Rats, all of whom are now trapped together by circumstances but none of whom are adjusting especially well.

All four stories are from the perspective of the in-migrants from Athens, who have left behind broken lives of relative privilege and prosperity and are still in shock but striving to rebuild in a new place... and finding it very, very difficult. Their prior values and cherished illusions are getting shown up as laughable and flimsy, they're facing real privation for the first time in their lives, and their support networks are disintegrated or diminished. They're still perservering, for now, but as each story opens, they're facing crises that may break them. And, I'll warn you right now, readers: don't come to these stories looking for happy endings or neat resolutions. Mysteries don't get solved. Resolutions may be fulfilled beyond the confines of a narrative but you don't get to see it.

But you do get to explore the interiority, and hidden resilience, of some very interesting characters as they struggle with the disappearance of loved ones, with vandalizing assaults on barely-started enterprises, with the question of the responsibility to act on knowledge they wish they didn't have about harm happening to a helpless other. As the protagonist of my favorite of the four, "Kill the German", a paraplegic who lost the use of his legs trying to blow up a sex shop and now uses mobility aids on an island not at all designed for his kind, observes to himself as he frets over the fate of a young girl pimped out by her family to a rich old man:

The world is constructed in such a way as to deprive each of us of the possibility of doing any personal good. No, that's not right. Let's take it from the top. Ready? Okay. The world is constructed in such a way as to relieve each of us of the responsibility of doing any personal good. We are all free to do bad in a thousand ways, but good is always someone else's affair.

We're all dealing with this right now especially, wherever we are in the world, eh? Only a lot of us have discovered that the government/social safety net/network of private charities we've always counted on to mitigate the sob stories the daily news brings us was never so robust as we thought, even in the free and prosperous West, and it maybe really is up to us to help each other out directly, even though we risk a lot in doing so.*

As we wring our hands at what the COVID-19 virus has done to and, more importantly, revealed about our world (though yeah, lots of us already knew from first-hand experience that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were very unevenly distributed), I feel like the characters, both Foreigners and Rats, from Ikonomou's stories would laugh at us, bitterly. Which is to say that these stories feel uncomfortably prophetic, especially for readers like me who live in remote places to which everybody else (*cough* Neil Gaiman *cough*) dream of or already have active plans for retreating, and have already seen the effects of decades in-migration by people who visited here once and decided to retire here but who are used to or demand "better" than what we have to offer, which is to say I was disposed to identify perhaps more with the Rats (none of whom really get developed as characters in these stories) than with the Foreigners, but Ikonomou is so damned good that he made me care about the Foreigners -- which is one of the big things that literature, that art, is for, isn't it?**

"If you're in need, if you are on the outside, you're a foreigner everywhere." another character observes. And your turn to be one might be next, is the not-so-subtle message here. So why not start being decent to one another now? Because here's the alternative, and it ain't pretty. 

So while these tales of people facing hostility, subterfuge, corruption, distrust, envy, sabotage, from people who are supposed to share the same culture as themselves, more or less, awaken empathy, they also are every bit as disturbing as any of, say, William Gibson's recent fictions of his post-Jackpot world.*** Passages observing the effect of long-term unemployment may soon come to feel a bit too familiar to a lot of people who have taken gainful work for granted , for instance. So I really can't decide if this is bad pandemic reading or good, but it's possibly the best pandemic reading? Because it is full of some sweet and amusing moments, too, like my favorite, which takes place in a new family-run taberna:

One of the ladies points at the light fixture on the ceiling. And the kid turns bright red and says no, no, no lamp, lamb, lamb, you know baaa, baaa. The old ladies start laughing and say okay okay and Petrus picks at the menus and comes over all in a huff and asks me who wrote the English menu.

And some frankly lovely prose, as when a man in search of his missing son (delivered into the employ of a shady local syndicate on his orders, no ifs ands or buts) pauses and observes the sea as he climbs to the top of the island's ridge to get a better look around: "The waves tipped with white like frothy eyebrows over the water's countless blind eyes" and wouldn't we all just kill to have sentences like that published under our names? And of course, how much of that is Ikonomou and how much is translator Karen Emmerich?

One bit that I think is mostly Emmerich comes as my paraplegic friend contemplates some old wisdom that I get from Jorge Luis Borges but think he probably got from Bishop Berkley or somebody, but phrased as succinctly and elegantly as I've yet seen in English: "Fathers and mirrors should be hated to an equal degree because they alone have the ability to make people multiply." Maybe it's really economical in the original Greek, too, but I'm thinking this is the translator's hand showing, gracefully.

So, as I said on Twitter the other day, if the rest of the books on the long list for Best Translated Book are anywhere near this good, I'm going to have an emotionally challenging but very satisfying set of reads ahead of me. Gimme!

*And, of course, in the U.S. and, it appears, the U.K. especially, we're also dealing with sizeable populations of people hell-bent on preventing us from helping each other, sometimes with the threat of deadly force.
**Not that my foreigners are going to be in quite the shape of these Athenian migrant-refugees, of course. I live in the Billionaire Wilderness.
***He seems to be buried in tweets whining to him that he predicted our current plight too damned well and maybe wasn't writing fiction but is some kind of pre-cog wizard. At least no one is mocking him for not foreseeing cellphones anymore?

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.

Ian Sales' ADRIFT ON THE SEA OF RAINS

Now that I know that alternate history Cold War Apollopunk is a thing, I want more of it. Much more. Good thing Ian Sales' Adrift on the Sea of Rains is but the first of a quartet of novellas, then!

As the story opens, a small band of astronauts manning a permanent American base on the Moon (established as part of a natural progression from the Apollo missions, in that time frame and with that technology) find themselves marooned there when the USA and the USSR decide to go ahead and fight out World War III and destroy the planet Earth, rendering its glorious blue-white marble a desolate grey rock to match its satellite. The astronauts have (nuclear!) power, and thus life support, for 20 years, but only have freeze-dried astronaut chow to last them about two! Oh noes!

Fortunately, one of their number is not really an astronaut but a mad scientist plucked from Nazi Germany and secretly put to work continuing his experiments travel between parallel universes. He's obnoxious as hell but he's their only hope once he's completed his masterpiece (which would only work in a vacuum, hence his presence on the Moon), allowing them to start jumping from universe to universe in search of one where nobody ever actually decided to play a game of Global Thermonuclear War.

And then the fun begins. Because our astronauts have to jury-rig and re-start all that wild old Apollo-era technology to try to get themselves to their new home!

The story of this mighty effort is intercut with the previous test piloting-and-espionage experiences of the Moon Base commander, Vance Peterson, in a series of cleverly arranged flashbacks that also tell the tale of how the disaster came to be. It's good storytelling, no doubt, but what makes this novella really stand out is its visceral conveyance of the experience of trusting the analogue tech of the late 1960s and early 1970s to keep people alive and hurl them across space. Famously, the Eagle that landed in Apollo 11 had less computing power in it than the smartphone in your pocket, but that's just the beginning. Paper-thin hulls. Huge banks of switches. Ring binders full of gnarly math and densely printed instructions. Slide rules and pencils. It's utterly, utterly glorious.

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.

Some more seriously cool shorter fiction

It's summer again, a time when I'm torn  between whatever "theme" reading I've drifted into (this summer has turned out to be all about the Napoleonic wars, by land and sea) and some big sprawling reads (moar Lymond! Also an abortive re-read of Infinite Jest which I've had to abandon since because it now just reads like a giant suicide note and my mental health can't cope with that right now) and yet also seem to have a diminished attention span, so once again I've been taking breaks between novel-length works with some fun shorter fiction by my friends.

Once again, these are all cheap ebooks, and extraordinarily high value for the money, or I wouldn't be talking about them here.

John Urbancik's Zombies vs Aliens vs Robots vs Cowboys vs Ninja vs Investment Bankers vs Green Berets is the ultimate kitchen sink fantasy meets Paul Hardy's Last Men on Earth Club. The archangel Gabriel has blown the trump of doom and the end of the world is here. The question is, which end will prevail? For every world-ending power that is, seems to be reacting as though the signal was just for them. The dead start rising from their graves. Big mother ships full of aliens start herding the living into food processing plants. A mad scientist unleashes his self-determined automatons on a quest for vengeance against an uncaring and un-understanding world. Investment bankers in what amount to Jaegers are out to save themselves. And cowboys (and ghost cowboys, some of whom find themselves, deliciously, fighting the zombie versions of their former bodies), ninja and green berets are mankind's only hope. Meanwhile, the angel and our narrator just want to watch the show and get drunk on good scotch. You might have more fun binge-watching Venture Brothers or something, but I still say this would give any such activity a run for its silly, over-the-top money.

Jodi Cleghorn's River of Bones is a little bit more serious in tone, but offers its own kind of genre-mashing fun. On the one hand, we have the lost and decrepit town of Elyora, which is mysteriously stuck in the year 1974; on the other, we have a down-on-their-luck rock band, on tour and on the verge of breaking up when their road takes them into said town for a pit stop. Romantic tensions erupt even before they meet up with the creepy townspeople, and soon the slightly prosaic surface of this story is chipped away to reveal its roots in classic gothic horror (as in Castle of Otranto et al): all identities collapsing in on themselves, ghosts, regret, and everywhere decay, decay, decay. But where in classic gothic fiction this decay is largely a matter of centuries of damp, here its decades of pitiless Australian sun and dust and, just possibly, a sinister government something-or-other at work "across the river." Also as is common in gothic fiction, not everything is explained. Which is as it should be. Though it's a bit maddening. Why 1974?

J. Daniel Sawyer is a San Francisco writer through and through; he can't not write stuff that feels like crime noir, even, as here, he's exploring more supernatural themes. His Lombard Alchemist Tales, of which this one is my first but his fourth, center around a pawn shop in a sad old gambling town (which town reminds me of, say, Central City, CO but without the amazing opera house CC has), from which all manner of fascinatingly weird and sinister objects emerge. On the strength of The Serpent and the Satchel, I'm going to go ahead and read them all. In this tight little story we explore the dual implications of a satchel that grants subconscious wishes and sends its new owner on a phantasmagorical jungle safari through an ordinary city park, and the parallel adventure of an innocent little box python named (what else) Monty after his owner-friend falls asleep in that same park. Pith helmets are involved. And excitable little kids. And park rangers. And bullwhips and machetes. More quality cheap thrills!

Then there's Hugh Howey's little number, The Plagiarist, my first non-Silo read from the man. And it's about as un-Silo as a story could possibly be, except in that it has more than a tinge of regret and melancholy. We deal here with an academic whose specialty is in plumbing computer-simulated worlds for new literature, which he painstakingly copies out (he has an eidetic memory) in the real world and publishes as found classics. Quite conceptually dazzling and fraught with implications, eh wot? But wait, there's more, because our man has become quite attached to one virtual world in particular (one world out of a whole galaxy of simulated worlds), and, moreover, to one virtual woman living on that one virtual world. And his focus has narrowed to this world, this woman, to the exclusion of all else. Including the real world threat posed by all of the real world artists and writers who are getting crowded out of the field by the products of the ultimate infinite monkey/infinite typewriters experiment, and have decided that they know just what to do about it. Boom. And while yes, the twist ending is a bit telegraphed, it's all handled very satisfyingly. Bravo, Hugh!

And now I'm come full circle back to zombie fun again, this time with Jake Bible. Bible is another go-to guy for me when I want some plain old fun. He's perhaps best  known for his Apex Trilogy, in which he combines everything one might love from the mecha (as in giant robots piloted by people) and zombie genres -- answering that eternal burning question of what happens if a mech pilot dies while in his mech and is reanimated as a zombie therein (answer, OMG what doesn't happen?). In Let Old Friends be Forgot, Bible goes a somewhat more traditional route, delivering a series of journal entries penned by a survivor of the zombie apocalypse. This could just be grim and dreary (especially since the zombies in this story are a lot like the Reavers in the Firefly universe, in that their preferred method of killin' is rapin' ya ta death), but fortunately, this particular survivor is a bit of a wit, with a dry sense of humor, waxing lyrical over a peaceful vista one moment, then wishing for a diminished number of monsters ravening at the edge of that vista. Our narrator is definitely the kind of guy I'd want with me in a crisis, if only for the quips, though of course he's also pretty handy with the weaponry and the strategizing and stuff. This one also gets bonus points for a hilarawful ending.

So there you have it. Lots of fun for very little money, and my requisite ending asking myself why I don't make more of an effort to read short fiction when smaller bites are totally what my lifestyle seems to call for these days!