Kontakt: An Antholgy of Croatian SF (Ed Darko Macan & Tatjana Jambrišak; various translators)

I love a good speculative fiction anthology, especially one with a theme. Kontakt: An Anthology of Croatian SF wouldn't seem to have much of a unifying theme beyond the nationality of its authors, but  while it's a hodgepodge of sub-genres and styles, some interesting similarities emerge that make it hang together brilliantly. 

Originally printed as a sort of souvenir for the 2012 European Science Fiction Convention, which was held in Zagreb, Croatia that year, it's a great showcase of a single nation's best and brightest established and up and coming writers of speculative fiction -- only a handful of whom I had heard of before grabbing this book!

From weird alternate universe godpunk-cum-Christian eschatology (Katarina Brbora's "Avaleon and the Black Feather") to Kafka-esque military sci-fi (Darko Macan's "The Corridor") to accounts of the practical impact of mind-bending metaphysics that would do Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky proud (Goran Konvični's "Time Enough, and Space"), pretty much everything that speculative fiction lovers look for in an anthology. Unlike many that are more concerned with adhering to the conventions and restrictions of English language speculative fiction publishing, several of these stories express national and regional concerns that might alienate less careful or curious readers. A few minutes of research, or at least clicking on unfamiliar words or proper names in the ebook edition, will greatly enrich the experience of reading Kontakt. 

Nowhere is this more clear than in the aforementioned tale of Brbora's, "Avaleon and the Black Feather," which the anthology's editors describe as "a breezy treatment of that trinity of heavy topics: religion, patriotism and cheap jewelry," in which a young man of Italian heritage but Croatian birth, Santino, becomes low-end jewelry store clerk Tamara's new roommate and quickly establishes himself as even stranger than he already seemed. For one thing, he has a good-sized collection of Croatian editions of books that have not yet been published in Croatia. And his Bible turns out to have content that differs somewhat substantially from the one we and Tamara are familiar with. The famous Well to Hell hoax gets discussed as Tamara discovers that in Santino's Bible, "Sataniel" isn't the obnoxious boaster and tempter we know but is in fact the supreme authority on Earth, which he rules ruthlessly from a mighty fortress near the North Pole! Before we can say "portal fantasy" Tamara has followed Santino into an alternate universe where the city of Zagreb still looks a lot like her city of Zagreb but is in much better shape and is located near the Black Sea, where an ikavian dialect is the official language and the ugly blue stone in Tamara's janky ring (which her weird boss makes her wear around for marketing purposes) actually has vitally important supernatural properties. The story is plenty engaging as translated (by the author herself, as is generally the case in this anthology. Monolingual education is not a Slavic value!) but I suspect it resonates much more with Croatian readers. 

Kontakt also contains some first rate body horror. In Danilo Brozović's "Fingers" the protagonist discovers a unique affliction waiting in his DNA like a time bomb - but too late to do anything about it. At first he has a glimmer of hope when he learns that his father had the same grotesque problem at his age but doesn't now... until he realizes that his father, who has succumbed to dementia, might not remember how he got over their condition. Brozovć is more interested in letting us contemplate what life would be like suffering from such a condition than in explaining it, though, and the story takes off in an unexpected direction, leaving us with even more questions but still satisfied as the story ends. 

Less satisfying because perverse and icky if you are, as I am, on the prudish side, is the vividly imagined "De Cadenza" (Danjiel Bogdanović) in which a crew of bon vivants in space begin their list of perversions with using living human beings as furniture, with and upon which to have imaginatively perverse zero-gravity sex, and then develop even greater manias for acts the Marquis de Sade would balk at recording because they don't have any philosophy with which to dress up their indulgences. Eventually the story dispatches with them satisfyingly, though. But still, pass the brain bleach.

For my money, the most enjoyable of the lot is Tatjana Jambrišak's exciting and ultimately hopeful tale of a group marriage of space explorers who suddenly find themselves having to plan to re-start human society on a distant and newly discovered planet. "Give Me the Shuttle Key" is maybe the most conventional story in Kontakt but that doesn't make it dull or ordinary. The characters and their imperfectly fitting agendas are engaging enough and their situation compelling enough for me to long for a much longer work exploring their relationships and how they rise to meet their fates as maybe, but hopefully not solely, the founders of humanity's second chance.

Another standout, Aleksandar Žiljak's haunting "The Dead" plays off cultural memories of Nazi concentration camps* as it sees what might well be the site of one put to use for a new purpose: the economic exploitation of zombies, the cheapest and, if you have a willing bokor on the payroll, most easily managed labor force there is. The story has a whole camp full of them toiling day in, day out, assembling cell phones under the watchful eyes of Kevlar-clad overseers, armed to the teeth and well practiced at head-shots. Double tap to, uh, select. Good science fiction should afflict the comfortable; I was more uncomfortable reading this story (on my electronic device of choice) than I was any of the other stories except maybe "De Cadenza" (because I really am more than a little prudish). Your results may vary.

One way or the other, not a single story in Kontakt left me unmoved, and most drove me to look up their authors to see if anything else they've done is available to me. Many of the writers gathered here are associated with a Croatian speculative fiction magazine called Ubiq (hooray!) and I find myself wondering how hard it would be for language nerdish little me to just subscribe and bull on through with a dictionary (once I've figured out what dictionary to buy; the intricacies of language in this part of the world are beyond what I'm accustomed to)? But meanwhile, I know the gang at Apex have already discovered and shared Alexandr Žiljak, and that Dark Horse and Marvel gave Darko Macan a whole lot of work in the 90s that I haven't read yet, so maybe I'll start there. Regardless, next time you're hankering after some spec fic that's a little stranger than you've been getting lately, look to Croatia! Because wow! They are quite familiar with our stuff, but they're not by any means just producing more of the same. 

*One of which, Jasenovac, was located in Croatia back when it was part of occupied Yugoslavia. 

Tony Burgess' THE n-BODY PROBLEM

It just this second hit me that the title of The n-Body Problem Tony Burgess' disturbingly memorable follow-up to the disturbingly memorable PontyPool Changes Everything is a pun in like three different ways. This weeks after I actually read the thing*. And this insight is hardly the only one to club me over the head in the intervening time.

Like Pontypool, The n-Body Problem could superficially be categorized as zombie fiction, but also like Pontypool (but not really like the rapturously lyrical Zone One that I recently praised to the skies**), this novel has a lot more going on than standard zombie fare.

This time around the zombie-causing disease has a more straightforward vector, but its results are far more disturbing: the victim dies but continues to move, to flail, to twitch. It won't stay buried -- the earth churns up at sites of mass graves until the writhing dead resurface. It will burn but the disease is so virulent that the living can't keep up with the crematory duties. It can be dismembered and diced up, but the bits keep on hopping around like so many undead jumping beans. The twitching dead are a problem, yo,

As our story opens, though, someone has devised a solution. If we can't deal with the twitching dead here on earth, let's launch them into space! A whole industry has sprung up around this, has become pretty much the only way to prosperity in this damned world.

And at last our primitive notions of Heaven as a place in the sky where our beloved dead go to spend eternity is given real form. For a monthly fee you can even track your particular loved one the way we internet users in 2014 can track the International Space Station and thus know exactly when to rush outside and watch and salute its brisk journey across our own personal sky.

But remember what I said about volume. And industry. Yeah.

Some solutions can be as bad as, or worse than, their problems. And here's where the title looks like it's going to really come into play: In physics, the n-body problem is an ancient, classical problem of predicting the individual motions of a group of celestial objects interacting with each other gravitationally. And now we've launched millions of new ones into near-earth orbit to join all of the frozen astronaut piss and debris that we'd already flung up there. Stuff that, occasionally, eventually loses momentum, breaks orbit, and comes crashing back to earth to burn up as it streaks through our atmosphere.

Mmm. Zombie meteorites.

And that's not even the primary environmental problem they cause, you guys.

Meanwhile, this is still a Tony Burgess novel, which means all that is just unpleasant backdrop to a hideously grotesque and deranged and disturbing and I'm just going to run out of adjectives trying to convey the sheer ickiness so I'm just going to stop here, earthbound story of sort-of-survival in rural Ontario amid apocalyptic madness, doomsday cultism (on a suspiciously industrialized scale) and the twitching dead. Heaven is not the only thing that's been literalized here. And soon the hell gets very, very personal for our protagonist (emphasis on the "agon" here, if you know what I mean). N- body scans kind of like "nobody", and he kind of is, and then... ARGH MY BRAIN JUST SHUT DOWN I THINK I NEED THERAPY.

A lot of people are going to put this book down, if not throw it or the e-reader currently containing it at a nearby wall, in sheer disgust pretty early on, but those of you who tough it out are in for, well, an even more unpleasant -- yet nonetheless amazing -- reading experience. Burgess is an artist of great imagination, talent, focus and yes, grotesquerie, a 21st century master of the grand guignol, a Hieronymous Bosch and a Goya of prose, who finds in playing with the zombie genre a proper showcase for what he can do.

He can do a lot.

Now I think I need a lie down.

Many thanks to Popqueenie, whose own reactions to this book are quite entertaining, for the chance to read this one. And headvomit. And keep on reading.

*Life has been happening. A whole lot of it, yo. I left my high-stress-but-also-high-downtime-job and the city of Cheyenne for a lower-key type B life in my home town of Saratoga, WY. It's been chaotic.

**Ha ha! You'll see what I did there in a moment!

Colson Whitehead's ZONE ONE

Admit it. You've always wanted to know what it would be like if E.L. Doctorow wrote zombie fiction. Could it be lyrical? Could it be beautiful? Could it be moving and produce a book for the ages?

Yes, yes it could. And Colson Whitehead's heartbreakingly lovely Zone One is Exhibit A. It may wind up being the only exhibit, mind...

But what an exhibit it is!

The zombie apocalypse has engulfed the world, has been going on for a few years now, as the novel opens and we start getting to know our point of view character, whose real name we never learn and whom we only ever know as Mark Spitz, an ironically bestowed nickname, given after he refuses to jump into the water and swim to safety as he can barely tread water. A Long Island boy who has always dreamed of growing up to be a Manhattan Man, he is finally getting his wish, but his Manhattan is merely the corpse of what he longed for as a young'un:

"He tried to orient himself: Was he looking north or south? It was like dragging a fork through gruel. The ash smeared the city's palette into a gray hush on the best of days, but introduce clouds and a little bit of precip and the city became an altar to obscurity. He was an insect exploring a gravestone: the words and names were crevasses to get lost in, looming and meaningless."

There are still fragments of civilization struggling to rejoin and reclaim the world, however, and Mark Spitz is a part of that mighty effort, a "sweeper,", member of a three-person crew who patrols a section of the city block by block, mopping up after the Marines whose zombie-killing sprees have caused as much destruction, perhaps, as the zombies and the struggling survivors did, ridding the city of perhaps 99% of the "infected" but that pesky 1% that's left, ah, there's the rub. For about 1% of the population who are infected with the disease that makes zombies do not turn into ravenous undead psychotic killing machines, but instead become "stragglers', mindlessly and poignantly fixated on a specific location and activity, three-dimensional freeze frames of filling mylar balloons or making photocopies or waiting for a bus or a ball game to start. And some psychotic undead regular zombies still lurk here and there as well. Both types must be disposed of, systematically and dispassionately, room by room, office by office, building by building, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, zone by zone, because the ad hoc government in Buffalo has decided that Manhattan is the ideal location to try to re-establish civilization when it's finally time to let the small shuddering populations of uninfected humanity out of the highly fortified and militarized refugee camps.

That all sounds like fairly standard zombie-novel fare, though, doesn't it? What's different here is Whitehead's skill as a crafter of prose and a sharer of feeling and nuance. The bare bones narrative covers just three days (albeit highly significant ones) in the effort to clean out one zone of Manhattan, but the story ranges back and forth in time and tone, Ragtime-like, as we experience the start and the early days of the disaster alongside Mark Spitz as he goes from ordinary schmo coming home from a gambling spree in Atlantic City to find his parents eating each other, to hunted survivor sleeping in the suburban trees, to part of an organized effort to clear Interstate 95 of abandoned and wrecked cars so that traffic and commerce and contact can resume someday (for my money, re-establishing physical mobility is way more important and significant than the standard hopeful moment set-piece of getting the lights back on that is such a cliche of post-apocalyptic fiction; Whitehead's recognition of this -- humanity survived for thousands of years before electricity, but has never done too well without being able to get around -- is another of the many reasons why my respect and even awe for this novel is almost without limit), to sweeper.

As we go, Mark Spitz's experiences and perspectives drive home the idea that the disease is just a heavy-handed literalization of what had already been going on in 21st century society: many of us were already basically zombies, deluding ourselves with notions of individuality and individual importance even as we buy identical consumer goods from identical stores the nation/world over: "They had shambled through the identical outlet showrooms and tested the same sofas with their asses... mentally arranging the merchandise according to the same floor plans." And the city is constantly referred to as a machine that "required people to make it go." Or this description of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder (which every survivor has): "'Survivors are slow or incapable of forming new attachments,' or so the latest diagnoses. droned, although a cynic might identify this as a feature of modern life merely intensified or fine-tuned with the introduction of the plague."

Zone One, if you can't tell, is not at all a hopeful read; in its way it's as bleak as, if not bleaker than, The Road. But where The Road and its ilk are just dreary individual survivor stories, Zone One has subtle tricks up its sleeve. For instance, it simply shines as a love letter to Manhattan, past and zomibe-riddled present, and to cities as a whole, even when the tone is at its most depressing, as when Mark Spitz observes an oncoming zombie horde, all still dressed in the remnants of the clothing each person had died in:

"All the misery of the world channeled through this concrete canyon, the lament into which the human race was being transformed person by person. Every race, color and creed was represented in this congregation...As it had been before, per the myth of the melting-pot city. The city did not care for your story, the particular narrative of your reinvention, it took them all in, every immigrant in their strivings, regardless of bloodline, the identity of their homeland, the number of coins in their pocket... They had been young and old, natives and newcomers. No matter the hue of their skins, dark or light, no matter the names of their gods or the absences they countenanced, they had all strived, struggled and loved in their small, human fashion. Now they were mostly mouths and fingers..."

See? Depressing as hell. But also glorious. Even if you are, as I am, sick to death (hee hee) of zombies, this book is not to be missed. Many effusive thanks to SJ the PopQueenie for this one!

Tony Burgess' PONTYPOOL CHANGES EVERYTHING #OneBookAtATime

This it's my year for completely bugnuts reading, it would seem. Pontypool Changes Everything is a bizarre maelstrom of language-drunk Ontario gothic in the vein of the famously gory and disgusting Avatar comic Crossed. Deep in that vein. Tearing that vein out with snaggly bloodstained teeth and flinging it around like a mad dog. A mad dog that quotes Ovid and makes weird puns.

It has some of the trappings of a (yawn) zombie story -- probably just enough of same to piss off serious zombie fans looking for the mixture, same as before -- but it is so much more interesting than that, that I refuse to use the Z word again in this post.*

For one thing, it's very interestingly, sometimes surreally, written, with lines like "The tofu cube of brain walks down the wall on its slippery corners and covers the black spider hole left by the bullet."
I can totally see, in my mind's eye, what a Jacen Burroughs drawing of that would look like. Totally. But there are humdrum zombie novels full of lines like that.

No, what really sets Pontypool Changes Everything apart is the weirdo literary accomplishment it represents, for not only does it depict a highly virulent disease that is transmitted via spoken language (yeah, if the nam-shub/meme/language games were your favorite part of Snow Crash, here's a new book for your favorites shelf), but it also puts the reader pretty much directly takes the reader inside the subjective experience of the infected; every single viewpoint character (at least until the weirdo pseudo-pastoral last chapter or so) is in some stage of losing his or her grip on ordinary thought processes and language (the first symptom of the disease is aphasia), and once the strangeness of the resulting prose settles into the reader's brain, well, we're already slavering through suburban Toronto and the forests beyond the 'burbs, our necks snapped, our jaws slack, looking for someone's face to attack.

An afterword by Burgess expresses his regret at having written this novel, half grand Guignol, half post-modern experiment. I can't really say I regret reading it, but I think I can understand where the author is coming from. His experiment is not entirely successful, but it's interesting and unusual and (mostly) entertaining, and worth a look if you're in the mood for something a little different. I was, and had fun reading it, until the really pretty incomprehensible ending anyway.

*I submit that "cannibal berserker" is a better term for what the characters -- and, vicariously, Burgess' readers -- become, anyway.

Your New Favorite Webcomic: Ryan Fox and Doug Groves' THE PRACTICAL DEAD

Today is launch day for a new webcomic by two good friends of mine in Toronto, Ryan Fox and Doug Groves, with whom it is great fun to drink way too much Guinness and come up with off-the-wall, high-concept story ideas and laugh yourself sick, as I personally can attest.

The Practical Dead projects their own personalities, more or less, into a world in which the Zombie Apocalypse is actually happening and these two rather entrepreneurial slackers (it's not a contradiction in terms, really) find a way to make a buck or two amid the chaos.

Groves and Fox are doing this -- and another comic which Groves, Paul Laroquod and I cooked up over Guinness the first time we ever hung out, which I am currently scripting for Fox and Groves to illustrate that will debut soon -- old school, with Fox on pencils and Groves on inks. Real pencils, real paper, real inks. They both work in digital content so it's a fun break for them to kick it analog.

Go read the first three pages, up today, then bookmark the page, subscribe to the RSS feed, or follow The Practical Dead on Twitter. Fox is on there as @RyanFox_AD and Groves is @Dougplanet (and I'm @KateSherrod if you didn't already know that). You'll want to be able to put on your hipster glasses and tell people you knew them/us first.

Now, I've got to get back to scripting a certain other, even sillier, series. Watch this space for details on that, chickadees.