Short fiction: December 28, 2017

Catherynne Valente, "Down and Out in R'lyeh"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/down-and-out-in-rlyeh/

This is not your average Cthulhu mythos story. In a style reminiscent of its other literary inspirations - Orwell's Down and out in Paris and London, Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - it's a travelogue, a drug-fueled expletive-filled exploration of the fetid underbelly of a city where that most fetid of all things, dead, lies dreaming. The narrator is an inconsequential 'eerie' named Moloch - not "the" Moloch, of course, just one of the thousand children of Shub-Niggurath, out for a night of tripping on the fumes of Cthulhu's farts. It's one wild ride, and it's worth it.


Allison Mills, "If a Bird Can Be a Ghost"; Apex Magazine, August 1, 2017
https://www.apex-magazine.com/if-a-bird-can-be-a-ghost/

Shelly's Grandmother is a Ghostbuster. Shelly has the gift as well, to see and communicate with ghosts, to send them on. Her grandmother has a lot to teach her, about when to send a ghost on, and when to let them be. About treating them like the people they were. But when Shelly's mother dies, she has to learn the hardest lessons on her own. Very strong story, it starts out sweet and turns powerful and full of meaning. By the end I was near tears.


Cassandra Khaw, "Don't Turn On the Lights"; Nightmare Magazine, October 2017
http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/dont-turn-lights/

Oh, this is a dark little piece of horror indeed. Or, considering that it consists of multiple variations on a simple horror trope, a series of dark little pieces, each one successively darker and taking its motivations from deeper in the human psyche. Khaw turns the screws sublimely.


Mary Robinette Kowal, "The Worshipful Society of Glovers"; Uncanny Magazine, July/August 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/worshipful-society-glovers/

Kowal's novelette, a historical fantasy set in Tudor times, features a journeyman glovemaker in a world where the crafting guilds have arrangements with the queen of fairies to produce enchanted goods - all properly licensed, of course, and the penalties for making unlicensed ensorcelled goods can be grave indeed. But laws intended to protect can also trap a good but desperate person in a maze of deceit and worse, with no way out. A story that is, ultimately, about the cruelty of class, the desperation of poverty, and the callousness of a system that makes no allowances for circumstance or simple human necessity.


Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali, "Concessions"; Strange Horizons, published in two parts, March 6 and 13, 2017
http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/concessions-part-1-of-2/

In a world where religious strife has led to wars and a suppression of faiths of all kinds, where religious exiles live in small communities in barren lands becoming increasingly less habitable, a muslimah doctor and scientist struggles to balance both her callings, and find a way to atone for her part in the devastation. A thoughtful, moving story about healing, responsibility, science and faith.


Vina Jie-Min Prasad, "A Series of Steaks"; Clarkesworld, January 2017
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prasad_01_17/

A delightful sf caper about a prime beef forger and her assistant threatened by a nasty client with blackmail on his mind. The details of the forged food business - and its cousin, the printed replacement organ business - are actually fascinating, and the way the women turn the tables and ride off into the sunset is delightful.


Kathleen Kayembe, "The Faerie Tree"; Lightspeed Magazine, November 2017
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-faerie-tree/

Striking a bargain with the faeries is never something done lightly, but when the need is great enough, some are willing to pay the price. But the sacrifice can be even worse than you thought it would be. A well-told tale with a bitter lesson.


Rachel Swirsky, "The Day The Wizards Came"; Lightspeed Magazine, November 2017
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/day-wizards-came/

A short but many-layered story. What if wizards - mere schoolchildren, on brooms, not unlike the wizards everyone has been reading about - suddenly appeared and stopped a terrible thing from happening. And what if the mundanes, who the young wizards didn't have much respect for anyway, instead if being suitable grateful, wondered why now, why, if they had such power, they hadn't stopped other terrible things before then. And what if... But as I said, there are many levels to this unsettling tale, having to do with responsibility, and power, and expectations, and wanting things to be better without having to do it yourself, and other tricky questions.


Theodora Goss, "Come See the Living Dryad"; tor.com, March 9, 2017

Goss' novelette deals with an issue that I feel rather strongly about - the treatment of people who have visible differences and disabilities, by society, by those close to them, by institutions and media. Set in 19th century England (and thus evoking echoes of the life of a similar medical curiosity, Joseph Merrick, the famous Elephant Man), this is the story of the life and murder of Daphne Merwin, the Living Dryad. There is a real, and very rare, genetic condition known as Lewandowsky-Lutz dysplasia, in which damaged skin develops into hardened tissue and forms papules that resemble treebark, and branches. It is this condition that the fictional Daphne suffers from, and the reason that her husband - the man who found her alone and starving in the streets of London - exhibits her under the name of the Living Dryad.

The story is told through Daphne's journals, the internal narrative of her great-great-granddaughter, also named Daphne, who has inherited her condition, and various documents - handbills, news reports, excerpts from the younger Daphne's book on Victorian Freak Shows. The younger Daphne, reading the journal for her research, becomes suspicious about the official version of the murder, and seeks to resolve the questions she has. Daphne's journals provide clues. But what lies beneath the murder mystery - which is interesting in itself - is the tragedy of two woman turned into objects for display, for the financial benefit of the man who wooed and used them both, and the voyeuristic pleasure of others.


Carlie St. George, “If We Survive the Night”; The Dark Magazine, March 2017
http://thedarkmagazine.com/if-we-survive-the-night/

There’s a house in the woods where the girls who die in horror films go. Every day there’s an angel who calls on them to repent their sins, and every night they are murdered again. Because everyone knows it’s the bad girls who die. But who decides what’s good and what’s bad? And who determined that the appropriate punishment for any sin that a teenaged girl could commit is to be horrifically murdered?

In an interesting literary coincidence, shortly after reading this story, I encountered the following passage in Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life: “You can be made responsible whether or not you have modified your behavior in accordance, because gender fatalism has already explained the violence directed against you as forgivable and inevitable.”


Kirsten Valdez Quade, “Christina the Astonishing (1150 - 1224); The New Yorker, July 31, 2017
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/31/christina-the-astonishing-1150-1224

More mainstream/literary fiction. A thought-provoking story recounting the life of a late Medieval female saint from the perspective of her sister. Reading with a modern eye, one is unable to discern sanctity from madness. Did Christina really return from death, or from a paralytic fit that seemed like death to the uneducated villagers and barely educated priest? Her sisters suffer greatly from her ranting, accusations and erratic, sometimes violent behaviour - is it the wrath of God or schizophrenia? What tears at the heart is the anguish of a sister torn between love, resentment, anger and reverence.

Rereading Heinlein: Part Three

And now for my thoughts on a Heinlein book i’d never read before, For Us, the Living. I think I’ve read everything else he wrote, but this was released so late in the game that I hadn’t gotten around to it til now. I’m glad I read it, because it’s in some ways a sourcebook for some of his greatest works.

It’s not actually a novel, of course. It’s a utopian treatise, one in a long line of such works that goes all the way back to Plato’s Republic. The story is the same in every case - dump unsuspecting everyman into your ideal society and find reasons for people to kindly take the time to explain everything about their world in depth. What is interesting is that as one reads For Us, the Living, one sees Heinlein publicly doing the worldbuilding for some of the novels and other writings that would follow. This is the world of Beyond This Horizon, and Coventry. It’s a world that came dangerously close to -If This Goes On, but escaped the theocracy (and tells us everything we needed to know about Nehemiah Scudder).

I like many of the ideas of this Heinlein, from a guaranteed annual income for everyone to the end of marriage as a public contract to compulsory voting to running a society on the idea that religious morality has nothing to do with law. To be sure, Heinlein is still pretty sexist - he thinks women are essentially different from men in some crucial ways and he couldn’t quite imagine a utopia where women are fully half of the politicians and engineers and test pilots and surgeons, though he could imagine some women being among the best in any field. But there are some bits in his utopian musings that are very much at the centre of even modern feminist thinking - such as his analysis of how giving women full economic equality, through the GAI he envisions, changes the entire nature of relationships between men and women. And there’s a bit where he accurately describes the way that male possessiveness turns into controlling relationships that stifle women.

This is the manifesto of the young (pre-Virginia) Heinlein, and it’s important because it shows where his “future history” came from. I kind of wish this Heinlein had stayed around, and avoided the plunge into John Birchism that influenced aspects of his later work.


Having read the first book Heinlein wrote, It seemed somehow appropriate to next read the last book he wrote, To Sail Beyond the Sunset. This is a book I both love and am frustrated by. Maureen Johnson is quite a tour de force of a character, the most vividly presented woman in all of his books - only a few of which are centred on a female protagonist, as this one is. She is everything I appreciate about the feminist Heinlein’s idea of the independent woman, and everything that makes me want to pitch something nasty at the old sexist’s ghost. Maureen is brilliant, practical, she adapts easily to new situations, she earns five or six degrees in subjects as diverse and complex as medicine, the law and philosophy, she is a financial genius, an amazing mother, a sexual free spirit. She also is the ever-ready sexual fantasy of too many entitled man-boys and just loves being pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen. It’s the quintessence of Heinlein’s ideas about the perfect woman, one who is strong but wants her man stronger, one who never says no to the ‘right’ men, one who loves to take care of her men and her children, who is as smart and brave and competent as any man but goes out of her way to make the men in her life feel smarter and braver and more competent. She lets her first husband control her life, make all the important decisions, for over 40 years of marriage, acting for herself only when he decides to ask for a divorce, at which point she outmaneuvers him with impressive ease and goes on to live an unapologetically independent life. She inspires and infuriates me.

She’s also the mouthpiece for Heinlein’s later political views. While his attitudes about sexuality and religion remain pretty constant throughout his working life - he was always in favour of sexual freedom and thought religion was a crock used to manipulate the masses - the man who began his writing career extolling the virtues of socialised medicine and a guaranteed annual income ended it ranting against freeloaders snd governments that gave people handouts.

And then there’s the stuff that squicks. In the course if her long life, Maureen has sex with her cousin, her son, at least one son-in-law (and probably at least some heavy petting with a daughter or two) and tries her hardest to seduce her father. Heinlein puts a lot of incest in both this book and in Time Enough for Love, his novel about the lives and loves of Maureen’s son Woodrow, aka Lazarus Long. He seems quite unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge, the power issues of parent-child sex, which exist well into adulthood. Never having had a sibling, I’n not really equipped to comment on his insistence that left to their own devices, siblings are going to form sexual relationships, but even as adults, it seems to me that there are some serious complications arising from the intense emotional cauldron that is the family. I don’t believe in sin myself, only in harm, and if siblings or other close relatives who have never lived in the same family and don’t bring that potentially hazardous baggage with them should meet as adults and decide to enter a sexual relationship, the only major objection I have is that of genetic consequences should there be children. But there’s way too much potential for psychological harm if there are already familial bonds established, and you attempt to build sexual bonds on top f them. So Maureen’s willingness to hop into bed with anyone, even her own father and son, as long as she isn’t risking pregnancy, bothers me. And I wonder what brought it to such a prominent place in Heinlein’s ideas about sexual freedom.

The other thing that’s both fun and strange is Heinlein’s quest, in the last years of his creative life, to amalgamate the universes of all of his works - and those of some other authors he admired - into one giant multiverse with multiple timelines. He carefully determined which stories and novels took place in which timelines, and created a Time Corps and a theory of creativity as reality to explain how he brought together not only his own science fiction works, but the fantasy worlds of writers from Burroughs to Baum. It’s fun, in a way - much as Philip Jose Farmer’s Wold Newton family of superheroes is fun - but it also seems oddly obsessive.

It’s a sprawling, self-indulgent novel that never ceases to fascinate and infuriate me.

Jane Austen: Lady Susan

Somehow I had never, until now, read Jane Austen’s early - but posthumously published - short epistolary novel Lady Susan. I am very happy to have amended this lack. It’s a wicked and cynical little piece, and it is clearly the unpolished work of an author who has not yet found her strengths or style, but it’s highly entertaining.

The main character - and, unusual for any novel of the time, antagonist - is Lady Susan Vernon, a beautiful and amoral widow of around 35, who is wealthy enough to be comfortable in society, pretty and coquettish enough to seduce men left, right and centre for the sheer amusement of the endeavour, and selfish enough to have hatched a plan to marry her daughter off to a rich but weak young man, so she will be assured of access to money down the line should her own assets begin to run dry.

The plot is rather simple, and the main cast of characters limited. Lady Susan, her confidante and accomplice Alicia Johnson, her brother-in-law Charles Vernon and his wife Catherine (nèe De Courcy), Catherine’s brother Reginald De Courcy, and Lady Susan’s daughter Frederica. Lady Susan, who has recently made a conquest of Mr. Mainwaring, with whose family she has been visiting, and has simultaneously detached the young and wealthy James Martin from her own lover’s daughter with the intention of fostering a marriage between him and her own daughter, finds it expedient to withdraw from the Mainwaring establishment and visit her brother-in-law. While there, she makes another conquest in Reginald De Courcy. Eventually, her schemes to marry Reginald while keeping Mainwaring on the side, and force Frederica to marry James Martin, fall through, but Lady Susan manages to snatch some degree of satisfaction from even the jaws of so significant a defeat.

Letters exchanged between Lady Susan and Alicia give us a clear picture of Lady Susan’s character and intentions, while letters from Catherine Vernon to her mother reveal the plot from an observer’s perspective. Occasional letters written by other characters - primarily Reginald - give additional details as to Lady Susan’s actions and their consequences. The most distinctive voice belongs to Lady Susan herself; her cheerful malignancy is fascinating. The other characters are less distinct - the only other truly individual voice is that of Lady Susan’s confidante Alicia. As Milton discovered, it’s much easier to make evil interesting than to do the same for good.

The novel ends rather abruptly, with a brief epilogue outlining the ultimate fates of the various parties following the collapse of Lady Susan’s plotting. Austen either decided to end it quickly, or never expanded the latter part of her outline into the epistolary format of the main portion of the novel. In either case, there is not evidence that she ever returned to the story to develop it further, but went on to write her first published novel, Pride and Prejudice. Lady Susan remains, just barely completed, but nonetheless fascinating for being an unpolished gem.