My life in books

Robert Boyczuk, Horror Story and other Stories

This was a delightful surprise. To begin with, I know the author – I studied C and systems design under his direction in my second foray into the academic world about 25 years ago, and I remember at the time he did mention working on some short stories. So when I wandered across his name in a list of recent speculative fiction publications, I just had to a) see if was the Bob Boyczuk I remembered, and b) read the book. Well, it was and I did.

The stories in this collection inhabit the worlds between fantasy, science fiction and horror. They are well-written, original, sometimes very provocative, often very powerful, and always interesting. And they are available under Creative Commons licence (https://cs.senecac.on.ca/~robert.boyczuk/writing/collected-works.htm) if you can’t find a dead tree version. Read. Spread the word.


Peter S. Beagle, We Never Talk About My Brother
Peter S. Beagle, The Line Between

Beagle is truly one of the masters of the short form in speculative fiction. I savour every new collection of his stories that I read. Beagle tells such quintessentially human stories, with such range and depth, that his work regularly takes my breath away. If you are looking for a more considered examination, you could always look at the articles in this issue of Green Man Review devoted to Beagle and his work (http://www.greenmanreview.com/oneoffs/peterbeagle.html) or you could just go and read anything he’s written.


Lavie Tidhar, HebrewPunk

Fantasy and alternate history that makes use of Jewish tradition, myth and archetypes is rather rare. I may be that I have been missing out on many such examples, but I am hard-pressed to think of many who have made significant use of Jewish culture and tradition in their works. The names that come first to my mind are Peter Beagle, Lisa Goldstein, Ellen Galford, Michael Chabon, Avram Davidson, and of course (though he is claimed by the literary fiction people as one of their own) Isaac Bashevis Singer. – and now, Lavie Tidhar. In this collection of four linked fantasy stories, Tidhar gives us a wealth of characters out of Jewish tradition. I am looking forward to reading more of his work.


Gwyneth Jones, The Buonarotti Quartet

Four stories set in the same universe as Jones’ Aleutian Trilogy, which use the existence of an instantaneous transit technology as the foundation for storytelling. Jones discusses these stories – which I found as thought provoking as I have come to expect Jones’ work to be – in a post on the Aqueduct Press blog: http://aqueductpress.blogspot.com/2009/05/gwyneth-joness-buonarotti-quartet.html

The as-yet unrecorded short speculative fiction read in 2009:


Report to the Men’s Club, Carol Emshwiller - a collection of Emshweller's short fiction, many of the stories with distinctly feminist overtones, which greatly pleased me. My introduction to Emshweller.


A Mosque among the Stars, Ahmed A. Khan & Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmed (eds.) - I was very pleased to see this anthology; as Constant Reader is surely aware, I have a strong interest in seeing the experiences of all sorts of people represented in speculative fantasy, and there has been a definite scarcity of stories about Muslim people - and particularly positive stories about Muslims.


Gratia Placenti, Jason Sizemore & Gill Ainsworth (eds.) - sometimes I like me a little dab of horror in my speculative fiction diet, and I've found the short story collections from Apex Publications do very well at feeding my kink. This volume was no exception.


Trampoline, Kelly Link (ed.) - a solid fantasy anthology, notable in my opinion for its inclusion of Vandana Singh's "The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet."

I've been reading science fiction (and what was, in my youth, its upstart cousin, fantasy) for going on half a century now - the first book I can remember buying off the grocery store paperback carousel was James Schmitz's Agent of Vega (The PermaBooks 1962 edition - I can still see the cover in my mind), and odds are that was not the first science fiction book I'd read.

In that time, I've built and sold or given away at least a dozen complete libraries of SFF titles - my life was for many years an unsettled one. But now that I've become a home owner, and have many walls that can be lined with books, it's my ambition to recreate all the libraries I've owned - or at least, all the best parts of them.

So I've given my partner a long list of SFF books I want to own once more, and every once in a while he finds himself in a used bookstore and buys several of the titles off that list.

AS it happens, there's been some of these re-acquired books hanging around in the to-be-read pile, and this past week I decided it was time to read them all.


Double Star, Robert Heinlein

This has always been one of my favourite Heinlein novels - probably because of the combination of the craft of acting displayed by the main character and the plot focusing on political intrigue. To me, there's still something profoundly engaging - and yet, upon re-reading, profoundly disturbing - about this portrayal of how one person comes to surrender not only his future, but his identity, for a cause. It's an interesting mediation on the idea of personal sacrifice for the common good and the processes that lead one to commit to such sacrifices.

We see Lorenzo as a tragic hero, because Heinlein presents the cause he comes to champion as a just one. But one must also look at the process Lorenzo undergoes here - a traumatic separation from everyday life, enforced isolation from everything familiar, deep immersion in a specific political viewpoint, being surrounded with people who strongly espouse this viewpoint and stress the importance of the task he has been recruited for in such a problematical way... it's the same set of techniques used in cults, in military basic training camps, in fundamentalist madrasas, in all sorts of places where one breaks down personal identity and replaces it with devotion to a cause or an organisation.

And in the end, Lorenzo has vanished and the person he has become doesn't even think all that highly of who he once was, satisfied that the ends have more than justified the means.


Beyond This Horizon, Robert Heinlein

One of Heinlein's quirkiest and least focused novels, I've always thought. We have some of the classic and contradictory elements of a Heinlein future - societies where the libertarian idea of arming everyone and allowing private duels to settle personal conflicts co-exists with the profound degree of social control necessary for the acceptance of a world-wide genetic breeding program. We have an attempted revolution by Luddite-inspired neo-facists (complete with plans to eliminate the inferior races - in this case, people who have not been part of the government breeding program), a love story between a man who doesn't want to further his carefully designed genetic heritage and the woman chosen by the agents of the state as his ideal genetic counterpart, numerous paeans to rationality and the wonders of science, a quest for the truth behind paranormal ideas such as reincarnation and telepathy, and a seemingly socialist political and economic system in which a well-run centralised state produces higher and higher citizen living allowances and excess production that can be used for just about any hair-brained scheme that comes to mind, as long as it can be argued to be in the interests of science, the people, or something else noble and iconic.

It's fun to re-read, but I still have no clue, after all these years, of what Heinlein might have been trying to say on this novel. Maybe that no one ideology has a hard-and-fast hold on utopian ideas, or that no matter how utopic a civilisation my seem, there will always be people who aren't content - some who will want to destroy, and some who will want to grow in new directions? Who knows. And Heinlein isn't around to tell us.


A Case of Conscience, James Blish

Another classic that leaves me with unanswered questions, even after re-reading it again after so many years. The novel is in two parts. In the first part, a team of scientists from Earth evaluate Lithia, a newly discovered planet which is home to a technological but pre-space flight alien civilisation to determine what kind of relationship should exist between it and Earth. One of the scientists, a physicist, wants to turn the planet into a physics weapons lab because of its wealth of fissionable materials. Two others want to open it up for mutual trade. And the fourth, a Jesuit priest and biologist, has decided that it is a Satanic trap for the human conscience, a planet where all adults of the dominant species behave in the most moral of fashions even though they have no religion, no god, no revelation, no experience of sin and grace.

In the second part, the scientists return to Earth, carrying with the a gift - the carefully stored embryo of one of the Lithians. The alien grows rapidly to adulthood and, cut off from his culture, deliberately becomes a focal point for the frustrations and discontents of a vast underclass of human beings, sparking riots and threatening to create fractures in human society. Eventually he is taken prisoner and sent on his way back to Lithia. Meanwhile, the priest has come under severe criticism within the church because in his assessment of Lithia, he has fallen into the heresy of manicheanism, in granting Satan the ability to create of his own accord - an ability that must be reserved for God. However, the Pope himself suggests a way out - Satan can create illusion, which, once exorcised, will vanish. At the same time, the physicist has been given the go-ahead to create his weapons research lab on Lithia.

The climax leaves the reader with no resolution to this case of conscience. Through the offices of a convenient advance in technology, a group of scientists - including the conscience-tormented priest, watch Lithia in real time as they wait for the physicist to begin a dangerous experiment that one of the scientists on Earth has predicted will destroy the planet. As he watches, the priest decides that he must try to carry out the Pope's recommendation and begins his exorcism. The experiment, as feared, fails with devastating consequences.

Has God chosen to destroy Satan's illusion via the material tool of a scientific experiment gone awry? Or has the theological issue been a red herring all along, and the real sin here the way that a arrogant physicist has been given the opportunity to destroy an entire planet of sentient beings? Blish clearly wanted his readers to think about the interrelationships of science and religion, and the effect they have on society, for themselves.


Slan, A. E. Van Vogt

One of the classic stories about the emergence of a super race, their persecution by "ordinary" humans, and their struggle for survival and plans for and/or success in achieving benign control over all of humanity, mutant and otherwise, for the greater good of all. Scratch the surface and it's a particularly ugly justification for a fascist utopia, but at the same time, it's such a deep-seated nerdly wish fulfilment fantasy that, as a nerd myself, I can't help identifying with the orphaned slan Jommy Cross and his search for the secret slan organisation that, he believes, must exist, so that he can give them the benefit of his father's scientific discoveries in their goal of preparing to take over the world.

Fantasy is, after all, one of the places where we can imagine the things we would never want to really do.


Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

Ah yes. The classic anti-censorship novel, which interpretation Bradbury recently repudiated, insisting that it's all about how bad television is for you. Well, I won't deny that there's a profound critique of the ways in which North American society has, for quite some time now, been creating dumber and dumber forms of public entertainment (it's fascinating to compare the "families" the Montag's wife is so enthralled by with the most recent forms of entertainment to hit the public airwaves, the participatory reality show where viewers can influence what happens on the show), and the effects that this may be having on society.

But if censorship is control of what people are allowed to see, then this is clearly about censorship, and what happens to people in censored societies when they realise what is being kept from them.


October Country, Ray Bradbury

In re-reading this collection of short stories, I was reminded both of how good a writer of the short form Bradbury is, and of how truly grotesque and disturbing his vision could be. There is a great deal of death and decay in these stories - suitable for the season where the weather turns cold and living things die and many cultures have their festivals of the dead. Bradbury was a master of may genres, from science fiction to horror, and this is certainly a collection of some of his finest examples of the latter.

The Armageddon Rag, George R. R. Martin

I loved this book when I first read it. It was the mid-80s, and it was time for a long hard look at the 60s – the music, the dreams, the energy, the dark side, the enormous potential for change, for hope, for new ideas, but also for blind obedience and destruction. It was all there, balanced on the edge of a vibrating metal guitar string, and Martin brought it back in a book that defied genre and made it all so real you could hear the music and smell the sweat and the weed and feel the vibe in your blood and the rhythm in your bones. And it made you want it all again, and wonder where it all went, and then realise that you can’t bring back the dead and still keep moving forward, but you can keep the dream alive and growing and changing as long as you set the energy free.

Then earlier this year, Jo Walton gave the book a retrospective review over at tor.com and I knew it was time to read it again.

And it was everything I’d remembered.

Unwelcome Bodies, Jennifer Pelland

I thought this was a great first-time collection of short stories from an up-and-coming writer of speculative fiction who has a truly unique way of looking at the world as it is and as it could be.

It’s also the first published book from a friend whose evolution as a writer I’ve been privileged to follow almost from the beginning. So yeah, I’m biased.

It’s also true that I have an abiding fondness for reading about the darkness in the human mind and soul, which explains a lot of things, including my interest in dystopic fiction and narratives about serial killers, and this is a collection representative of Pelland’s darker writing.

Because she’s good*, and she hits a lot of my buttons, I would have enjoyed these stories even if someone else had written them. They are for the most part dark, often uncomfortably so, and whether they are horror with an SFnal base or science fiction with a serious dose of what human beings find horrifying, they are original and thought-provoking, each and every one of them.

I can’t really pick out a couple of favourites to talk about. Many of the stories in this collection place the protagonist in a profoundly difficult, even nightmarish situation and then follow the story through to what H. P. Lovecraft might have called unspeakable ends – except that Pelland dares to speak them. Among the purist examples of this are the stories “Big Sister/Little Sister” and “The Call.”

There are dystopic visions galore, from the despair of “For the Plague Thereof Was Exceeding Great”, a story about a future in which a new air-borne variety of AIDS comes to be seen as a gift that frees people from devastating isolation to the ecologically-based nightmares of “Flood” and “Songs of Lament” – visions given a profound reality by Pelland’s ability to distil all the horror of these damaged worlds into their singular expression in the lives of her protagonists. I’ll give a very special nod in this general category to the previously unpublished story “Brushstrokes,” dealing with forbidden love, forbidden thoughts and forbidden knowledge in a society that enforces its rigid class and caste laws with police state methods.

Then there are the – for me, at least – profoundly moving explorations of disability, both as a lived and as an observed state of existence in “The Last Stand of the Elephant Man” and “Captive Girl.”

There are stories that explore the ways in which even the highest and purest of ideals and philosophies can, under the right combination of pressures and personalities, drive the descent into terrible acts – “Immortal Sin” and “Firebird.”

I feel that I must point out that Pelland’s work is not all dark – in fact, one of the stories in this collection, “Last Bus,” is to my mind a very optimistic story in its own poignant way – although it’s also true that even her funniest work can contain some elements that some might consider disturbing (you’ll definitely know what I mean if you’ve read “Clone Barbecue” or “The Burning Bush”**). This collection was published by Apex, a publisher that specialises in dark speculative fiction, so naturally the short stories selected for this volume showcase that side of her writing. I hope her next collection will have some room for all the other shades of Pelland’s distinct vision.


*She’s already been a Nebula Award nominee for her short story “Captive Girl,” and I see many more nominations and awards in her future.

**Links to a number of stories available online can be found at the author’s website.