Fakes

 
 
Fakes

An Anthology of Pseduo-Interview, Faux Lectures, Quasi-Letters, 'Found' Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts

edited by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer

WW Norton & Company

2012

 

 

Fakes is a collection of 40 literary short stories in the subgenre we might think of as 'gimmick fiction', where the writing is very visibly constrained by some higher concept that shapes the text. Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style and Matt Madden's tribute to it, 99 Ways to Tell a Story are veritable catalogs of gimmicks, each retelling the same simple story over and over again with a different high concept each time. One common type of gimmick is to imitate the form of another kind of writing or document; not every gimmick is like that, but the ones in Fakes all are.
 
Despite the connotation of the title, the stories collected here are not actually trying to trick anyone into thinking they're really whatever style of writing they appear to be. No one reading JG Ballard's "The Index", for example, is going to be fooled into thinking that it's the only surviving remnant of the autobiography of Alexander Hamilton's secret son, who inspired and was then denounced by every major historical figure of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ballard's story definitely qualifies as ergodic fiction - where the narrative is implied rather than told, often because our only access to a character is indirect, mediated through a document supposedly prepared by the character - but most of the stories here are more straightforward than that. The most oblique is probably Donald Barthelme's "The Explanation", which is a surreal sort of interview. Also, with the exception of these two luminaries, most of the stories are from the 1990s and 2000s.
 
There are a few commonalities among the stories. One is that an awful lot of them are humorous, likely because of the playful nature of this style of writing influences what sort of story you want to use it to tell.
 
Another is that many of these authors play up the irony of a style that's usually fairly business-like or professional to talk about parts of life or express emotions that are inappropriate for that setting, such as loneliness or romantic desire, over-the-top misogyny, a too-crude interest in sex or drugs, self destruction or other symptoms of mental illness, or grief or mourning over a recent death. The effect of this disjunction is sometimes funny, sometimes sad. It almost always communicates that the narrator of the story has feelings so powerful that they can't be contained by social norms of propriety.
 
A few stand-outs for me include "Officers Weep" by Daniel Orozco, a police blotter that shows two patrol partners falling in love while ineffectually following a vandal with a chainsaw cutting a swathe of random destruction through town (it also reminded me of Carmen Maria Machado's "These are There Stories," which does something similar with fictional Law & Order SVU episode summaries); "Our Spring Catalog" by Jack Pendarvis, where we infer a publishing intern's crisis over her status in the industry and the overall direction of her life from the deteriorating quality of the summaries she writes to advertise upcoming books; "Life Story" by editor David Shields, which is told entirely in bumper sticker slogans and variations; "Reply All" by Robin Hemley, where a poetry club falls apart when one member accidentally sends a love letter to the entire email listserv instead of solely to the woman he's having an affair with; and "National Treasures" by Charles McLeod, an auction catalog where the object descriptions tell the seller's very troubled life story.
 
A few stories missed for me because there just wasn't enough going on, like a letter to a funeral parlor complaining about their use of the word 'cremains,' or an essay about depictions of the crucifixion that seemed to be straight nonfiction as far as I could tell.
 
A few others I didn't personally care for because they seemed to me to be trying to express grandiose and exaggerated inappropriate sentiments in a way that should be humorous, but I couldn't really find them funny. I found that I couldn't quite forget the reality that there are people who truly think and do things like this, which made them more troubling than funny. Joe Wenderoth's "Letters to Wendy's" is supposedly a series of letters sent by a disturbed young man to the fast food company, where he announces his drug use, speculates about other customers' genitals, plots to physically assault employees, plots to sexually assault the non-existent Wendy herself, and declares his plans to get his dock out and wave it around the store. Stanley Crawford's "Some Instructions to My Wife Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage, and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood" is a maniacally over-controlling set of instructions for a wife from her husband governing every aspect of her appearance, behavior, inner life, and an exhaustive list of chores, all woven through with an extended metaphor about how the house is the marriage. (Incredibly, both those two were story-length excerpts from book-length complete works!) Editor Matthew Vollmer's "Will & Testament" is supposedly written by a young man just before his suicide, and supposedly sent to strangers chosen from the phone book, asking them to dismember his body and send the parts to all sorts of people, including all his ex-girlfriends and former bosses, and to then engage in a lifetime of ritual mourning on his behalf.

There's also a real bibliography at the end, listing other works that could've been included in a much, much longer collection. I was aware of a few of the book-length recommendations, but most of them, and essentially all the short stories, are news to me, and have the potential to keep me busy looking them up. 

Tower Dungeon 1

 
 
Tower Dungeon 1

by Tsutomu Nihei
Kodansha

2025 

Tower Dungeon is a new fantasy manga series by an artist who's best known for a couple of scifi series. In the first volume, it appears to be a fairly straightforward story about a quest to rescue a princess from a tower, although there are hints that things might become stranger as the story goes on. 

 

The tower, for example, is a megastructure. It's not big like a medieval tower, or even big like a modern skyscraper; it's big like a mountain, big like something only magic could make. It's white a covered in pillars, and it hovers hundreds of feet above the ground, accessible only by vertiginous staircases, and only when it floats past. One of Nihei's previous series, Blame!, is about an infinite city, and since we've only glimpsed the lowest levels of the tower, I suspect we'll see more fantastic architecture as we go. The way things work seems directly influenced by D&D and Delicious in Dungeon. The tower also reminds me of the one in Senlin Ascends, but I don't know if Nihei was influenced by it.

 

The first volume of Tower Dungeon opens in a small village, where superhumanly strong teen Yuva spends his days doing chores for his grandparents. When news reaches the village that the princess has been kidnapped and taken to the Dragon Tower, and that the royal army has already been decimated trying to rescue her, Yuva's neighbors are quick to offer him up to the military recruiters to spare their own sons from conscription.

 

Yuva travels to the base of the tower with only a barrel lid as a shield and a small metal cookpot that looks like a wide-brimmed hat to wear as a helmet (a bit like Don Quixote and his shaving bowl). The surviving soldiers are covered in bandages and eye patches and slings. A small expeditionary force of the leaders and the new recruits go back in. Yuva's strength is put to work carrying barrels of salt on his back to use against a slime monster on level 50. Along the way, they find rare mushrooms that can be used in a powerful healing potion, fight off several waves of skeletons in armor, and meet a badly-wounded but still firebreathing dragon.

 

On level 50, the 'slime monster' is a bizarre giant humanoid that's protected by a thick carapace of translucent slime. Yuva manages to dissolve the slime with the salt, but before anyone can finish the fight, a strange tentacled man appears and threatens to kill the princess unless they spare the monster. The princess speaks up to say that he wants her as a live hostage for now, so they shouldn't let this threat scare them! When the slime monster dies, a coin-like token appears, and the tentacled man says they can trade the token for the princess up on level 100.

 

Back on the ground, we learn that the remaining royals have decided to coronate a replacement, and are recalling the guards to the ceremony. Outfitted in better armor, Yuva is left behind with a master archer and a young woman who can use fire magic to continue the rescue on their own. I suspect the main plot next time will continue following Yuva and his new companions, but I hope we'll also learn more about what's going on in the kingdom, why the princess was kidnapped, who the weird man who took her is, and so on.

 

Nihei's art has a kind of rough quality to it, like his pens can only produce thick lines with wobbly edges. It immediately looks harsh and brutal compared to Witch Hat Atelier, for example. The story here also seems more violent and might go on to include more sex. Nearly all the soldiers except Yuva have been injured or maimed; the fire magician wears a modest black cloak ... but nothing underneath, as we realize when her cloak floats away from her body while she conjures a bonfire.

 

In addition to monumental architecture that, for all its neoclassical and gothic flourishes looks more science fictional than fantastic, Nihei's monster designs are strange enough to spill over from dark fantasy into weird fiction. The slime monster, for example, might've been a traditional cube shape or an amoeba, but instead it was a humanoid secreting its own slime armor. The dragon looked like pterodactyl. The tentacled man is so asymmetrical he looks less like Cthulhu and more like Swamp Thing or Man Thing. I'm curious to see what's next.

Thieves

 
Thieves
by Lucie Bryon

Nobrow

2022 
 
 

Thieves is one of my favorite comics so far this year, and it mostly came as a pleasant surprise, because I knew almost nothing about it beforehand, just that I'd heard that it was good. It's fair to say I caught only a fraction of the buzz. In addition to being praised in basically every publication that prints reviews, Thieves won Lucie Bryon the Entente Litteraire Prize, which was presented to her by the queen of England and the first lady of France. Which is pretty impressive for a comic about two queer girls in high school going to house parties, getting drunk, and stealing things!

 

Thieves isn't quite as scandalous as I make it sound, but Bryon is willing to allow her characters to be imperfect, to make mistakes, to handle their emotions and their social relationships badly. But most of the book isn't about doing the wrong thing, its about trying to put it right again afterward. Friends and girlfriends push one another to be better, to try harder.

 

Ella is a social butterfly and a bit of a tomboy; she has a crush from a distance on Madeline, a femme girl who sits in front of her in morning class. Ella's best friend Leslie sits beside her every day, and tells her to stop longing from afar and actually just go talk to her already! But before Ella quite gets the chance, she and Leslie crash a house party, and Madeline is there. Ella is nervous, gets drunk, blacks out, and wakes up at home to discover that she's stolen a half dozen curios from one of the party host's closets...

 

Ella experiences a wave of longing for Madeline

  

Ella got home safe the night before hanks to Leslie, and also thanks to Leslie, Madeline comes over that morning to check on her. It turns out that Madeline's been crushing on Ella from a distance too, and now that they both know, they start dating. Ella soon realizes that the person she stole from was Madeline, but there's a twist. All the curios were things Madeline had stolen too. Not because she was drunk; more like acting out at times when she felt overwhelmed by negative emotions.

 

Ella and Madeline agree that it will feel better to stop carrying physical reminders of mistakes around with them. They spend the rest of the book returning the stolen items one by one, sneaking them into house parties and leaving them where the owner will eventually find them. Returning the items means confronting the original negative feelings, which is hard. A few times, Ella and Madeline fight. Leslie helps with a few of the reverse-burglaries, and she helps the couple work things out after arguing. She is like, the straight analogue to the 'gay best friend' character of 90s rom-coms. Like all stories set in the senior year of high school, the story ends with graduation.

 

Ella and Leslie walk to a party and step inside

 

I like Bryon's characters and her storytelling, and the emotional realism of a shy kid acting out when she gets bullied or teased, in part because she has no one she can talk to. Once Madeline has a real friend and can put her feelings into words, she's able to control her actions better.

 

I also really, really like Bryon's art. Her figures are fairly realistic, but they're also quite expressive. They're like, just the right amount of stretchy and cartoony for the story she wants to tell. Her use of color is great, too. Each scene has a single accent color that reflects to mood and time of day, to complement the black ink drawings. School is orange, outdoors at night is green, parties are red. Some background and scenery details appear solely in color and negative space, with no black outline at all. The colors are soft, and rich, like muted jewel tones. On the few occasions Bryon uses more than one, the art suddenly takes on surprising depth.

Summerland

 
Summerland

by Hannu Rajaniemi

Tor

2018

 
  
Summerland is a spy novel in the tradition of John le Carre, set in London during the Cold War, its intrigue driven by the accusation that there's a traitor, a Soviet mole, in the heart of the British secret services. But this is an alt history. The year is 1938. Germany lost the Great War so comprehensively that it stands no chance of rearming to invade its neighbors. Instead, a tense stalemate between the UK and USSR plays out as the belligerents pick sides in another country's civil war, prolonging endlessly. But this war isn't in Vietnam or Korea - its the Spanish Civil War, with a British-backed Franco unable to defeat the Soviet-supported Republic. And, oh yeah, half the spies on both sides are ghosts.

 

In Summerland, the afterlife is a physical place, a layer of four-dimensional space just below the layer of the living world. Theosophical exploration discovered the ruins of Summer City in the 1890s, the remains of an earlier civilization built by the now vanished Old Dead. If a person can imagine a specific 4D shape as they die (with the help of a Ticket, a printed card that seems to function like a psychic QR code, a visual representation of the unique coordinates of a specific location), then their soul will reawaken at that location in Summerland. If you die without a Ticket, your remains near where you died, and rapidly Fades until you lose all of your memories and sense of self.

 

These discoveries have given rise to a world where the death has lost its sting. Indeed, the living envy the dead. Each nation exists half on Earth and half in the afterlife. The ghost of Queen Victoria still rules the British Empire, aided by her living Prime Minister, HG Wells. Spy duties are split between the dead in the Summer Court and the living in the Winter Court. Lenin still rules the Soviet Union as well - in death, Soviet citizens merge with their leader, transforming him into a truly collective superintelligence, the Presence. Because the dead are not gone, the torch is never passed. Living children remain beholden to their dead ancestors; Stalin is the dissident leader of a splinter faction, trying to use the Spanish Civil War to create a Communist but non-Leninist enclave.

 

When they visit the living world, ghosts can only see electromagnetism and souls. They can read emotions but not thoughts, and they can be blocked by Faraday cages. For a price, a ghost can temporarily possess the body of a medium wearing an electric crown. Ghosts make very good spies. In this world, radio and electric technology have advanced rapidly, all cars use electric motors for example, and medicine has languished. The only treatment for severe illness or injury is an overdose of morphine administered while you stare at your Ticket.

 

Summerland starts when a Soviet defector reveals to living British spy Rachel White that there is a mole loyal to Lenin among the ghost spies of the Summer Court. The mole is Peter Bloom, wunderkind and illegitimate son of the Prime Minister, who is simply too beloved for anyone to suspect. Because her defector tells her this just before committing suicide without a Ticket, Rachel gets demoted for fucking up her case. Not knowing who she can trust, if anyone, Rachel goes off-books to catch and expose Peter on her own.

 

Peter meanwhile is desperate to avoid getting caught, and to be exfiltrated to the Soviet afterlife to become one with the Presence. He's trying to stop Britain from switching their alliance from Franco to Stalin, and looking for a British secret to steal that's big enough to buy him a way out of his double life. He thinks he finds it, in the form of an old study HG Wells commissioned investigating the afterlife equivalent to the Fermi paradox - if the souls of any intelligent dead can travel to Summerland and set up civilization there, why was it empty when humans first arrived in the 1890s? where are all the alien minds? Not realizing that Rachel knows his identity, Peter picks her, obvious disaffected after a recent hushed-up embarrassing incident, and tries to use her to steal the physical file he needs.

 

Rajaniemi has really succeeded here on two fronts. First, this is a fun and imaginative scifi novel. What if Victorian era ideas about the affinity between electricity and spirits were true? What if the Theosophists' beliefs about immortal souls and four dimensional space were correct? And what if the tradition of all dead generations very literally weighed like a nightmare on the brains of the living? I like how Rajaniemi imagines and describes the afterlife, and especially his depiction of movement through 4D space, and the ana and kata directions that function as analogues for up and down. I like the way he extrapolates. The ghostly storage of information resembles cloud storage of digital files, and the way everything in the afterlife can be located and indexed using hypercube diagrams reminds of librarians' ambitions for a semantic web, where all real-world objects, including people, have URLs that allow them to be linked consistently online. Rajaniemi provides enough detail so you can imagine this strange, half living, half ghostly society, and so that the powers and limitations of the ghosts appear consistent, but not so much that everything is belabored or weighed down in minutia.

 

Second, Summerland succeeds as a spy novel. The alt history sets up an alternative Cold War with comprehensible stakes and sides. There's plenty of suspicion and paranoia, plenty of intrigue, and well-described scenes of tradecraft like spotting a tail or developing an asset. Multiple characters hidden agendas, and Peter Bloom is not the only double agent. But at the same time, the characters are consistent enough that their actions remain plausible, even when they catch you by surprise in the moment. They have comprehensible motivations, whether loyalty, ideology, or self interest, and they behave true to those motives even when they're trying to act in secret. Getting close to both Rachel and Peter as viewpoint characters not only lets us see the living and dead worlds, it provides us with direct and accurate information about the two main covert ops being run. And both have personal histories that give them a complex relationship with the current state of the world, and relatable reasons for wanting to change it.

  

I would compare Summerland favorably to Rasputin's Bastards, which also features psychic spies, and very favorably to The Eyre Affair, which also has a fairly divergent alternate history.

 

My complaints are very few. First, Rajaniemi's dialogue almost never includes contractions. The effect isn't so much to make the speakers sound posh or proper as it is to make what they're saying sound a bit stilted and artificial. 

 

Another thing I found odd is that although the British PM is very specifically HG Wells, man of imagination, author of Little Wars and The Invisible Man, both of which play roles in the plot, for some reason Rajaniemi calls him 'Herbert Blanco West,' and then has to repeatedly make really obvious allusions to make sure you realize that 'HB West' is really supposed to be HG Wells. Rajaniemi references Lenin and Stalin by name, as well as radio inventor Marconi and 4D theorist Charles Hinton by name, so it's difficult for me to understand why he doesn't do the same for Wells. I even sort of wonder if it's somehow a legal or practical decision rather than and artistic one.