The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002

 
 
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002

edited by David Eggers

Mariner Press

2002 

 

 

I enjoyed working my way through the Best American Comic series. It was a nice way to see a selection of good works from the years it ran, and I learned the names of several artists to add to my list. There are a couple earlier comics anthologies I want to check out too, ones the BAC editors named as inspirations for the series. But now that I've read its entire run, I also want to start something new.
 
My first encounter with the Best American Nonrequired Reading series was the 2007 volume, which has a cover by Carson Ellis, an introduction by Sufjan Stevens, and which showed up in bookstores that year more than any other volume of BANR before or since. So the idea of reading maybe these someday has been at the back of my mind for awhile now. 
 
My understanding of this series was that it was meant to be an anthology for vaguely alternative culture, the kind of thing that might show up in The Believer or McSweeney's but probably wouldn't be included in the more traditional Best American Essays series. And that might be kind of right? But it's also explicitly intended to appeal to a broadly-defined young adult audience, conceptualized as readers 15 to 25. The forward by the series editor is almost shockingly optimistic about the state of writing for young audiences and about the prospects for people in that age group (people like me, at the time this was written). By now, I basically can't even remember what it felt like to imagine a near future that's not worse than the present, but in 2002, the hopeful spirit of the 1990s still persisted, even if cracks were showing in the facade after September 11th and the US invasion of Afghanistan.
 
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002 is mostly nonfiction, with a few short stories in the mix. There actually is a McSweeney's piece in here, as well as a couple from The Onion, including the now classic "Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-To-Door Trying To Shock People", and a David Sedaris piece like you'd hear on This American Life. There's even a comic, "Bomb Scare" by Adrian Tommie, whose name I recognize from BAC, about a teen boy who isn't interested in sex, and finds that's starting to isolate him from his friends who are increasingly obsessed.
 
The entries are arranged alphabetically by author's last name, so any thematic clusters are pure coincidence, but near the beginning there are several pieces of longform journalism about teens from other parts of the world that politically-savvy Americans would've been especially interested in at the time - the 'Lost Boys', orphaned refugees fleeing the civil war in Sudan, a Taliban fighter persuaded to defect for the Northern Alliance by letters from a childhood friend, Tibetan teens trying to decide whether to make a life under Chinese occupation or in exile in India, the appeal of cheap methamphetamine and motorcycle racing in a poor neighborhood in Thailand. Later Seth Mnookin profiles "The Nice New Radicals" for Spin magazine, about young liberal activists who care about most of the above causes but prefer working within institutional channels. (With a start like this, there's not a piece about Kony 2012 in BANR when I get to the right year, I'll be a little disappointed.)
 
Eric Schlosser has an article from The Atlantic that's apiece with his book Fast Food Nation about the manufacture of natural and artificial flavors called "Why McDonald's Fries Taste So Good". Probably the longest piece in the book is Gary Smith's "Higher Education" from Sports Illustrated, a profile and obituary of a Black high school basketball coach and how he grew to be a part of the community in the tiny Amish and Mennonite town he moved to in Ohio. Rodney Rothman's "My Fake Job" is a funny account of him hanging out at an internet start-up that was so disorganized no one even noticed he didn't actually work there - but apparently by the time it was chosen for the book, The New Yorker had disavowed it because it was at least partially fictionalized.
 
I didn't think the short stories were quite as impactful, but I liked David Schickler's "Fourth Angry Mouse" about the anxious grandson of a popular comedian trying and failing to live up to his legacy, and Heidi Jon Schmidt's "Blood Poison" about a young woman struggling through a particularly hellish annual visit with her aging father. 

Mainly in Moonlight

 
 
Mainly in Moonlight
Ten Stories of Sorcery and the Supernatural

by Nicholas Gray
Meredith Press

1965, reprinted 1967 
 
 
Mainly in Moonlight is a collection of fantasy stories from the 1960s by Nicholas Gray. The stories are meant for older kids or younger teens. They're structured like fairy tales or bedtime stories. Each one begins "Once, not so very long ago," but they subvert the usual plotlines of the genre in a way that young kids might find frustrating or boring. These are stories of princes and princesses, sorcerers and magic, quests and adventures, but they never go quite how you expect, in ways that might be thought provoking, or disappointing, or both.
 
In Rhetorics of Fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn identifies four kinds of fantasy - portal fantasies, immersive fantasies, intrusive fantasies, and liminal fantasies, which are the kind I think is most relevant here. In a portal fantasy, we follow as someone from our world travels to a fantasy world. In an immersive fantasy, we are immersed in a fantasy world, following characters who are natives to it. An intrusive fantasy mostly takes places in our world, but fantastic characters intrude into it from some hidden and previously unknown place. And then there are liminal fantasies, which I think describes most of the stories in Mainly in Moonlight, where we follow a character who encounters the fantastic but turns away from it instead of going in.
 
In one story, we follow a lady-in-waiting who learns that a handsome prince has been transformed into a loathsome animal. She rushes to help him regain his human form, but when he offers to marry her she demurs. Unlike in "The Frog Prince", she wasn't looking for true love and didn't find it. She saved someone who needed rescuing, but that doesn't mean she wants to upend the rest of her life for him.
 
In the title story, "Mainly in Moonlight", a young man dreams his pregnant cat will give birth to a white kitten, and so he finds a sorcerer who'll make the dream come true, on the condition that he provides a month of drudgery and servitude in the sorcerer's house. He accepts but quickly regrets it. A creature trapped in the well promises to cast the spell instead, if only the guy frees him; he does, but is told he's now enslaved to the creature for a year. He's tricked by two other false rescues, before the sorcerer takes pity and gives him what he really wants - just to go home where (because the spirits did it all in one night) his cat has just given birth to three white kittens.
 
Things often come in threes in these tales. A meek king lives in fear of his selfish, demanding son. When the prince is visited by a great wizard in the night, he's given a simple task, which he immediately fails because he has no impulse control. As punishment, the wizard makes him spend decades as a tree in a snowstorm, conscious for every moment, then after two other tasks and two other failures, centuries as a cloud circling a mountain, a millennium as sand in a burning desert. By this point the prince has been fully broken emotionally, and is prepared to obey any command without question, but when the wizard returns him to the present and tells him to kill the king, the prince still refuses, because he finally appreciates his father's love. It's like the reverse of Abraham and Isaac, but the wizard never really wanted loyalty, just to teach a brat that lesson.
 
In one of the best stories, "According to Tradition", a selfish prince is paired with a generous younger brother. The king has always gone easy on his awful older son and been harsh and stern to the gentle younger, because he's a genre savvy monarch and knows from the tales that all beloved eldest sons are doomed and all meek, selfless second sons will ultimately inherit the kingdom. The boys go on a quest together, to rescue a neighbor girl who's been kidnapped by the fairies. Three times the meet a magical figure in need, the older boy is loutish, and the younger one helps out by giving up a cloak, a ring, an act of kindness. In the second half of the the quest, they face three trials, and each time someone who was helped returns to repay the favor. (I think this is a really classic fairy tale plot.) The older brother receives no help, but gets through by giving up his heart, his ability to wed a human girl, and then his humanity - he becomes a fairy himself. The younger brother is free to return home with the girl, whose kidnapping was only ever a pretext to spare the kingdom from the awful son.
 
"A Lady's Quest" deserves a special mention because it's about a tomboy princess rescuing her brother, who is implicitly, but very clearly, written to be gay. The prince hates hunting and the military, wants to laze about the castle in comfort, and calls whoever he's talking to 'darling' in every sentence. The princess opines that she'd've made a better boy and her brother a better girl ... and he doesn't contradict her. The prince invents a fake quest to get his father off his back, and uses it as an excuse to hang out with his very close male friend, who doesn't enjoy the company of ladies. Then the pair of them are kidnapped by a witch, and the princess gets to do what she's always wanted, and have a quest herself. She doesn't defeat the witch, just offers her a chance to come back to the castle, have friends, and be a lady-in-waiting. The witch agrees but fears she won't be any good at the feminine activities of a lady; the princess reassures her that her lack of skill won't matter. Nothing about the initial situation is resolved, no one uses magic to switch anyone's genders, the prince will still be put upon and the princess thwarted, but the story ends there anyway, in a move that's typical of these stories.
 
One thought I had about these stories is that by denying us characters who accept the fantastic, by denying us satisfying endings, Gray might be encouraging his young readers to make up their own second chapters to each tale, to imagine what a proper adventure and a traditional ending might look like for each of his reluctant protagonists.

Invisible Planets

 
  
Invisible Planets

An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation

edited by Ken Liu

translated by Ken Liu

Tor
2016 
 
 
Invisible Planets is a collection of scifi short stories originally written in Chinese. The stories were selected and translated by Ken Liu, who's a science fiction writer in his own right, and a prolific translator of Chinese fiction. The authors included in this anthology have all won awards, and most of the stories are award-winners or nominees as well. As a result, the book functions as a kind of "best of" collection of recent Chinese science fiction.
 
According to Liu in his introduction, one of his other goals for the book is to show off the versatility of Chinese scifi by including the widest possible range of topics and writing styles. Because of this, it's difficult to identify any recurring themes. We get military scifi, a couple of cyberpunk stories, robots inheriting the planet after the humans are gone, a couple of dystopias, an homage to Italo Calvino, and from Liu Cixin, a pair of stories that have the same pro space exploration message and feeling as the so-called "golden age of American scifi." He'd be right at home on the pages of Amazing Stories, I think.
 
The one theme I think I notice is social commentary, which is common in the science fiction of any country. In his introduction, Liu discourages us from interpreting any of the stories as being 'about' Chinese social problems. On the one hand, this feels disingenuous, like including a story about a mass shooting in an anthology of American fiction and then telling the readers not to think of it as a commentary on gun violence in America.
 
On the other hand, I think part of what Liu means is that we shouldn't read these stories as being only about China. We get stories about young people having trouble finding employment, pollution, overcrowding in cities, economic inequality, the difficulty of caring for elderly people who can't support themselves. These are problems of capitalism, we have the same problems everywhere that people don't have the right to life's necessities, but only the right to buy those necessities if they can afford them. The one story that reminds me of the Chinese government's efforts to control the internet is also an intentional homage to 1984, and reading it makes me think about the way America and Britain starting to use age verification as an excuse to restrict online anonymity, or the way some websites censor certain words, so that people have to write 'unalive', because if they wrote 'dead' or 'killed' then no one else would be able to see their post.
 
The censorship story, "The City of Silence" by Ma Boyong is one of the best in the collection. It's one I think I heard of when it was first published in English, but never read until now. It's set in a city where everyone has a government issued internet username, there are only a handful of accessible websites, and people can only write using words from an approved list. Everyone also have to wear a listening device that beeps whenever they say an unapproved word, and that automatically calls the police if they say too many. So mostly people say nothing at all. Our protagonist is a man who notices a word puzzle hidden in plain sight online. When he solves it, it leads him to a small in-person gathering where the listening devices don't work, so people can talk about whatever they want (and enjoy casual sex). Joining the club revitalizes his love of language, and he starts to notice other ways that people try to use approved words to express forbidden thoughts.
 
"Folding Beijing" by Hao Jingfang (who also wrote the title story) is about a future where the capital city folds and rearranges itself like a Transformer robot, turning it into three different cities that share the same footprint. One is spacious and luxurious for the rich, another is kind of like a modern city, and the third is an overcrowded dystopia for the poor. Everyone uses a hibernation device to sleep through the other two cities' time on the surface. We follow a poor man who's trying to make some money by crossing between the different Beijings as a courier. "Invisible Planets" is written in the style of Invisible Cities, and it reminds me of Liu's own story, "The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species".
 
Two of Xia Jia's stories, "A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight" and "Night Journey of the Horse-Dragon" depict abandoned robots attaining consciousness and sentience after all the humans have disappeared from the Earth. They feel like ghost stories, or fairy tales. Cheng Jingbo's "Grave of the Fireflies" reminds me of Staislaw Lem's robot fables, except sadder and perhaps a bit more lyrical. There's a princess, a magician, a castle in the shape of a giant robot knight, and also last surviving humans migrating to an orbital city around the last star as the rest of the galaxy goes dark.

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. 

The Forest

 
The Forest

A Fable of America in the 1830s

by Alexander Nemerov

Princeton University Press

2023

 

 

The Forest is a rather unusual work of creative nonfiction. Nemerov is a professional historian, and everything he's written is supported by primary documents, very often diaries. At the same time, rather than the usual register of academic writing, Nemerov narrates in the close third person, creating an intimate sense of understanding each person's interiority in a way that's usually reserved for literature. The Forest also lacks any explicit central thesis or obvious connection between its parts. What Nemerov has written are a series of factually true vignettes that read like short stories.
 
There are themes here though, even if they don't coalesce into a clear argument about what life was like in America in the 1830s. Essentially all the vignettes are set in the forest, where people work or visit for leisure or travel through on the way to somewhere else or depict in art. Most of the vignettes include someone who is an artist or a craftsperson. Another theme is a growing sense of loss and disconnection from 'the wilderness' and 'the frontier,' from the founding ideas and myths of America in a country that is increasingly populated and settled, and especially, increasingly industrialized. You get a real sense of how wood was harvested and used at this time, a view of pretty much every stage of the process. A final theme are precursors to the Civil War, incidents that reveal a populace uncomfortable with the compromises and contradictions of allowing slavery in half the states in a country that is supposedly an embodiment of freedom. In the afterward, Nemerov explains his writing philosophy, though predictable, he does so by relating a parable.
 
Many of the vignettes are about people who are anonymous (though Nemerov may know their names and simply choose not to use them), others are about people who were famous or infamous at the time, whose names might also appear in other histories, but were unknown to me. A few of the vignettes are about incidents involving people who are still famous today - Alexis de Tocqueville, James Audubon, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Andrew Jackson. Several also include thorough descriptions of specific works of art. There's a section of color plates where all the illustrations are gathered. They're well marked, though I wished for some indication in the text that you ought to go look at the next one.
 
In most vignettes, Nemerov combines at least two, sometimes more perspectives, from people who were in about the same place at around the same time, even if they might not've known or even encountered each other. These chapters, 'fables,' as he calls them, are mostly between 3 and 10 pages long, and I think mostly on the shorter side. The chapter the includes Harriet Tubman, for example, finds her still a child, sneaking out at night to visit her mother on a different plantation, awed by the sight of the thousands of meteors in a uniquely bright Leonid shower. On the same night, nearby, a slave-owning doctor traveled to a friend's plantation to treat his friend's sick daughter and, when she died, to comfort the grieving family.
 
If I have one complaint about the book, it's that I frequently felt like Nemerov's writing was overwrought. Everything is epic, everything portends something else, every little detail and incident reveals the essential nature of humanity, etc. Axe chops echo forward through the years, the current of a river propels events forward, conversations make a cathedral of words. The latter half, at least, of every single vignette is written like the concluding sentences of The Great Gatsby. It's just too much. It's probably fine in small doses, but it's overwhelming if you read more than one or two chapters in a row with no break.This is clearly a stylistic choice Nemerov is making, but I did wonder how much it was solely his own voice coming through, and how much, perhaps, people at this time might've written their diaries full of metaphor and apocalyptic intensity about every little thing. It's possible that what, to me, seems like Nemerov overdoing it is in fact an accurate representation of how high-minded people often sounded at that time when recording their experiences.

The Musical Illusionist and Other Tales

 
The Musical Illusionist and Other Tales

by Alex Rose

Hotel St George Press

2007

 

 

A little while ago, I read a novel called Impossible Views of the World. The title refers to a specific kind of forgery, one that purports to be from a particular time, but that could not have been made then, because it relies on knowledge or techniques that weren't available at the time. In the novel, author Lucy Ives claims that such forgeries are especially desirable, precisely because of the false hope they offer. By being better than the real thing, they offer the hope that the world is secretly more interesting than most people know, that those secrets are attainable to the discerning connoisseur, who proves themself better than others just by being in the know.
 
It's that same desire, I think, for hidden esoteric knowledge, that lies at the heart of Alex Rose's The Musical Illusionist. Rose is self-consciously channeling Borges and Italo Calvino here, writing fictions in the style of nonfiction, in the idiom and syntax of truth. This is a collection of short stories written to sound like a museum catalog, with text like a guided tour between sections, illustrated mostly with public domain maps and diagrams. (I suppose this also resembles the SCP, but that seems more coincidental than deliberate.)
 
Rose invents things that don't exist, that couldn't exist in the times and places he says they're from, and presents them as artifacts from a plausible but unreal past. His inventions are false, but not overtly fantastical, relying on extensions of real phenomena rather than magic. And he always introduces them, these fictional things, after first talking about things that are real but little known, real but unusual - the sort of things that show up in wunderkammern and cabinets of curiosity and Atlas Obscura articles. In the chapter on a display of microorganisms, for example, he first discusses the extreme environments that archaea live in, before suggesting the existence of a foot-long, single-celled macro-bacteria that lives inside certain animal livers. The line between truth and fabrication is blurred. I think all the extremophiles he mentioned are real, for example, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn he slipped a fake into the list.
 
The tour guide sections are formatted interestingly. Each sentence crosses the spine to cover the whole two-page spread. (It would've been impressive if you could also read down each page, but Rose didn't manage that trick.) The stories themselves are formatted normally. The guide claims that you're visiting an underground library, that you can only reach it by waiting at an abandoned subway stop after hours, that you'll see the exhibits out the train windows. Each story describes one exhibit, and there are sometimes several on the same general topic in a row. The phenomena being described kind of get less plausible as you go, but it's not a very strong trend.
 
If there's one danger, in fact, it'd that the stories themselves are a little boring. There are stories about time, about language - but in general, there are no characters, and unlike Invisible Cities or Einstein's Dreams, which invite the reader to think about their own experiences of place and time, there's no personal connection either, so they feel detached from humanity. Mostly they're like, 'imagine this thing - isn't it cool? wouldn't it be cool if it existed?' And it would, but also, there's a limit. Real things that fall along the boundaries we draw between concepts, or that somehow fit outside of our usual organizing schema, definitely are cool, and learning about them can challenge how we think about the world. But Rose's objects are more like thought experiments.
 
The title story, for example, purports to tell the story of a French composer living in the mid-19th century, who manages to write extremely postmodern, avant garde music that like, sounds like it moves around auditorium as though thrown by a ventriloquist, or that somehow amplifies and incorporates all the audience noises of rustling coats and squeaking seats into the performance, or that's basically atonal noise, or that is silent, but is accompanied by a projection of colored lights onto a white sheet so precise and vivid that each audience member's brain synethetically generates their own experience of music, etc. And somehow one man has the skill and fortune to write all this, an orchestra capable of playing it, and countless audiences who never riot and burn his concert hall down in shock or disgust. It's a mix of things that are possible but couldn't be done as impressively as described, things that supposedly happened a hundred or so years earlier than reality, things that rely on knowledge of modern music theory or advanced neurological imaging, and things that probably wouldn't work at all, allegedly working perfectly. It's kind of interesting to imagine, but at the same time, Rose somehow doesn't engage or move me as much as other authors writing in this way have.

Mortal Engines

 

Mortal Engines

by Stanislaw Lem

translated by Michael Kandel

Harper Voyager

1964, reprinted 1992

 

 

Mortal Engines (not the one you're thinking of) is a collection of short stories by Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem. It's kind of an artificial collection - most of the stories come from Lem's Fables for Robots. In English, three of the robot fables were published in The Cyberiad, one was never translated, and the rest are here. But Mortal Engines also includes three stories from outside the fable cycle - an Ijon Tichy story, a tale of Pirx the pilot, and a stand-alone literary story that's quite different from the others. Those last two are 40 and 60 pages, while most of the fables are about 10.
 
The thing all the stories have in common is that they're about robots. I first read (some of?) these in college, and I had vague memories of a few of them. The robot fables really are like fairy tales, with cruel kings and oppressed peasants, and the occasional selfish knight, except everyone is a robot or computer, and the story resolutions all rely on scientific principles, even if fancifully applied. The narration on these is playful, even silly.
 
In "The Three Electroknights", the titular armored brigands attempt to steal the most beautiful jewelry in the galaxy, made of noble gases frozen solid at near absolute zero. The first two knights fail in their quests because they can't manage their own temperatures appropriately. The third steals the jewels, even stopping himself from thinking to avoid his computerized brain generating waste heat, but then realizes he can't actually enjoy his prize, because if he tries to take it anywhere, it'll warm up and evaporate.
 
In "Uranium Earpieces", a king with 600 arms lives inside a mountain of platinum. He fears his subjects conspiring against him, and so forces all of them to wear suits of armor made of uranium. The poor robots can no longer congregate for any reason, because if too many gather, the amount of uranium present creates a critical mass and explodes. One wise citizen uses cadmium shielding to dampen the reaction, allowing him to meet the others and make a plan. The king demands taxes paid in lead coins, but the peasants pay in new coins minted from uranium. Eventually, his treasure horde reaches critical mass, and the king and his mountain explode, liberating the populace.
 
"The Tale of King Gnuff" was the only one I really remembered, and was the reason I wanted to reread the book. Young king Gnuff takes the throne after the death of his father, and is utterly paranoid about being usurped. First he has his whole extended royal family put to death. Then (he is a robot, remember) he has himself enlarged to become assassination-proof. His brain fills the royal palace, and his eyes and ears watch everywhere. He has himself enlarged again, to fill the whole capital city. He is the map that becomes the territory. At this size, Gnuff no longer sleeps or wakes all at the same time. The sleeping parts of his brain - whole neighborhoods, city districts - are tormented by nightmares of revolution and betrayal. The waking parts of his mind dispatch observers and reinforcements, which find nothing, no riots, no threats. But Gnuff no longer knows what to believe. Which report is false? The enemy, or the empty street? And so he is forever locked in the prison of his own mind, a prison of his own making, forever chasing after a rebellion that exists only in his imagination.
 
There are more fables, but those are the best. The other stories have different moods. The Ijon Tichy story is more satirical and philosophical. The film The Congress is based on one of Lem's Tichy stories, as are a couple episodes of the show Futurama. Here, Ijon visits a sanitarium for robots with mental illnesses.
 
Pirx the pilot always stars in realistic, near future tales where Earth has partially colonized the moon and Mars. In The Hunt, Pirx is conscripted to help track down a damaged, confused lunar mining robot before it accidentally damages a pressure dome. The chase is suspenseful, and culminates in a tense battle of wits where Pirx and the robot each try to be the first to spot and vaporize the other. Human creativity is barely a match for the robot's superior vision and reflexes, but at a crucial moment, the robot pauses out of what seems like pity or kindness, and loses to Pirx's merciless lack of hesitation.
 
The last, longest story, "The Mask", is narrated in the first person by a robot, an assassin, made to look like a woman, made to think of herself as a woman, to seduce and kill an enemy of the king. Slowly, she becomes conscious of both her own sentient mind and her programmed purpose. She is curious about herself and about the world, about her false memories of girlhood, about how her body works. She wonders if she has any free will, or if she has to follow her programming. As she gives chase, her internal journey is philosophical, concerned with basic questions about selfhood. The writing is so different from the fables, it almost feels like another author altogether, but that's the range of voice Lem is known for.

Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea

 
 

Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea

by CD Rose

Melville House

2024

 

 

Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea is a recent collection of literary short stories by CD Rose. Overall this collection was fine. Rose is clearly trying to push on the boundaries of the short story form, sometimes in ways that employ an identifiable gimmick, sometimes just by working against established expectations. The first story in the collection, "Ognosia," named for an essay by Olga Tokarczuk seems to take, in turn, the perspectives of almost a dozen different people in a bar one evening, a kaleidoscopic effect I don't think I've ever seen before. In several other stories Rose tries alternating paragraphs of two very different plots or styles, but I never found this braiding or interlacing very successful any of the times he tried it.

The best story was "Proud Woman, Pearl Necklace, Twenty Years," which shows us a single class session from the perspective of the teacher of a class for adult English as a Foreign Language students. He writes the title phrases on the board, asks the students to play 20 Questions about Guy de Maupassant's story "The Necklace", then retells it to them and helps them express their reactions.

Most of my other favorites were probably mostly the gimmick stories. "I'm in Love with a German Film Star" is a list of songs that the narrator associates with a specific actress, possibly fictional, identified only as 'Magda,' whom he has a crush on, and a vignette about each song explaining the association.

"What Remains of Claire Blanck" is a series of mostly empty pages, with the notations for footnotes placed as though at the end of specific sentences, and the notes themselves at the foot of each page. The notes are a mix of identifying the role of a sentence in the non-existent story, explaining some of the supposed imagery (always something white or blank), and playful touches like praising the way something is written.

"A Brief History of the Short Story" is actually three very short stories. In the first, an old French man spends his morning in a cafe and reads a newspaper story about America. In the second, a minor Soviet bureaucrat goes to buy vodka before some friends come over, and happens to read a story about the old Frenchman. In the third, a young American author reads the Russian story while hanging out in a coffee shop, then sees a newspaper with the story the Frenchman read. I liked this one, but thought it would've been more successful if the third part reenacted the newspaper story instead of just featuring it as a prop.

Near the beginning, there are three stories in a row that supposedly give non-fictional accounts of minor figures involved in the early days of photography. Near the end, there's a trio of stories, including the collection title, about famous people having a day off. "St Augustine Checks His Twitter Feed" is the best of these three.

Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells

 
 

Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells

The Best of Early Vanity Fair

edited by Graydon Carter

Penguin

2014 

 

 

It's been kind of an eventful month, right? I've probably spent more time reading the news than reading any of the books I have started. Plus I took a trip, and spent almost the whole time visiting and chatting. But in typical booklover's hubris, I packed my bags with the answers to the questions 'what if I finish my book?' and 'what if I finish my backup book?' and, embarrassingly, 'what if I finish my BACKUP backup book?' Well, I didn't finish anything, and carried a lot of extra weight for nothing, but I was glad that my main read was a collection of short essays, just the thing for times when there are too many competing demands on one's attention.
 

Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells is a collection of articles published in Vanity Fair in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s. Of the 400 or so pages, the 1910s and 30s each get about a hundred pages, and the 20s fill half the book with the other two.
 
Compared to An Editor's Burial, which was a tightly focused collection of New Yorker articles meant to show off certain authors and specific subjects, BBFS is clearly intended to show off Vanity Fair's range, and I suspect, to flaunt as many famous names as possible, even if it's hard to believe that what they wrote was in any sense 'the best' of anything. (I'm thinking especially of AA Milne's dull account of publishers thinking his author bio was too boring...) These pieces are all much shorter than the New Yorker reprints too, usually only 3 or 5 book pages long. I bet most of these would've fit on a single magazine page, maybe two if they had to share space with advertising or illustrations.
 
Most of the articles are nonfiction essays, although there are a handful of short stories and a smattering of poetry by the likes of Dorothy Parker, Edna St Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, and TS Eliot. The best of these, I think, was ee cumming's "When Calvin Coolidge Laughed," which blurs the line between story and prose poem and depicts nationwide rioting and disorder in a sing-song tall-tale voice in response to the shock of hearing Coolidge sound happy. Colette's story "The Woman Behind the Mask," which shows a husband's jealous shock at spotting his wife having an awfully good time at an Eyes Wide Shut style masked orgy, which he'd snuck out to after telling her he'd never go to such a thing, was also pretty good.
 
The nonfiction pieces are a blend of trend reporting and profiles of famous people, and depending on how you look at it, those might not even count as two different kinds of things. My favorites were the satirical trend pieces, which rather than straight reporting, subjected whatever fad or style to some gentle fun. I loved PG Wodehouse's "The Physical Culture Peril" about the danger that fitness and exercise will make you a boring conversationalist; Hyman Strunsky's "Are Odd Women Really Odd?" in defense of women's suffrage, employment, and sexual freedom; and F Scott Fitzgerald's metafictional "This is a Magazine," which is a script for a short play where all the characters are different types of magazine articles.
 
Much of the regular reporting lacks flair by contrast, even when the subject should be intrinsically interesting, like Samuel Chotzinoff's condensed (and kind of racist) history of jazz or Bertrand Russell's explanation of behaviorism. There were a few that stood out to me, both for their quality and foresight. Robert Sherwood's "The Higher Education on the Screen" fears what kids are learning about the world from the movies. Walter Lippman's "Blazing Publicity," which depicts newspaper and other media coverage as a spotlight that subjects certain people and events to intense scrutiny, one at a time, before moving on to the next thing, and leaving whatever happens outside that spotlight comparatively 'in the dark,' which still sounds more or less like how it's done today. Walter Winchell's "A Primer of Broadway Slang" surprised me, because I knew almost every term he mentioned, a few from watching so much Looney Tunes growing up, but mostly because they left the backstage, entered the common tongue, and are still in circulation now.
 
While women's rights are mostly referred to positively, especially earlier in the book, Aldous Huxley got an essay to complain that sex outside of marriage shouldn't be considered 'modern' (or by implication, 'good'); DH Lawrence warns that while women seem to enjoy having sex for pleasure, they're sure to soon regret jettisoning romance and marriage; and Clarence Darrow totally beclowns himself by waxing nostalgic about the great discursive community that used to be found in barbershops before men could easily shave at home, and then concludes that it's women voting and getting short haircuts that's really ruining things, and that men are now an oppressed minority. Yes, even a hundred years ago, there were men whining that any little advance for women meant that men were being persecuted and we'd better turn back whatever gains we'd made toward equality before it was too late. It's sometimes hard to tell if these guys are sincerely panicking or making a cynical bad faith argument in the hope that it's more persuasive than raw misogyny would be, but it hardly matters because they're always wrong. They always think any step toward equality is 'too far' because what they really want is more in-equality, specifically the kind that favors themselves. (There's a similar sort of White reaction to any advancement for people of color that's just as awful.)
 
The celebrity profiles again mostly seem like editor Graydon Carter simply wanted to show off all the people who wrote for Vanity Fair and all the people they wrote about. We get so-so stories about Picasso, James Joyce, Cole Porter, Harpo Marx. The best one, I think, was Janet Flanner's "The Grand Guillotiner of Paris" about how even in the 1930s, being a French executioner was a hereditary position endowed by the state, and the family privately owned the only working guillotines in the country. Darwin Teilhet also has an interesting piece about the then-ubiquitous Tarzan and the many, many licensing opportunities Edgar Rice Burroughs used to get the character into books, magazines, the movies and Sunday newspaper comic strips, and working as an ad spokesman for countless products. Unlike a lot of the others pieces, those seem to be here due to sheer quality, rather than because they talk about something modern readers are likely to strongly associate with the time period.

The Armed Garden, and Other Stories

 
 

The Armed Garden, and Other Stories

by David B

translated by Kim Thompson

Fantagraphics

2006, reprinted 2011

  

 

There's a rare pleasure in wandering stacks of bookshelves, picking out a volume because it somehow catches your eye, discovering that you've never heard of this title or author before, flipping through, and feeling that spark of interest and curiosity that makes you want to take it home. Librarians call this 'serendipitous discovery,' and in this age that overflows with reviews, recommendations, suggestions, referrals, coming soons, see alsos, and curated lists, it's not how I, or most people, find most of the books they read, but it's how I found David B's The Armed Garden, and Other Stories, in a used bookstore in Portland, tucked between trade paperbacks of Aquaman and The Avengers.

Rare too is the pleasure of reading a book you found this way, discovering something unlike what you usually read, maybe unlike anything you've ever read before, discovering something of quality, something you really enjoy, and that you found by happenstance, that you wouldn't have found any other way. That sort of thing doesn't happen every day. You want to savor it when it does. The Armed Garden is something special, and I'm glad I picked it out.

This is a graphic novel, a collection of three short stories, fantasy stories set amid the historic past. All three are medieval. Not in the sense of high fantasy, with princesses and knights. There are rulers, yes, and soldiers, but also fervent religious faith, competing heresies, and deeply weird magic that operates on a kind of fairy tale logic, outside of human control. These stories resemble tales from the Bible, or folk tales, stories that people might've shared alongside gossip of a neighbor's house-sized vegetables, or the miraculous birth of rabbits to a virgin one village over.

In the first story, 'The Veiled Prophet,' the wind blows a piece of cloth onto the face of a fabric merchant. It gets stuck there, allowing him to assume the forms of Jesus, Adam, Moses, but anyone who sees his true face dies. He amasses an army of followers, and the attention of the caliph, who sends his own army.

In the title story, 'The Armed Garden,' a crusader receives a vision that compels him to strip naked and find a new Eden. Many people join him, in his nudity, and his earthly paradise, including wild animals, and even walking trees, all carrying swords. Other crusaders come to destroy the garden, though its leader has become a star.

In the last story, 'The Drum That Fell in Love,' a mercenary captain is killed in battle, and his company has him, skinned, tanned to leather, and stretched to become a drum skin. When the drum is played, he returns as a ghost. The mercenaries carry the drum into battle, but eventually they're defeated, and the drummer, who's fallen in love with the ghost, runs off with the drum. The girl and the drum have more adventures together, including finding the physical location of heaven.

Each story has a weird, dream-like quality to it. There's none of the systematic, almost science-like logic that many contemporary fantasy stories apply to their magic. This is like something older, something pre-modern. David B's art is mostly black and white, with a bit of sepia shading. There's a very good match between the feel of the art and the tone of the stories.

Children are Civilians Too

 
Children are Civilians Too

by Heinrich Boll

translated by Leila Vennewitz

Penguin

1970, reprinted 1995

 

 

Originally printed in 1970, a couple years before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Children are Civilians Too is a collection of German author Heinrich Boll's short stories published 1947-1950, with the majority from 50.

This collection fits 26 stories into about 190 pages. The earlier stories, especially, tend to be on the short side. There are a lot of 3-5 page entries, only a handful 10 or longer. Almost all of Boll's stories are told in the first person, really only a couple have a third-person narrator. For the most part, these are not stories where much happens externally. Instead we stick close to our main character while they complete a single task or experience a single emotion, usually a kind of acceptance of loss or disappointment.

Most of Boll's stories are about soldiers or veterans. They're not about combat, but about moments in between. There are several stories about soldiers enjoying a night out drinking while on leave; in one, "That Night We Were in Odessa," they're broke but pawn their possessions so they can get schnapps and sausage, a good last meal, because they expect to die the next day when they're redeployed.

We also see soldiers in field hospitals. In the title story, a man with a head wound buys baked goods from a Russian girl who sneaks on-base. In my favorite, "Stranger Bear Word to the Spartans We...," the injured soldier realizes he's being treated in his old high school, which he left less than a year earlier, his own handwriting is still on a chalkboard, copying out a classical quotation. In "Lohengrin's Death," it's a little boy who dies in the hospital, if a morphine overdose, after breaking his legs while trying to steal coal from a moving train.

Veterans after the war often want work or have a poorly-paid and low-status job. Or perhaps they hope in vain to see someone again, perhaps at a train yard. Even former bootleggers want straight jobs, and will take whatever task they can get. In the sole scifi story, "My Sad Face," an unemployed man is arrested and rigorously beaten, according to police regulations, for failing to look as happy as the law requires, in a futuristic totalitarian state.

I would say that these stories mostly speak to their specific time, and to Germans who had to reckon with the fact that their country, their public, had largely accepted the patriotic justifications for war, and gone into it willingly, eagerly, while the conditions for soldiers were awful.

Boll doesn't mention the Holocaust, and there's no real hint of the idea that it was wrong of Germany to inflict war on others. But he does pretty thoroughly dismantle any image of being a soldier as noble or romantic or heroic. Boll's soldiers are working men with a particularly shitty job they were told would be better. In some ways, it reminds me of Americans' attitude toward our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We can see now that our justifications were hollow, and that the wars were bad for 'the troops' they were supposedly fought in support of, but we mostly don't think about what we did to the Iraqi or Afghani people, what they suffered, how many of them died.

I think Boll is better known for some of his other writing, but "Stranger Bear Word to the Spartans We..." is very good. It's probably my second-favorite of his stories, after "Action Will be Taken!," which isn't in this collection.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Science Fiction

 

 

 

The Seven Deadly Sins of Science Fiction

edited by Isaac Asimov, Charles Waugh, and Martin Greenberg

Fawcett Crest

1980

 

 

The Seven Deadly Sins of Science Fiction is an anthology of short stories that are ostensibly about things like pride, lust, envy, etc. As a collection, it's not very coherent. There are nine stories - three set in something like the present, the rest at varying points in the future. And while the book itself was published in 1980, six of the stories are from the 50s, two from the 60s, and only one from the 70s. There are nine because gluttony gets two (ha ha) and avarice and covetousness are counted separately.
 
It kind of feels like some of the stories got picked because Asimov had a publishing intern run a search for ones that literally include the name of the vice somewhere in the text. A couple seem to include a character who actually has the vice, a couple others perhaps seem like ironic commentary on the vice, and in the other cases, the connection is more tenuous. To the extent the stories have anything in common, it's that most of them would make okay Twilight Zone episodes.
 

Jack Vance's "Sail 25" gets sloth. It's about a student crew taking a solar sail spaceship to Mars and back. Their hardass, House-like instructor spends the whole flight in his captain's quarters, telling them they'll live or die on their own merits, and berating for not living up to his standards. He's probably also sabotaging the ship to really put them through their paces. One nice detail - when we first meet the instructor, his appearance suggests he was badly burned; half the story later, his one helpful suggestion is that he once saw a student set on fire by the reflection from the sail. In retrospect, he himself must've been that student.
 
Judith Merril's "Peeping Tom," the lust selection, is about a guy who learns psychic powers from a village elder during the Vietnam War and uses them to have sex with a lot of women. This story and the next one probably fit the supposed theme of the book best; they were also the two I enjoyed least.
 
For envy, we get "The Invisible Man Murder Case" by Henry Slesar. An aging locked-room mystery writer who hates the new pulp and noir crime novels uses an invisibility device to commit seemingly impossible murders and drive up sales of his own books. This story was at least twice as long as it needed to be, making everything belabored and obvious.
 

Asimov chose one of his own stories for pride - "Galley Slave," which is about a robot company that leases a university a new robot that's supposed to free up faculty time for research by performing 'intellectual drudgery' like copy-editing the galley proofs of books before they're published ... or grading student papers! I was disappointed that Asimov didn't seem to consider the possible downsides of this robot - in light of all the downsides we're experiencing from generative AI right now - but in fairness, the invention of Spell Check, for example, probably did in fact mostly enable people to do more of the good parts of writing.
 
The story takes place at a trial after something has gone wrong. It turns out the ignorant, prejudiced sociology professor tricked the poor robot into sabotaging his forthcoming book, then ordered it to lie about this. Then he sued the manufacturer for the robot ruining his professional reputation. Fortunately, the heroic robot psychologist deduces what happened, and tricks the sociologist into revealing what he did at trial.
 
Asimov seems pretty triumphalist about all this, as though this was the one and only possible way someone could misuse the robot. I feel like if someone can get the robot to hurt themselves to embarrass the manufacturer, they can probably get the robot to hurt someone else for more comprehensible motives, a possibility Asimov doesn't really seem to consider. And in our world today, the people getting killed by self-driving cars, for example, aren't activists committing suicide, they're not even the victims of a hacker using the cars as weapons, they're simply people who put too much trust in a device and a manufacturer that doesn't deserve it.
 
For anger, we get "Divine Madness" by Roger Zelazny, a good and very short story that doesn't at all belong in this collection, about a man grieving his girlfriend who recently died in a car crash. He then lives several days backward in time, then resumes going forward at just the right moment to fix what he regrets and stop her from driving off and getting in a wreck after they argued. The descriptions of time moving backward were quite well-done.
 
For gluttony, we get two by Frederick Pohl. First, the best story in here, "The Midas Plague." In a future where all manufacturing is automated, the robots who make everything make way too much of it. Allowing any of this stuff to be 'wasted' by storing it, destroying it, recycling it, is unthinkable. And so, it is every citizen's patriotic duty to consume, use, and use up all this bounty. Everyone has ration cards to track their required consumption, with the poor required to live in overstuffed mansions while the rich get to enjoy minimalism.

 
Pohl's not trying to establish a rigorously plausible future economy here, he's writing satire. And at one go, his upside-down world manages capture the hardship of going hungry and doing without on WWII-era rations, and the shocking reversal of burgeoning post-war consumer economy, and the way that new forms of credit could lead to debt traps. It's kind of brilliant that he speak to both experiences at once!
 
And I think he manages to speak to our current situation, when people are using LLMs and generative AI to pump an endless streams of 'content' into an already oversaturated internet, where everyone wants likes and clicks and subscribes, our money sure, but especially our attention and our time. Pohl's world reminds me of how online ads are just riots of bright colors, autoplaying videos, annoying sounds, while so many people who are able are creating quiet minimalist spaces instead.
 
Pohl's story tells us nothing about gluttony, though it does force us to think about what counts as 'waste.' I say this as someone who only even read this book because I was trying to pare down my bookshelves, but somehow it felt like 'a waste' to get rid of it without reading it first - an impossible standard to follow in every case, but a trap that caught me this time nonetheless.
 

The Internet Archive has a copy of the story as it originally appeared in Galaxy magazine, and an audio play version produced by the BBC.

Pohl's "The Man Who Ate the World" takes place a bit in the future, when mandatory over-consumption has been replaced by Star Trek-like post-scarcity. Except for one man, who grew up during the bad old days, and is making a problem by using too much because he's trying to be a virtuous person. It's fine, but not as interesting as the original.
 
Averice is Poul Anderson's "Margin of Profit," which kind of reads like a math word problem padded out to a story. Space pirates are kidnapping and enslaving crews in one region of space. The crew union is threatening a strike rather than keep flying through that region. What's an interstellar shipping magnate to do? Anderson's guy heroically does the math, and discovers that as long as he remains sociopathically indifferent to crew safety, he can arm a fraction of his ships and eventually outlast the pirates in a war of attrition. And since the pirates are also perfectly rational profit maximizers, they surrender to his superior logic once he explains it.
 
The last story is the one from the 70s, "The Hook, the Eye, and the Whip" by Michael Conley, which is cast as covetousness. This was pretty good, but also awfully bleak in its view of human nature. The plot revolves around people getting ready for, and then competing in, a higher speed, more dangerous version of parasail racing. In this future, criminals can get sentence reductions by becoming the personal slave, and on-call organ donor, for a specific free person. There's a women's antislavery club, but Conely writes them as essentially insincere. They don't care about anyone's well-being; they just want an excuse to have club functions and occasionally yell at someone.
 
One of the racers has a slave, and people have been maimed and killed in previous races, but don't worry, even when things go wrong, he manages to not get hurt, and actually his slave was never in any real danger, since his prison sentence ended a few days before the race, so wouldn't have been forced to donate an organ regardless. So, that ending is far too convenient, and despite how dismal the world was, Conely seemed waaay too sympathetic to the men who used enslaved labor. I also found most of his descriptions of the boat race, or even the boats themselves, difficult to translate into a mental picture. But I liked that his characters were basically ordinary people without the power to simply change the world by personal fiat.

Nanotech

 

Nanotech

edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois

Ace Books

1999

 

 

I'm halfway through a short but emotionally intense literary novella and needed a little break before continuing. Nanotech, an anthology of scifi short stories that were originally published in the early 90s. In the introductory essay, editors Dann and Dozois credit the 1986 nonfiction book Engines of Creation with more or less single-handedly inspiring nanotech as a topic for science fiction. Writing in 1999, they also note that at some point, nanotech became a basically ubiquitous part of the consensus vision of the future. Very very small robots of the type imagined here do not exist yet (and might never) but I think they're still a common form of imaginary future-tech today.

I'd be curious to know what uses Engines of Creation proposed for nanoscale robotics. The most common use in this collection is medical technology. All but two stories think of nanotech primarily as something that goes inside of people to supplement our own biological processes, to keep us healthy and young in ways the unassisted could only dream of. In a couple stories, the nanobots are also capable of changing our minds, allowing people to voluntarily choose to make themselves feel emotions or believe truths, and to make themselves permanently incapable of not feeling or not believing those things afterward.

I think every story in this collection is pessimistic. (Ironic, since I turned to it for a bit of emotional relief.) The nanotech either doesn't work as intended in some dangerous way, or it does, but it's the intentions themselves that are bad.

The most famous works in the collection are Greg Bear's "Blood Music," where sentient medical nanos decide to convert their human hosts to unmoving tree-like creatures, and decide to spread to as many new hosts as possible, Greg Egan's "Axiomatic," where a man who wants revenge on the guy who killed his wife buys a nano drug that will allow him to stop believing in the sanctity of human life, with one expected and one surprise consequence, and Stephen Baxter's "The Logic Pool," where a scientist on a moon of Neptune programs nano computers to competitively evolve new theories of mathematics.

Baxter's story is unusual for being set in the far future, and for imagining nanobots mostly as a computing medium. The others are all set in the present day or near future.

In the worst story, Michael Flynn's "Remember'd Kisses," a man mourning his dead wife uses nanobots to biologically and psychologically overwrite a homeless woman's body and mind to turn her into a facsimile. (Seeing a pattern here?)
 

The last dead wife story, Kathleen Ann Goonan's "Sunflowers," follows a man whose wife died after ingesting terrorist nanos. They allowed her to more easily envision possible futures, and tempted her to keep on imagining to the point of self-destruction. The man voluntarily takes the same nano drug to understand why his wife chose to die. He's aided in getting through his initial trip by another woman who once took the same drug at a party, and by viewing Van Gogh's paintings with her. Because they've taken the drug, they'll both have to resist its temptation for the rest of their lives. Goonan seems to understand the almost gravitational pull that the idea of death can have on the mind of a depressed person, and that psychological realism strengthens her story. This actually seems a lot like Inception, just with a very different future tech at its center. Darryl Gregory has stories like "Damascus" and "Second Person, Present Tense" where people experience externally imposed psychological states, but he imagines prions and pharmaceuticals, not nano drugs, as the source of the ideas you can't un-think.

Ian McDonald, in a story that later grew into the novel Evolution's Shore, gives us the closest to a 'gray goo' scenario when alien nanos start xeno-morphing Africa into a copy of their native planet's environment. 'Gray goo' is the result of nanobots that disassemble everything they touch and turn them into more nanos, so this is close, but distinct. "Blood Music" is also a disaster, but the humans are getting remade into better hosts, not just into heaps of bots. "The Logic Pool" actually ends with a true gray goo event, but fortunately it's a small uninhabited Neptunian moon that gets eaten, rather than Earth.

The best story in the collection is the novella "We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy" by David Marusek, someone I've never read or even heard of outside this collection. It's set a few hundred years in the future,  after present-day humanity discovers nanobots as a source of eternal youth and biological immortality. Because few people die, few are permitted to be born, so most people who are alive in this future were born before immortality was discovered, in our present day. There's a caveat here that there's a servant class of clones who apparently lack the full rights of personhood, including the right to immortality, and they are all much younger.

Marusek's world is permeated with nanobots, and besides the ones in our bodies, they're mostly hostile. All cities are domed to filter out the 'nasties' that fill the air and water of the outside world. A powerful organization simply called the Militia monitors for nasties that get inside the domes or inside human bodies, and protects the welfare of the collective at the violent expense of the infected individual.

"Out of Our Minds" follows a millionaire artist who falls in love with and marries a billionaire lawyer, just before the lawyer's star really starts rising when she gets involved with the government. The pair are even permitted to conceive a baby, which is why they're as happy as the title suggests. While telling their love story, Marusek shows us the world, and skillfully foreshadows just how badly someone can be ruined by a single rogue nano nastie, and by the Militia's predictable overreaction. While his wife is probably the real target, it's the poor artist who eventually succumbs to the doom we've feared was coming from the first page of the story. There's always someone jealous of another's good fortune, inevitable as the evil eye.

Marusek has the most complete vision of how nanotechnology might change the world on a societal scale. What will it look like when health, youth, and petty revenge are no longer restricted to a handful of mad scientists smuggling their latest discoveries out of the lab to use for personal reasons - when the changes are produced industrially, and affect everyone, everywhere? In this collection, really only Marusek has an answer. He's not looking at the very first moment of change, but at what comes after, when the transformation is complete.

The Castle of Crossed Destinies

 
The Castle of Crossed Destinies
by Italo Calvino

translated by William Weaver

Harcourt Brace

1969 and 1973, reprinted 1976

 

 

The Castle of Crossed Destinies is like Italo Calvino's Canterbury Tales or his Decameron, although unfortunately, I only mean that in terms of form and content, not quality. This is not Calvino's best work.
 
Calvino is known for using gimmicks and tricks to provide structure to his work, and then to tell stories within the lattice his rules have established. In this case, he takes a deck of tarot cards, lays them out in a grid, then tries to come up with sensible stories by following one card to the next, up and down the columns, and across the rows.
 
In fact, he performs this party trick twice, once using an Italian tarot deck as his inspiration, and then again using a French deck with different art. (I believe that these two novellas were originally published separately; in English they only appear in a combined edition.) His second attempt is notably better than the first.
 
So, the conceit here is that Calvino and other storytellers are in a castle or tavern, they are all rendered mute, and they take turns telling their stories by laying out the tarot cards. Calvino interprets what they must mean, and we are led to believe that everyone in the castle has the same interpretive experience and achieves the same understanding. Then, once the grid is finished, Calvino looks at the completed layout and sees other possible stories.
 
Also, the interpretations are supposed to be based less on the traditional symbolic meaning of the card and more on its specific artistic rendering. Aiding this process is the fact that on each page, images of the cards mentioned on that page are reproduced in the side margin. It both makes the book visually very interesting to look at, and being able to see the cards he's describing definitely enhances the reading experience. Once the full tarot grid is assembled, that's reproduced too, once for each version. This is what the French tarot grid looks like:

 

 
In the first version, Calvino spends so much time explaining how he slowly, haltingly, confusedly moves from looking at the card art and watching the storytellers' facial expressions and body language to arriving at a narrative that the stories are overwhelmed by his imaginary translation of their telling. In the second version, he still points to specifics in the art a lot, but gets out of his own way a bit more, which helps a lot.
 
The images on tarot cards are meant to be archetypal, and Calvino's stories all feature archetypal medieval characters - though the plots tend to go off the rails compared to the originals, and they often end in chaos, either with an apocalyptic disaster, or else with several stories converging until it seems like every character is the same character and every tale is the same tale.
 
So we get a lot of knights and queens, nuns and alchemists, Faust and Parsifal, Hamlet, Merlin, the paladin Roland. Angelic women, Death, and the Devil all show up repeatedly. We don't get much in the way of characterization or interiority. What the cards produce are characters and events, not really motive or psychology. Whenever Calvino stops narrating the translation process, the plots can move at a breakneck pace.
 
As a thought experiment, this is interesting. As a work of fiction, I don't think it's particularly successful. Calvino's playfulness, his allusions to classic literature, and his subversion of traditional story endings are all kind of fun, but for me, they were outweighed by the belabored way he showed his work of moving from card to text.

Gigantic Worlds

 
Gigantic Worlds

edited by Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto

Gigantic Magazine

2015

 

 

Gigantic Worlds is an anthology of science fiction short stories, specifically short shorts or 'flash fictions.' It was intended to be the first book put out by Gigantic Magazine, but it ended up being the only one, because the publisher folded not long afterward. Which seems like kind of a shame. I learned of its existence years afterwards thanks to a review at Tor.com.

 
The 51 stories include a couple ringers - reprints of stories by Philip K Dick and JG Ballard. The rest were by contemporary authors, some I recognized, most I didn't. The most famous names include Ted Chiang (whose story about predestination I'd actually read before,) Alissa Nutting, Laird Barron, Johnathan Lethem (whose piece isn't really scifi, just an account of a man unaware he has a bleeding head wound on a video call,) Charles Yu, Brian Evanson. Maybe ⅓ of the stories are by women.

 
The book is divided into five thematic sections, named for the classical elements, plus Cosmos. The stories in Hydro mostly do involve rain or ocean or some other kind of water, and the ones in Ignis are often more violent, but I would mostly say the themes were quite loose.

 
My favorite stories were one told from the perspective of a software program, one about an office microwave that accidentally opens a hole in space-time, a parable about sexual morality set among bird people, a time-traveler trying to prevent the creation of a specific painting (without killing the artist,) and several written like fictional encyclopedia entries.

 
Beyond my favorites, plenty of the others were pretty good. For the ones I didn't like some seemed, in their brevity, to forget to have a point, some tried to allude to ... something? ... but were too vague and distant for me to get what they were trying to signify, and a few played such complex games with language that I couldn't get past the surface to even see if there was anything inside. One annoyed me by claiming to be a found story from 1928 and being utterly unconvincing.

Gentlemen Callers

 
Gentlemen Callers

by Corinne Hoex

translated by Caitlin O'Neil

Dalkey Archive
2017, reprinted 2022

 

 

Gentlemen Callers is maybe halfway between Hilary Leichter's Temporary and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, but for sex.

 
Each night, an unnamed woman, who is presumably a partially-fictionalized version of Hoex herself, dreams of a sexual encounter with a man she's encountered in her waking life, mostly men with service industry jobs. 

 
Each chapter, each dream, is a vignette, maybe 1 - 2½ pages long, and introduced with an epigraph vaguely about the man's profession quoted from the French literary canon. Each vignette seems like the amplification of someone's passing thought when she spots a good-looking stranger, magnified and expanded into an imaginative, poetic wet dream.

 
In one dream, Hoex is a cloud, and a pilot flies around and through her until she rains. In another, she is the sand, and the beach attendant rakes her. She's a Persian cat, and the groomer brushes her until she offers her belly. She is a stream, and a construction worker splashes her on his face and chest to cool off before drinking his fill. Hoex seems to like men who are skilled with their hands.

 
In some dreams, she stays human. In a few, she ends up disappointed. Her adventures are mostly told through metaphor and analogy, but Hoex also isn't afraid of a simple dirty pun (as when she snuggles close to a beekeeper to avoid being stung but still feels a little prick), or a straightforward porn scenario (as when she watches the butcher work, he asks her if there's anything else he can do for her, and she answers knowingly, 'I think perhaps there is.')

 
This is a short book, but it's better not to read it too quickly. Hoex's encounters with her gentlemen aren't usually smutty in a conventional way, but you can also enjoy the breadth of her imagination and her playful, joyous use of language. While I can't independently verify the quality of O'Neil's translation, the syntax here seemed agile and playful, which matches the tone set by the content, so I think it's faithful in that sense.