Category: Short Fiction

Peter Watts, ‘The Things’ (2010)

24th August 2010 / / 1 Comment

A new season of the Torque Control Short Story Club begins this weekend, and I thought I’d take a look at the first piece up for discussion, especially as it’s by Peter Watts, an author I’ve been meaning to read for some time. I glanced at the comments before reading the story, which gave me some useful context – Watt’s tale is a response to John Carpenter’s film The Thing, which I haven’t seen; but reading a plot synopsis gave me an idea of the background. I don’t suppose it’s necessary to know about The Thing to understand ‘The Things’, but it did deepen my appreciation of the story.

So: a research station in Antarctica has been attacked by a creature able to take on the forms of its victims; only two survivors remain at the end of the movie, Childs and MacReady. Watts posits that ‘Childs’ is actually the creature in disguise, and tells his tale from its point of view – and what a beautifully unsettling depiction of a non-human intelligence this is. The creature in ‘The Things’ is no mindless monster, but a highly intelligent being whose awareness is suffused throughout its being, which is what allows it to assimilate others. There’s a certain grandeur, even a kind of nobility, about the way this being presents itself:

I was so much more, before the crash. I was an explorer, an ambassador, a missionary. I spread across the cosmos, met countless worlds, took communion: the fit reshaped the unfit and the whole universe bootstrapped upwards in joyful, infinitesimal increments. I was a soldier, at war with entropy itself. I was the very hand by which Creation perfects itself.

And now, here it is on Earth, faced with humans who can’t partake of its ‘communion’, because their intelligence is held within a specific part of the body. The whole concept of this is abhorrent to the creature, who views the human brain as a kind of tumour. And so, the creature becomes a monster to the human characters, because its motivations are as unfathomable to them as theirs are to it. All is very effectively done by Watts, and the second Short Story Club is off to a great start.

D.P. Watt, ‘Apotheosis’ (2010)

20th August 2010 / / 2 Comments

One of the contributors to Null Immortalis has suggested I might find that William Meikle’s story gains greater resonance once I’ve read the book, because of the connections brought about by its context in the wider anthology. I suspect that will indeed happen – and here’s a story whose affect is certainly amplified by its context.

In Watt’s tale, S.D. Tullis is an enormously prolific and celebrated writer, whose secret is that his work is assembled from the solicited contributions of who-knows-how-many others. Our narrator is one such writer, who received a letter from ‘Tullis’ and responded with a short paragraph – and now obsessively checks Tullis’s output for signs of his contribution. ‘Apotheosis’ works enough well on its own as a character study and a story that hints at a hidden view of the world; but it works even better in Null Immortalis, whose structure echoes that of the work in the story.

Rating: ***½

Daniel Pearlman, ‘A Giant in the House’ (2010)

17th August 2010 / / 1 Comment

I love this kind of fantasy story, where the fantastic  elements slide from metaphor to concrete reality and back again, and can be read just as fruitfully either way. Pearlman’s narrator looks back on his relationship with his father, which began with him viewing his dad as a giant of a man, and grew worse as the protagonist his father’s shortcomings. At every stage, the father’s stature diminishes – figuratively and literally – in his son’s eyes, and the intertwining of reality and fantasy results in a very fine tale.

Rating: ****

William Meikle, ‘Turn Again’ (2010)

17th August 2010 / / 4 Comments

A shared interest in the building of a wind-farm leads Patty to begin conversing with the enigmatic Mr Tullis, who has much to say about the symbolic significance of the wheel shape described by the turbines’ blades, and is – of course – more than he seems. This is a short (four-page) tale that doesn’t quite pack all the emotional intensity for which I think it aims. Mr Tullis’s talk of ‘wheels within wheels’ successfully creates a frisson of wonder that there’s more to Meikle’s fictional reality than the world we know. But I feel that the emotional heart of the story takes off a little too late in proceedings for it to have quite as strong a pay-off as I’d have liked.

Rating: ***

Elsewhere
William Meikle’s website

Null Immortalis: Nemonymous Ten (2010)

16th August 2010 / / 3 Comments

It’s the end of the line: after ten years and as many volumes, Nemonymous has come to an end. For those unfamiliar with the concept, the stories in each volume were published without bylines, with the authors’ names being revealed at a later date. Null Immortalis is a little different: as it’s the final Nemonymous anthology, bylines are already assigned to the stories — which gives us the following contents list:

William Meikle, ‘Turn Again’

Daniel Pearlman, ‘A Giant in the House’

D.P. Watt, ‘Apotheosis’

S.D. Tullis, ‘The Return’

David M. Fitzpatrick, ‘Lucien’s Menagerie’

David V. Griffin , ‘Violette Doranges’

Ursula Pflug, ‘Even the Mirror’

Andrew Hook, ‘Love Is the Drug’

Joel Lane, ‘The Drowned Market’

Tim Casson, ‘The Scream’

Tony Lovell, ‘The Shell’

Gary Fry , ‘Strings Attached’

Derek John, ‘Oblivion’

Margaret B. Simon, ‘Troot’

Mike Chinn, ‘A Matter of Degree’

Richard Gavin, ‘Only Enuma Elish’

Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., ‘Icarus Above…’

Reggie Oliver, ‘You Have Nothing To Fear’

Rachel Kendall , ‘Holesale’

Roy Gray, ‘“Fire”’

Cameron Pierce, ‘Broom People’

Stephen Bacon, ‘The Toymaker of Bremen’

Mark Valentine, ‘The Man Who Made the Yellow God’

Steve Rasnic Tem, ‘The Green Dog’

Bob Lock, ‘Haven’t You Ever Wondered?’

Tim Nickels, ‘Supermarine’

I’ll be blogging these stories one at a time, with links appearing in the list above as I go.

(One last note before we start: last year, Nemonymous editor/publisher D.F. Lewis ran a competition to see who could match the greatest number of authors to their stories in the previous anthology, with the prize being the chance to appear as a character in every story in Null Immortalis. The winner was Scott Tullis, who is also a contributor to the book; I’m particularly intrigued to see what he’s written…)

Elsewhere

D.F. Lewis & Nemoymous website

Stories: Conclusion

4th August 2010 / / 1 Comment

Having reached the end of Stories (click here for the index of my posts), it’s time for a few remarks in closing. I’d characterise this as a solid anthology — a broad range of material, and nothing particularly bad (Gene Wolfe’s is probably the weakest story, and even that has a certain amount of interest). However, more stories fall into the ‘quite good’ bracket ( as opposed to the ‘good’ bracket) than I’d have liked, and this is what makes the anthology solid rather than spectacular for me.

What, then, are the best stories in Stories? Roddy Doyle and Jodi Picoult do interesting things with fantasy, and demonstrate how fruitful the results can be when ‘mainstream’ writers try their hand at the fantastic. Michael Swanwick, Jeffrey Ford, and Joe Hill contribute perhaps the best-told tales; and Kat Howard’s piece is a strong debut.

Finally, how far does the anthology meet its stated aim: to collect stories that encourage readers to ask ‘and then what happened’? Quite well, I think — for all the criticisms I might make of some 0f these stories, they’re rarely dull. I’m wary of saying that any anthology has ‘something for everyone’ — but I think Stories comes close.

Joe Hill, ‘The Devil on the Staircase’ (2010)

3rd August 2010 / / 1 Comment

And so, we reach the climax of the anthology, and this is a great way in which to end it. Hill tells of a boy who lives in Italy (towards, I’d surmise, the end of the 19th century), in a mountain village accessible only by a network of staircases cut into the cliffs. The boy has eyes for his cousin, Lithodora, and one day kills her lover in the heat of the moment. He then encounters a devil in the form of a child, who gives him a tin bird that sings a beautiful song when told lies.

Hill’s telling has the flow of a folktale; the rhythm of his prose is emphasised by the downward slopes in which the text is arranged on the page. Add to this a neat metaphorical undercurrent (the tin bird comes to represent the spread of propaganda), and you have a fine story indeed.

Rating: ****

Elsewhere
Joe Hill’s website

Elizabeth Hand, ‘The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon’ (2010)

3rd August 2010 / / 1 Comment

A museum exhibit designer takes it upon himself to restage the first flight of the Bellerophon, a Heath Robinson-esque aircraft which crashed in mysterious circumstances, and of which only a few seconds of film footage survives. At fifty pages, this is the longest story in the anthology — but it zips along so briskly that it feels only half its length. Told with brio, Hand’s tale is great fun, and saves a moment of real poignancy for the end.

Rating: ***½

Elsewhere
Elizabeth Hand’s website

Michael Moorcock, ‘Stories’ (2010)

1st August 2010 / / 3 Comments

I don’t quite know what to make of this. ‘Stories’ is the first-person account of a magazine editor reflecting on his friendship with a writer named Rex Fisch, who has recently committed suicide. The idea of telling stories in both fiction and real life runs through this piece, and Moorcock is doing something of this himself here — his narrator is named ‘Mike’ and apparently modelled on himself, whilst Rex Fisch and the other characters are apparently fictional. I’ve no idea how far Moorcock has fictionalised his own life in the story — and therein lies the difficulty I had connecting with it.

The portrait of the characters’ lives and relationships is interesting enough; but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I needed to know more about Moorcock’s life (and, perhaps, his work) to really appreciate this story. That’s why I’ve ended up feeling ambivalent about it.

Rating: ***

Elsewhere
‘Moorcock’s Miscellany’ website

Kurt Andersen, ‘Human Intelligence’ (2010)

31st July 2010 / / 1 Comment

A twist on the staple sf idea of an alien spy living on Earth, disguised as a human. In this story, the alien’s Arctic monitoring station is discovered by a scientist; the twist is that the scientist , far from trying to deny that she has found an extraterrestrial artefact, is so enthused at the thought of meeting an alien that she tracks down the spy’s house and pays him a visit. The knowingness of Andersen’s telling makes ‘Human Intelligence’ a pleasure to read; but, unfortunately, after such a good beginning, the story seems to fizzle out after a shaggy-dog-style revelation.

Rating: ***½

Elsewhere
Kurt Andersen’s website

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