Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar-Apr 2013 (36 page)

He comes upon a place called Story City, which seems promising except that it already has a secret of its own that you can probably guess from the title of the book. What follows is a fascinating take on the effects of totalitarianism that also includes some background information on what Bigby was up to during the second world war.

The art by Craig Hamilton and Jim Fern is simple but effective, and the story's gripping. It's a standalone piece that requires no previous knowledge of the series or even Bigby, though naturally there are deeper resonances for the readers who are familiar with Willingham's previous work.

I was particularly amused by Willingham's afterword describing how the book came to be. It turns out there really is a Story City, but what I found funny was Willingham going into a diner there and ordering a meal and a drink…and a story. The waitress just gave him a blank look, so he had to find one for himself.

And it's a good one.

Faery Tale: One Woman's Search for Enchantment in a Modern World
, by Signe Pike, Perigee Trade, 2011, $15.

I read non-fiction books for two reasons. The first is to get information. The second is for the writer's voice. When it comes to the latter, if the voice is interesting, it doesn't really matter what the book is about, I'll keep reading. (Which is a great way to find out about things you didn't think you cared about, but hey, once you're better informed, they turn out to be pretty fascinating after all.)

Now, I've never seen a faerie (outside of gatherings like FaerieCon or FaerieWorlds), but I like the idea of them, I suppose that's pretty obvious from my fiction, and I really enjoy reading about how the idea of searching for faeries and magic impacts peoples' lives, so I was sold on trying this book by its subtitle, "One Woman's Search for Enchantment in a Modern World."

The thing is, while people might set out to look for actual physical proof of faeries or magic, in the best of such quests the seeker eventually discovers that the spiritual connection they're looking for is actually inside themselves, and that the world is full of enchantments and glamour, albeit not necessarily of the fairy tale kind. And I know it's pretty much a cliché, but it's the journey that's important, and therefore of the most interest.

One of the first such books I read was Colin Wilson's
The Occult
, published back in 1971. Wilson was a skeptic and he wasn't looking for faeries, but in his search for the validity of magic in that book, and in the others that followed, he came across all sorts of fascinating things, including the phenomena of ley lines and the movement of Earth energies.

Which leads us along a rambly road through the decades to some of the current thoughts about faerie, which basically consider them to be some kind of sentient energies that we clothe in the garments of fairy tale characters so that our minds are able to "see" them.

And from there to this book.

Signe Pike was an editor at Random House who decided to take a sabbatical during which she would search for the existence of faeries and write a book about that search. It's part travelogue, part spiritual quest, part memoir. She has a good eye for detail and the story never lags—whether she's interviewing the Frouds (Brian & Wendy) in England, hiking in the highlands of Scotland, or coming to terms with her feelings about her father's passing.

Her voice is engaging and informal, so much so that I—and I'm sure many of her readers—would just like to sit down in the corner of a coffee house or pub for an evening of conversation with her. The book hits all the right notes—lyrical but still down to earth, a little woo-woo but with a healthy dash of skepticism, full of interesting characters and great descriptions of her travels.

Since it's unlikely that most of us will have that conversation in person with Pike, this charming book is the next best thing.

Material to be considered for review in this column should be sent to Charles de Lint, P. O. Box 9480, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1G 3V2.

 
American Science Fiction Novels of the Fifties
, ed. Gary K. Wolfe, Library of America, 2012, boxed set, $70.

 
Volume One, 1953-56: The Space Merchants
,
More Than Human
,
The Long Tomorrow
,
The Shrinking Man

 
Volume 2, 1956-1958: Double Star
,
The Stars My Destination
,
A Case of Conscience
,
Who?
,
The Big Time

 
THOSE among us who have looked up and around of late may suspect that there's a willful co-opting of genre underway. Celebrated mainstream writers without apology squeezing out science fiction, fantasy, and crime novels. Tussles online and off. Social-networking writers declaring that "literary" is simply another genre rife with its own blind spots and conventions. Or my favorite by far: Colson Whitehead admitting he'd rather "shoot himself in the face" than suffer through another literary vs. genre discussion.

So let's just clear our throat and move along. Nothing to see here.

Except. In the fifty-plus years science fiction has been an integral part of my life, I've watched waves lap in and recede, and I've walked among shoals of fish gasping on the strand. It has always seemed to me—a notion brought up repeatedly in my criticism—that a periodic return to science fiction's origins has been essential to restoking its fires. The same is true, I think, of the crime novel. That something muscular, primitive, even a bit shabby lies at their heart and accounts in part for their impact and power.

And now, it appears, the rest of the tribe's got onto us.

Previous Library of America volumes include historical anthologies of science fiction and fantastic tales, books from Shirley Jackson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and H. P. Lovecraft, three collections devoted to Philip K. Dick and two to Kurt Vonnegut. This latest entry celebrates the golden age of the science-fiction novel, a time in which signature idioms were being established and the field's ambition—its reach—rose like flood waters. These novels for which many of us paid thirty-five cents or a dollar in drugstores and bus stations and used bookshops have traded in their overalls and worn jeans and got dressed up to go into town.

It's a beautifully designed, beautifully produced set. Attractive box, comfortably sized volumes with some heft to them, great repro covers, good paper. And with Gary Wolfe editing, one can be sure of taste, knowledge, and discernment.

Beware though, aged children, of nostalgia rolling in like a wind across the plains. Many reading this column will have little need of plot summaries or reminders because these stories have become a part of who we are. I can remember where I was when I read each of these books the first time, the specific light, the sounds of traffic or insects or birdcalls around me, the clip-clop of rain on a roof.

Many too, I suspect, may find themselves of two minds regarding this enterprise, pleased with our little plot of land's having gained such recognition
(See, we knew all along!)
yet feeling at the same time a tug of loss for what has been so resolutely and privately
ours
.

As condiment for the novels themselves there's a great deal of ancillary material at the Library of America website (www.loa.org). This includes personal introductions for each novel by current writers such as Tim Powers, Neil Gaiman, and William Gibson, an introduction and two other brief pieces ("Historical Context" and "Why the 1950s?") by editor Wolfe, and a reprint of Robert Silverberg's essay "Science Fiction in the Fifties: The Real Golden Age."

Citing this very magazine's debut in 1949 as "the first harbinger of the new era" along with Galaxy's advent the following year, Silverberg reminds us that:

"Until the Fifties there was essentially no market for science fiction books at all. The paperback revolution had not yet happened; the big hardcover houses seemed not to know that science fiction existed…. All that changed in the Fifties. The mighty house of Doubleday began to publish hardcover science-fiction novels steadily, soon joined by Ballantine Books, an innovative company that brought its books out in simultaneous hardcover and paperback editions. The sudden existence of willing publishers was all the encouragement the new writers needed: and suddenly we had dozens of splendid novels in print in book form."

All today's science-fiction writers are deeply indebted to the dominant Fifties writers, Bob insists, to Bester and Sturgeon and Sheckley and Pohl and the rest, "for the fundamental body of ideas and technique with which they work today," a thesis well served by the nine novels selected here.

What may surprise is how well these novels hold up. Witnessing corporate artful dodger Mitch Courtenay prepare for battle—"As I dressed that morning I ran over in my mind the long list of statistics, evasions, and exaggerations that they would expect in my report"—it occurs to us that Pohl's and Kornbluth's
The Space Merchants
isn't showing its sixty years much at all. English 101's verisimilitude and Aristotle's recognitions right there on the page. And its teeth are still good.

The wondrous voice and language of Theodore Sturgeon gleam untarnished in
More Than Human
:

"The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear. His clothes were old and many-windowed. Here peeped a shinbone, sharp as a cold chisel, and there in the torn coat were ribs like the fingers of a fist. He was tall and flat. His eyes were calm and his face was dead."

Leigh Brackett's bildungsroman still grabs you from the first sentence,
The Long Tomorrow
, a template by which we measure hundreds of tales of social repression and relapsed civilizations. Richard Matheson's
The Shrinking Man
, diminished to less than a pinpoint, gains vision of the world's true vastness and possibilities:

"He stood in speechless awe looking at the new world with its vivid splashes of vegetation, its scintillant hills, its towering trees, its sky of shifting hues…Scott Carey ran into his new world, searching."

The Chilean poet Vincente Huidobros wrote: Invent new worlds & be careful what you say.

Exactly.

And that's just the first volume. We move then from social satire, shrinking men, shriveled civilizations and inchoate superbeings, to dramatized theology, political intrigues, the nature of identity, and individuals suspended in wars so all-embracing as to be the only existence they can ever know.

Talking about books that changed one's life is right up there with "making a difference" and "giving something back" on my list of blathermouth cliches. But two of these novels proved of tremendous importance to me.
More Than Human
, along with much of Sturgeon's work, first stirred within me the urge to write, and first brought me to consider that such might be possible. When years later, an earnest poet, I turned back to the science fiction I'd loved as a child, it was this novel and Bester's
The Stars My Destination
that I read and read again. Breathing them in, getting them in my blood.

"Bester strips the dross from classic mechanisms of fiction," William Gibson writes on the LoA website. "It made most of the rest of its assumed genre look hick."

And of
More Than Human
, Kit Reed remarks:

"It's still risky, exciting and fresh.… He showed me how to open [my stories] up.… He uses timing, cadence, selection, everything at hand to shape his story so organically that there's no separating the story from the telling."

This is about imagination and story. We mature, we create ourselves as human, by mimicking those around us, form gradually becoming content. We attain civilization by identifying with other individuals of our group. And we compose our own individuality, our selves, by patching together the stories we find around us: structures upon which we will superimpose our lives.

The stories we choose, or allow to be chosen for us, are important.

And that does often seem a central theme in these novels. Father Ruiz of James Blish's
A Case of Conscience
struggles to reconcile the stories by which he's led his life with the new reality he sees around him. Bester's Gully Foyle rewrites the given narrative of his life. The problematic robot of Algis Budrys's
Who?
is patently a revision, perhaps a whole new edition, of Lucas Martino. Robert Heinlein's
Double Star
with its spitballing actor is about becoming what we pretend to be, as a person and as a society. In
The Big Time
, Fritz Leiber's characters try to see one another and selves in the fog of stories that seem all event, with no glue, no true narrative, to hold those events together.

Leigh Brackett's juvenile protagonist in
The Long Tomorrow
speaks for all of us forever reaching, hoping to lay hands on the story that will keep us afloat: "Oh God, you make the ones like Brother James who never question, and you make the ones like Esau who never believe, and why do you have to make the in-between ones like me?"