INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014 (16 page)

MORPHOLOGIES: SHORT STORY WRITERS ON SHORT STORY WRITERS

edited by Ra Page

Comma Press pb, 204pp, £9.99

reviewed by Andrew J. Wilson

Manchester’s Comma Press is dedicated to promoting the short story form, and having published a raft of collections and anthologies, it has now added this compilation of critical essays to its list. Publisher Ra Page commissioned fifteen contemporary writers to discuss fifteen past masters. The idea was to assemble these structural interpretations in order to celebrate the diversity and idiosyncrasy that the form encourages.

In his playful introduction, Page dismisses the idea that
Morphologies
is an attempt to define a Platonic ideal: “The wonder of the short story – not to mention its unique political power – lies in its pluralism, its sheer variety and flexibility as a form.” He goes on to propose three distinct types of story, and discusses the use of misdirection, revelation, imagery and ritual. Page is refreshingly self-deprecating about his theorising, but it seems sound to me. In particular, his critical superstructure supports close readings of both mainstream and speculative fiction.

It’s fascinating that half of the authors under discussion wrote what can be argued to be SF, a slightly higher proportion than that represented in the writers discussing them, in fact. On the other hand, Katherine Mansfield is the only woman to have an essay devoted to her, and less than a third of the contributors are women. I’m not sure what to make of this, but if
Morphologies
is rather more male-dominated than the contemporary literary landscape, it seems to me that this must be by accident rather than design.

The book is chronological, so we begin with Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. Sara Maitland argues convincingly that Hawthorne’s stories represent magical realism
avant la lettre
. Poe was very much influenced by Hawthorne, of course. In fact, his well-known, though often misquoted, definition of the purpose of a short story as the achievement of “a certain unique or single effect” is taken from a review of
Twice-Told Tales
.

Three of the other authors dealt with in
Morphologies
– Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells and H.P. Lovecraft – all readily acknowledged that Poe’s tales had inspired their own work. However, it could well be argued that his literary criticism influenced many of the other writers in the book, even if only at second hand. Sean O’Brien proposes that Poe “sought to demonstrate the inescapable rightness of his own practice” by advocating concision, compression and unity of effect. Nevertheless, Poe’s theories about short story structure undoubtedly cast long shadows.

Morphologies
underlines the fact that distinctions between the realistic and the fantastic break down into incoherence in discussions of the short story.
Interzone
readers will be interested to discover that Brian Aldiss has chosen to write about Thomas Hardy. Adam Roberts tackles Rudyard Kipling, but not his overtly speculative work. Toby Litt amusingly describes his rather dysfunctional relationship with Franz Kafka. Ramsey Campbell’s contribution is a thoughtful essay on H.P. Lovecraft.

Notable contributions from the mainstream camp include a moving personal essay on Anton Chekov by Frank Cotterell Boyce. Ali Smith’s contribution focuses on the first three stories in James Joyce’s
Dubliners
, and shows that, while not inclined to twist endings, he favoured sudden mid-story changes of direction.

At the beginning of this review, I raised the question of whether short fiction should deal with an internal or external experience. If nothing else,
Morphologies
suggest that it is perfectly possible to do both. Similarly, the false dichotomy of the realistic versus the fantastic is well past its sell-by date.

Katharine Mansfield is often held up as one of the defining figures of the mainstream moment-of-psychological truth story. However, Alison MacLeod argues that: “There is a quietly visionary sense at work in Manfield’s mature work, a sense that reality […] is ‘porous’ (a favourite adjective for Mansfield in ‘At the Bay’). Division is an illusion.”

I would highly recommend this excellent book to anyone interested in how classic short fiction works. All of the contributors to
Morphologies
have their own unique angles on the craft, but each is constructive and informative. The truth is, all first-rate stories are unique; and that is what makes them great.

THE MADONNA AND THE STARSHIP

James Morrow

Tachyon pb, 192pp, $14.95

reviewed by Duncan Lunan

One respect in which SF differs from reality is that most stories take place in a world which has no science fiction, so the characters are unprepared for whatever they find to be happening. The exceptions tend to involve media sci-fi rather than written SF: in Mark Clifton’s
When They Come from Space
, ETs who’ve been watching our television broadcasts turn up in the form they expect us to expect. In
Galaxy Quest
, the cast of a long-running and strangely familiar TV series are abducted by aliens who think it’s all true. In Arthur C. Clarke’s story ‘Armaments Race’, one of the
Tales from the White Hart
, the special effects team of a US TV series have to produce a succession of ever-more-impressive death rays until they come up with a disintegrator which actually works. It’s probably no coincidence that most of
The Madonna and the Starship
takes place on the New York set of a very similar series in 1953. Dylan Thomas dies offstage halfway through the book, rather disappointingly since the characters know him and keep quoting him – in one scene going all round the line from
And Death Shall Have No Dominion
which James Blish used as a title just at that time.

The series may be imaginary but the sponsors are real: “BROCK BARTON AND HIS ROCKET RANGERS! Brought to you by Kellogg’s Sugar Corn Pops, with the sweetenin’ already on it, and Ovaltine, the hot chocolaty breakfast drink schoolteachers recommend!” In Britain at that time few homes had television but we did have
Dick Barton
on radio and
Dan Dare
on Radio Luxembourg, sponsored by Horlicks, and its deservedly forgotten rival sponsored by Ovaltine, which featured a flying saucer crewed by very Young Adults and armed with a nuclear weapon – used to trigger a volcanic eruption, much like the one on page seventeen of this book. James Morrow is only two years younger than myself. In the acknowledgements he claims that the inspiration for this book came from research rather than childhood memories, but I wonder.

“Even the grottiest pulp SF performs a salutary cultural function,” writes Morrow in his afterword. His characters do take their young audience seriously, to the extent that each episode is followed by a short science lesson from ‘Uncle Wonder’, urging their child star and their viewers to try experiments at home, always ending with the mantra ‘Safety first!’ In consequence they are visited by a delegation of Qualimosians – “by-God extraterrestrials, complete with crustacean physiognomy, insectile eyes and an antisocial agenda.” They’ve come to present the show with an award for its values, but also to wipe out irrationality wherever they find it, especially in religious belief. Unfortunately
Brock Barton
shares studio facilities with a Sunday morning religious show called
Not By Bread Alone
, and the only way to save the world is to subvert it and present a ‘special’ portraying the Christian story as a hoax.

In
The
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
, John Clute’s entry on Morrow concludes, “JM’s work has been likened to that of Kurt Vonnegut, and similarities are indeed very evident. But while Vonnegut never disbelieves in the medium of his art, JM has great difficulty giving credence to the artifices of fiction. This may be the price paid for passion and clarity of mind; and it may be a price worth paying.” The metafiction of
The Madonna and the Starship
might have been written in answer to that. Its central character is Kurt Jastrow, sharing his first name with you-know-who but his last name with a distinguished astronomer and science writer, the author of
Red Giants and White Dwarfs
(“a masterpiece of science” according to Wernher von Braun),
Until the Sun Dies
and
The Enchanted Loom
. Paddy Chayefsky called him “the greatest writer on science alive today” and Sir Bernard Lovell said of him “Very few scientists are capable of writing as fearlessly and honestly as Dr Jastrow”. Calling the character ‘Sagan’ would have been too obvious…but to whatever extent the Qualimosians represent the spirit of Richard Dawkins’
The God Delusion
, the ‘live and let live’ moral of
The Madonna and the Starship
is closer to Sagan’s
The Demon-Haunted World.
And what’s more, it’s funny! My one regret is that we don’t see more of the child star, Andy Tuckerman, who gets only one good line but whose similarity to ‘Zuckerman’, the passionate opponent of nuclear proliferation, suggests Andy might have been intended for a bigger role. But if his part in the story had to be abridged for publication, maybe that, too, was a price worth paying.

HOLLOW WORLD

Michael J. Sullivan

Tachyon pb, 384pp, $15.95

reviewed by Simon Marshall-Jones

If
you’d
just been diagnosed with a terminal illness, what would you choose to do in your remaining time? Go on a round-the-world cruise? Climb Mount Everest? Or maybe do what Ellis Rogers does: build a time machine and project himself into the future.

Rogers is an MIT-educated scientist, and the story opens with his being diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and given just six-to-twelve months to live. He’s trapped in a loveless marriage, but his wife Peggy still cares for him despite blaming him for the suicide of their son, and he spends most of his spare time either tinkering on his machine in the garage, or drinking with his buddy Warren, his intellectual, spiritual, and physical opposite. However, the terminal diagnosis has given him the impetus he needed to go ahead and try the machine out. Much to his surprise, the device works, and he zooms forward to what he thinks is two hundred years in the future.

He arrives in a forest on a seemingly abandoned world, with no signs of humanity apparent. Following the course of a river, he soon finds a familiar landmark, the Ford Museum, but still he finds no indications that anyone’s around – that is, until he hears the sound of someone being murdered. This is the turning point – the start of a new adventure.

The time travel device in
Hollow World
is secondary to the main thrust of the novel, merely serving as a literary hook upon which to hang the strands of the narrative. The future in which Rogers is pitched is not the two hundred years he calculated, but two millennia. Not only has the physical world changed, its inhabitants having moved underground, but homo sapiens itself has metamorphosed into a race of identical-looking, genderless, hairless mannequins who display none of the negative traits of humanity apparent in Rogers’ time. There’s no violence, everyone lives according to their own whims, sex and biological reproduction have been replaced by artificial means, no one dies, and no one gets ill. Society has changed immensely, its stratification turned upside-down, a place where artists and geomancers (what we would call meteorologists) being highly venerated.

Sullivan has, at least superficially, woven a sparky science-fiction yarn, but that would be too shallow a reading; there’s a lot more going on here than that. It explores the nature of love, one’s relationship to oneself and to others, to one’s environment and how it shapes human beings (both as individuals and collectively), as well as looking at how the Other is perceived. Rogers, known as a Darwin (as he was born through natural means), is a stranger in Hollow World, not just culturally but also physically, in essence being the alien. But it is Pax, the shy, sensitive bowler-hatted arbitrator, who not only shows him how to accept his new world, but also himself.

The other theme which pops up is one’s definition of paradise. Warren, his old drinking buddy, turns up, now the leader of a tiny community living on the planet’s surface who have embraced ‘the old ways’. Warren’s transference to the future also changed him, but in a more fundamental, less transcendent way. A fanatical God-fearing ‘Old West’ frontiersman, he wishes to institute the New United States of America, believing it his divinely-ordained mission. However, his definition of paradise amounts to nothing more than a reversion to the aggressive and competitive humanity of two millennia earlier, achieved by reintroducing genders, and simultaneously providing what amounts to a final solution with regards to all those who live below ground. Stopping him is Rogers’ own mission.

Sullivan writes fluidly, his vivid descriptions and characterisations being especially sharp. He paints the world in bright lights and shiny colours, while Ellis Rogers is drawn as being out of joint with the new world (having been similarly burdened in his own time) as well as a man heavily infected by guilt. Pax is entirely engaging, a wide-eyed innocent, albeit possessing some very special qualities. Warren is the antithesis of everything Rogers believes: Ellis is also Christian, but cleaving to the New Testament in contrast to his friend’s fire and brimstone Old Testament approach. In the latter part of the book, it is the dynamics between these two which drives the story along at its helter-skelter pace.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable and engaging story with a satisfying philosophical edge elevating it entirely. Recommended.