Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams

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Magic Dirt

- the Best of Sean Williams

by Sean Williams

No copyright 
 2013 by MadMaxAU eBooks

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CONTENTS

LUDIC DREAMING

A MAP OF THE MINES OF BARNATH

GHOSTS OF THE FALL

THE SOAP BUBBLE

THE MAGIC DIRT EXPERIMENT

NIGHT OF THE DOLLS

ATRAX

THE END OF THE WORLD BEGINS AT HOME

THE SEVENTH LETTER

EVERMORE

THE BUTTERFLY MERCHANT

RELUCTANT MISTY & THE HOUSE ON BURDEN STREET

THE GIRL-THING

ENTRÉ LES BEAUX MORTS EN VIE

PASSING THE BONE

A VIEW BEFORE DYING

TEAM SHARON

WHITE CHRISTMAS

THE MASQUE OF AGAMEMNON

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LUDIC DREAMING

JOHN HARWOOD

Magic Dirt
brings together the finest of Sean Williams’ stories from a career that has so far spanned sixteen years, during which he has published twenty-two novels and sixty short stories, received fifteen major awards, and established an international reputation as a leading author of speculative fiction. His range, as this collection abundantly demonstrates, extends from hard SF to horror, from the classic ghost story to crime, comedy, mystery and romance, to his own special brand of magic realism. Yet trying to list all the genres he’s worked in leaves you with the uneasy feeling that you’re missing the point, because he’s also a writer who delights in crossing—or dissolving—the boundaries between them.

His gift for storytelling—a sure instinct for the pace and shape of a narrative, a seemingly effortless fluency of invention—is manifest in the earliest of the stories here, such as the wonderful “A Map of the Mines of Barnath” and the apocalyptic stories set in Adelaide. “Ghosts of the Fall”, “White Christmas”, and “The End of the World Begins at Home” have lost none of their futuristic edge; indeed they seem to have gained in immediacy, now that the realities of climate change have seized our collective imagination. (They also demonstrate that Adelaide is not only an ideal setting for a Stephen King novel, as Salman Rushdie once remarked, but an all-too-plausible vantage point from which to witness the end of the world). In Sean Williams’ stories, there are no secure vantage points, nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide. The protagonist of “White Christmas” doesn’t know, and nor do we, who has sent the malignant ‘snow’; whether it’s aliens or the fallout from some Faustian technological bargain, all he can do is watch and wait.

Reading these stories is like lucid dreaming, in which you dream that you’re lying awake in your own bed; the room is exactly as it would be in waking life, until the impossible intrudes. Sean Williams doesn’t simply stay one step ahead of his reader; he knows how to make you believe you know exactly where he’s going, while steering you down a far more sinister path. The immediacy of the action is never compromised, but there’s an unnerving resonance, a shadow cast (shadows often carry a particular charge in his work) which doesn’t quite match up with the object supposedly casting it.

Thus “A Map of the Mines of Barnath” unfolds from a plain and seemingly straightforward opening—protagonist arrives at mine in search of his missing twin brother—into an increasingly vertiginous series of perspectives more reminiscent of Borges’ “Library of Babel” than Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001, which the ending deliberately echoes, but with chilling contrast. Whereas the astronaut Dave in
2001
is a mere cipher, a peg on which to hang the ideas, we have become far more involved in the haunted Martin Cavell’s quest for his vanished twin. Sean Williams’ ultimate engagement is always with his characters, rather than with the situation or the technology, however mind-bending, and so the stories bend back on themselves, reflecting into inner space: the space, characteristically, of obsession, of deals with the devils of the mind, and the price that must be paid. “Reluctant Misty and the House on Burden Street”—a variation on the classic ghost story—has, superficially nothing in common with “Mines of Barnath” and yet a line from the latter—’You only get out once’—could serve as the refrain for either story. In ‘Burden Street’—a highly effective twist on the topos in which the house itself is a ghost—the heroine’s ominous lack of fear points toward a conclusion in which she, too, confronts a kind of twin.

Like all the best writers of ghost and horror stories, Sean Williams has the gift of knowing where to stop and what to leave out, chillingly manifest in “The Girl-Thing” (printed here for the first time). Again the power of the story is amplified by its crossing of genres; it reads, almost to the end, like realist hard-boiled crime, but there’s a lurking undercurrent, manifest in the troubled detective’s nightmares (if that’s what they are ... ), drawing us toward the final shocking discovery. Elizabeth Bowen once remarked that the effect of the ghost story depends upon those pivotal details which are only a little, but unmistakably ‘out of true’. Though it isn’t a ghost story, the same applies to “Team Sharon”, a chilling variation on the theme of male bonding. There’s nothing intrinsically impossible about men gathering in a park at night for the purpose described here, but it has the revelatory terror of a horror story, all the more sinister for staying just within the boundaries of realism.

I see that I’ve dwelt upon the dark side of Sean Williams’ imagination at the expense of the playful, presented here in the comic extravaganza “The Masque of Agamemnon”, and most recently “The Seventh Letter”, with its wonderful ‘Royal Society for the Semantically Impaired’, a comic but also surreal displacement of the familiar. It’s a sign of his versatility and creative intelligence that one can’t tell where his imagination will take him next, but I can safely predict that once you’ve read
Magic Dirt,
you won’t want to miss the ride.

— John Harwood

February 2008

<>

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“Inneston, 2006”

the man’s seen hard times

he turns his face from the light

craters on the moon

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INTRODUCTION TO:

....................................A MAP OF THE MINES OF BARNATH

Where do ideas come from?

This is one of those questions that usually send writers sprinting for the door, but in the case of this story I can answer with certainty.

The idea came to me in a dream.

The dream didn’t have a story and it succumbs readily to analysis. I was descending by elevator into the depths of a planet, where lay the surface of another world entirely. Below that, at the core of both planets, was an entire sun. The image was so wondrous and strange that it stayed with me all day.

While it was nice of my subconscious to remind me that the surface of things can hide all manner of wonder, I’m a science fiction writer, and turning metaphors back on themselves is one of the tools of the trade. I could keep the spirit of the dream and still make it a real place, which a real character could explore. That this character might be seeking a lost twin who had disappeared into the bowels of such an impossible world—and that he might discover along the way a level more strange than anything in a mere dream—only made it more interesting.

There are several stories in this collection that I’ve wanted to expand into a novel. This is one of them. Who were the original builders of the mines? Where do the five other elevators lead? Why does the mysterious Director take some people and kill others? I like to think that I know the answers to these questions, but until I try to write them down, I’ll never be sure.

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A MAP OF THE MINES OF BARNATH

The Manager of the mines was a small, grey man named Carnarvon, wiry with muscle and as tough as old boots. A slight accent betrayed his off-world origins; one of the older colonies, I thought, or perhaps even Earth. He was sympathetic in a matter-of-fact way, as though my position was far from unique.