Nebula Awards Showcase 2013 (22 page)

In “Sites for Sore Souls: Some Science-Fictional Saloons” (Fall 1991
Extrapolation
), Fred Erisman loosens the argument made above that the club story can be understood in terms of denial; he suggests that sf club stories—or in his terms saloon stories—respond more straightforwardly to a human need for venues in which an “informal public life” can be led. Although Erisman assumes that the paucity of such venues in America is reflected in the UK, and therefore significantly undervalues the unspoken but clearly felt ambience of the pub in Arthur C Clarke's cosily Recursive
Tales from the White Hart
(
1957
), his comments are clearly helpful in understanding the persistence of the club story in US sf. Beginning with L Sprague de Camp's and Fletcher Pratt's
Tales from Gavagan's Bar
(
1953
), it has been a feature of magazine sf for nearly half a century, partly perhaps because imaginary American saloons and venues like conventions—where the genuine affinity groups that generate and consume American sf tend to foregather—are similar kinds of informal public space. Further examples of the club story in the USA, not all of them set in “saloons,” are assembled in Poul Anderson's
Tales of the Flying Mountains
(
1970
); Sterling Lanier's
The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes
(
1972
) and
The Curious Quests of Brigadier Ffellowes
(
1986
); Isaac Asimov's several volumes of nonfantastic
Black Widowers
mysteries, starting with
Tales of the Black Widowers
(
1974
); Spider Robinson's
Callahan
books, starting with
Callahan's Crosstime Saloon
(
1977
); Larry Niven's
Draco Tavern
tales, which appear mostly in
Convergent Series
(
1979
) and
Limits
(
1985
); and
Tales from the Red Lion
(
2007
) by John Weagly (1968–). A further Poul Anderson example, the
Nicholas van Rijn
story “The Master Key” (July 1964
Analog
), pastiches Rudyard Kipling's use of the club-story format. There are many others; some individual stories are assembled in Darrell Schweitzer's and George Scithers's
Tales from the Spaceport Bar
(
1987
) and
Another Round at the Spaceport Bar
(
1989
). Almost certainly the most important sf novel to have been organized around a club story frame is Dan Simmons's Time Opera,
Hyperion
(
1989
), which is very loosely based on Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales
[see above]; and Rana Dasgupta's
Tokyo Cancelled
(
2005
) very effectively applies the model to the contemporary world.

 

2.
But there is more to the club story form than its capacity to fix tall tales into sanctums where it is safe to pretend to believe them. Fixing a tale into place can be a double-edged sword. Superficially, locking a story into the moment of its telling may seem to constitute a narratological insistence that the
meaning
of the story is itself locked down by the visibility of its telling; but for at least three reasons, it is in fact dangerous to make a story visible. One: each and every club story represents a bringing into the present tense of witness a story which, it is claimed,
has already happened
, which is to say the world of the auditors was in some sense false or incomplete
before the truth was told
. The Club Story brings together the past and the future. Two: it could be argued that the more visible a story is, the less reliable any paraphrastic abstraction of that story will be, for what is almost inevitably exposed by paraphrase is the essential elusiveness of Story, what might be called the polysemy of the visible when narrated. Three: it seems clear that to make a story visible within a club story frame is primarily to enforce not meaning but
witness
, for the story has now been
told
to auditors whose very attentiveness affirms the storyable world: it is, in a clear sense, impossible to deny the existence of a story once told in this fashion, in this context. The club story is a vessel explicitly shaped for the mandatory reception of raw story. There are few genuinely great club stories, but all of them are threatening.

It may be more than a rhetorical gesture to note that at least two paradigm creations in the nearly new-born realm of the fantastic, the Frankenstein Monster and the Vampire—both transgressive figures central to the evolution of sf, and fantasy, and horror—were created within the context of the club story. In the middle of a famous 1816 walking tour in Switzerland, Lord Byron, John Polidori, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1892–1822) were forced by rain to stay inside at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva. After an evening recital of readings taken from an assembly of
Schauerroman
tales told in a club story frame—
Das Gespensterbuch
[“The Ghost Book”] (
1811–1815
) by Johann August Apel (1771–1816) and Friedrich August Schulze (1770–1849) writing together as Friedrich Laun—Byron suggested that each member of the party make up a similar tale to be told on a subsequent night. Though there is no clear evidence as to what was actually recounted aloud, both Polidori's and Mary Shelley's eventually published narratives—
The Vampyre: A Tale
(
1819
) and
Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus
(
1818
)—came out of that club-story moment, and both stories exhale the intrusiveness—the first words spoken by Frankenstein's “monster” are “Pardon this intrusion”—of tales that enforce witness. (It might be noted that Chuck Palahniuk's
Haunted: A Novel of Stories
(
2005
)—which suggestively treats a writing workshop/retreat in club story terms—is set in a “theatre” referred to as the Villa Diodati.) In Germany at about the same time, transgressive authors like E T A Hoffmann—whose
Die Serapionsbruder
[“The Serapion Brothers”] (
1818–1821
) is a club story assembly—and Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853)—whose
Phantasus
(
1812–1816
) is also presented in club story form—were publishing work of oneiric power that hit, as it were, below the belt.

Though James de Mille's
A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder
(
1888
) is a powerful precursor, and works as a corrosive dismantling of Imperialism's exploitative gaze upon worlds that comment upon its pretences, the great period for the club story, for the club story that threatens rather than consoles, comes rather later: during the 1890s, exactly when reactive club story writers (see above) were beginning to construct Polders against a sense that the Western imperium had become fragile. The four greatest novellas of that decade are probably Arthur Machen's “The Great God Pan” (1894), H G Wells's
The Time Machine: An Invention
(
1895
),
The Turn of the Screw
(
1898
) by Henry James (1843–1916) and Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
(in
Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories
,
1902
). Each of them is a club story. Each of them constitutes a witness against any stable understanding of a darkening world. The case of
The Time Machine
is central to the history of sf: the Time Traveller recounts his Scientific Romance–inflected epic of long inevitable decline to a group of auditors who are forced to recognize his tale by virtue of the fact that he returns like some inverted Hero of the Thousand Faces to irrefutably
tell
it. In
Heart of Darkness
—whose setting and tone reflect the contemplative witnessing of the Gustave Doré New Zealander, who gazes upon the same darkening Thames that Marlow and his auditors have sailed into—a tale almost totally resistant to paraphrastic analysis is recounted, at times somewhat bewilderedly, by Marlow, whose pilgrimage into the heart of darkness at the head of the Congo leaves him whited like a sepulchre: Kurtz's cry of “The horror! The horror!” is in fact—after decades of critical analysis—beyond all understanding: though we
suspect
he sees what the future will hold. In conveying his witness to this overwhelming cry, and by enforcing his auditors' witness to that prophetic experience,
Heart of Darkness
perfectly exemplifies the deep power available within the club story format. A club story that has been told cannot be untold.

Can't sleep. Still dark. Waiting for light in the East.

My rooster crows. Knows it's my wedding day. I hear the pig rooting around outside. Pig, the traditional gift for the family of my new wife. I can't sleep because alone in the darkness there is nothing between me and the realization that I do not want to get married. Well, Patrick, you don't have long to decide.

The night bakes black around me. Three-thirty a.m. In three hours, the church at the top of the road will start with the singing. Two hours after that, everyone in both families will come crowding into my yard.

My rooster crows again, all his wives in the small space behind the house. It is still piled with broken bottles from when my father lined the top of that wall with glass shards.

That was one of his good times, when he wore trousers and a hat and gave orders. I mixed the concrete, and passed it up in buckets to my eldest brother, Matthew. He sat on the wall like riding a horse, slopping on concrete and pushing in the glass. Raphael was reading in the shade of the porch. “I'm not wasting my time doing all that,” he said. “How is broken glass going to stop a criminal who wants to get in?” He always made me laugh, I don't know why. Nobody else was smiling.

When we were young my father would keep us sitting on the hot, hairy sofa in the dark, no lights, no TV because he was driven mad by the sound of the generator. Eyes wide, he would quiver like a wire, listening for it to start up again. My mother tried to speak and he said, “Sssh. Sssh! There it goes again.”

“Jacob, the machine cannot turn itself on.”

“Sssh! Sssh!” He would not let us move. I was about seven, and terrified. If the generator was wicked enough to scare my big strong father, what would it do to little me? I keep asking my mother what does the generator do?

“Nothing, your father is just being very careful.”

“Terhemba is a coward,” my brother Matthew said, using my Tiv name. My mother shushed him, but Matthew's merry eyes glimmered at me:
I will make you miserable later
. Raphael prized himself loose from my mother's grip and stomped across the sitting room floor.

 

* * *

 

People think Makurdi is a backwater, but now we have all you need for a civilized life. Beautiful banks with security doors, retina ID, and air conditioning; new roads, solar panels on all the streetlights, and our phones are stuffed full of e-books. On one of the river islands they built the new hospital; and my university has a medical school, all pink and state-funded with laboratories that are as good as most. Good enough for controlled experiments with mice.

My research assistant Jide is Yoruba and his people believe that the grandson first born after his grandfather's death will continue that man's life. Jide says that we have found how that is true. This is a problem for Christian Nigerians, for it means that evil continues.

What we found in mice is this. If you deprive a mouse of a mother's love, if you make him stressed through infancy, his brain becomes methylated. The high levels of methyl deactivate a gene that produces a neurotropin important for memory and emotional balance in both mice and humans. Schizophrenics have abnormally low levels of it.

It is a miracle of God that with new generation, our genes are knocked clean. There is a new beginning. Science thought this meant that the effects of one life could not be inherited by another.

What we found is that high levels of methyl affect the sperm cells. Methylation is passed on with them, and thus the deactivation. A grandfather's stress is passed on through the male line, yea unto the third generation.

Jide says that what we have found is how the life of the father is continued by his sons. And that is why I don't want to wed.

My father would wander all night. His three older sons slept in one room. Our door would click open and he would stand and glare at me, me particularly, with a boggled and distracted eye as if I had done something outrageous. He would be naked; his towering height and broad shoulders humbled me, made me feel puny and endangered. I have an odd-shaped head with an indented V going down my forehead. People said it was the forceps tugging me out: I was a difficult birth. That was supposed to be why I was slow to speak, slow to learn. My father believed them.

My mother would try to shush him back into their bedroom. Sometimes he would be tame and allow himself to be guided; he might chuckle as if it were a game and hug her. Or he might blow up, shouting and flinging his hands about, calling her woman, witch, or demon. Once she whispered, “It's you who have the demon; the demon has taken hold of you, Jacob.”