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radfrac_archive_full) wrote2007-09-29 10:21 pm
radfrac_archive_full) wrote2007-09-29 10:21 pm
Review: Subterranean #7: Of Radiant Fractures
[Warning: Everything spoils eventually.]
Something interesting is happening in fiction. You've been told this before. Maybe you're the one who told me. There was literary fiction, and there was genre fiction, and it was important to define where your loyalties lay. We had a map and the boundaries were clear.
Suddenly our vision has inverted. What looked like a solid line is a bottomless fissure, and across that gap sparks are leaping, neurotransmitters, unpredicted messengers announcing eccentric revelations.
One of the places interesting things happen is Subterranean. Subterranean Magazine is produced by Subterranean Press, which also creates remarkable limited editions of books you like a lot. I had the excellent good fortune to be one of the first five people to offer to review Ellen Datlow's guest-edited issue of Subterranean, and she generously sent a copy all the way to the Canada, across another intently observed border.
The reading was an exhilarating expedition. Subterranean Issue #7 offers seven short stories and one novella, rich with linkage and disjoint. I enjoyed working out which was which in the introductory references. Whose was the "lushly written story of contemporary malaise and revenge"? The "convoluted darkish fantasy about love"?
The issue opens elegaically, with Lisa Tuttle's "Old Mr. Boudreaux", observing generational preoccupations with grief, caretaking, return. With apprehensive tenderness, the slow thoughtful motion of the bayou that runs through this landscape, the burden of caretaking unfolds to show itself also a surprising gift. The journey into the remembered intensity of childhood perception is vividly constructed. The natural world is potent, anticipatory. The story, though, feels elusive, as if it does not really finish, or a loop of symbolism has been drawn closed without my being caught in it.
The mood of memory and regret continues in Richard Bowes' gentle maybe-ghost-story "The King of the Big Night Hours," which reminded me a little of David Leavitt's "The Marble Quilt". This haunting is less a matter of ghosts than of the uncanny doubled feeling we have in a place we have known for a long time, where we have lived many selves. In this case, it is the mechanism by which a library workplace becomes by default a personal memory-house, a storage place for nostalgia and loss. The emotional movement of the story is quietly satisfying.
Jeffrey Ford's "Under the Bottom of the Lake" is a playfully self-aware series of infolding knots and recursions. Images meet, match, melt, in the dreamlike operations of invention, the growth of story itself. I would have liked this story to take more risks. If the narrative stayed committed to its hallucinatory structure, but engaged stronger emotion, moved deeper into its characters, Ford could harrow us, using our own expectations, generated by his moments of apparent realism, against us.
In "City of Night", Joel Lane and John Pelan take some preoccupations of speculative stories, including the ones in this issue, and literalize them. The doubled narrative which is present as reminiscence in the other stories becomes the double world of ruined (and ruinous) dream-city versus disaffected ordinary life. Exploitation, especially embodied as sexual exploitation, is a concern of several stories in the issue. Land and Pelan carry through the erotic preoccupations of alien-invasion imagery: penetrating tentacles, draining life-force.
Queer content always makes me happy, and in a couple of stories it was a confidently evoked presence. "City of Night" recalls Burroughs' queer underground of parasitical desire and sexualized addiction.
"Holiday", M. Rickert's contribution, gives us not so much an unreliable narrator as an narrator struggling with unreliable self-perception. This internal instability may be the most unsettling thing a writer can attempt. What's more appalling than the fear that our own selves are part of the forces that cannot be understood or controlled? Then, to make it worse, there is the way that the perceptions of others can escape or entrap us. The cheerfully innocuous name "Holiday", given both to story and to character, limns the protagonist's yoke of ruined innocence and uncertain escape.
Anna Tambour's "The Jeweller of Second-hand Roe" usurps any metaphor I'd use to describe it. It is the jewel of the issue, and I can't escape calling it a confection either. It's a fable rather than a fantasy, a Faberge egg crafted out of brunch leftovers. It is elegant in construction, perfect in tone, and made me gag violently on a public bus. I highly recommend it.
It nags at you a little, doesn't it, the current romance of pirates, when you know that there are still people called pirates who aren't at all romantic figures. Terry Bisson's "Pirates of the Somali Coast" is a stark address to that concern, and it won't make you feel any better. It's a brief, harrowing "e-mail story", a one-sided epistolary narrative. It’s a difficult form to carry off so successfully.
I thought of A High Wind in Jamaica, though no one here is as well-meaning as even the pirates in that novel. I wasn't sure I bought into the child protagonist's perspective and his apparent belief (or any potential ambiguity) about the nature of the events, but the story will trouble me for a long time.
"Vacancy", the Lucius Shepard novella which closes the issue, takes on the less nostalgic side of memory and self-perception. Self-delusion is not even a doubtful rescue: it's another crime. There's a deep revulsion in the story for the banality of cruelty, the way self-absorption in the user (consumer, colonizer, invader) can cause havoc for those made use of. I did want to know more about the particulars of the avenging entities.
It's tempting, when evoking mystery, to turn back and over-explain what you've created. The stories in Subterranean #7 do the opposite: they take the risk of omission. Often this gives the stories a spare power; occasionally it makes them feel unfinished. I'm glad the authors attempted it. It's a brave act for a storyteller.
As an object, Subterranean #7 is pleasingly crafted: high-quality paper, clean layout, ink that doesn't come off on your fingers. Now would not be a bad time to order it, given the exchange rate. I did find a few typos, and one or two places where either a pun is in use whose relation to the text is too subtle for me, or a spell-check has wrought minor havoc: for example, a "breech" of the law.
When I'd finished the issue, the autumn evening was falling outside the sliding glass doors of the Station, and for a long time the feeling of instability, of faulty perception, and the fundamental hauntedness of human memory wouldn't leave me.
Memory makes the world; it tells us what things are and what they mean. Memory also unmakes the world; it makes the present seem frail and flawed, the past a richer, more solid place –- whether tender or terrifying. Good stories lead you up to the gap, the rift between the real and the unreal, memory and hallucination. Then they leave you there to make your own way back. Here I am, and this is my account.
{rf}
Something interesting is happening in fiction. You've been told this before. Maybe you're the one who told me. There was literary fiction, and there was genre fiction, and it was important to define where your loyalties lay. We had a map and the boundaries were clear.
Suddenly our vision has inverted. What looked like a solid line is a bottomless fissure, and across that gap sparks are leaping, neurotransmitters, unpredicted messengers announcing eccentric revelations.
One of the places interesting things happen is Subterranean. Subterranean Magazine is produced by Subterranean Press, which also creates remarkable limited editions of books you like a lot. I had the excellent good fortune to be one of the first five people to offer to review Ellen Datlow's guest-edited issue of Subterranean, and she generously sent a copy all the way to the Canada, across another intently observed border.
The reading was an exhilarating expedition. Subterranean Issue #7 offers seven short stories and one novella, rich with linkage and disjoint. I enjoyed working out which was which in the introductory references. Whose was the "lushly written story of contemporary malaise and revenge"? The "convoluted darkish fantasy about love"?
The issue opens elegaically, with Lisa Tuttle's "Old Mr. Boudreaux", observing generational preoccupations with grief, caretaking, return. With apprehensive tenderness, the slow thoughtful motion of the bayou that runs through this landscape, the burden of caretaking unfolds to show itself also a surprising gift. The journey into the remembered intensity of childhood perception is vividly constructed. The natural world is potent, anticipatory. The story, though, feels elusive, as if it does not really finish, or a loop of symbolism has been drawn closed without my being caught in it.
The mood of memory and regret continues in Richard Bowes' gentle maybe-ghost-story "The King of the Big Night Hours," which reminded me a little of David Leavitt's "The Marble Quilt". This haunting is less a matter of ghosts than of the uncanny doubled feeling we have in a place we have known for a long time, where we have lived many selves. In this case, it is the mechanism by which a library workplace becomes by default a personal memory-house, a storage place for nostalgia and loss. The emotional movement of the story is quietly satisfying.
Jeffrey Ford's "Under the Bottom of the Lake" is a playfully self-aware series of infolding knots and recursions. Images meet, match, melt, in the dreamlike operations of invention, the growth of story itself. I would have liked this story to take more risks. If the narrative stayed committed to its hallucinatory structure, but engaged stronger emotion, moved deeper into its characters, Ford could harrow us, using our own expectations, generated by his moments of apparent realism, against us.
In "City of Night", Joel Lane and John Pelan take some preoccupations of speculative stories, including the ones in this issue, and literalize them. The doubled narrative which is present as reminiscence in the other stories becomes the double world of ruined (and ruinous) dream-city versus disaffected ordinary life. Exploitation, especially embodied as sexual exploitation, is a concern of several stories in the issue. Land and Pelan carry through the erotic preoccupations of alien-invasion imagery: penetrating tentacles, draining life-force.
Queer content always makes me happy, and in a couple of stories it was a confidently evoked presence. "City of Night" recalls Burroughs' queer underground of parasitical desire and sexualized addiction.
"Holiday", M. Rickert's contribution, gives us not so much an unreliable narrator as an narrator struggling with unreliable self-perception. This internal instability may be the most unsettling thing a writer can attempt. What's more appalling than the fear that our own selves are part of the forces that cannot be understood or controlled? Then, to make it worse, there is the way that the perceptions of others can escape or entrap us. The cheerfully innocuous name "Holiday", given both to story and to character, limns the protagonist's yoke of ruined innocence and uncertain escape.
Anna Tambour's "The Jeweller of Second-hand Roe" usurps any metaphor I'd use to describe it. It is the jewel of the issue, and I can't escape calling it a confection either. It's a fable rather than a fantasy, a Faberge egg crafted out of brunch leftovers. It is elegant in construction, perfect in tone, and made me gag violently on a public bus. I highly recommend it.
It nags at you a little, doesn't it, the current romance of pirates, when you know that there are still people called pirates who aren't at all romantic figures. Terry Bisson's "Pirates of the Somali Coast" is a stark address to that concern, and it won't make you feel any better. It's a brief, harrowing "e-mail story", a one-sided epistolary narrative. It’s a difficult form to carry off so successfully.
I thought of A High Wind in Jamaica, though no one here is as well-meaning as even the pirates in that novel. I wasn't sure I bought into the child protagonist's perspective and his apparent belief (or any potential ambiguity) about the nature of the events, but the story will trouble me for a long time.
"Vacancy", the Lucius Shepard novella which closes the issue, takes on the less nostalgic side of memory and self-perception. Self-delusion is not even a doubtful rescue: it's another crime. There's a deep revulsion in the story for the banality of cruelty, the way self-absorption in the user (consumer, colonizer, invader) can cause havoc for those made use of. I did want to know more about the particulars of the avenging entities.
It's tempting, when evoking mystery, to turn back and over-explain what you've created. The stories in Subterranean #7 do the opposite: they take the risk of omission. Often this gives the stories a spare power; occasionally it makes them feel unfinished. I'm glad the authors attempted it. It's a brave act for a storyteller.
As an object, Subterranean #7 is pleasingly crafted: high-quality paper, clean layout, ink that doesn't come off on your fingers. Now would not be a bad time to order it, given the exchange rate. I did find a few typos, and one or two places where either a pun is in use whose relation to the text is too subtle for me, or a spell-check has wrought minor havoc: for example, a "breech" of the law.
When I'd finished the issue, the autumn evening was falling outside the sliding glass doors of the Station, and for a long time the feeling of instability, of faulty perception, and the fundamental hauntedness of human memory wouldn't leave me.
Memory makes the world; it tells us what things are and what they mean. Memory also unmakes the world; it makes the present seem frail and flawed, the past a richer, more solid place –- whether tender or terrifying. Good stories lead you up to the gap, the rift between the real and the unreal, memory and hallucination. Then they leave you there to make your own way back. Here I am, and this is my account.
{rf}