Interconnections

I love Caleb Wilson’s “American Dreamers” in the most recent issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Unfortunately, it can’t be read online, so you will have to trust me and go out to buy a copy of the zine in order to read it. It’s a set of three interconnected stories of driven people: a detective who becomes more lost the more answers she finds, an artist whose medium is bacteria, and two composers in a cutthroat rivalry. The creativity of this story is astounding:

Nile, studying composition under avant-garde marching band leader James Hannibal Orser, wrote a requiem, based upon the poetry of Sappho, to be sung pianissimo by a hundred-strong choir of quadruple basses.

The example here is good because, while it’s silly and a bit of a parody, it also exemplifies the creative wonder in many of the characters’ actions. The story’s tone is gentle, humorous, and poignant, as when the masterpiece of the bacteria artist grows, lives, and dies off schedule, dashing the artist’s plans.

There seems to be some type of cause and effect relationship between the three stories, as if these driven people infect each other with their passions. This story is pleasant to mull over — it has a good aftertaste, meaning that I liked to play with the images it put in my head. I read it out loud to my husband as he was making dinner, and found that, on a second read, I enjoyed watching for interconnections and speculating about them.

Excellent Sentences

Tonight, I read “Bohemians” by George Saunders. I had a few other ideas about what I might write about tonight, but I can’t get Saunders’ excellent sentences out of my head. I’ll put in some examples below.

This sentence wins a prize from me for proving that sometimes an adverb can be transformative:

Mrs. Hopanlitski, on the other hand, was thin and joyfully made pipe-cleaner animals.

List seem to want to come in threes, and Saunders uses the rhythm of three to emphasize his largest point about the friendship:

This new, three-way friendship consisted of slumping in gangways, playing gloveless catch with a Wiffle, and trailing hopefully behind kids whose homes could be entered without fear of fiasco.

And a sentence that is true in the special way of fiction: I knew this before I read it, but I’d never put it this way to myself:

Ours was a liquor household, where you could ask a question over and over in utter sincerity and never get a straight answer.

Perhaps it would be possible to analyze what exactly makes each of these sentences great. What I know is that, as I was reading, each of this sentences made me stop and say, “Wow.”

On the Moral Discomfort of Daily Life

Yesterday, I was on a walk with a friend, and we came across a dog, loose at the edge of a college campus near a busy intersection and the train tracks. It seemed to like me, following me and leaping in circles around me. I patted it and turned to go. My friend, however, was worried that the dog might be a runaway. She wanted to call some authority to have the dog picked up and cared for. I was afraid of taking it away when there was nothing wrong. I was sure its owners were just over the hill, or lived down the street, and that calling some authority would make the situation worse, not better. Alone, I would have been content to let the dog find its own way home.

In the back of my mind was the way I got the cat I loved growing up. It was a similar situation. I was with a group of people who thought the cat was a runaway. I took it home, and was supposed to look for its owner. I didn’t try very hard. Looking back on it, I feel I appropriated the cat, and that it probably wasn’t lost at all. It lived with me for a good eight or nine years before dying of old age.

I tell these stories because daily life is full of these morally ambiguous situations. Do you intervene or not? What kind of intervention is appropriate and what kind of intervention is self-serving? What kind of intervention clarifies and what kind confuses? I find that encounters with animals, homeless people, and environmentalists particularly bring up this sort of moral confusion for me.

Elizabeth Creith’s “Stone the Crows,” published at Flash Fiction Online, is about a pigeon that is nearly killed by a raven. A well-dressed man plays the role my friend did with the dog. The narrator plays my role (reluctant and conflicted):

“That damn crow!” he said to me, “did you see that?”

“I did,” I said. I looked down at the bird in his hands. Its neck feathers were iridescent, pink and green and blue. Its half-plucked breast was speckled with blood, and I could see an end of bone protruding from the right leg. The eyes were black, bright and unreadable.

“What can we do? Could we take it to the humane society?”

“You could try that,” I said, “I don’t know if they take wild birds.” This bird is dead, I thought. It just hasn’t stopped breathing yet.

The story successfully gets across all the discomfort of this sort of chance encounter. I viscerally feel the urge to just get on with my day and not mess with this, tempered by the knowledge that walking away is excellent furel for a conscience that wants to feel guilty for any little privilege of modern life. I’m reading that into how the narrator feels, but that’s what I’d be feeling.

Yesterday, after my friend convinced me to call animal control, and I reluctantly agreed to wait for them to come, the dog’s owner showed up, completely casual. “She does this all the time,” the owner said. I called animal control and told them never mind. My friend was indignant that the owner could be so casual about letting the dog wondered. I listened to her, wondering why I couldn’t feel indignant that way.

I identify strongly with Creith’s narrator. If you read the story, you’ll see. I don’t want to give the ending away, but I read through a pile of flash fiction this afternoon, and this story was the only one that I felt truly nailed its ending.

At the Edge of Comprehension

Today’s offering from Every Day Fiction, Bill Ward’s “Cloudcutter,” helped to break me out of a dull mood. The world and characters Ward describes are incredibly strange, and so I found the setting and story just at the edge of what I can accept. A story this weird is a bit dangerous, I think — sometimes, if I get too lost, I get annoyed and give up on a story. This story struck just the balance I needed. It was strange enough to give me a feeling of liftoff, but it maintained some basic things to which I could relate.

On the strange side: It’s hard to tell exactly how genetics are operating. The character opens by talking about the day he got his fifth brain. I gather that each brain adds functionality, but it’s uncertain what these creatures are. The character has fur, but I’m not sure why. As with many stories, I have the sense that this is some future earth, but I can’t be sure.

The thing is that as I made that list, I realized that isn’t so bad. I understand what I need to understand. The character is young and still maturing, and the world seems terribly polluted and constrained, when that doesn’t seem to have been the case before.

On the side of liftoff: The character dreams of flying, and the impact is strong:

That night I flew above the ceiling. I was sucked up through the gash cut by the high current, and soared in a bright world of toplight blue. I did not move as I normally do, as Charlie does, but hung in the fibers of the air with broad arms and pushed forward mightily with my feet. I cannot remember a more beautiful thing.

“Your fifth brain can dream, Charlie; you are a man now.” Dandrys smiled and patted my head. I then asked why our bodies differed but Dandrys said it did not matter, and told me to come with him to work.

Ward does a good job of establishing the sense of a low ceiling of dirty clouds, and of making the idea of getting beyond them appealing and meaningful. The relationship between Charlie and Dandrys is strange, but intriguing. Their interaction as mentor and student is classic, but emphasis, as above, on the difference between their bodies left me wondering. I wasn’t sure if I should take that as a difference caused by age difference, or species difference, or some sort of sexual difference.

In any case, today I was in the mood to be confused this way, and the dream of flying gave the story a basic premise that I could connect with easily.

On a side note, my feed reader also brought Every Day Fiction’s interview with Nicholas Ozment. I was pleased to see that his story, “The Only Difference Between Men and Boys,” had gotten good traffic last month. I didn’t post about it, but it is definitely worth reading.

A Thousand Faces

Surfing tonight, I discovered a very cool literary journal called A Thousand Faces. They say they look for character-driven pieces that rise about the usual superhero genre technique of making stories as a framework on which to hang a fight scene. They also have an interesting revenue sharing model that they use to pay writers.

Anyway, so far I’m very impressed with the quality of fiction there. As an example, check out Michael Obilade’s “Matchstick.” I was completely won over by the first line:

In the eleventh grade my brother fell in love with a girl made of fire.

The story plays with something that I think is a common theme in superhero stories: the girl’s superpowers make it hard for her to be around people in a normal way. However, in this case, that’s really the focus of the story, and the result is an odd and moving work:

I didn’t know much about Josie, except that she was made of fire, and my brother loved her. I wasn’t even sure of these. She didn’t go to this school - no one knew her - which meant she was either home-schooled, or from another town. We spoke briefly. She said she was sixteen, like Dural, but she looked like she still belonged in junior high. My brother wasn’t evasive about many things, but he was doggedly secretive when it came to her. The only conversation I ever had with him about her occurred on a morning when I caught him peeling blisters off his hands in the backyard. I sat beside him, and stared at the sun, pale white in a blue sky.

This story was a breath of fresh air to me, after an evening of wandering around the Internet not being too excited by what I found. I’m really glad to have discovered A Thousand Faces, and am looking forward to seeing more of what they have to offer.

Dinosaur

I have a weakness for dinosaurs, and so, tonight, I’ll point to Jo Walton’s “Remember the Allosaur” in Lone Star Stories. This is another quick, fun piece, funnier than I often read:

Dialogue, Cedric, don’t lash your tail at me, you didn’t have any dialogue before I started directing. Didn’t I start you off in comedy? Remember that rubber fin in Stegosaur? “Cedric the Allosaur stars in Stegosaur.” You were such a hit, you wowed them, remember? What a movie. What a series of movies! Kids loved them, seniors loved them, and Hollywood Times voted Pterosaur the date movie of the year. We could make Pterosaur 2 tomorrow.

I’m not sure why it is so amusing to anthropomorphize dinosaurs, but it basically guarantees that I will pay attention.

Thinking of dinosaur flash fiction reminds me of a story I read a story a couple years back, Bruce Holland Rogers’ “Dinosaur” in the July 2006 issue of The Sun, that I still think about all the time. Its mood is very different — it’s a serious story. It doesn’t seem to be posted online, but, if you can track it down, it’s well worth it.

The two stories have completely different tones, but I had to read both of them because they contained the word “dinosaur.”

Isolation

Tonight I read D. Thomas Minton’s “Two Drawers Down From the Butcher’s Block” in Postcards From… The story paints a good picture of isolation, particularly of the religious variety:

Others lived on the shelves above the butcher block. Stanislaw did not know them, because he could not climb up there. But he heard them sometimes, voices too faint to understand, and saw them as fleeting shadows of light. One day, he became convinced that they spoke Hebrew and he longed from then on to join them.

The story is about a character named Stanislaw, the only Jew in an afterlife that takes place in a kitchen, and where Father Kerrigan and his flock seem to be in control. I’ve spent the last five years somewhere between Christianity and Judaism (I’m very slowly converting to Judaism, which is my husband’s tradition), and I can relate to the isolation the story describes. When I don’t quite fit in among a group of people who take their own traditions for granted, it’s tempting to make little compromises:

He remembered the night he had asked his wife to put the children in Sunday School so they could make friends and play with the neighborhood children. She had tsked loudly and refused with a slice of her finger. She would not force her children to sing praise to another Almighty, even if it made their lives easier. “Life is not meant to be easy, Stanislaw,” she had said.

But ultimately, Stanislaw can’t compromise away his identity, and so the loneliness continues. There’s a comment at the end of the story that says:

Not sure about this one. The writing is good, but I got bored half way through. The trouble with this kind of story is that you know all there is to know from the start.

I can’t dispute that the commenter got bored, but I think he or she may have missed the point. I knew at the beginning that Stanislaw was isolated, but I think the story does a beautiful job of building up the nature of that isolation, and showing how Stanislaw’s situation in the afterlife is really just a culmination of an isolation that started in life, going back to when he was quite young.

Incidentally, I’m hoping Postcards From… is still publishing. There have been no new posts since May, so I’m a bit concerned, but the site has a premise that I would like to see continue (very short stories, categorized as fantasy, science fiction, or horror).

Easing Back Into the Swing (Yeah, Right)

In honor of being home after a long week of travel, time-zone confusion, and waking up in the morning staring at an unfamiliar ceiling wondering what state I’m in, I thought I’d ease back into normal routines by touching on the intersection of my vocation and avocation. Tonight, I read George Dyson’s “Engineers’ Dreams,” published in Edge. I’ve known about this story for a few weeks, and have been looking forward to sitting down and going through it. It’s far from a light read. Dyson’s piece sits firmly in the intersection between article, short story, and essay. Stewart Brand wrote this in his introduction to the piece:

This George Dyson gem couldn’t find a publisher in a fiction venue because it’s too technical, and technical publications (including Wired) won’t run it because it’s fiction. Shame on them. Edge to the rescue.

“Engineers’ Dreams” is indeed heavily technical. I’m not an engineer or computer scientist myself, but I spend every working day talking to people who are, trying to understand and translate what they do. I have to say that Dyson’s story stretched my ability to follow technical explanations:

Google was inverting the von Neumann matrix—by coaxing the matrix into inverting itself. Von Neumann’s “Numerical Inverting of Matrices of High Order,” published (with Herman Goldstine) in 1947, confirmed his ambition to build a machine that could invert matrices of non-trivial size. A 1950 postscript, “Matrix Inversion by a Monte Carlo Method,” describes how a statistical, random-walk procedure credited to von Neumann and Stan Ulam “can be used to invert a class of n-th order matrices with only n2 arithmetic operations in addition to the scanning and discriminating required to play the solitaire game.” The aggregate of all our searches for unpredictable (but meaningful) strings of bits, is, in effect, a Monte Carlo process for inverting the matrix that constitutes the World Wide Web.

I follow this just enough to catch a vague glimpse of what he means. In computer science, a Monte Carlo process is a way of using random numbers (think this kind of Monte Carlo) to model the behavior of a process that isn’t actually random. It’s useful because many times it’s easier to use random numbers to try to find things out about the desired process than to approach the problem more directly. The image I get from the paragraph above is of each of my search queries as effectively random, modeling, when combined with everyone else’s search queries, some approximation of the collective intelligence of the world.

The point here is that the image is worthwhile, but requires a fair bit of work and background knowledge.

I’m not sure how this story will read to someone who hasn’t studied computer science in some capacity. I fear it will be incomprehensible, which seems to be the reason it was rejected by fiction publishers (in fact, I think it might even be a difficult read for Wired’s readers, which might help to explain why that publication apparently passed on it. However, it has lovely moments:

Ed developed a rapport with the machines that escaped those who had never felt the warmth of a vacuum tube or the texture of a core memory plane.

And the last line is the loveliest of all. Like many things, this story will reward those with the means and patience to puzzle it out. I do find it interesting to consider the audience for a story like this. I imagine the story would interest the people who are equipped to read it, but I can see why Dyson had a hard time getting it published. This is why I’m glad for the Internet: It’s so much easier to find the right quirky venue for a piece online, I think. We’ll see what I have to say about that if I manage to place the Klingon story I wrote (more on that when I’ve found it a home).

It’s wonderful to be back. I hope you didn’t give up on me while I was gone.

Away For a Few Days

I’m attending the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas for the next couple of days, and then a friend’s wedding. While I plan to keep posting if possible, I’ll also have to play it by ear. I’ll definitely be back next week.

On Making Sexual Tension Count

Richard A. Lovett and Mark Niemann-Ross have a great novellette, “New Wineskins,” in the October issue of Analog: Science Fiction and Fact (don’t ask me why the October issue is out already). It’s near-future science fiction, which I tend to like. I like to imagine what might happen in 10 years or so, since I have a chance of seeing how that works out. (SPOILER ALERT: I quote from the ending toward the end of this post).

There are many things to like about “New Wineskins.” It’s smoothly written. The main character is a reporter, and, as a reporter myself, I can attest that the description of a reporter’s life is extremely convincing. The authors set up a good mystery, and they give satisfying hints. For example, one hint is that something at a winery is amiss because there aren’t many laborers around. This is what I consider a “fair-play” hint: I had the power to notice it (though I didn’t), and I have no problem believing that the main character would notice it and draw meaningful conclusions from it.

I think the thing that stayed with me the most, however, is the hint at romance. The story does this just the right amount. There is sexual tension between two characters, but the writers keep it subtle:

“Damn,” Valerie said. “No wonder nobody knows what they’re doing in there at night. You can’t even get close to that place.”

B.J. shot her an odd glance. “What do you mean, ‘can’t?’ Last I noticed we’ve each got two good legs.” Valerie was sure he was about to comment on hers, but surprisingly he didn’t. Maybe he wasn’t quite the geek she thought.

I like romances in stories, though I tend not to like stories that are entirely romances. As these characters end up risking their lives together, the writers build this sexual tension into something very meaningful, and it becomes the source of much of the power of the ending. I’m going to go ahead and quote the last paragraph, but please don’t read it if you’re worried about a spoiler:

She kept hoping he’d ask her to dinner, but days and then weeks passed and it never happened. When she wrote the story, she gave him top billing. When he asked why, she turned away. It had been a long time since she’d allowed herself to cry.

What I like here is that the authors never suggest that there is true love between B.J. and Valerie. They’re getting all of their mileage out of attraction that grows as the characters find themselves dealing with extreme situations. In the end, it’s lost possibility that Valerie is mourning, and that’s worth mourning.