Cover art for Philip K. Dick's Adjustment Team

The artwork for Philip Dick's Adjustment Team - volume two of Subterranean's new project to collect his short stories. Looks a little... ugly...

Exciting Hal Duncan news

Hal Duncan posted on his blog about his forthcoming poetry collection Songs For the Devil and Death. The collection is coming in July for those of you, interested in his unorthodox writing. I know I am.

In other news, Duncan has signed a deal with Lethe Press for a collection of his short stories. No further info for now, but I'll keep you posted.

Speculative Horizons

I've had my fair share of disagreement with Pat and the stuff he writes on his Hotlist. I doubt I even register on his radar, but he has royally pissed me off on a number of occasions. However, being asked to edit a short story collection is - well let's face it - effin awesome! I can only imagine the guy's enthusiasm for the job, and in a way I'm happy for him. I know it would be a dream come true for me, and I'm pretty sure it was for him.

That said, Speculative Horizons doesn't make it easy for you to pick it up. At $20 it is only 130 pages long, with just five stories inside. Sure, they are all new and unpublished ones - and yes, one of them is by Hal Duncan!!! - but it's still pretty steep. And then there is the truly hideous cover (a lot less hideous live than it is on the screen though) - another turn-off. What made the decision for me was the fact that a portion of the proceeds goes to cancer research - I'm always up for supporting this kind of stuff, and I even bought my copy through Subterranean's site, paying the full price and all.

So, is the book worth it? I would have to say yes. Let's see:

Soul Mate by C.S. Friedman is an eerie vampiric story of a woman who finds true love, or what appears to be such. In the end it is more urban fantasy horror than anything else, and manages to be extremely disturbing in the way the tale progresses. Just like with everyone else except for Hal Duncan, this is my first time reading anything by Friedman, so I didn't know what to expect, but I find her decision to go into such a sensitive subject as the way we come to resemble the ones we love brave to say the least.

Tobias S. Buckell's The Eve of the Fall of Habesh is my favorite story in the collection. It manages to build an intricate tapestry of a corrupt and dying city where the elite rule using the life-force of children in a world where magic takes away chunks of your life every time you use it, and everyone is limited to only one type of spell. It is dark story that reeks of despair and self-destruction, and of things ending forever, and I absolutely loved it, even though the ending was probably a bit underwhelming and the main character Jazim is less than relateable.

In The Stranger, by L.E. Modesitt, Jr., I was reminded yet again of why I will probably never try a book from that author. It was the Eddings experience all over again - cardboard characters, pretentious drama, tired world-building and an adequatly depicted action scene. I admit to a mild curiosity about the science-fiction elements in his Recluse world, but having read other books of that type, I just know it's not going to be worth the effort. Still The Stranger earns points for being the only actual sword and sorcery classical fantasy in the collection.

Brian Ruckley's Flint is a great story of a very young prehistoric shaman who tries to save his tribe from a mystical disease, only to find that it is a legacy of the previous shaman's dark secrets. Fighting his people's prejudice against his youth, as well as the knowledge of his own inexperience, Flint must grow up and become the man his tribe needs him to be. The tale is a beautifully structured ghost story and the prehistoric setting brings that primeval feeling of people with not even the notion of history behind them, of a life that is an endless discovery every single day.

The Death of a Love, by Hal Duncan, is the least "fantastic" story in Speculative Horizons. It is more of a magical realism kinda deal, almost a parable, as it doesn't even have an actual plot. In the world he depicts, love takes corporeal form as little cupids that flutter about the "'birds", and as such, the little bastards can be killed for any number of reasons and in many different ways, thus killing the 'birds relationship. The story is told in first-person from the perspective of a cop working for "erocide" - the police department charged with solving those murders. It is a gritty examination of how gruesome "true love" can be, and of the messed up ways in which people are capable of destroying their own relationships. There is a lot of cursing in this one, but it kind of adds to the surreal realism of the murder of cupids.

In the end, Speculative Horizons offers a broad variety in its five stories, and although that could lead to some disconnection from the collection, I am sure everyone could find something of worth there. Personally, I fell in love with Duncan's story (see what I did there), as well as with Buckel's, which made me look for other works of the guy. Also, the book is made for a good cause and that adds to its worth. I would definitely recommend it if you can afford the steep price.

7.5/10

Leviathan Wept and Other Stories - Daniel Abraham

I first heard Abraham's name when Hunter's Run - his collaboration with George Martin and Gardner Dozois - came out. Since then he has been a constant presence in the blogosphere, and always mentioned with great admiration. So I decided to try his short fiction first, before jumping to The Long Price Quartet.

Leviathan Wept and Other Stories is a very diverse collection. There is fantasy there, as well as post-cyberpunk, ghost stories, horror and just plain old comedy. The Speculative element is all but missing at times, but that steals nothing from the quality of the writing. And the quality of writing is very, very high. Abraham delves into disturbing topics with energy and determination, and doesn't shy away from uncomfortable truths. His style of writing is rich enough to allow the diversity of genres and themes, and the ideas around which the stories evolve, are - more often than not - rather original.

The Cambist and Lord Iron is a Victorian tale of a noble playing a bad joke on a money-changer, only to find himself in need of his services again and again, when he has to determine the value of more and more abstract concepts. There is no obvious supernatural element to the story, apart from some hints of the world being an alternative reality, but the focus of the tale itself is somehow outlandish enough to make it feel like fantasy.

Flat Diane is a story of subtle horror and implied brutality, in which a father cuts his daughter's image from paper and sends it across the world to reconnect with distant relatives. Too late he realizes that he has sent away a part of his little girl's soul. And as she grows up, she is forever changed by the experiences "Flat Diane" has. This is perhaps the most horrific story in Leviathan Wept, and the fact that nothing actually happens for the reader to "see", that it is all "off-screen" and implied, makes it even more so.

The Best Monkey is the other story in the collection bordering on horror, or at least that's how it felt to me, since altered humanity always chills me. In this particular case, the plot revolves around the perception of beauty, and what happens when that perception is changed.

The Support Technician Tango is perhaps my favorite in Leviathan Wept - a comedy about a malicious self-help book that wrecks havoc in the lives of all the employees of a law firm. It is witty, elegant and smart, and flows with such ease, that it's pure delight to read.

Then comes A Hunter In Arin-Qin, a fantasy story that shares absolutely nothing with the previous four. Its protagonist is a mother tracking the demon who kidnapped her daughter. There is something of Gene Wolfe in this tale of unlikely revenge, both in structure, and in the atmosphere of mystery, of things left unsaid.

The titular story, Leiathan Wept, was a bit of a disappointment to me. It deals with analogies in a world where connections between people have maybe turned humanity into bigger organisms in which individual humans are only cells. And those organisms might be at war with each other. But what if there is only one, and it is just sick? Even though the idea is very interesting, and the story is well written, I found the development unsatisfying. The concept was intriguing, but remained vague, undeveloped, as if Abraham wasn't entirely sure what he wanted to do with it.

Exclusion is the story with the most interesting idea in the collection. It deals with a future society where technology has advanced to the stage where humans have their own AI systems integrated into their bodies, and those systems allow them to "exclude" other people from their existence. The Ignore function in a very extreme and literal sense, because contact with the excluded is impossible. You don't see them, they don't see you. You can't perceive them in any way, and neither can they perceive you. But what happens to a person's will and courage, when they can simply erase any problem with a thought? Unfortunately, the obvious happens - people prefer to run away from, and "ignore" the problematic relationships, instead of dealing with them. The story had great premise, and I sort of expected more than this simple moral from it.

As Sweet is another Wolfean tale - a poetic piece musing on the nature of love and passion, mixing different centuries but always getting back to Romeo and Juliet's (and more importantly - Rosaline's) Verona and the contemporary life of a literature teacher entering her middle years.

The Curandero and the Swede is a story about the importance of stories, and the way their meaning can change, and by changing - change us. It is the third tale reminiscent of Gene Wolfe's writing, and it deals with dusty roads, and Indian spirits, and Mexican witch-doctors, and all the right stuff that stories should be made of.

All in all, Leviathan Wept and Other Stories is a great collection. There are overarching themes in all stories, like that of sexuality. It is always there, sometimes obvious, others - just implied, but ever present. Many of the stories deal with IT and its evolution, and there is always some dry wit, no matter the seriousness of the plot.

Two things disappointed me a little. The first was the repetition of structure. Too many of the stories are structured in short passages that switch between some present and the slowly developing past that led to it. True, it is a tried and proven frame for a short story, but when you read it so many times in a collection by the same author, it becomes tiring. The second thing is that many of the stories revolve around a single idea, and when that is exhausted, they don't seem to have much to say. Examples of this are Leviathan Wept, Exclusion, and to a lesser extent The Cambist and Lord Iron, although the trend is recognizable in other places as well.

Still, it couldn't have escaped your notice that in three instances I actually compared Daniel Abraham to Gene Wolfe. People who know me should be aware that there is no higher praise I could give an author, and Abraham more than deserves this praise. He has a rich and diverse style of writing, great ideas, and that indefinable energy that compels the reader to continue reading, no matter what. Leviathan Wept is a brilliant book, and I hope we see more collections of his short works soon. Meanwhile, I will soon be jumping into his longer ones.

8/10

Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse

I am a sucker for thematic short story collections. Although I respect "best of the year" books, there is something much more focused in an overarching theme. Years could be generally weak (although, thankfully, recent ones haven't been), and so the "best of..." collection suffers. But with themes you just know that if the editor has done his or her job, it is going to be good.

That said, I am an even bigger sucker for apocalyptic SF. Not the Mad Max b-movie kind, but the thought-provoking, inventive, chilling predictions of the many, many ways in which civilization or the world as we know it could be destroyed. So, naturally, when I noticed the gorgeous cover of Wastelands, and then the names written on it, I simply had to read it.

In one word, this apocalyptic collection is superb! The amount of genuinely brilliant fiction inside is staggering. John Joseph Adams has opted for established names, and those deliver stories that range between light-hearted quests - such as Jack McDevvit's Never Despair (set in the universe of his post-apocalyptic novel Eternity Road) - and poetic pieces like Gene Wolfe's delicate and silently horrifying Mute. There are tragic tales (George R. R. Martin's beautiful Dark, Dark Were The Tunnels) and there are tales of violence and strife (Paolo Bacigalupi's The People of Sand and Slag). And above all lies the theme of a world that has been, but is no more. An idea that holds as much hope as it does horror.

Two stories deserve special mention:

One of the most original entries in this collection is Octavia Butler's Speech Sounds in which the "apocalypse" has appeared in the form of a disease that renders most of humanity incapable of recognizing and producing speech or written words. People have reverted to a deteriorating primitive society that resorts to violence as the alternative to communication. But the effects of the disease are not passed to further generations, and hope is born anew.

Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels by George R. R. Martin has to be my favorite story in Wastelands. A few centuries after a nuclear war has destroyed Earth's surface, a form of humanity has survived deep underground, developing telepathic connection to the mutated animals that also dwell in the tunnels. Then a shuttle from the dying Moon colony - the only remnant of an age long gone - lands in search of survivors and resources. And the meeting between the two civilizations is not what any of them might expect.

Of course, not all stories in this collection are equally good. Stephen King's The End of the Whole Mess is more or less Stephen King being his usual manipulative self, using easily recognizable ways of extracting the appropriate reaction from his readers. Orson Scott Card's Salvage on the other hand - part of his "Mormon Sea" cycle - could very well be set on an alien planet with no change of setting whatsoever. The apocalypse has happened a long time ago, and Card is a lot more interested in exploring his religion than anything else.

Still, there isn't even one weak story in Wastelands, and the good ones are pure joy. Adams starts each entry with an introduction to both the author, and the story itself, and I found many of those really interesting. There is also a "For further reading" list at the end of the book, which contains almost every work of apocalyptic SF that's worth its salt.

All in all, Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse is as good as they get. There are both new, and old names, an amazingly wide range of themes and styles, and an overall quality that is truly rare even in this type of collection.

8.5/10

The Island of Doctor Death And Other Stories And Other Stories - Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe has always been the kind of author that makes me feel guilty and maybe a little dumb. All his works - but especially his short fiction - require undivided attention, an almost maniacal eye for detail, and no doubt a passion for solving puzzles. The part that makes me feel dumb is knowing that the mystery is right in front of my eyes. Hiding in plain sight is always the trick with Wolfe, and one of the reasons his fiction is so exquisite. Alas, that knowledge rarely helps in unraveling the layers of innuendos, the significance of the character names, or the little details in the way words are arranged. Feeling guilty comes later, when I realize I've barely scraped the surface, but just couldn't force myself to start reading all over again. I am rarely able to reread before a long time has passed.

With all that said, I am nothing if not a sucker for punishment, so I keep reading Wolfe's works and keep loving them. The Island of Doctor Death And Other Stories And Other Stories is one of the more ridiculous titles of short story collections out there, and the reason for the repetition is the titular story, The Island of Doctor Death And Other Stories, which is a part of the so called "Wolfe Archipelago" - four stories that all have the words "Island", "Doctor" and "Death" in them. Here endeth the similarities though, as we can see from two of the other three parts of the Archipelago, also published in this collection. While The Island of Doctor Death... is a sort of magical realism and externalized metaphor for escapist literature (the characters from a pulp Science Fiction novel resembling The Island of Dr. Moreau all come to life, manifesting in the company of the young main character Tackie to help him with his real life problems), the second story, the Nebula award winning The Death of Dr. Island, is - in Wolfe's own words - "a thematic inversion" of it. The real island from the first story is replaced by the artificial satellite of "Dr. Island". The AI psychiatrist "Doctor" himself is now the villain of the story while the good boy Tackie is turned into the vicious and unstable Nicholas who has to be "cured" by the mind-screwing space station.

But Wolfe wouldn't be Wolfe if he made things that easy, and the third part of the Archipelago, The Doctor of Death Island, is nowhere near as comparable to the other two as they are to each other. It gives us a world in the near future, where humanity has achieved immortality at the price of losing love, ambition, literacy and other little things of the sort. Unfortunately for the main character - a convicted murderer - a life sentence in this world is still a life sentence. Although the author himself insists that themes of the other Archipelago stories persist here, I was not able to find them on the first reading. I also found the story a bit underwhelming, compared to the other two, and especially The Death...

Other highlights of this magnificent collection are:

The Hero As A Werwolf (the mistake is intentional) where humanity has turned itself into the "Masters" - a race of art-loving near-immortal creatures that never suffer from diseases, hunger or compassion. The remaining humans are hunted and purged, but they have learned to survive by feeding on the Masters. Thus the "Werwolf", from the Anglo-Saxon wer, which means "man"; the hero is a "man-wolf" - a noble creature turned into an animal, but still better in Wolfe's eyes to the soulless Masters.

Seven American Nights has to be my favorite story from this collection. In a future where America has barely survived a genetic apocalypse, leaving almost all of its citizens malformed and mutated in some way, a man from Iran arrives on its shores. The story is told through Nadan's journal. But it seems to cover only... six nights. Seven American Nights is by far the most intriguing mystery among the fourteen stories and a shining example of Wolfe's love for the "unreliable narrator". First of all, the number of nights does not match. Second, Nadan is vain, and trying to impress his potential readers - his mother and fiance. Also, at some point he gets paranoid about the intrigues in which he has inadvertently involved himself, and tears pages from his diary in fear that someone might read them. Also there are moments where he is obviously not in his right mind, be it under the influence of drugs or just raging fear. None of the characters - not even Nadan himself - are what they seem to be, and there are many theories as to what really happened, and how many nights he spent in the enigmatic third-world country of America.

Hour of Trust again sees America almost destroyed, this time by a vicious anarchist civil war. The only opposition are the big corporations which have taken the side of the failing American army, and are trying to raise funds from other firms in Europe by staging a party where their expected victory over the rebels in Detroit is to be aired live on TV. Here there seem to be no big secrets to unravel, but Wolfe gives indications for the ending from the very beginning. Names are important, and actions, and also little words. The strongest point of the story is in the atmosphere. You could feel the desperation, even if the main characters can't, the delusions of the Old Order that things could ever get back to what once was. Hour of Trust is a story about change, and about a world dying so that it can be reborn. It is also a little sad, because Wolfe never gives guaranties that what comes next will be better than what was lost.

All the stories offer more on second and third glance. I could write about the New Testament allusions in The Hero As A Werwolf, or about the multi-faceted relationship between Tackie and Doctor Death in The Island of Doctor Death...; or of the many layers of mystery and misleading clues in Seven American Nights. But I am neither qualified, nor willing to steal the incredible sense of wonder and fulfillment that comes with untangling Wolfe's stories by yourself. Suffice to say that after almost twenty years of reading SF and Fantasy, I am yet to find another author with such eye for intricate detail, and able to tell a self-sufficient straightforward story with another straightforward story hiding in plain sight inside it. And yet another one, thrown in for good measure. It is not a coincidence that Gene Wolfe has been labeled by many of his colleagues as the greatest living stylist in American literature. It is not an empty title, and I am yet to read a book or short story from him that disproves it.

As for The Island of Doctor Death And Other Stories And Other Stories, I couldn't find a single story inside that I didn't love, and I just couldn't recommend it enough.

10/10