Shelf Life

Written by Terry Weyna Tuesday, 19 August 2008 20:02

Columns - Terry Weyna

Every March, during that time fondly known to students and academics as Spring Break, a certain cadre of authors, academics and independent scholars gather in Florida for the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. This conference is notable for three things (at least): it welcomes independent scholars and encourages them to present papers on various aspects of science fiction, fantasy and horror; it is as much a giant, four-day party as it is an academic conference, even while it maintains a degree of seriousness that separates it from the usual science fiction convention; and it attracts a large number of science fiction, fantasy and horror authors who actually write the books the teachers are teaching and the scholars are studying.

I've attended the conference on and off for about ten years now, and I've always had a wonderful time, even though I'm a little shy about approaching authors whose works I've read and admired, not to mention the critics whose reviews I rely upon to guide my reading. I tend to feel like Wayne and Garth from those old Saturday Night Live sketches - "I'm not worthy!" I'm finally getting over that a bit, especially since I've recently discovered that these folks don't bite, and are actually quite friendly. As a result, I've had some illuminating conversations with some of my favorite authors.

For example, I once discussed The Night Watch with Sean Stewart. Stewart's fantasy has a scene in which an individual is trying to light a fire in an airplane hangar in subzero temperatures in pitch darkness. If he isn't able to light a fire, there's no question he will die. It's a lengthy scene, and written so well that the anxiety starts to eat into your bones. Stewart told me that he was himself very, very cold as he wrote, despite the fact that the ambient temperature was a comfortable 72 degrees; when he finished, he had to go drink hot coffee and wrap himself in an afghan.

On the subject of coldness, I told Peter Straub about reading his classic horror novel Ghost Story during a temperate spring in Sacramento, California. I headed out one fine weekend morning and saw flowering trees in brilliant white bloom, and immediately assumed that it had snowed during the night - so immersed was I in the cold winter of the world Straub had created. It wasn't until it dawned on me that I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt that I realized my perceptions were being screwed up by my imagination. Straub was amused.

I told Gregory Frost that I'd been accused of writing a hagiography rather than a review of his book of short stories, Attack of the Jazz Giants (go out and get a copy and read it if you haven't - it's wonderful!). He asked me, "And this should bother me ... why?"

I eavesdropped on a conversation between Brian Aldiss, the author of "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," and my husband, who'd written a paper on Steven Spielberg's movie, "A.I." - for which Aldiss's story had been the inspiration. It was great fun to hear Aldiss talk about his experiences with Stanley Kubrick, who began work on "A.I." before his death, and later with Spielberg.

But the conversation that I found most enlightening was with John Kessel. Kessel is the co-director of the creative writing program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. He has won the Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the Locus Poll, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. He is very tall, very outgoing, and very encouraging to new writers and independent scholars. We talked about short stories - at the time, not a major part of my reading diet. But Kessel thinks that there's a lot of excitement going on in short fantastic fiction. He encourages his students who do short work to consider genre fiction, which is one of the last bastions of the short story. Think about it: only one short story gets published each month in the New Yorker, but half a dozen novelettes, novellas and short stories get published in each of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Analog, Interzone, Strange Horizons, and several other venues, both in print and on the internet. And original anthologies have been published in increasing numbers in recent years, as well as single-author collections. These are boom times for short works of the fantastic.

I took Kessel's advice, and have been reading a lot more short works in the last several years, with great pleasure. Most recently, I've read Kessel's own collection, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence (Small Beer Press, 2008, trade paper, $16.00). The collection is in turns funny and somber, science fictional extrapolation and flights of fantasy, political and carefree. One thing all the stories have in common is that they are very good indeed. Some are brilliant.

The centerpiece of the book is A Lunar Quartet, four stories based on the moon after it has been colonized underground. The Quartet principally concerns the Society of Cousins, a matriarchal society established on the far side of the moon. Here, women are very much in charge, a change accomplished in large part, apparently, by making sex freely available and without taboo. Men are also freed from work in order to devote their time to the arts and sciences, and are paid a stipend by the colony to do this work. The fruits of their labors are used by the women for the good of the colony, and the women do the hard labor of keeping the colony going - the farming, the maintenance of the technology needed to supply the air and water, and so on. Only those who do the hard labor get to vote, so most men do not have a vote. They can choose to labor rather than pursue the arts and sciences, but such work for them is without honor and largely without chance of promotion. Furthermore, while motherhood is cherished, fatherhood is barely recognized, and carries with it no obligations. In this society, then, men are more or less treasured, very sexualized, pampered, loved toys. And most of them like that just fine.

But there are always consequences. Some men are not happy with their so-called "privileged" position, and who would prefer to have a hand in running the political end of things. Some men miss having power, even if they are generations away from a system in which males ruled society. Kessel carefully shows how his matriarchal structure would work for these men, as well as for those who live normal lives under the system, and encourages us to wonder whether things would be better or worse or just different.

The funniest story in the collection is "Powerless," about a man trying to build a perpetual motion engine using the rotation of the earth as his power source; he calls it a Foucault engine. This leads to much discussion of the difference between Jean Bernard Leon Foucault, who invented the Foucault pendulum (and after whom the Foucault engine is named) and Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, and the thoughts of the latter about sex, psychiatry, and criminology. Why? For the same reason we also hear about the dwarves Dimli and Halbo, the Chalice of Dreams and the Jewel of Reduction (in other words, I haven't a clue). Somehow, though, all these disparate parts fit together into a hilarious whole. Kessel read the greater part of this story aloud at ICFA this past spring, and had his audience laughing so hard that the group next door had to send someone in to ask us to keep it down so they could hear the papers being presented there. We tried, but I think we were probably still too loud. It's that kind of story.

Other stories in the collection give us a look, for instance, at how Orson Welles might have responded to a time traveler who gave him a second chance at achieving fame and respect in his lifetime ("It's All True"); how Oz might be a land of plenty if Dorothy were a seductive, amoral tramp instead of the innocent farm girl we all watched Judy Garland portray on the silver screen ("The Baum Plan for Financial Independence"); and how women might have protected themselves from the cruelty of men in colonial times in what was to become the United States ("The Invisible Empire"). One of my favorites treats us to a visit by Victor Frankenstein to Mary Bennet, one of the younger sisters from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, in "Pride and Prometheus."

Kessel's skill at storytelling continues to grow. This book is full of gems. Buy it, read it, be challenged by it, think about it for weeks after you finish it, go back to it again and again and reread, treasure it. It's that kind of book.

Terry Weyna doesn't understand why she still doesn't have enough time to read, since she now practices law only part-time. Perhaps it's because she reads and reviews just about everything - contemporary fiction, non-fiction, science fiction, fantasy, horror and mysteries - for various outlets, including Reading the Leaves (her blog), and SF Signal. Books for review should be sent to her at 2033 Ralston Avenue, #154, Belmont, California 94002-1737.

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