This book was shelved in mystery, but it read to me more like a fantasy novel that used the tropes of detective stories as an endlessly malleable playground. The main character, Charles Unwin, is easily likeable, as he moves through the story hopelessly in over his head. The set pieces are beautiful, even haunting. I enjoyed the first two thirds of the book more than the ending, in which the amorphous dreamlike reality Unwin has been cast into solidifies into a literal, structured dreamscape. The plot, while reasonably satisfyingly resolved, just isn’t as compelling as the images and atmosphere. For most of the book the story feels like a dream, in that even when there are moments of danger and uncertainty, there is no sense of menace: in the end, we will wake up safe in bed. As the story moves toward the climax it embraces more traditional forms of narrative tension and suspense, and starts to feel somehow flatter for it. Still, even if the plot seems slight in retrospect, the characters are delightful and each gets his or her moment to shine before the end. This was a highly enjoyable read, and a perfect book to keep on the bedside table, get lost in under the covers, and fall asleep while reading.
Author: Eugene Fischer
More sculpture.
Today I felt too slow for fiction, so I made sculpture.
My poll asking readers to tell me what genre they think my story “Husbandry” is has been up for a week now, and as of this writing the results are: 4 votes for “Fantasy,” 5 votes for “Science Fiction,” and 6 votes for “Something Else.” So it’s pretty close. The something-elses have, I think, some granularity, with Sarah, Damien, and Kat arguing that it’s interstitial fiction, and Elizabeth Twist opining that it’s subtle horror–an opinion shared by Karen Meisner (who was my editor on the story) in this comments thread. (Thanks for the kind words, Shweta!) EDIT: Oops! I mischaracterized Karen’s opinion–see the comments on this post.
I didn’t vote in the poll. If I had voted when I set up the poll, I probably would have voted for fantasy, though I would have been thinking that it was fantasy written with a distinctly science fiction sensibility. I have trouble thinking of it as really being science fiction because, well, zombies. Everything around that core I tried to treat naturalistically, even rigorously, but there is no mechanism for how death works in the story, and without that I can’t really consider it science fiction. All of the stories I’ve read with zombies have been ones I would characterize as fantasy, but I could be persuaded that this is because my familiarity of horror as a literary genre is almost nonexistant. It occurs to me that most zombie movies are considered horror; perhaps that is the natural home of the trope. I don’t really know where the edges of fantasy and horror meet, or how widely they overlap. And is what I’m calling an overlap what the Interstitial Arts Foundation would call an interstice? I’m not sure I understand what interstitial art is. It seems more natural to me to think of these categories as overlapping Venn diagrams, of genres as things that bleed into each other rather than as things with gaps between them into which some stories slip. But then I don’t have the task of marketing books to bookstores. The interstitial metaphor begins to make more sense if there is a shelf of fantasy and a shelf of horror, and they don’t touch each other. Suddenly, in the bookstore of my mind, my story is lying on the floor somewhere between them. So, I’m still not sure I know what genre “Husbandry” is, but I’m starting to be persuaded that “something else” is a worthy winner. Let’s hear it for the wisdom of crowds. (I’m going to leave the poll open for a while longer, just to see what happens.)
My parents met and socialized with Theodore Sturgeon at the University of Kansas before they were married–they claim to have the only copy of Venus on the Half-Shell (written by Phil José Farmer pseudonymously) signed by the real Kilgore Trout. EDIT: My father wrote to correct me: they got Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut, signed by Sturgeon as Trout. I grew up on Sturgeon stories. Memory fades, but I think my first Sturgeon was “Microcosmic God,” which was either actually read to me as a bedtime story, or was put in my hands by my parents as something to read myself to sleep with. In college I wrote a comparative literature paper on the treatment of the mentally disabled by Theodore Sturgeon and Philip K. Dick.
This week’s story in Strange Horizons is a Theodore Sturgeon reprint. And I can tell you, because I just got off the phone with them, that my parents are totally geeking out about their son’s name appearing next to Theodore Sturgeon’s on a table of contents. My mother insists she is going to print out the page and frame it. I’m pretty happy with this turn of events also. I told my dad, “This is the nicest thing that doesn’t really mean anything at all that’s happened to me in a while.” So thanks for the unexpected gift, SH! As a Sturgeon fan, this is a clipping for my archives:
Facebook, which always has my best interest at heart, communicates with me through the ads it chooses to place on my profile page. I have just decoded its latest instructions:
I am to set up a social networking website that lets me achieve wealth by acquiring free samples of Huggies and selling them to the vast market of nontraditional urination enthusiasts. EugeneFischer.com will soon be relaunching with an exciting new design! Suck it, recession; Facebook’s got my back!
I’m still getting over my respiratory infection, trying to take it easy and hasten being able to start on my Humira. I’m on Levaquin now, which will hopefully help. But content may be light here for a little while, as my energy levels are low and my activities not particularly varied. For now, here’s a picture of sign I drive by fairly often that amuses me, in kind of a dark, symbol of the economic times sort of way:
So many things are in the past tense now.
My Clarionmate Sarah Miller has had a lovely, elegant flash piece published at Everyday Weirdness. Take a few moments and make your day a little stranger by experiencing “The Music at Bash Bish Falls.“
I spent much of yesterday insane. I mean this quite literally.
The highest that I actually measured my temperature was 102.6, but I suspect that there was some selection bias there, in that to measure my temperature I had to be competent to operate a thermometer. An easier to fact-check set of statistics is items I managed to saturate with sweat: six shirts, five towels (including one beach towel), and all my pillowcases were strewn about in still-damp bundles when it came time to fill the washing machine today. My fever finally broke sometime around 2:00 am, after which it dawned on me just how strange my cognition had been for most of the previous 24 hours.
I didn’t have an experiential referent for “fever dream” before, but yesterday I spent well over an hour in intense mental negotiation with a bottle of tylenol. The balance of the situation had to be carefully, maintained, you see. All of the relevant energies–both political and ethereal–taken into account, else disaster. It was crucial that the bottle of tylenol not be allowed, under any circumstances, to notice the tension in my jaw, or all would be irretrievably lost. This interaction between myself and the bottle was, in my mind, as furious as it was protracted. And yet if you were to have walked into my bedroom and watched it take place, what you would have seen was me lying completely motionless for a very long time with my bloodshot eyes locked on a small white bottle sitting ten inches from my face, hair plastered to a head full to bursting with primo crazy.
Curiously, there was no visual component to this experience. I was not hallucinating, merely beset by flagrantly nonrational concerns and obsessions. Fever dreams. Anyone else have experience with this phenomenon?
My short story “Husbandry” has just gone up at Strange Horizons! I encourage you to read it, and hope you enjoy it.
I have never been able to characterize this story to my satisfaction in terms of genre. I can’t decide if I think it is fantasy or science fiction. To that end, a poll:
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