Fantastic Metropolis

An unusually large portion of the short fiction that came my way this year could be characterized as politically inspired. WisCon’s Guests of Honor, China Miéville and Carol Emswhiller, both chose to read intense, moving stories inspired by the US’s twelve-year war against Iraq. “The General,” the story Emswhiller chose to read, I later read for myself in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, and I could almost hear her voice inside my head as I did so. Another strong Emswhiller story, “Boys,” appeared in SciFiction. (January, 2003); it shares Deena Metzger’s quest for “taking the war out of men”–but comes to different conclusions than Metzger’s novel does. The anthology, Politically Inspired: Fiction for Our Time, edited by Stephen Elliott (San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage, 2003), has several good pieces (and a few lame ones). My favorites include the good-natured “The President’s New Clothes” by Anne Ursu, in which we see that Dubya would make an extremely successful eleven-year-old were he to happen to exchange consciousness with a little boy; Jim Shepard’s “Dade County, November 2000,” a story I would not have read politically absent its title; Elizabeth Tallent’s “Eight Hundred Pages,” a story about desire, ghosts, and trying to make one’s body remember; and the elegantly illustrated tale in verse, “The Vampires of Draconian Hill” by Brian Gage and Von Do:

The sun could destroy vampires roaming the night—
A sun that is hidden from toddlers’ sight.
Instead they stare blankly at glowing blue globes—
A gift from the dead that is placed in their homes.
Its beauty transfixed upon all those who stare—
It lulls them with hypnotic somnolent fare.
When they look to it, they see not the dead,
But charming old statesmen—no fangs in their head. (193)

Every year I seem to find a Kelly Link story that I absolutely adore; this year I found “The Canon” in Say… #2, a tale in which men and women are fired out of cannons but “don’t travel to the same place.” I’m grateful to editor Ellen Datlow for reprinting Chan Davis’s “It Walks in Beauty” (SciFiction, Sept 2003). This story first appeared in 1958, sadly adulterated by its editor, as Davis reveals in his interview with Josh Lukin. The anthology Fantasmas: Supernatural Stories by Mexican American Writers is in the “Borderlands” tradition first made prominent by Gloria Anzaldua. Its stories, by Kathleen Alcalá, Daniel A. Olivas, and others, forge the conventions of traditional Mexican American storytelling, folk religions, and pulp fiction into ghost stories “with irony, affection, and an eye toward their aesthetic value.”