Fantastic Metropolis

Zipless books from 2003: books that I fell into with no resistance, no barriers, no spectacle-polishing. The fact that there are so few reflects the constraints on my reading time, not any scarcity of excellent books.

Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures, Michael Swanwick

(Tachyon Publications, 2003)

To read this collection of tiny stories is to have a series of unusually personal interactions with the storyteller. In each story, the author seems to be completely at your disposal, with no goal other than your amusement. The barrier of the book disappears.

Novels, even the most compelling, can be impersonal—the author may be distant, and the characters usually feel the wrath of people and forces that do not have their best interests at heart. Short stories, too, have their own agendas—they have tales to tell, they have business to transact. Even a coherent sequence of short-shorts, such as Swanwick’s The Sleep of Reason or The Periodic Table, has responsibilities and ambitions outside of keeping you, personally, entertained. Cigar-Box Faust, however, has no ulterior motive, no evident career plan.

Reading it is the adult equivalent of having your dad tell you stories in which the main character has your name. Each story speaks directly to you, its ideal reader. Some were written specifically to amuse Swanwick’s wife, or son, or favorite editors, and these happy origins may contribute to the effect. It’s not a children’s book—there’s no sugar here, rather, an intoxicating, slightly tart, effervescence.

Here’s how it works:

Swanwick lays down a sentence. It’s short, it’s punchy, it promises a pay-off. You read it, smile, nod, and move on to the next sentence. That one pays off the sentence before it, and promises an even better payoff if you move on to the one following. You do so, collect the even-better payoff as promised, and continue to be led through the story by increasing promises and even more rewarding payoffs. Very quickly, you come to the end of the story, because it’s very short. You have both hands full: felicities, surprises, bon-mots, witticisms, epiphanies, goodies of every description. But, alas, it’s over.

Oh, look: there’s another story right after it. Can Swanwick do it again? Yes, he can.

Captain America: The Truth, Robert Morales and Kyle Baker

(DC Comics, 7-part series, November 2002-June 2003)

(Graphic novel will be out in February, 2004)

The Truth gives Captain America, the World War II Marvel superhero, a generous dose of reality. What if, it asks, the serum that turned blonde, blue-eyed Steve Rogers into a superman was tested first on black soldiers? What if the first Captain America was black, and the success of the second was built on exploitation of the first? The series opens with a evocative glimpse of the black urban experience in 1941, then follows a handful of soldiers, men from diverse backgrounds, who have been conscripted—they are not volunteers—into the superman experiment. The story emphasizes the subjection of black soldiers in World War II, and recalls the notorious Tuskegee experiment, conducted from 1932 to 1972. When we are reminded, later in the series, that the Nazis were worse than the Americans, it comes as a bit of a surprise.

Conceived at Marvel, which chose to make this a part of the Captain America continuity (making it officially part of the story, rather than publishing it as part of their alternate-history Ultimate series), this seven-part series was written and drawn by the sophisticated writer/artist team of Robert Morales and Kyle Baker, whose daring, trenchantly political collaborations first appeared in Vibe nearly a decade ago. Morales has a razor wit, a superb ear for dialog, and a genius for ironic juxtaposition. Baker, himself a witty writer and a versatile illustrator, designed and drew the series with a deceptively comic line, and a use of form and color that brings to mind Jacob Lawrence and Paul Gauguin.

Without the candy colors, the story might be unbearable: almost nothing done by the government or the military or the soldiers themselves springs from worthy motives. Most of what happens in the world of the story, as in the world of the 20th century, is horrific. The effect of racism is pervasive and toxic, and the overwhelming impression of the series is of the lives wasted—crumpled and thrown away—due to its effects. The ending embodies a quick, poignant visual tour of the last quarter century of black achievement in the U.S., and a tribute to the resilience, humor, and intelligence of black women.

Marvel was wise in their choice of Morales and Baker to write this story. There is a rich and ironic resonance to every creative decision the storytellers made, and the flood of detail defies easy interpretation. The white Captain America, in a framing story, apparently gives the aghast white reader a safe place to stand while viewing the carnage. Since white Cap had no idea what was going on, and has been in suspended imagination for fifty years, he must be innocent, right? So: exactly how many Americans have spent half a century asleep and oblivious?

This is a comic book: it’s an easy read. You just keep turning the pages, and The Truth leaps out at you.

Pattern Recognition, William Gibson

(G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2003)

I tend to read a William Gibson book as a guided tour of his brain, and of my own. Not so much a story: rather, a chance to spend some quality time with an acute observer of what’s interesting in the clockwork of contemporary life. What are we thinking about that we don’t quite know we’re thinking about yet?

The fact that a Gibson book affects its environment in a Heisenbergian way adds spice to the process. Perhaps, I thought, when reading this for the first time, I should corner the market in Curta calculators, since Pattern Recognition fetishizes them. And their prices, substantial even then, have doubled on eBay since the book came out.

The book is of course now a year old, and we know what we are thinking. Looking back into it, I still find the opening scene fresh and clean: Cayce waking alone in a minimalist London apartment, savoring the few differences left between here and there, anywhere in the world: electric plugs, cars on the wrong side of the road, telephone handsets. An anti-Molly, Cayce wears oversized jeans and pricey simulations of workingmen’s clothing. She belongs to the millennial urban counterculture of people who make much more money than they need and flaunt it so subtly that to the uninitiated it’s invisible.

Cayce is detached but observant. Like Gibson, her livelihood depends on a strange radar for what will be interesting to the cool people some time in the future. Maybe that’s a misconception: maybe, by observing a pattern, or calling attention to an interesting anomaly, she brings it subliminally into some sphere of interest. The act of her observing it causes it to become cool. Heisenberg again.

If you ever wondered what William Gibson was driving at with the damned brand names—Molly’s Zeiss-Ikon eyes, Case’s Ono-Sendai cyberdeck, etc.—well, maybe you weren’t paying very much attention. You get another chance here. Cayce, though allergic to logos, dotes on her Buzz Rickson jacket, attends her Pilates classes, drinks Starbucks coffee. This makes perfect sense to me.

I enjoyed making Cayce’s acquaintance, and I enjoy renewing it by re-reading. Like Cayce, and so many other people, I loathe having logos on my clothing, and I fall asleep quite helplessly during Tarkovsky films. She’s very much like one of my friends.

Custer’s Last Jump, and Other Collaborations, Howard Waldrop

(Golden Gryphon Press, 2003)

The stories in this collection are great, of course. Some are recently published, some have been sprung from the prison of time, and one, the long-rumored collaboration between Howard Waldrop and Bruce Sterling, has never been published previously. The title story is the one that changed the ground rules for writing alternate history. These are stories of ideas—of complete profligacy with ideas—of inventing forms, pushing their envelopes, and making the rest of the world sit up and take notice.

But the stories are only half the story. This collection comes with context. Context bubbles irrepressibly out of Waldrop’s introductions to the stories. Context pours from the afterwards written by his collaborators. Waldrop’s accompanying essays pretend to be about the process of collaborating, but they too are really about context. And the context is of people who’ve known one another forever: people who grew up together, drew comics together, slept on one another’s couches, drank one another’s last beer, and after all that, still like one another.

Howard’s collaborators are among the people who made Austin a free-fire zone of SF ideas and original stories in the Seventies and Eighties: Bruce Sterling, Steven Utley, George R. R. Martin, Leigh Kennedy, Buddy Saunders, and astrophysicist Al Jackson. Howard says it’s “thirty years of the True History of SF.” Since he and Saunders were in the 7th grade together, and he and Martin first started corresponding in 1963, so I’d say Howard is shorting himself a decade there, but really, who’s counting?

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Eileen Gunn is a short-story writer, and the editor of the online science-fiction magazine The Infinite Matrix. She is also currently the chairman of the board of directors of the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop. Stable Strategies, and Others, a collection of her short stories, will be published by Tachyon Publications in the fall of 2004.