Fantastic Metropolis

Observatory Mansions, Edward Carey

(Crown, 2001)

Observatory Mansions is a sort of postmodern gothic novel whose real protagonist is, well, Observatory Mansions, a dilapidated block of flats on a traffic island in a small city somewhere in England that once upon a time used to be a real mansion set on gorgeous grounds. Francis Orme, the 37-year-old narrator who wears white gloves so he never really has to touch anything and works as a mime in a wax museum, recounts the delightful eccentrics who frequent the place—Claire Higg, who watches television day and night and thinks of the actors on it as her friends; the porter, who doesn’t talk, but hisses; Peter Bugg, who can’t stop sweating and crying; et al. Everything drifts in a gray, bland temporal fog until Anna Tap, the new resident who is slowly going blind, shows up and sets Observatory Mansions in motion. More concerned with character and consciousness than plot, this debut novel is an odd, dark, funny investigation into existential bizarrerie.

Changing Planes, Ursula K. Le Guin

(Harcourt, 2003)

One afternoon during an excruciatingly dull layover at O’Hare, Sita Dulip of Cincinnati discovers an “interplanar technique” allowing her to travel, not just between airplanes, but also between planes of existence. Trapped for hours in an uncomfortable plastic chair at her gate, Sita finds “by a mere twist and slipping bend, easier to do than to describe, she could go anywhere—be anywhere.” Before long air travelers everywhere, copy of Rornan’s Handy Planary Guide in hand, are vacationing among alternate realities. What follows in Ursula K. Le Guin’s seemingly whimsical collection of linked fictions are sixteen anthropologies of brilliantly weird cultures employed as extended metaphors for and enactments of the power of the human imagination. Islac, for instance, is filled with genetic misfires (a waitress who is part corn; insect-teddy-bearish hybrids that live off children’s books) resulting from botched attempts to make better flora and fauna. On the Frithian plane people dream other people’s (and animals’) dreams for entertainment, while on the Yendian you can catch immortality from a fly. At their strongest, these stories by the high priestess of American speculative fiction are Borgesian in their evocative abstraction and inventiveness. At their weakest, they are much less substantial than that—something closer to Borges Lite. Either way, their almost childlike simplicity is deceptive. The more you look, the more the strange worlds they conjure investigate some aspect of our own—from the inherent instability of selfhood and language to looming ecocatastrophe—seen through a vibrant, satiric imagination darkly.

Textual Harassment, run by Lance Olsen

For hundreds of other suggestions by me and lots of other readers, or to suggest your own choices and/or argue with me about mine, let me conclude by inviting you to Textual Harassment, the forum I run on my website, Cafe Zeitgeist. Textual Harassment is a possibility space where a continuous discussion of interesting edge novels, books of theory, comics, and story collections is going on. For my purposes, “the edge” can take many forms–speculative fiction, outre fantasy, postmodern fiction and theory, cyberpunk, post-cyberpunk, alternative, critifictional, slipstream, transgressive, avant-pop, hypermedial, avant-garde, experimental, innovative, hypertextual, comix, etc. In other words, as long as it makes your brain itch, well, that’s good enough for me.

Lance Olsen’s most recent books are Hideous Beauties (Eraserhead Press, 2003), a collection of short fictions, and Girl Imagined by Chance (FC2, 2002).