Fantastic Metropolis

In “Family, Sexuality, Gender, Art” (Genders 39; 204) Jo-Anne Berelowitz interviews Vivien Green-Fryd about her new book, Art and the Crisis of Marriage. Fryd comments that artists are generally taken to “exemplify non-traditional and experimental lives that defy the norm,” seeming to “exist outside the realm of the ordinary.” After having asked herself what is at stake “in considering artists within the context of marriage,” Fryd says that she came to recognize “that the older notions of marriage, which entailed the imposition of patriarchal authority, the repression of female sexuality, the control of male sexuality, and the occurrence of unplanned pregnancy, and the newer ones, which were yet to be fully forumulated but which included affection, comradeship, and mutual sexual gratification, affected the art and lives of both artists and their spouses.” Later in the interview Fryd discusses the vexed issue of Georgia O’Keeffe and Jo Hopper’s acting both “as the passive model for the active patriarchal male artist and as an active agent in her own subjectivity” as an artist. The interview made me want to read Fryd’s book.

Moving on to fiction: I especially enjoyed three anthologies this year: So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy ed. Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004); Polyphony 3, ed. Deborah Layne and Jay Lake (Wheatland, 2003); and The James Tiptree Award Anthology 1, ed. Fowler, Murphy, Notkin, and Smith (Tachyon, 2004). About the latter I want to emphasize to everyone who has read Flying Cups and Saucers, the first Tiptree award anthology, that despite the title, this book does not duplicate the contents of the first anthology, as I assumed it did until I actually looked inside the book. Nor does this anthology pick up where the first anthology left off, but reprints mostly recent stories (with the exception of Kelly Link’s “Travels with the Snow Queen”). Despite the confusion (which the editors compound by pointedly avoiding all mention of the original volume), this book is rich with essays by several stars of feminist sf as well as fine fiction, including the first print version of Karen Joy Fowler’s controversial, Nebula-winning story, “What I Didn’t See.” I recommend also both issues of Steve Pasechnick’s new fantasy magazine, Alchemy: the first two issues are beautifully produced and feature beautifully written fantastic tales.

My recommendation for specific stories include Lisa Goldstein’s “Finding Beauty” (F&SF Oct-Nov 2004); Andrea Hairston’s “Griots of the Galaxy” (So Long Been Dreaming); Lois Tilton’s “The Gladiator’s War: A Dialogue” (Asimov’s June 2004); Claire Light’s “Pigs in Space” (McSweeney’s No. 14)—hard sf that revisions Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations”; Alex Irvine’s “The Fall at Shanghai” (Alchemy 1); Amber Van Dyk’s “Sour Metal” (Alchemy 2); and Ellen Klages “Basement Magic” (F&SF May 2003).

This year saw the publication of an unusually large number of collections by excellent short-fiction authors. As a result, I have a huge, tottering stack of them I will happily but slowly work my way through in the months (and maybe even years) to come. So far I have read only two, Ian R. MacLeod’s Breathmoss and Other Exhalations (Golden Gryphon, 2004) and Victoria Garcia’s Unspeakable Vitrine (Claw Foot Bath Dog, 2004), both absorbing, intelligent reads. I also took immense pleasure in Carter Scholz’s The Amount to Carry (Picador, 2003)—encountering there stories I read for the first time as well as several I’d read three or four times before. This is fiction that wears very well indeed. The cleverest, most entertaining collection I read this year was Jane Stevenson’s Several Deceptions: Four Novellas (Houghton Mifflin, 1999). The delicious opening story, “The Island of the Day Before Yesterday,” begins with the sentence “In retrospect, I am strongly inclined to blame the whole thing on Umberto Eco.” A vain, social-climbing academic, the narrator has visions of pulling off a postmodernist coup through his dastardly machinations but instead renders himself a laughing-stock. The stories in Leslie What’s The Sweet and Sour Tongue (Wildside Press, 2000), which explore areas of family relations and religion that f/sf seldom takes heed of, deeply moved me. What’s narrative perspective is infused with sensitivity as well as a sense of humor, and her images are simultaneously quotidian and startling.

What’s novel, Olympic Games (Tachyon, 2004—excerpt) ventures into the territory of satirical religious sf—rubbing shoulders with the likes of James Morrow and Stanley Elkin—using postmodern manifestations of the ancient Greek gods, Zeus and Hera, to do so. Since it has been centuries since anyone has worshiped Zeus and Hera, What is able to avoid asking critical questions about any particular extant religion and can make her gods as absurd or obnoxious as she chooses without offending anyone. As with The Sweet and Sour Tongue, What uses humor here to serve serious and emotionally tender purposes. The reader may howl with laughter at the thought of the vapid, self-centered Hera being impregnated by a cockroach and giving birth to a cockroach-human hybrid named Igor, but the implied reference to the famous cockroach named Gregor is poignant rather than hilarious, particularly since Igor is sweet, doomed, and lovable.