Fantastic Metropolis

Two chapbooks brought me particular pleasure this year. Common Ectoids of Arizona: Field Drawings and Notations by Stepan Chapman, “Doctor of Etheric Zoology” (Lockout Press, Milwaukee WI, 2001) (“who can be reached at his wild insect preserve”) is a humorous textual and graphic excursion through the imaginative landscape that is so peculiarly Chapman’s own. Kelly Link’s Catskin: a swaddled zine (Jelly Ink Press, 2002) takes us to the fantastic if grim world of a witch with a “passion for children” and a cat called “the Witch’s Revenge.” Like most fairy tales, it’s probably not suitable reading for children, even if it does end with the question “and who is to say that they might not live…. happily ever after, until all the ants have carried away all of the time that there is, to build something new and better out of it?”

I read some very fine short fiction this year. I particularly recommend Ian MacLeod’s “Breathmoss” (Asimov’s SF, May 2002), Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Wild Girls” (Asimov’s SF, Feb. 2002), John Kessel’s “Stories for Men” (Asimov’s SF, Oct/Nov, 2002), Karen Joy Fowler’s “What I Didn’t See” (SciFiction, July 2002), Bev Jafek’s “The Death of Sappho” (Thought Magazine, Fall/Winter 2002), Tamar Yellin’s “Moonlight” (Leviathan 3), and Theodora Goss’s “The Rapid Advance of Sorrow” (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #11, Nov. 2002). Three anthologies provided hours of pleasure: Polyphony, ed. Jay Lake and Deborah Layne (Wheatland Press, 2002), Leviathan 3, ed. Jeff VanderMeer and Forrest Aguirre (Ministry of Whimsy, 2002), and Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists, ed. Peter Straub (2002). Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (HarperCollins, 2002) contains the brilliant, prize-winning “The Matter of Seggri,” while James Patrick Kelly’s Strange But Not a Stranger (Golden Gryphon, 2002) contains “Undone,” one of the best stories of 2001. Three collections in translation, Zoran Zivkovic’s Time Gifts (Northwestern University Press, 200) and Seven Touches of Music (Polaris, 2001) and Christina Peri Rossi’s The Museum of Useless Efforts (University of Nebraska Press, 2001), despite their authors’ rather different cultural backgrounds, share a similar sensibility, often exaggerating to bizarre proportions moments and experiences of strangeness most humans would, on reflection, find familiar, to the end of revealing aspects of human existence invisible to ordinary perception. Like all dedicated readers, I naturally did some rereading, too. I revisited the stylistically vivacious Stanley Elkin’s Greatest Hits (E.P.Dutton, 1980), which may be described as the opposite of a “cut-up novel”-being a collection of lengthy novel excerpts served up as stories. And when I heard of Gina Berriault’s death, I pulled one of her collections off the shelf to reread. A tribute to Berriault’s excruciatingly honest gaze and moral intelligence, The Infinite Passion of Expectation (North Point Press, 1982) examines life in West-Coast America in the third quarter of the twentieth century, elucidating the pain and beauty and longing to be found in every life, whatever its worth, whatever its setting.

I’ve already written at length elsewhere on the technical brilliance and political courage of Carter Scholz’s Radiance (Picador USA, 2002), so I’ll simply mention it here. For my birthday a friend gave me Shelley Jackson’s hypertext Patchwork Girl (Eastgate Systems, 2001); it so enthralled me that I stayed up past two a.m. devouring it. This elegant, vivid work, which I’d characterize as Rebecca Brown meets Karen Joy Fowler, seriously revisions Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “There is a kind of thinking without thinkers,” Jackson writes. “Matter thinks. Language thinks. When we have business with language, we are possessed by its dreams and demons, we grow intimate with monsters.” Patchwork Girl is both story and metacommentary. “Mary writes. I write, we write, but who is really writing? Ghost writers are the only kind there are.” Two fantastical novels in translation provoked the wild side of my imagination: Lenore Carrington’s surrealist The Hearing Trumpet (Exact Change, 1996) and Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation (The New Press, 1997). Emma Tenant’s bizarre satire The Last of the Country House Murders (Faber and Faber, 1986) struck me as a version of Gosford Park according to Philip K. Dick. Michael Swanwick’s Bones of the Earth (HarperCollins, 2002) and Laura J. Mixon’s Burning the Ice (Tor, 2002) are in different ways near-excessive tours de force of the science-centered sfnal imagination, the former mischievously playful, the latter almost painfully earnest. About Carol Emshwiller’s The Mount (Small Beer Press, 2002), I will say only, read it. Iain Pears is most widely known for his detective series set in Italy, but as someone who appreciates quietly reflective writing and a meticulous, careful understanding of intellectual history, I prefer his historical novels. The Dream of Scipio (Riverhead Books, 2002) interweaves the stories of three men at three different critical moments of European history confronted by the question of what obligation they, as individuals in a society under siege, bear to civilization. Anyone who enjoyed Pears’ detailed evocation of the English Scientific Revolution in An Instance of the Fingerpost (1998) will appreciate this novel.

In sum: I may have not read as much in 2002 as I would have liked, but I did enjoy the good fortune to have read well.