Black Gate

What’s interesting about a collection of “interfictions,” aka “interstitial fictions,” is that this isn’t just another descriptor  (e.g., new wave fabulism, new weird, slipstream, paraspheres, fill-in-the-blank) made up by an editor or a marketing department or critic that subsequently becomes blogosphere fodder about how inaccurate and/or stupid it is. Rather, interfictions is the self-proclaimed terminology of an actual organization that sponsors not only this second volume of what presumably is an ongoing anthology series, but promotes all kinds of “interstitial” literary, musical, visual and performance arts.

So just what is an interfiction? Henry Jenkins’s introduction opens with the famous quote from Groucho Marx about not wanting to be a member of any club that would have him as a member. While it may be true that interfictions don’t fit neatly into traditional categories, there’s considerable irony, if not the essence of interstitiality, about the idea of an organization in which membership is earned by virtue of failing to belong anywhere else.

I don’t want to spend a lot of time on defining interfiction (if you’re interested, see my review of the first Interfictions for further deliberation), though it is interesting that the authors themselves, as well as co-editors, Delia Sherman and Christopher Barzak, aren’t always quite sure, other than to note what it isn’t.

Sherman, for example, says that one rule of thumb for considering what to accept for Interfictions 2 was that if a story more than likely could be something you’d see in a genre magazine, say, Fantasy and Science Fiction, then it probably wasn’t an interfiction (adhering to the “if it belongs to some other club, it can’t be in ours” rubric). It is particularly ironical, then, that Amazon has named  Interfictions 2 as one of the top ten science fiction and fantasy books of 2009!

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While her work sometimes hints at the fantastic, Lydia Millet isn’t strictly speaking a fantasy writer, certainly not in the sense of questing elves or weird alternate universes, and certainly not as evidenced in her new short story collection, Love in Infant Monkeys.  Yet Millet’s work  is frequently mentioned in genre venues; indeed, one of the stories collected here, “Thomas Edison and Vasil Golakov,” (in which the famed inventor of light bulbs and power generation attains metaphysical illumination by continually re-running a film of a circus elephant’s seemingly Christ-like electrocution)previously appeared in Tin House Magazine’s Fantastic Women issue. I think this might be because her depiction of human relations is satirically weird, even though in these days of reality television and talk shows, that’s pretty much standard fare. As Tom Lehrer once lamented, it’s hard to make fun of something that is already so patently absurd.

Millet, however, takes the actual absurd and elevates it to a higher level of preposterousness, in the process depicting how humans in observing, caging, exploiting or otherwise interacting with undomesticated animals illustrate how evolution may be working backwards on the so-called higher species. Specifically, she extrapolates real-life occurrences between animals and real celebrities and  other well-known historical figures to illustrate human instincts for cruelty, self-centerness or just plain indifference, both to other  species as well as their own.

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