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Short Fiction Review #22: Interfictions 2

Short Fiction Review #22: Interfictions 2

51e9xmo1jbl_sl160_aa115_1What’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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Short Fiction Beat, Shameless Self Promotion Division

Short Fiction Beat, Shameless Self Promotion Division

cover4Steampunk Tales offers an interesting convergence of the new and old,  a pulp magazine for the iPhone (don’t worry, non-Apple heads, there’s also a downloadable PDF version). Volume 4  features ten stories:

“Convergence Culture, Pt. 2” by C.B. Harvey
“The Brass Pedestal” by Natania Barron
“The Gods of War” by Arkwright
“Miluth” by Alison Boyd
“Stormada, Pt. 3” by SatyrPhil Brucato
“An Unfortunate Engagement, Pt. 6” by G. D. Falksen
“Sideways” by Andrew Singleton
“The Choice for Cibyl” by David Soyka
“The Steam Mapper” by Clark Sumner Edwards
“The Juggernaut” by Rajan Khanna

And, yes that Soyka fellow happens to be directly related to me in the most direct way possible. But, check the issue out, anyway.

Short Fiction Beat: On Spec

Short Fiction Beat: On Spec

os_fall09_coverCanadian SF magazine On Spec completes its 20th anniversary of publication.

The Fall 2009 issue is guest edited by Robert J. Sawyer, and features fiction by Brent Knowles, Joanna M. Weston, Dave Cherniak, Amanda Downum, Erin Thomas, and Andrew Bryant. There are also poems by Phoebe T.H. Tsang and Lynn Pattison, as well as author interviews and other commentary.

Quite an accomplishment, eh?

Oh, well… but not everything is so bad

Oh, well… but not everything is so bad

425x159_prisonerThough I had unrealistic high hopes for the remake of The Prisoner, if only because of the presence of Ian McKellan, early returns are not good,other than noting that Ian McKellan is the only redeeming value.

Sigh. I guess the success of Battlestar Galactica and perhaps also the Star Trek reboot resulted in unwarranted optimism about remakes, as the track record remains mostly abysmal, with the exceptions proving the rule. And the exceptions usually have the advantage of source material in sore need of improvement.

cover_smallOn a more positive note, I just finished Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City I’ve only read a few reviews, and then only just skimmed them, which can be the only explanation why I haven’t seen anyone draw the obvious line between Philip Dick and this novel. Besides the overall Dickian theme of “just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me,” one example of Lethem’s riffs on Dick is the protagonist’s highly publicized relationship with his astronaut fiancée, trapped in orbit by Chinese mines, whose love letters try to make the best of both their situations. I’m assuming it is not coincidental that in Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney, the character Walt Dangerfield is also stuck in permanent orbit around the earth, and whose daily broadcasts inspire his devoted listeners to carry on in the aftermath of catastrophe. Somewhere, there’s a master’s thesis in picking out all the Dickian parables in Lethem’s wonderful novel.

You might have to be a bit of a geek to appreciate this (and would you be reading this if your weren’t?). Highly recommended.

Short Fiction Beat: Interzone #225

Short Fiction Beat: Interzone #225

204In today’s mail arrived the December 2009 Interzone #225, containing these stories:

“Here We Are, Falling Through Shadows” by Jason Sanford
“By Starlight” by Rebecca J. Payne (a debut)
“The Killing Streets” by Colin Harvey
“Funny Pages” by Lavie Tidhar
“Bone Island” by Shannon Page & Jay Lake

As well as the usual assortment of columns and reviews.

Also in the mail is a slew of short story collections, including Interfictions 2, Paper Cities, Kurt Vonnegut’s posthumous Look at the Birdie, Conjunctions: 52 Betwixt and Between, and McSweeney’s Thirty Two.

As soon as I’ve read them, I’ll let you know. Just don’t expect anything in time for your Christmas shopping decisions.

Short Fiction Review #21 1/2: Intelligent (?) Design and the Godfall’s Chemsong by Jeremiah Tolbert

Short Fiction Review #21 1/2: Intelligent (?) Design and the Godfall’s Chemsong by Jeremiah Tolbert

interzone-224If there is a watch, then there must be a watchmaker. That’s the crux of the argument for intelligent design, that existence, and specifically you and me, are the result of some conscious creator. My main problem with this is the adjective “intelligent.” If I was designing existence, there’s a lot I’d leave out, like cancer or maggots or flatulence or Glenn Beck. Or that for certain kinds of life to continue and thrive, other life forms must suffer. Besides, this all begs the question of, if there is a designer (intelligent or otherwise), who created the designer?

Whether our universe was a random cosmic accident, the result of some higher consciousness declaring, “Let there be light,” Olaf Stapledon’s “Starmaker,” or a computer simulacrum created by another dimension of beings with a lot of bandwidth, who knows? And whatever we come up with as an explanation, most likely it is wrong.

Why? Well, the answer is in the Bible, though it’s not the answer religious fundamentalists tend to appreciate. In the Book of Job, God has plagued his good and loyal servant with one catastrophe after another. Job petitions for explanation. But Job’s friends keep telling him the explanation is obvious: Job must have offended God. Job insists he hasn’t. God gets tired of listening to all this, and appears before them and asks if any one of them ever created a deer, or the arch of the heavens. No one here except, God, right? Then stop being arrogant and thinking you have any idea of what God does or why he does it. It’s beyond your limited comprehension. You guys haven’t got the faintest clue.

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Short Fiction (World) Beat

Short Fiction (World) Beat

apex-digestFrom Jason Sizemore of Apex Magazine:

    This month we present a special “international” issue of our online
    magazine. Lavie Tidhar, editor of The Apex Book of World SF, guest
    edits this issue and brings us three excellent selections from around
    the globe. To round things out, Charles Tan interviews Malaysian
    author Tunku Halim and Lavie writes an editorial about the
    international genre scene.

    Editorial: “A Celebration of World SF” by Lavie Tidhar
    Interview: Tunku Halim by Charles Tan
    Short Fiction: “After the Fire” by Aliette de Bodard
    Short Fiction: “Benjamin Schneider’s Little Greys” by Nir Yaniv
    Short Fiction: “An Evening in the City Coffeehouse, With Lydia on My
    Mind” by Alexsandar Žiljak

Short Fiction Review #21: Love in Infant Monkeys

Short Fiction Review #21: Love in Infant Monkeys

43583086jpgWhile 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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Imaginarium

Imaginarium

200px-imagofparn_spanVery much looking forward to this. 3752907268_a45d683fc41

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is directed by Terry Gilliam, stars Tom Waits as the Devil and Heath Ledger, notwithstanding how they marketed Batman, in his last (albeit, incomplete, which the movie reportedly got around by casting multliple actors in the same role after Ledger died) screen appearance. Here’s the Wikipedia summary. Premiers November 2 and it is to be hoped soon at a theater near you.

On another note, despite my aversion to “dress-up,” I’m going to a party tonight in a t-shirt to which my wife has pinned my daughter’s old Barbie collection (which she never played with, I’m happy to report). I’m going as a “chick-magnet.”

Happy Halloween.

Short Fiction Beat: Halloween Treats

Short Fiction Beat: Halloween Treats

203In the mail today, just in time for Halloween, is the blood-spattered graphic of the October/Novemberapexmag100109 cover of Black Static magazine, the horror and dark fantasy counterpart that alternates monthly appearances with Interzone science fiction published by the folks at TTA Press. The artwork is by David Gentry.  The stories are:

“Cuckoos” by Tim Lees
“The Shadow Keeper” by Kim Lakin-Smith
“Dead Loss” by Carole Johnstone
“Some of Them Fell” by Joel Lane
“My Secret Children” by James Cooper

There are also several regular nonfiction columns, book and film reviews.

Also just out is dark fiction from  Apex Magazine, available in pdf, web, Kindle and even good old-fashioned print. The October issue features short stories by Alethea Kontis (“A Poor Man’s Roses”), Peter M. Ball (“To Dream of Stars: An Astronomer’s Lament”), Jason Sizemore (“Yellow Warblers”) and Paul Jessup (“Ghost Technology From the Sun”), and a poem by  J.C. Hay (“After, Thoughts–A Pantoum”).  There’s also an interview with Brandon Massey by Maurice Broaddus and recommended reading from  Ekaterina Sedia.