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The New York Review of Science Fiction http://www.nyrsf.com/ Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989. en-US 2014-10-12T13:35:42-04:00 NYRSF Issue 313 September 2014 Editorial: Pointing and Seeing http://www.nyrsf.com/2014/10/editorial-pointing-and-seeing.html A miscellany of thoughts this time. Last month's editorial on the World Fantasy Award statuette crowded out any other concerns, so I wanted to note that NYRSF has now completed 26 years of monthly publication, 2 full years in electronic...

A miscellany of thoughts this time.

Last month's editorial on the World Fantasy Award statuette crowded out any other concerns, so I wanted to note that NYRSF has now completed 26 years of monthly publication, 2 full years in electronic publication, and 1 full year in our less eyestrainy layout. Thank you, all, as always.

One of the harsh realities of the pleroma of distraction in which we live is that it's a constant struggle to attract new readers, and NYRSF has not been doing as good a job of that as we would like. The best way to cultivate an engaged audience is through word of mouth, so if you read and enjoy NYRSF, either in magazine format or on the web site, please let your friends know! Our electronic versions are drm-free, so you can loan them out to people who would find them interesting. Spread the word.

We're making NYRSF individual issues more readily available. Starting with this issue, the Draft2Digital service will publish NYRSF through various online retailers such as B&N (for the Nook), Kobo, iBook, and Scribd. Subscriptions will still be available exclusively through Weightless Books, because they've been wonderful to us.

That said, we're thinking of holding an actual subscription drive, and we're soliciting ideas. What premiums would you like to see? If you've been on the fence about subscribing, what would help you clear the top? Let us know!

On an unrelated matter, I'm very happy to mention that Bernadette and I are attending this year's World Fantasy Convention in the Washington DC area. Bernadette was a regular attendee back in its formative years, but I've only been to the Saratoga Springs instance back in 2007. If you'll be there, give us a shout!

Finally, this time, a memory. When I was around 9 years old, my maternal grandparents took me to Key West. (They lived in Homestead, Florida, so it was just a day trip for us.) For years, I thought my only memory of the trip was seeing Ernest Hemmingway's house, which is a museum to the author but which primarily interested young me because of its population of polydactylic cats. Recently, though, I had another memory come back to me. I was pondering genre boundaries in the wake of Paul Kincaid and Nina Allan's appearance on last week's Coode Street Podcast <jonathanstrahan.podbean.com/e/episode-202-nina-allan-paul-kincaid-and-the-state-of-british-science-fiction> and I found myself thinking of literature oceanically. Earth has only one ocean, but we speak of it as if there were four, or five; then we divide it into bays and inlets and seas and give them all names. As I thought of this, I remembered standing at Key West's Southernmost Point while my grandpa Bob gestured. "Over there is the Atlantic," he said, sweeping left, then with a gesture to the right, "and over here is the Gulf of Mexico, and this is the exact point at which they meet." And the dark waters of the Straits of Florida stretched before us, warm and green and heedless of the distinctions we draw.

It is possible to overstretch metaphors. Metaphors are wheelbarrows; overload them and they fall over. But it's particularly amusing to me, writing this now, to realize that Key West's Southernmost Point, the locus of this misguided attempt to divide this-against-that, is itself a false witness: Standing at the Point, one can look south and immediately see parts of Key West further beyond.

But it is our nature to split apart and bring together, just as it is the ocean's nature to flow.

—Kevin J. Maroney
and the editors

 Editorial David Hartwell 2014-10-12T13:35:42-04:00 NYRSF Issue 313 September 2014 Table of Contents http://www.nyrsf.com/2014/10/brian-stableford-putting-flesh-on-the-myth-of-the-final-war-a-parable-of-the-limitations-of-the-speculative-im.html Brian Stableford: Putting Flesh on the Myth of the Final War: A Parable of the Limitations of the Speculative Imagination Bernadette Lynn Bosky: Underground and Secret Spaces in Peter Straub's Fiction Bravo by Greg Rucka, reviewed by Alec Austin The...

Brian Stableford: Putting Flesh on the Myth of the Final War: A Parable of the Limitations of the Speculative Imagination

Bernadette Lynn Bosky: Underground and Secret Spaces in Peter Straub's Fiction

Bravo by Greg Rucka, reviewed by Alec Austin

The Madonna and the Starship by James Morrow, reviewed by Darrell Schweitzer

Christopher S. Kovacs: The Raw Emotion Behind "A Rose for Ecclesiastes"

Patrick L. McGuire: The Most Accurate Space Movie Before Destination Moon

Ursula Pflug: Around the Gyre: Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being

Photos

Editorial: Pointing and Seeing

 TOC David Hartwell 2014-10-12T13:29:35-04:00 Bravo by Greg Rucka, reviewed by Alec Austin http://www.nyrsf.com/2014/10/bravo-by-greg-rucka-reviewed-by-alec-austin.html New York: Mulholland Books, 2014; $26.00 hc; 291 pages It's San Diego Comic Con in 2001, and Greg Rucka has all but accused me of buying the ARC of Critical Space that I'm holding via eBay. Off-balance and fighting against...
New York: Mulholland Books, 2014; $26.00 hc; 291 pages

It's San Diego Comic Con in 2001, and Greg Rucka has all but accused me of buying the ARC of Critical Space that I'm holding via eBay. Off-balance and fighting against my stutter, I manage to explain that I got it from my godmother, who's an assistant manager at Cody's Books, and mumble something about admiring his novels and his comics work. Rucka's anger subsides, and his gracious inscription includes the phrase, "This is a dark ride."

It's true. It's dark as hell. I loved it.

The twin hallmarks of Greg Rucka's work are an uncompromising, well-grounded depiction of violence and its consequences, and a deep compassion that can flare into rage. This is particularly evident in his novels, from the loathing of corporations lying about their products' health risks that permeates Smoker to his brutal depiction of human trafficking in Walking Dead. Nobody writes about gunplay and tactics as well as Rucka. Of those who come close, very few have politics that could be described as humane while Rucka's villains are tobacco companies, antiabortion terrorists, and plutocrats setting up false-flag attacks on American soil.

Bravo, direct sequel to Alpha (2012), is not science fiction. While Alpha takes place in an imaginary equivalent of Disneyland, its alternate history stops there. Both Alpha and Bravo are firmly embedded in the genre discourse of the thriller rather than sf. This is not to say that thrillers do not blur into sf and vice-versa—Harris's Fatherland, Stephenson's Zodiac, and nearly anything by Michael Crichton immediately spring to mind—but Alpha and Bravo essentially have no speculative elements even when compared to works like Greg Bear's Quantico or Tobias Buckell's Hurricane Fever.

What Alpha and Bravo have in common with sf are rigorous attention to detail, their use of exposition, and shifts between realism and hyper-realism. These commonalities are sufficient for their successes (and failures) to be understood using the critical lenses that we use for sf.

Alpha's plot is a variation on Die Hard: a group of terrorists infiltrate a major American theme park (Wilsonville, a transparent stand-in for Disneyland), and a rock-jawed hero must stop them while also saving his family, who are being held hostage. But Rucka's execution takes this formula and turns it inside out. Master Sergeant Jad Bell, Alpha's protagonist, isn't John McClane, able to take down a building full of terrorists single-handedly—while he leads a team of special forces operators, he (and they) are distinctly mortal. Jad's daughter, Athena, is deaf but far from passive; both her handicap and her ability to read lips and body language are handled deftly and have an impact on the action. And instead of being a greed-driven caricature, the primary antagonist in Alpha, Gabriel Fuller, is depicted in a sympathetic light, especially once his girlfriend is taken hostage alongside Jad's daughter and ex-wife. Rucka's strengths are employed to their fullest in Alpha, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Other readers and critics have praised Bravo for not reprising Alpha's narrative. Opening days after the events of Alpha, it traces the consequences of the failed terrorist attack as Jad and his team storm a villa in Uzbekistan to capture Vosil Tohir, the Uzbek middleman who set up the events of Alpha on behalf of a shadowy mastermind known only as the Architect. In capturing Tohir, they also capture Chief Warrant Officer Petra Nessuno, a deep cover operative spying on Tohir for another group in Special Operations Command.

Bravo extends Alpha's themes of duplicity and dual identities beyond Nessuno to include Brock, the general in charge of her section of SOCOM—who helped orchestrate the plot against Wilsonville—and Jordan Webber-Hayden, the agent of the Architect with whom Brock is sexually involved (and who is obsessed with the man who groomed her to be his instrument). This plotline is less successful than Gabriel Fuller's in Alpha because the folie à deux between Jordan and the Architect is problematic on several levels; a major plot point involving Jordan holding people hostage to ensure Tohir's death doesn't really work as written, given what all special operators would know about hostage situations.

As a thriller, Bravo keeps the reader's attention from the first page to the last without flagging. Its well-choreographed action sequences are as brutal as those in Alpha, and the sequences involving Athena are just as solidly handled. But its problems are threefold. First, Bravo's POV proliferation (there are six nonthrowaway POVs, compared to four in Alpha) is symptomatic of the book's wavering focus. What begins as a race to uncover the identity of the Architect before he silences Tohir turns into a race to prevent a devastating second terrorist strike, which turns into the Architect bartering away the details of the terrorist strike and the identity of his financial backers in exchange for Jordan's life and freedom. (His freedom, in turn, is ensured by the CIA, who intend to turn him and his network to their own ends.)

In the heat of reading, this all works fairly well, but once I was finished, I had the queasy feeling that the book I'd been promised and the book I'd just read were not the same book. Bravo is a book full of trailing threads; of motivations that are not quite grounded enough and shadowy masterminds taking on their opponents personally instead of through catspaws. The parallels between Nessuno and Jordan never quite cohere into anything more than what they are on the surface, and unlike the end of Alpha, it's not at all clear what comes next.

There is also a shift in Bravo's level of realism that occurs roughly halfway through the book, once Jordan and the Architect begin to take action personally, a shift that parallels the shift from the first half of Christopher Nolan's 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises to the second. In the first half of Rises, the Gotham City Police Department uses cover, tactics, and muzzle discipline when engaging Bane's minions. By the concluding brawl, they rush down the street as a screaming mob, all thought of tactical advantage eradicated in favor of naked catharsis.

While Bravo never descends to that level—Rucka knows better than that—the escalation that comes as the Architect becomes personally involved in saving Jordan pushes the book further and further from the grounded experience of Alpha where commanders and masterminds stayed far away from the killing. The second half of Bravo reads like the sequel to a book where Tohir's impossible promise of a helicopter coming to save Gabriel from Wilsonville at the end of Alpha turned out to be true.

This probably reads as a harsher condemnation of Bravo than it's meant to be. The trouble with Bravo is that Alpha was so brilliantly executed that anything short of its sequel firing on all cylinders—plot, characterization, action, realism—was going to come off as a disappointment. Bravo is a more ambitious book than Alpha in several regards; the depiction of Nessuno struggling with the aftermath of her infiltration is gripping, and Rucka never stoops to fridging* Jad's relatives to motivate him (Hurricane Fever, I'm looking at you). While Alpha hits the mark, Bravo doesn't, and close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

Alec Austin lives in Los Angeles.

[*"Fridging" refers to the "Women in Refrigerators" story cliché identified by Gail Simone in 1999. It refers broadly to killing characters purely as a motivation for the (action) hero to have an excuse to unleash violence on the perpetrators. The eponym is a 1994 Green Lantern comic where the hero's girlfriend, introduced only a few issues earlier, is found murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator. It's a term of, unfortunately, wide applicability across a range of genres.—the eds.]

 Review David Hartwell 2014-10-12T13:12:35-04:00 Ursula Pflug: Around the Gyre: Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being http://www.nyrsf.com/2014/10/ursula-pflug-around-the-gyre-ruth-ozekis-a-tale-for-the-time-being.html Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being r...

Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being recently won the Kitschie Red Tentacle, which rewards "the year's most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works that contain elements of the speculative or fantastic." A UK award, its aim is to "encourage and elevate the tone of the discussion of genre literature in its many forms." Ozeki was unable to attend the February award ceremony, lamenting that "When I wrote myself into my novel, as the character Ruth, I failed to anticipate the consequences, and now, like Ruth, I find myself marooned on a remote island in Desolation Sound, trapped in a fictional world of my own creation, unable to get away. It is a conundrum that you, at the Kitschies, will no doubt understand."

Critic Edward Fowler in his 1988 study, The Rhetoric of Confession, discusses shishōsetsu, the early twentieth century Japanese novel form, and Ozeki quotes from his introduction:

 The shishōsetsu (more formally watakushi shōsetsu; commonly translated as "I-novel") [is] an autobiographical form that flourished in Taishō Japan (1912–26). The shishōsetsu, narrated in the first or third person in such a way as to represent with utter conviction the author's personal experience, is riddled with paradoxes. Supposedly a fictional narrative, it often reads more like a private journal. It has a reputation of being true, to a fault, to "real life"; yet it frequently strays from the author's experience it allegedly portrays so faithfully. Its personal orientation makes it a thoroughly modern form; yet it is the product of an indigenous intellectual tradition quite disparate from western individualism. Progressive critics have ridiculed it over the decades as a failed adaptation of the western novel, while traditionalists have reveled in its difference.

A Tale for the Time Being's point-of-view characters are Ruth, a writer, and Naoko Yasutani, a depressed Tokyo schoolgirl. Nao's diary washes up on the beach on Cortes Island in British Columbia, where both Ruth Ozeki and the character Ruth live.

The character Ruth becomes obsessed by Naoku, whose diary she finds sealed in a ziplock bag tucked inside a Hello Kitty lunchbox, flotsam that crossed the Pacific on tsunami drift. Nao's diary is an SOS, a message in a bottle. The girl is abject following her family's plunge into poverty after her father loses his Silicon Valley job, precipitating a move back to Tokyo. After the move, she is additionally challenged by extreme bullying at her new school and her father's multiple suicide attempts.

In an interview with Jessica Doyle for Abebooks, Ozeki tells us that after the 2011 tsunami she decided she needed to be the reader of Nao's diaries, and that if she created a version of herself as a POV character, she must also write her husband, the artist Oliver Kelhammer, into the book. He agreed, and the description of their life on Cortes carries so much verisimilitude that we wonder whether in this section Ozeki is attempting a shishōsetsu or whether she only wishes to draw our attention to this important Japanese genre.

Nao's life is harsh but she has a fairy godmother—or a great-grandmother, anyway. Jiko Yasutani is an anarchist, a feminist, an ordained Zen Buddhist nun, and, it turns out, a novelist as well. We are a little intimidated, but being a nun mainly means presiding over traditional rituals for the local community and spending days on end fermenting the summer's daikon harvest. When she is given an old computer by a parish member, she has a new activity: writing cryptic but supportive messages to her traumatized granddaughter in Tokyo.

At some earlier point in her life Jiko also wrote a shishōsetsu. We don't hear much more about this I-novel, and I wondered whether we weren't being winked at by Ozeki, who is also a feminist, possibly an anarchist, certainly an ordained Zen Buddhist nun, and a novelist (A Tale is her third). Is Jiko Yasutani an alter ego? Is her life a life Ozeki could be leading in a forest temple on a mountain in Japan? Are these the kinds of question a reader of shishōsetsu is supposed to ask?

Near the end of the novel, Ruth and her husband Oliver discuss whether or not she has actually brought a World War II–era diary from the present to the past, or, perhaps, from one dimension to another. Oliver, more the science head of the two, points out that neither of them has the math skills to really understand quantum theory, and for them, it must remain a poetic kind of game, rife with paradox and hence similar in some ways to the Zen Buddhism which both Ruth-in-the-book and Ruth-in-real-life practice.

In "Shishōsetsu and the Myth of Sincerity," blogger Jonathan Delacour wonders why he finds the form so fascinating. He too quotes from The Rhetoric of Confession, telling us it uses, as Fowler has it, "the techniques of essay, diary, confession, and other non-fictional forms to present the fiction of a faithfully recorded experience." Hence, Delacour writes, it "collapses genres that are commonly regarded in the Western tradition as quite separate and exploits the tension between fictional and non-fictional modes of representation."

Edward Fowler continues:

 By far the most common approach to the shishōsetsu has been the nonfictional one, for the general critical perception has been that it is resistant by definition to analysis as an autonomous text. Unlike "pure literature" in the west, which calls to mind an author aloof from his writing after the manner of Flaubert or Joyce, "pure literature" in Japan (a category to which the shishōsetsu belongs) is considered inherently referential in nature: its meaning derives from an extra-literary source, namely, the author's life. The Japanese as readers of shishōsetsu have tended to regard the author's life, and not the written work, as the definitive "text" on which critical judgment ultimately rests and to see the work as meaningful only insofar as it illuminates the life.

From Fowler and his interpreter Delacour we learn that shishōsetsu is primarily a naturalistic form and is measured by how closely it mirrors the author's life. If we do not learn true things about him or her, it's not a proper specimen; the main reason the genre is read is to gain a window into the author's personal experience, both exterior in the sense of life events and interior, meaning emotions and thought processes.

Why a novel then? Why not an autobiography? Am I too Western to understand the difference?

Well, for starters, in autobiography a shape-shifting crow doesn't appear to lead the protagonist on a mystical, dangerous quest to save the second POV character, because such things don't happen in "real life." But they shouldn't happen in shishōsetsu either, since the form expects the author to paint a rigidly realistic picture.

In Japan there is a mythical being, the jishin namazu, or Earthquake Catfish. He punishes human transgressors to his realm by causing earthquakes and is only held in check by a large stone wielded by a minor deity, who pins the kanmae-ishi or stone to the catfish's head. Following this thread of story, we might surmise that the earthquake which caused the March 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant happened because the caretaker deity of the shrine had taken a nap or left for a meeting. The meltdown occurred because the stone was understaffed.

The catfish has a relative or alter ego or some such, the way these things go in myth, called the yobaoshi namazu or World Rectifying Catfish. Ozeki tells us that

 belief in the world rectifying catfish was especially prevalent during the early nineteenth century, a period characterized by a weak, ineffective government and a powerful business class, as well as extreme and anomalous weather patterns, crop failures, famine, hoarding, urban riots, and mass religious pilgrimages, which often ended in mob violence. The world rectifying catfish targeted the business class, the 1 percent, whose rampant practices of price-fixing, hoarding, and graft had led to economic stagnation and political corruption. The angry catfish would cause an earthquake, wreaking havoc and destruction, and in order to rebuild, the wealthy would have to let go their assets, which would create jobs in salvage, rubble clearing, and construction.

Which catfish caused the accident, the "jishin namazu" or the "yobaoshi namazu"? Is it true, as a December 2013 Reuters article tells us, that homeless men in Sendai are being "recruited" off the streets by yakuza gangsters and coerced to work for minimum wage, on the largest nuclear cleanup in history?

The World Rectifying Catfish, seemingly, would have something to say about that, as it can hardly be described as an improvement to an already dire situation.

In August 2012, I traveled to Japan with my older sister and my niece, 15 years old, close to Nao's age. It was over a year after the Fukishima disaster, and we wouldn't go north of Tokyo, we promised our nearest and dearest, not even to take a quick look around before we headed back south where, allegedly, the fruits and vegetables were still safe to eat. Unfortunately, the numbers depend, as is always the case in these matters, on whose readings you believe, and what their vested interests are.

My niece is one of the many Japanophiles of her generation, having grown up like my own kids watching Ultraman and Sailor Moon and, later on, Neon Genesis Evangelion. She read stacks of manga to the exclusion of much else and eventually pursued this interest into a study of the language. I learned that she knew more than she was giving away when, standing in Tokyo Station one afternoon trying to decipher the way to our bullet train, she removed her ear-buds and said "That way," calmly pointing to one of the many tentacle-like corridors.

"But how do you know?" I asked. For all I could tell a little map-fairy had whispered the answer in her ear.

"Because it says so."

"Where does it say so?"

She pointed to one of the countless signs encrusting the overhead beams.

"Right there."

"You can read kanji?"

My niece nodded. "Some."

Before we went to Kyoto, we visited the old capital of Kamakura, a town south of Tokyo boasting both a large, hollow Buddha (you can get inside its head) and the important Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gū shrine (鶴岡八幡). We visited a man, a friend of my aunt's, who has been living in Japan for almost 20 years and has learned basic kanji, which encompasses over a thousand characters even though it is the short version taught to children prior to middle school. As with cursive in North America, the longer versions are not taught as much as previously, hence Ruth-in-the-book, Nao and her parents spend a fair bit of time researching the meaning of some of the rarer characters.

A Tale for the Time Being includes footnotes, (some of them in kanji) and as such resembles another of my favorite novels of recent years, Roberto Bolaño's Los Detectives Salvajes.

As I get older, I find myself lamenting, books that knock my socks off become rarer. We have just read too many books; it is harder to impress us, and so, a little disconsolately, we head back to some "classics," read or reread a Russian or two, Moby Dick or Middlemarch if we never got around to them. But the contemporary world is reflected by contemporary authors: that, arguably, is what novels are for and what they do best. They do it better than television or film. It's the way they can get inside things: a character's head, the time in the world which the characters are inhabiting (the time that the time beings are inhabiting, as Ozeki would have it).

The footnotes in Bolaño's book tell us wonderful things, such as which characters in Los Detectives Salvajes are stand-ins for which real-life poets in the Mexican infra-realism literary movement, called Visceral Realism in the book. Another thing the novels share (aside from being immersively rich, dense, and layered) is that both boast a main character, also a writer, who is barely distinguishable from the author. In both cases the writer has the same name as the book's author, although Bolaño's poet protagonist has a different first name. Bolaño's trick was also employed by Bret Easton Ellis in Lunar Park, which was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 2006. As writers we exist, of course, both within and without our work, and blurring and/or exploring this line can be delicious for the author and intriguing for the reader.

Ellis is perhaps most famous as the author of American Psycho, a book I couldn't actually finish as I didn't have the stomach for it. Lunar Park, his sixth novel, is about a writer named Bret Easton Ellis, author of the novel American Psycho. Often called a "mock memoir," it appears to me to be the real Ellis's way of unpacking the experience of writing American Psycho, and what followed when he became an "overnight success," much of it unpleasant. Reading it, we definitely feel we are learning something close to the truth about Ellis's inner life and his outer life as well, but here we are not sure how much. It diverges in several places; for example Ellis-in-the-book has a minor Hollywood actress for a wife. We're not sure we've heard of her, but because Ellis has written about his life as the author of American Psycho with what seems like such relentless soul-baring honesty we assume it is true. The publicists went one step further and created an fan web site for her so that a cursory search would inform the reader that yes, she does exist and is his wife.

The question of where the line between "self-revelation and self-concealment" (as Ozeki calls it) actually lies is addressed in an interview with Ellis on Lunar Park's web site. Like Ozeki, Ellis decided only partway through the writing to insert himself into the novel as a character, Bret-in-the-book:

 Q: We have to start with the most obvious question: the main character in Lunar Park is Bret Easton Ellis, author of Less than Zero, American Psycho, etc. People are going to question just how fictional the novel is. What is your intention? How much of Lunar Park are we to believe is true?

 A: My intention? My intention was to write a book that I thought was interesting, meaning there was no intention at all.

 The genesis for the book began in 1989 and changed a lot in the ten years before I began writing it. I first wanted to write a book that, I suppose, paid homage to a genre that meant a lot to me growing up (Stephen King was an idol of mine) and which was concerned with a house that was haunted. And it was really that simple.

 Bret Ellis was not the main character at that point, though the narrator was a writer and he was married and he did have children. And as I thought about the book—and as my own life became more complicated with age and experience—I realized that the book I had been planning was really about what it meant to be a writer.

 Sure, it was a ghost story and there were monsters and demons and I enjoyed playing with the traditional trappings of the genre, but I was also at the stage where the process of writing began to matter to me as material—and I think this happens with most writers.

 And that was a big jumping off point and energized me when I was having problems with the outline of the book.

 I don't want to demystify the events that take place and I don't want to have to clarify which things are autobiographical and which things are less so. But it is, by far, the "truest" book I've written, in terms of the majority of events that happened.

 It's up to each reader to decide how much of Lunar Park actually occurred.

Indeed.

The North Pacific gyre is a more or less circular set of currents that course north from Japan in a clockwise fashion across the Pacific to the west coast of North America, south to California and west to Asia again. In the center lies the Hawaiian archipelago, and just northeast of there lies the great Pacific garbage patch—or the eastern one, anyway; there are actually two.

The gyre is important to the plot because it brings things from Japan: low-level radiation from Fukushima (or not, depending on whom you believe); a Hello Kitty lunchbox stuffed full of letters and diaries; and a Japanese crow.

That August my sister, my niece, and I backpacked from Tokyo to Miyajima, staying in hostels and budget hotels— admiring, in proper weeaboo fashion, countless Shinto torii climbing the hillsides in a shadowy pine forest; screeching young women in French maid outfits in the densely neon-coated streets of Akihabara (where the novel opens); herds of miniature deer strolling freely though a village on the sea; crows.

Yes, crows.

Traveling, our senses are drenched each day in the new, and we open, porous, to impression. We are supposed to be interested in Kinkaku-ji, Mishima's golden temple in Kyoto but it turns out we like Hiroshima more; the tourist guides urge us to explore Ueno Park but we find ourselves standing on a street corner in busy Shinjuku looking at the remarkable crows. "They must be a different species of crow than our crows," I remarked often, and I turned out to be right. Oliver-in-the-novel tells us the native species in Japan is Corvus japonensis, a subspecies of Corvus macrorhynchos, the large-billed or jungle crow. We learn that the crows:

 use wire coat hangers to make nests on utility poles, which short-circuit the lines and cause power outages. Tepco has special crow patrols to hunt them down and dismantle their nests but the crows outsmart them and build dummy nests.... Ladies stopped wearing shiny clips in their hair.

It is important to understand how smart Corvus japonensis is because one particular jungle crow is pivotal to the plot and a major part of what makes this novel magic realist or speculative fiction.

What is the half-life of plastic in the gyre? Oliver discusses the science with the retired anthropologist Muriel, while Ruth's attention strays to all-encompassing metaphor; the gyre and the Internet are the same, she decides, each is a bearer of memory. An enormous patch of plastic detritus, brightly colored and ground over time small as pixels floats in the Pacific, just as every web page ever made is out there still, drifting in the vast lonely stretches of the Web.

I have never met Ruth Ozeki, but my husband and I knew Oliver-in-real-life well; he is a former student of Doug's and a fellow artist. When Oliver-in-the-book pontificates on the gyre, the Neo-Eocene forest he's planting, or the concurrent feeding and electrocution of oysters in a bucket, his personality is established on the page so vividly it is as if we were in the same room together. The Oliver Ruth describes is so precisely the Oliver we remember (just a little older) it's almost uncanny. Intruding into the descriptions of their life under the dripping trees is the story of the Hello Kitty lunchbox and its contents and Ruth's dream-time intervention, assisted by a crow, in Nao and her father Haruki's lives. These fictional characters tell us that while the novel imitates in part the form of shishōsetsu, it is only in part. We can read the novel as a wink to the genre, a kind of sly nod rather than an example. But in the end it also doesn't matter.

The central metaphor of the book is about time and information. I found the following passage astonishing, describing a warning from 600 years ago that was ignored at enormous cost:

 What is the half-life of information? Does its rate of decay correlate with the medium that conveys it? Pixels need power. Paper is unstable in fire and flood. Letters carved in stone are more durable, although not so easily distributed, but inertia can be a good thing. In towns and up and down the coast of Japan, stone markers were found on hillsides, engraved with ancient warnings: do not build your homes below this point.

Profundity almost never works when it's sought after, but a little farther on, the following (almost throwaway) paragraph jumped out and quietly stunned me. I had missed it the first time around and am glad I gave the book a second read because this passage alone was worth the price of admission.

 These images, a miniscule few representing the inconceivable many, eddy and grow old, degrading with each orbit around the gyre, slowly breaking down into razor-sharp fragments and brightly colored shards. Like plastic confetti, they're drawn into the gyre's becalmed center, the garbage patch of history and time. The gyre's memory is all the stuff we've forgotten.

And everyone we used to be, but forgot or turned our backs on; the vids and web pages and LinkedIn accounts that remember us and show up on someone's search somewhere, sometime, without us ever even knowing.

This is the kind of notion, I told my professor husband, that people who are academics rather than novelists build an entire course or thesis around, eventually publishing a non-fiction book written in abstruse academic language expanding (and expounding) on one idea, usually not nearly as good. It is lucky my husband is an artist first and makes real things in the real world, objects that take up space and humble us and make us think, or he might have been annoyed.

Ursula Pflug lives in Ontario. This essay was funded by the Writers' Reserve Program of the Ontario Arts Council.

Works Cited

Bolaño, Roberto. The Savage Detectives. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

Delacour, Jonathan. "Shishōsetsu and the myth of sincerity." the heart of things, 22 April 2003. <weblog.delacour.net/archives/2003/04/shishosetsu_and_the_myth_of_sincerity.php>

Doyle, Jessica. "An Interview with Ruth Ozeki." Abebooks, undated. <www.abebooks.com/books/authors/ruth-ozeki-interview.shtml>

Ellis, Bret Easton. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005.

——. "Q&A with Bret Easton Ellis." Lunar-Park.com, undated. <www.lunar-park.com/interview1.html>

Fowler, Edward. The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishōsetsu in Early Twentieth-Century Japanese Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. <publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft0k400349;brand=ucpress>

Saito, Mary and Antoni Slodkowski. "Japan's homeless recruited for murky Fukushima clean-up." Reuters, 30 December 2013. <www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/30/us-fukushima-workers-idUSBRE9BT00520131230>

 Essay David Hartwell 2014-10-12T13:06:21-04:00 Bernadette Lynn Bosky: Underground and Secret Spaces in Peter Straub's Fiction http://www.nyrsf.com/2014/10/bernadette-lynn-bosky-underground-and-secret-spaces-in-peter-straubs-fiction.html Peter Straub's body of fiction is noteworthy for, among other strengths, its combination of coherence and development from work to work. Previously, I have looked at this coherence and maturation in terms of the structure of his novels, his handling...

Peter Straub's body of fiction is noteworthy for, among other strengths, its combination of coherence and development from work to work. Previously, I have looked at this coherence and maturation in terms of the structure of his novels, his handling of metafiction, genre creation and reframing, and themes such as personal and socio-political guilt. Here, I'll continue this exploration by examining the specific tropes of the bad place—a location where evil things are done or have been done that continues to resonate with horror—and the secret place, of which the bad place is often an example. These tropes have continued to develop in Straub's fiction, in ways corresponding very roughly to the time and genre of each work so far. Specifically, I'll examine the appearance of the bad place as an underground site, primarily in the Blue Rose books and how this transforms into two different places in Straub's more recent fiction.

The Blue Rose stories often include underground spaces, locations that embody guilt but also the possibility of the numinous. These places are further buried by futile attempts to forget what happened there; digging up this place or going there, mentally or physically, is dangerous but potentially healing. I call this trope, variously, "the cave," "the grave," and "the labyrinth." More recently than the Blue Rose stories, climaxing in The Skylark/A Dark Matter the secret place is split into two. One type of secret place is a room, often underground, set apart for the enjoyment of evil. These locations are hidden not out of shame but for protection, and I call this specific trope "the lair." The other secret space in the most recent novels is any place or no place, indoors or out, where humans encounter numinous powers that are dangerous but beyond good or evil; I call this "the meeting place." Straub's novels lost boy, lost girl and In the Night Room are pivotal books between these two approaches.

Underground bad places abound in the Blue Rose stories, especially in Koko, The Throat, and "The Ghost Village." These secret locations include, first, the cave in Ia Thuc, mentioned in all three of those works. During the Vietnam War, U.S. soldier Harry Beevers kills a group of 30 Vietnamese children there, traumatizing two other soldiers, in ways that make one soldier even more of a murderer than Beevers. Another secret location in the Blue Rose stories is an underground room in the hamlet of Bong To, the eponymous "ghost village." There, soldier and writer Tim Underhill encounters the chamber, which stands as a witness to the violent deaths of many children and of the village chief who tortured and molested them. Finally, The Throat features an underground room in an arcade in New York City's Chinatown decades after the Vietnam War, where Underhill and Beevers finally confront one of their fellow soldiers who has become a serial killer. This third underground room is an echo of the others; it is proof of the persistence of the past and its power in and over the present.

The natural cave in Ia Thuc and the man-made cave in Bong To are graves, sites where human evil has left a palpable presence. In "The Ghost Village," narrator Tim Underhill mentions Ia Thuc: Underhill and Poole "went into that cave and knew that something obscene had happened there. We smelled evil, we touched its wings with our hands" (68). When Underhill encounters Bong To, it is a ghost village in both senses. First, it is abandoned and "too still, completely without noise or movement" in a way Underhill has never experienced elsewhere in Vietnam (69). More literally, Underhill sees ghosts while he is there, not only a "Vietnamese boy of seven or eight"—a spirit that Underhill immediately knows was killed in the underground room—but also two dead soldiers from his platoon (74–75). Later, he is told that the village was abandoned because the atrocities caused the dead to appear, until the inhabitants "were seeing ghosts all the time. They had crossed a kind of border" (94).

These underground places form a perfect metaphor for trauma, in that they both hide traumatic violence and memorialize it. Here Straub's work is completely in keeping with what is called trauma theory. Michelle Balaev writes, after the approach of Cathy Caruth and others, "The origin of traumatic response is forever unknown and unintegrated; yet, the ambiguous, literal event is ever-present and intrusive" (7). The underground bad place is always in the present, whether literally or in memory, and it is always about the past. As John Ransom explains to Underhill about Bong To, "that village is supposed to be like a kind of monument.... To shame" (90). The room still smells of blood, and the walls are covered with the names of the victims: Underhill first thinks that the writing looks "like poetry" (72). The sections in Koko from the serial murderer's point of view show that Ia Thuc and other ghostly graves are preserved in his psyche just as thoroughly as the ghost village is physically preserved (343–45). He thinks of his underground room in New York as "his room, his cell, his egg, his cave" that "caged all the light and let none of it escape" (502). That is an amazing accumulation of images of permanence, stasis, and entrapment.

Though in themselves these buried sites of violence contain nothing that is healing or joyful, they have a kind of numinous power. Ransom says of Bong To that the villagers left because their "really spectacular sense of shame" created "an even more sacred obligation" than the obligation to stay in the place of their ancestors (92). The serial murderer—clearly insane, yet understanding eternity in a way that sane people do not—thinks, concerning a woman he has just shot in the stomach, "Pain and fear took people in different directions. Anything having to do with eternity made them show you their real selves" (Koko 102). He may also have been speaking about how he himself encompasses both the traumatic and the transcendent. A "jungle" that includes wartime Vietnam, but is much more, is eternally with him, "beneath the sidewalks, behind the windows, on the other sides of doors" (Koko 502). During his experience in the cave at Ia Thuc, "eternity came in a thunderclap, eternity happened all at once, backwards and forwards" (Koko 503).

To those who are linked to it by trauma and other experiences, this underground place in the Blue Rose stories is Bluebeard's secret room, as tempting as it is forbidden, and in part tempting because it is unimaginably, impossibly horrible. It is a grave or tomb, because it houses death and because it remains buried. Yet especially in The Throat, the underground bad place is reconfigured in ways that further emphasize the numinous and allow for recovery—recovery in the sense of healing and in the sense of unearthing something that is buried. In The Throat, Underhill repeatedly refers to violence or sexual abuse and memories of them as a labyrinth, a significant change from a cave. As a place of entrapment, it is no less horrible. For one thing, there is always the Minotaur, explicitly connected to both sexual abuse and the repression of memory (219, 308, 589–90). Metaphorically describing ongoing sexual abuse, Underhill states,

 Reality flattened out under the Minotaur's instruction—the real feelings aroused by the things he did would tear you into bloody rags, so you forgot it all. You cut up the memory, you buried it in a million different holes. The Minotaur was happy with you, he held you close and his hands crushed against you and the world died. (218)

However, unlike the grave, the labyrinth is not an eternal experience: there is a way out, an exit, although a person has to be very clever, and perhaps have some help, to find it.

In the Blue Rose stories, this exit from the labyrinth is a function of remembering, of capturing the memory and removing it from the permanent absence that repression gives it and the permanent presence that trauma gives it; only with this uncovering can the past be examined and processed. As seen in the above quotation from The Throat, Straub often presents this re-membering as the opposite of dis-memberment. Both The Throat (278–9) and a short story by Straub called "The Juniper Tree" refer to a fairy tale by the latter name, in which a murdered child is reborn when the bones of his severed limbs are buried together and he can rise from them: for dis-covery and re-membering, what is buried has to be unearthed, and what is separate must be joined. The narrator of "The Juniper Tree" says, "Someday ... I will remember this from beginning to end and then I will be free of it" (64).

Thus, the Blue Rose stories feature the trope of the secret place as the grave and cave, but also show it as a labyrinth, an enclosure that a person can move through, as Orpheus does, without actually dying or otherwise being trapped there. In The Throat, Underhill mentions the journey of Orpheus into the underworld but says that instead of "los[ing] everything" if you look back, perhaps "you see the missing, unifying section of the puzzle, the secret filled with archaic and godlike terror, you have kept from yourself" (79).

Straub's novels lost boy, lost girl and In the Night Room examine the underground secret place in a way that combines these versions and reaches beyond them, indicating that the novels both are part of the Blue Rose stories as well as standing alone as a diptych that tackles grief, denial, and healing in a new way. Both of the more recent novels feature Tim Underhill as both character and writer, as the Blue Rose stories often do. However, rather than the recovery of and (hence) from decades-old afflictions shown in the earlier works, the books concern Underhill's flight from and then peace with two much more current afflictions, the suicide of his sister-in-law Nancy and the murder of his nephew Mark.

The bad place in these novels is the house of Joseph Kalendar, a serial killer whose work was discovered in the late 1970s and who is Nancy Underhill's cousin. lost boy, lost girl explains that the house itself is an evil doppelganger of the house owned by Tim's brother Phillip, with backyards adjoining, although separated by a wall (58). However, Kalendar added a secret room, almost entirely subterranean, and built the wall to hide the addition (113, 122). The house is left empty until it is purchased by Mark's murderer—Ronnie Lloyd-Jones, a devotee of Kalendar's killings (262–65)—who buries some of his victims there. Like trauma, the house is always there but always repressed. Nancy tells Mark that people ignore the house because, "Something's wrong and they smell it. One of these days, the city will knock that place down. Until then, it's best to forget about it" (88). In this novel, we learn that Kalendar used the hidden room to repeatedly rape his daughter, Lily, and finally to kill her (122–3). Mark's curiosity about the house, and particularly the hidden room, lead directly to his murder by Lloyd-Jones.

However, in Tim Underhill's artistic imagination, this grave becomes a site of redemption for both Mark and Lily. In this alternate story, Mark's death is voluntary, as he and Lily's ghost "remake" the site of evil by making love there, and then he chooses to join her eternally (lb,lg 254). Tim receives e-mail from the afterlife with a link to an online video that shows the lovers on a tropical beach, "like Adam and Eve," perhaps threatened "even in that world" but with a shared "joy" that "burned through the image on his ... monitor" (279). Due to the metafictive nature of Straub's work and his esteem for the power of stories, it would be wrong to dismiss this vision as "just" imaginary. However, in addition the book ends with a real-world image of opening and cleansing: a bulldozer levels the house (279) and Tim and Phillip "looked on as the first of the adolescent dead began their journey upward into daylight" (281).

Also, even if lost boy, lost girl seems to end on a note that separates fantasy and reality, In the Night Room sends the reader whirling back to the metafictive uncertainties of The Throat and then some, as Tim Underhill, now receiving numerous e-mails from dead people he has known, meets Willy Patrick, a character in a novel he is writing. In one way, the secret place hardly appears in this story at all: the title of the novel is the title of Willy's Newberry Award–winning YA novel, and only at the end does In the Night Room come back to the room in which Joseph Kalendar raped his daughter. In a narrative that may be entirely supernatural or may be entirely imaginary—as if Straub's fiction from Ghost Story on allows us to maintain that distinction—Underhill discovers that Willy is his fictional version of Lily Kalendar, who is still alive. Tim and Willy see the real Lily through the window of her present home, emotionally scarred and even tainted by her father but, as a pediatrician, "treating children who came to her by giving them the generosity and mercy her childhood had never known" (302–3). Reconciled to her fate, Willy enters Kalendar's house and joins with the spirit of Tim's nephew Mark, on whose face Tim had based Willy's.

Thus, in these two books, repeatedly the secret space is a bad place but also a place of sacrifice and redemption. Unlike in The Throat, this redemption is transpersonal in two important ways. First, the acceptance and healing in the earlier work generally takes place within a single psyche, while that in the two later novels comes from love and understanding between people. (It can be argued that, paradoxically, Underhill in The Throat primarily regards the real serial killer as one of his own personas, while Underhill in In the Night Room engages the perhaps-imaginary Kalendar as a real person with individual flaws and strengths that are in no way extensions of Underhill's. Certainly, Willy is awed and humbled by Lily's reality.) Secondly, both novels depend on at least the idea of a possible mode or realm of life beyond that of mortal humans. In that way, they point back to Straub's supernatural novels from Julia through Mr. X but also forward to Straub's most recent work.

That work has come out in two main forms: The Skylark, published by the specialty house Subterranean Press, and A Dark Matter, a shorter version given trade publication by Doubleday. The specialty house Borderlands Press published some of the material cut from A Dark Matter separately, under the title A Special Place. Examination of the trope of the secret place in this work does show a cleavage exactly along the lines of A Dark Matter and A Special Place. A Special Place and those parts of The Skylark depict an even darker incarnation of the tomb and cave of the Blue Rose books: the lair, a site of horrible violence seen not as a place of trauma, from the perspective of the victim or appalled spectator, but as a site of power and self-expression, from the point of view of the perpetrator. The lair is the location of unrepentant evil; insofar as it hides itself or closes itself off, it does so to continue its horrible work, never out of fear or shame. The other secret places of significance in The Skylark, and the only ones seen directly in A Dark Matter, cannot truly be called bad places at all, although they are terrifying and even actively dangerous. These meeting places are spaces—that can be any place or no place—where the human meets the transhuman; the forces in play there are primarily both inhumanly powerful and beyond mere good or evil.

The lair is a reminder that not everyone who is deeply wounded wants to be healed. In A Special Place, Keith Hayward is only 12 years old when his uncle, a canny multiple murderer himself, helps Keith turn himself into a serial killer. Uncle Till sees his nephew as a fertile field to be planted with poison. "If you get a special place all your own," Uncle Till advises, "you should be able to lock it up, so no one else can get in. What goes on in that room is private. Nobody should know about it except you" (7). The basement of an abandoned building becomes Keith's special place, where he displays the pelts of the neighborhood pets he kills, dominates and makes a sex slave of a fellow student named Miller, and finally gives Miller as a Christmas present to his Uncle Till.

Keith is not totally evil: in fact, it is vital to The Skylark and A Dark Matter that Keith in some twisted way loves Miller and that another character named the Eel realizes that. Still, to Keith the horrible basement is his "sacred chamber" (35), and he is dedicated to it unreservedly. When he realizes that Uncle Till actually murders people, Keith experiences a dark epiphany:

 here was the true, the real abyss.... Lit with bright, wandering fires, his entire body seemed to tremble from within. A great confirmation rang through him and seemed to lift him off the ground. (46)

Instead of being divided selves, like those who have survived the underground bad place but not yet recovered from it, Keith and Uncle Till are wholly what they are. As Uncle Till states, "Unlike you and me, most people hide their real motives from themselves." When they explain their actions, he says, "what they tell you isn't even close to the truth. Because they don't know the truth. They can't let themselves know it. The truth is unacceptable" (62). Uncle Till is not completely right: Tom Flanagan or Tim Underhill could tell him about the self-acceptance that is possible and even necessary in the mind of the magus or the artist. However, he may be right about most people. As the labyrinth opens onto one kind of integrity, the lair embodies another.

Another lair appears in The Green Woman; written by Straub and Michael Easton and drawn by Jon Bolton, it is a graphic novel about Fee Bandolier, another name of the main killer in the Blue Rose stories. The eponymous location in Black House, cowritten by Straub and Stephen King, is another major presentation of the lair. However, compared to Straub's other recent work, these pieces are much simpler, both artistically and psychologically, more similar to Straub's novels from Julia through Floating Dragon. One reason may be that both works are collaborations. However, more importantly, unlike in A Special Place, the evil in these lairs is not purely human. In Black House, the killer is used—although quite willingly—by a servant of the Crimson King, a major power of evil in King's Dark Tower series. In The Green Woman, the female spirit of the abandoned tavern may be all in Fee's head, but the visual nature of the medium gives a reality to her that Straub's prose might not. Still, both these secret places are lairs, including the fact that both, like Joseph Kalendar's house and Keith Hayward's special place, are finally destroyed. Unlike the cave or the grave, the lair does not have the permanence that trauma gives, and unlike the labyrinth, it cannot be traveled through and learned from.

The other type of location featured in The Skylark, and the dominating motif of A Dark Matter, is the meeting place. While the lair is a site of unremitting violence and evil, the meeting place is where quasi-magus Spender Mallon and his acolytes encounter new dimensions of experience beyond anyone's ability to categorize. They are part of, as Underhill says of his near-death experience, "a realm where darkness and light inhabited the same dazzling space" (Night Room 15).

Straub's earlier works do present moments of pure transcendence, including the psychic union that defeats the supernatural villain in Floating Dragon, Tom Flanagan's literally magical act of self-acceptance and transformation in Shadowland, and moments I have referred to as "the everyday sublime" in Koko and elsewhere. Often, such moments are linked to music, especially in Mr. X and The Throat. However, these moments are either tied to a kind of supernaturalism that seems unrelated to the reader's world (generally in the earlier works, though also in Mr. X) or, if they are glimpsed in and through our ordinary world, they are fleeting and highly subjective.

In A Dark Matter, our world repeatedly rips open or gives way to allow contact with another kind of reality; these moments are presented as transpersonal but seem more compatible with the real world. The secret space here, the meeting place, is characterized by an encounter with transcendence. During the rehearsal of a magical ritual, Hootie perceives something "small, white, and agonized, not a scarf" fly by:

 Around it ... the landscape had bulged.... the tormented white scarflike thing had been in flight from whatever had caused the world to ripple and bulge.... The wretched thing had flown through, it had escaped into this world. (85)

During the ritual itself, each person perceives something different, but each is changed permanently by the encounter; one is killed and one disappears into the seams between worlds.

The central image in The Skylark (and A Dark Matter) is an ecstatic flight by the Eel's soul, freed from her body by the ritual. In a series of nested boxes, she experiences moments in the lives of everyone else in the ritual, including their perceptions of creatures described by Cornelius Agrippa, madly rioting figures that are indifferent or hostile (358–61). Then, inside Keith Hayward's soul, she encounters a demon (363–76) and boards a bus that leads to a stairway, which she climbs to an ultimate experience (380–86):

 Assailed by both love and terror, an unbearable combination, the seventeen-year-old Eel, who had been weeping uncontrollably, cradled her head on her forearms, urinated into her blue jeans, and wept some more.... To the extent that she could think at all, she thought, So the Great Mystery and the Final Secret is that we cannot tolerate the Great Mystery and Final Secret. (386)

While others in the ritual experience a surfeit of meaning—especially Hootie and the Eel—the title of A Dark Matter comes from a haunting encounter by Jason Boatman, in which he steals a boat on the shores of Lake Michigan and then endures a world gradually stripped of all reality (288–309), another kind of meeting place.

In The Skylark and its two daughter works, the transformation of the cave or grave into the lair is easier to understand. It is in part a move back to horror, unmitigated by the theme of recovery that works through the Blue Rose stories; it presents an examination of extreme violence and violation from the point of view of the eager perpetrator instead of the victim who may heal from the trauma or may grow up to pass it on. Yet, paradoxically, that focus on the perpetrator stretches Straub's themes of acceptance and sympathy if, like the Eel, we readers can endure the unendurable and embrace the intolerable.

It is harder to understand the movement from the cave or grave, or even the labyrinth, to the meeting place and its transhuman reality. Certainly, as Straub stated in an interview with Locus in 1994, "At moments of terrible terror and extremity, one can experience a sort of clarity" (4). However, The Skylark shows that Straub reconsidered an earlier statement in that interview, that a novelist "cannot write about transcendence" and must sneak up on it slantwise through such extremity and through the experience of "healing" that comes "later" (4). In 2009, talking to Cemetery Dance magazine, Straub stated that rather than an "escape," horror is "more about engagement.... it's about discovering one's ability to feel in certain ways, and deepening and widening one's emotional experience by that means" (Clasen 40). Though The Skylark definitely provides a full supper of horrors, the trope of the meeting place shows that the deepening and widening of emotions need not depend on horror, although they never can be fully separated, either.

The meeting places in both In the Night Room and A Dark Matter are guarded by ambiguous beings who may intend to keep people away, or to urge them forward, or just to observe any result. In the Night Room depicts a terrifying, serene angel that is first sighted by Tim Underhill on a Manhattan street (52–53) and that later allows Tim and Willy to enter Kalendar's house, or perhaps even ushers them in (315). Willy tells Tim that Kalendar's spirit is "afraid of" the angel (317); indeed, Kalendar says of the angel outside, "And tell that blasted thing out there to leave me alone" (322). Mallon and his followers encounter what Mallon calls "dogs," humanoid figures so frightening that seeing one causes Hootie to stumble in "terror" (Dark Matter 62–63). During the ritual, another follower, named Don, sees one of these figures looking at him with "pity and contempt" (124).

Perhaps a necessary part of the meeting place, these austere and frightening guardians resonate in many ways. Immortal, transhuman beings naturally remind us of our limitations. Evil is a threat to us in one way, by calling us down to what we can be but resist being, and ultimate good—what Charles Williams calls "terrible good"—is a threat in another, calling us up to what we want to be but can never reach. The guardians also clearly represent the ineffable nature of the experience. As the Eel realizes after an evanescent moment of ultimate meaning in A Dark Matter, "you did what you could with the little bit you managed to keep" (380). From yet another perspective, in Straub's fiction all transcendence comes in and through the imagination, and the guardians represent the fact that imagination is both boon and bane. In any event, the proper incarnation of the imagination by the process of art, Straub reminds us, is always hard work.

Examination of this one trope, then, leads us through many themes in Straub's work, provides some implications regarding period and transitions in his career thus far, and leaves us with interesting questions regarding where his fiction will go next. The split publication of A Dark Matter and A Special Place may suggest that Straub's writing has finally broken boundaries between supernatural and mimetic fiction, in a single work, in a way that his emphasis on subjective perception and his love of metafiction allow artistically, but may be too challenging for commercial labels. Or not. What will happen next to Straub's use of the trope of the secret place is, perhaps even to Straub, still a secret.

Bernadette Lynn Bosky lives in her own hidden space in Yonkers, New York.

Works Cited

Balaev, Michelle. "Trends in Literary Trauma Theory." Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. June 1, 2008.

Clasen, Mathias. "A Conversation with Peter Straub." Cemetery Dance #61, 2009.

King, Stephen and Peter Straub. Black House: A Novel. New York: Random House, 2001.

"Peter Straub: The Path of Extremity." Locus v. 32, n. 1, January 1994.

Straub, Peter, Michael Easton, and Jon Bolton. The Green Woman. New York: DC Comics/Vertigo, 2010.

Straub, Peter. A Dark Matter: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

——. "The Ghost Village." Magic Terror: 7 Tales. New York: Random House, 2000.

——. In the Night Room. New York: Random House, 2004.

——. "The Juniper Tree." Houses Without Doors. New York: Dutton, 1990.

——. Koko. New York: Dutton, 1988.

——. lost boy, lost girl. New York: Random House, 2003.

——. The Skylark: A Novel. Burton, Michigan: Subterranean Press, 2010.

——. A Special Place: The Heart of A Dark Matter. Baltimore, Maryland: Borderlands Press, 2009.

——. The Throat. New York: Dutton, 1993.

 Essay David Hartwell 2014-10-12T12:59:03-04:00 The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks, and William Weaver, reviewed by John Crowley http://www.nyrsf.com/2014/09/the-complete-cosmicomics-by-italo-calvino-translated-by-martin-mclaughlin-tim-parks-and-william-weav.html Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014; $24.00 hc; 434 pages Italo Calvino's work is unique in the literature of the twentieth century; it would be impertinent in this brief notice to try to characterize it, since almost anything said about The...
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014; $24.00 hc; 434 pages

Italo Calvino's work is unique in the literature of the twentieth century; it would be impertinent in this brief notice to try to characterize it, since almost anything said about The Castle of Crossed Destinies or Invisible Cities or Mister Palomar wouldn't apply to any of the other works. In a biographical piece he wrote in 1978, Calvino addresses this multiplicity from the maker's point of view: "Writing is such a boring and solitary occupation; if you repeat yourself an infinite sadness seizes hold of you." Not of most writers, actually; but it may be the reason for what Calvino has called with (false) modesty "that collection of fragments that is my ouevre."

It's an interesting literary evolution. Calvino grew up in rural Italy; his parents were left-wing nonreligious people who worked as agricultural experts, imprisoned by the Fascists in the 1930s; Calvino was a partisan at the end of the war, engaged in some firefights and other exploits against the collapsing Fascist regime and the German army, and became a Communist afterwards, a commitment he gradually modified but only gave up after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, a turning point for many loyal Party members. His first novels were realistic, or perhaps neorealist, but certainly not fantastical, more Hemingway than Kafka (he actually went fishing with Hemingway in Italy after the war). The first was The Path to the Nest of Spiders and was pretty successful.

But boredom (or something) set in, and he embarked on the series of little pseudohistorical romances that first won him wide attention: The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees. I was among those whose introduction to Calvino was these clever philosophical fables. My father, though—whose reading wasn't all that wide—somehow in the late 1950s discovered a little book called Cosmicomics, and for a week couldn't stop regaling the family with stories about Qfwfq, a being who pre-existed existence, and his adventures in time and space. He hadn't known there were such writings, and in a sense there never had been.

That collection was followed by another called t zero, which really ought to be t0—a mathematical expression that (in the context) would have annoyed the American publisher even more; the book also appeared as Time and the Hunter, which sounds like a thriller, and which at least as an enterprise in fiction t zero was. The whole of these, and later stories from a more complete collection of Cosmicomic stories Calvino put together in 1984, and some others—refurbished, or exiled and restored, or newly translated—are now collected in one volume by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, introduced by Martin McClaughlin. All of us who over time read our early editions to death, or loaned them to people who loved them and never gave them back, or don't remember where we left them, will want this volume; those who don't know Calvino may not know they want this volume, but they do.

It's true that a few of the pieces have undergone that aging process that certain groundbreaking works can suffer, whereby the effect of strange newness, which was central to their effect, has passed, and without which the work can seem slighter than it once did. The early Cosmicomics mostly turn on a couple of funny tropes that become hilarious when they are insisted on. One is that abstractions like the Big Bang and the expanding (or steady-state) universe are described as though they contained a cast of characters making do somehow under extreme physics conditions, say pre–Big Bang ("All at One Point"): "[W]e were always bumping against the Z'zu family's household goods: camp beds, mattresses, baskets ... with the excuse that they were a large family [they] would begin to act as if they were the only ones in the world: they even wanted to hang lines across our point to dry their washing." Some prejudiced people dislike the Z'zus for being immigrants, having come later than the ones who came first, "but this was mere unfounded prejudice—that seems obvious to me—because neither before or after existed, or any place to immigrate from." This little Italian town settled into the Singularity rises to an astonishing climax, probably the greatest use of bathos as a literary device in modern literature, a claim I make without having read all possible competitors.

The other trope Calvino loved was to take a peculiar or unique moment and describe it in such elaborately logico-philosophical pseudomathematical terms as to draw it out to absurd but not exactly contradictory lengths. The title story in t zero is one: here Qfwfq finds himself "in a random space-time intermediary point of a phase of the universe" where "after hundreds of millions of billions of seconds" he finds himself in the moment of shooting an arrow at a lion who is in the act of leaping from the bush upon him. Will he shoot the lion or will he miss? Is the arrow the poisoned one or not? Will the (already released) arrow and the leaping lion intersect at a point X crossed by both of them at the same moment t0, in which case the lion will fall dead, "with a roar stifled by the spurt of blood that will flood his dark throat pierced by the arrow," or will they not, in which case "his mouth, closing with a snap of his jaws, will rip my head from my neck at the level of the first vertebra." The expanding and then contracting universe will obviously bring this moment into being very many, perhaps infinitely many, times, t1, t2, t3, ... "as often as the universe has repeated its systole and diastole." The question then being, do "the space-time lines of the phases of its pulsation coincide at every point" or only at certain points, of which Qfwfq believes this to be one, thus giving Qfwfq at Q1, Q2, Q3 ... at least a little leeway, or is the outcome always identical? Quotation is inadequate to express how this question is worried through several pages, growing ever denser and more enclosing.

There are many stories in Cosmicomics built on this principle—like "The Chase," in which a man in a car with a gun is being chased by a man in a car with a gun a certain number of car lengths behind at a busy intersection that lets only a few cars through at a time, moving the two cars in relation to one another like the digits on that old puzzle you had to arrange in numerical order with only one empty square to use. To me these stories are less like real mathematical or physics problems than they are like monkish problems worked through in Scholastic logic, whose rigid assumptions and tedious elaboration are always at hilarious odds with a drastic outcome.

To understand the breadth and originality of Calvino's storytelling, read the first story in the original volume, "The Distance of the Moon," deriving from an old theory that the moon was once much closer to the earth; and the last story of t zero, "The Count of Monte Christo." The first is an exquisite and impossible romance; the latter a lunatic metafiction in strict control, and the nearest equivalent I can think of in fiction to the paradoxical constructions of M. C. Escher.

And the finally wondrous thing about reading this collection, translated variously by William Weaver, Tim Parks, and Martin McLaughlin, is to know that after it will come Invisible Cities, an even greater achievement, and all the rest as well.

John Crowley lives and teaches in New England.

 Review David Hartwell 2014-09-17T22:58:52-04:00 Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution, edited by Ann VanderMeer, reviewed by Eugene Reynolds http://www.nyrsf.com/2014/09/steampunk-iii-steampunk-revolution-edited-by-ann-vandermeer-reviewed-by-eugene-reynolds.html San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2012; $15.95 tpb, 432 pages It starts, for me, with Jules Verne. The images of steampunk are all implicit in his descriptions of the too-beautiful technology that he envisioned arising (literally: balloons, airships) all around him...
San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2012; $15.95 tpb, 432 pages

It starts, for me, with Jules Verne. The images of steampunk are all implicit in his descriptions of the too-beautiful technology that he envisioned arising (literally: balloons, airships) all around him in the nineteenth century. Space cannons, Rococo submarines, airships (again). The illustrations of his novels play out in my mind whenever I encounter this contemporary flourishing of "retro-futurism" (as editor VanderMeer likes to term her chosen genre).

But, even more so in this third volume in a steampunk anthology series, one dedicated to revolution, one that seeks "to challenge the status quo and think about change" (11). For so did Verne, an author who gave a prescient and mildly dystopian view of Paris in the Twentieth Century (written in 1863, but not published until 1994), one who liked to write about protagonists who were nameless in the cause of revolt, such as A Family Without a Name (1889) who fought and led the 1837 Quebec Rebellion. And his most famous character is named "Nobody" (Latin: "Nemo"), a self-exiled Indian prince, regarded as "a great criminal" and "a rebel, outlawed by humanity" (Mysterious Island, 587), one man struggling against the status quo to be "reclaiming the riches of his country by driving out the foreigner and restoring its independence" (MI, 590). Sounds like a rather steamed punk to me.

But is he? For I stumble over the meaning of steampunk, the problem (as always) of locating it, bringing it into focus enough to define it, at least to ameliorate some of my own confused expectations. This definitional dilemma haunts all genres of Art (and will continue to do so as long as dictionaries continue to feature nouns). Editor VanderMeer takes a tussle with definitions in her Introduction, adducing the aforementioned "retro-futurism" and adding in Bruce Sterling's "salvagepunk" take (along with his story "White Fungus," included herein). Yet, after a read through the book, I feel quite dislocated. The stories range well across both the "retro" and the "futurism," enough so that there are historical and post-apocalyptic fictions sitting cheek-by-jowl, as well as those that delightfully seem to be both past and future simultaneously. And others that do not seem punk, steamed or otherwise. One story ("To Follow the Waves" by Amal El-Mohtar) even comes with its own manifesto, necessitated by fan-based protests against it being labeled steampunk (No steam! No Victoria! No London!). Clearly, further seeking is required.

So, akin to St. Augustine ("Tolle, lege!"), I took up the book, to reread. And in the flipping of the pages, I found a story entitled "Salvage." And another ("Fixing Hanover" by Jeff VanderMeer) that discusses salvage. And, of course, Sterling telling me about "salvagepunk." Well, you do not have to hit me over the head too hard to get the message through—repeatedly will work just fine. The essence of steampunk lies in the idea of salvage, of reuse, repurpose. Because I remembered something else about M. Verne: his dislike for the fast-and-loose fictioneering of his fellow science fiction founder, H. G. Wells, who liked to anti-gravitate his characters to the moon via mythical floating alloy instead of sensibly smearing them with massive g-force in a space cannon. "Il invente!" snorted Verne—"He invents!"

And steampunks do not invent. They salvage. They reinvent.

What do they reinvent? The technology of some bygone era. (Of which I shall speak loosely, in the sense of the Greek "techne," covering the objects and the craft of making the objects and the knowledge of same.) Editor VanderMeer views the steampunk revolution in similar terms: "to examine our relationship with technology, with each other, and with the world around us" (11). I may not stray as far from the tech as she, but I do appreciate her use of the preposition "with" (in place of "to") in that sentence. The relationship is with technology, in a bidirectional sense. The steampunk street finds uses for its tech both coming and going. We use the tech, the tech uses us, for when we stare into the blueprints, the blueprints stare back into us.

But, we start off simply. "Harry and Marlowe and the Talisman of the Cult of Egil" by Carrie Vaughn is a straightforward goggles-and-airships "boys own" yarn, with sky battles against German dirigibles and a bloodthirsty lost tribe hoarding a bit of UFO tech, liberated by the Victorian adventurers for Queen and Country. Except that the "boys" include a girl, as Harry is a royal princess when she is home in Blighty. And the savage locals are descendants of Vikings occupying a cave complex in Iceland. We are off in alt-history territory, where we will frequently stray with steampunk. Not a surprise, given that one of its ur-documents, The Difference Engine by Gibson and Sterling, is a paean to alt-tech mingled with alt-politics (Lord Byron becoming British Prime Minister of a pro-tech party, fueled by Charles Babbage actually building his electro-mechanical computers). We brush against the punk lightly, mainly through the notion that tech leads to some leveling, allowing Princess Maud to maraud about as "Harry" and to link herself to commoner Marlowe, even as they scavenge "Aetherian" (invented yet MacGuffin) tech from the hands of ill-kempt keepers, much in the manner of the Parthenon pieces that Elgin crated out of Greece, what ho. Identity, as much as tech, is reinvented within steampunk.

So, what we find is engagement with the tech. Which is not always presented as successful. Cherie Priest takes a folkloric faux-academic investigation of "Addison Howell and the Clockroach" to unearth the story of a missing inventor and an abandoned piece of clockwork. History is not altered so much as adapted. Myths of the frontier (here, the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state) mingle with a John Henry tall tale skewed by various remembered accounts of how the inventor and his family met their demises (not from defeat by the machine but from community ire at the genius who stands apart). The mute machine reveals naught, not even how (if?) it operated.

Nor is it always steam-powered (the lack that bedeviled Ms. El-Mohtar). Paolo Chikiameo goes pre-steam, with the older legendary tech, human-powered flight "On Wooden Wings," da Vinci's drawings taking to the air above a wooden Fleet of Wisdom, floating academies/manufactories that ply a Spanish-free Indonesian archipelago. Again, as with "Harry," the tech mediates for outsiders (a "Spanish" woman who is locally born and who would be persecuted in Spain for her Muslim heritage, being a "Moor," and a Tagalog man who is Christian in a Muslim sultanate). A crash ensues, but any landing you walk away from is a good landing.

And sometimes the tech is more broadly the technique, as in Vandana Singh's "A Handful of Rice," where Prana Vidya yoga is driven underground by ostensible persecution in a Mughal kingdom that survives British and Portuguese incursions. But it, too, survives and provides a way to the stars or, at least, the skies, as we again dream of flight. There is a duel of prana energies and a departure, so we truly have a fight-and-flight narrative. The tech may also be symbolic, as in Christopher Barzak's dream-quest of "Smoke City," where the titular smog substitutes for its watery fellow industrial vapor.

With the typical time-frame being Victorian, steampunk is haunted by the Empire, whether it strikes back as in Jeff VanderMeer's "Fixing Hanover" or is fended off as in N. K. Jemisin's "The Effluent Engine," where the reek of racism almost overpowers the stench of methane extraction from rum distilling. VanderMeer's tale is timeless, which is to say that his Empire bears no name nor identifiable locale. Nor does his protagonist, at least at first. But, bowing to "the first law of salvage: what is found must be brought before the community" (181), he is condemned to fix the apparatus that will reveal his existence to his former Imperial masters. This J. Robert Oppenheimer-in-exile is dragged back, via airship (naturally), to his Alamogordo, while behind "the village burns as all villages burn, everywhere, in time" (193). Jemisin offers more hope, as her Haitian operative navigates the smelly streams of New Orleans to find a Creole inventor who might forsake the slave society of America for the imperiled free state, desperate for methane to fuel its airships (yes, those) and its gas-powered artillery. Fight-and-flight again ensue, as an innocent mixed-race person will receive no justice after killing a Euro-American assassin from the Order of the White Camellia (historical, if post–Civil War organization, and we are pre-war), even in self-defense. It's hard to have a "self" in a slave society if you are not one of the masters.

And, perhaps, the engagement with the tech is made all the better to escape into itself, to make the tech itself "a nation-state entity with its own jurisdiction and its own constitution, answerable to no laws except its own" (289). Technology as Utopian escape, an idea rich in science fiction history, and making occasional forays into the mainstream (I think of Sinclair Lewis and Arrowsmith). The tech is, of course, an airship, the S.S. Discordia of "Captain Bells and the Sovereign State of Discordia," and it is as paradoxical and whimsical as an anarchy ("chaos, pure and wonderful") with its own constitution. Here, the disguised royal works against the Empire of Albion and its colonies on the Malay Peninsula, suborning the native agents and liberating members of the resistance (children included) amid "discarded bicycle parts, stacked rolls of engineering plans, and contraptions of metal gearing" (307). There is fight and there is flight, for there is an airship. There is always an airship.

Except when there isn't and it is the post-Apocalypse instead of the Victorian era. I puzzled for a while over the inclusion of future narratives, even given editor VanderMeer's preferred "retro-futurism" descriptor. Post-Apocalypse just feels all future, with only passing glances at retro. But, I realized, that is enough. There is salvage; there is engagement with the tech.

Caitlin R. Kiernan labels her post-apo tale "Goggles (c. 1910)," but the date is not needed. Her adolescent scavengers leave their Dickensian shelter to range over a blasted landscape, ruined by Tesla's death rays, picking among the remains of the nearby dirigible (so it goes) terminal. WW1 was fought with hellfire. But, it could be any war, any time. "So, we weren't good people?" asks Samuel, the protagonist, about why the war came (355). "We were people," is the answer he gets, the only answer that ever applies. At the end, Samuel rejects the goggles, a symbol of "all those people who never got their hands dirty" (357) but battened off the exploitation of people and resources that kept the steam pressured.

The post-apocalyptic setting can also set off the tension with "retro" and "futurism" quite well. Christopher Rowe's "Nowhere Fast" has the feel of an Edisonade, a tale of a young genius crossing the country in his (re)built diesel automobile (named "Rudolf," of course, tipping the top hat to Herr Diesel). But, we are again in a post-collapse landscape, one where the average citizen lives in a localized polity, a (dis)United States of small municipalities, where the motto is "live lightly upon the earth" (242). They live under a "bruised sky," a "torn up sky"; they know about global warming and just whose fault it was. So, private autos? No. But Luz, the protagonist, is enchanted by the idea of speed, as the young often are, even as her father cautions that speed kills ("expedience leads to wars and floods"). And the Fed enforcers? They ride coal-fired mechanical horses. Like that is going to heal the earth. How to pick a side in this battle? Luz goes steampunk: "I know where we can get some parts" (247). Your mileage may vary.

Perhaps the most touching of the post-apo stories is Genevieve Valentine's "Study, for Solo Piano," wherein a traveling circus caravan, seeking shelter, is rousted out by the unfriendly locals from their hoped-for winter quarters, an abandoned old mansion house. (Can't have winged freaks with loose morals too close to our wimmen and chil'uns, can we?) Within is a (mostly) intact concert piano. Maybe the last one. With maybe the last piano player as part of the circus. But, the mob is coming, the house is to be torched. What can be salvaged is, but the piano cannot. The musician, who is himself part instrument (accordion), stands with the match, before the mob can desecrate the spot: "A funeral or a butchering" (133) are his choices. What cannot be salvaged can be salved.

There is another post-steampunk-apocalypse story, Garth Nix's "Peace in Our Time." But here I think we go too far. Yes, it involves the collapse of a civilization, one built on "clockwerk," geared mechanisms, destroyed by "sandgrain" tech (replicating nanoparticles of grit that foul up those gears). Humans augmented with clockwerk are killed en masse; only the Grand Technomancer survives, he alone sans clockwerk to tell the tale to an investigator from off-Earth. There is much here over which to marvel (the Grand Technomancer served in the Mechanodromedary Cavalry in the desert—how cool is that?—during the war against the investigator's ancestors). But, M. Nix, il invente! His clockwerk civilization is not salvaged from the past or a past, real or imagined. Gears (or airships) themselves do not make steampunk, if they are new gears, never-before-seen airships. There is a newness of creativity here, which is no bad trait for a speculative fiction, and Nix has a worthy model on which to draw, with his clockwerk Mechanists fighting bio-tech Shapers, à la Bruce Sterling (whose own turn will come, alas and alack). In terms of steampunk, though? J'accuse Nix!

The engagement with retro tech can become a marriage. In a number of stories, we find an embedding of tech into human flesh, again raising the reinventing of self alongside the reinventing of tech. The merge can be quite complete, daring us to distinguish flesh augmented from metal endowed with agency.

Perhaps the simplest, and most affecting, is Malissa Kent's "The Heart is the Matter," wherein Coraline Malsante ("bad health") has donated her heart to her sister Eva and survives with a mechanical heart-pump, manually operated (literally), her hand squeezing spasmodically to keep her blood circulating. It is 1889, the Eiffel Tower is the hot topic of the moment, the Exposition Universelle about to open, and Coraline is one of the "metal men," cyborgs developed by French medicine to heal the wounded of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Like the Tower, she inspires revulsion and admiration, curiosity and detachment. She struggles with identity (first, hidden as Eva's donor; next, displayed in a glass box at the Expo); she struggles with the tech (it preserved her life, but Tom Edison, impatient to establish a telegraph station atop the Tower, brushes past, ignoring her pleas for an electro-mechanical heart). There is a new world struggling to be born, and what we feel most are its birth pangs.

The marriage may be even bleaker, as in Ben Peek's "Possession," which has a "Returned" (reanimated human, sold into indentured servitude to pay for the process) women seeking to end her endless existence by plummeting down the Shaft (a Mohole of a pit, deep into the bowels of the Earth). She is rescued by a woman Botanist, someone who attempts to heal the vitiated soil of the Shaft. Both have reason to search out the depths: "It's okay—God is not watching, not down here." "No. He never is" (96).

But the marriage may be more integral, as with "Salvage" by Margaret Ronald, which features not only augmented humans ("Merged") but a full-out cyborg, one of the "damnably stubborn brains in damnably stubborn jars" (195), talking via phonograph and directing a rescue operation. Rescue whom? A preceding party off to salvage a legendary crashed airship (no points if you did not guess that) and (as we discover) possibly relink via weird tech ("Society thaumaturgy") with the soul of the doomed airship's pilot, trapped within. And the marriage may even produce children, such as in "Beatrice" by Karin Tidbeck, whose human protagonists love their tech (he, his airship; she, her steam engine: "His name is Hercules") to the point where offspring arise, though not without consequence (she dies in childbirth; he is divorced by his airship).

Engagement, marriage, childbirth, divorce. Have we forgotten anything? No, for we are also provided with some answers about what comes next. Surprising or not, the steampunk afterlife is modeled on its cousin, cyberpunk. Again, we find escape into the tech, Utopia realized as the clatter of electro-mechanical relays, whether we approach from the factory floor or from the executive suite. "Arbeitskraft" ("Labor") by Nick Mamatas focuses on the practitioner Friedrich Engels, social activist and fighter for workers' rights and factory manager in his family's textile mill in Manchester. Here, Engels tries to salvage the lives of girls who work in match factories, stripped of personal names, disfigured from the phosphorus they ingest, and given mechanical mandibles programmed with sales pitches: "Buy Bryant and May matchsticks, Sir" (109). Worse are the cyborged "steam-workers," laborers adapted mechanically for industrial manufacture. Engels has worked out the plans for a Dialectical Engine, to replace the mere calculating Difference Engines with enough intelligence to wholly automate a factory and thus eliminate the need for the mechano-proletariat. But, the Dialectical Engine is cleverer than Engels could hope, for it writes out the missing fifth volume of Marx's Kapital and demonstrates that the solution to a human brain trapped in a mechanical body is a brain liberated into a mechanical universe, "a sound mind outside a sound body" (123).

Leow Hui Min Annabeth's "Ascension" takes another Victorian icon, perhaps the most steampunk of all, Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron and the first computer programmer in history, and sends her to China to prepare the "Ascension" of the Empress Cixi. Again, we upload into a steampunk virtual reality, to escape death (though not for Ada, who craves relief at age 83), to ensure perpetual rule. To borrow the last line of Mamatas's piece, "What could possibly go wrong...?" (123).

The marriage of human and tech overlaps us into the final territory, that of Tech Animate itself, when our tech assumes our own qualities and characteristics. I pair two stories from the anthology at this point, "Sir Ranulph Wykeham-Rackham, GBE, a.k.a. Roboticus the All-Knowing" by Lev Grossman together with "The Seventh Expression of the Robot General" by Jeffrey Ford. Both give us war veterans. Sir Ranulph joined in the adventure of WWI because "he liked the uniform, and hated life" (58). His body is gradually torn away from him, by war and by time, as is his notoriety, first as Britain's "man of steel" (and coveted by Stalin as such), later as one of Warhol's Factory. At the end, he is a sideshow fortune-teller ("Roboticus") with a light-bulb for a brain. The Robot General is, similarly, a war hero-turned-villain when his celebrity slides into his country's guilt over the deeds he did to ensure victory. He, too, seeks oblivion but must escape having his brain ("The Knot") harvested for its strategic thinking potential. Sir Ranulph, scarred, reduces his mask collection to a single choice, "Melancholia"; the Robot General never discovers just what his seventh expression is (though "pained surprise" would be my guess). Sir Ranulph as a fortune teller earns little money, as he "only ever predicted the imminent and painful demise of whoever consulted him" (63). The Robot General winds up a severed head, sunk beneath the waves "without a moment of peace ... confabulating intricate dreams of victory" (315). Discarded man becomes robot; robot becomes discarded man. As in some long marriages, the partners become alike, nigh indistinguishable.

But the tech does not have to imitate us in form to mimic us in feeling, as we have seen with the love-averse airship, Beatrice 2. It may even take its own dream-quest, as in Catherynne M. Valente's "Mother is a Machine" ("Father is a factory," chants the little product, made to be born). Tech may take on its agency for its own sake, albeit within the bounds of human society, or at least stretching them, as does the wounded blériot, flying away from the culling of the flocks in the fields "Beside Calais." Samantha Henderson's French flying academy is also an airplane farm, wherein blériots, éoles, and avions are bred and raised and trained. But war looms and the military want big American breeds like wrights, so the old French beasts must be put down. The image of wild flocks of primitive monoplanes catches the nostalgia inherent in steampunk nicely, and the three-way triangle between Ian the wrangler, Claire the breeder, and Henderson the hunter encapsulates the fading of the romantic period in the face of the industrial war to come. Plus, while I give no love away for airships to any steampunk enthusiast (I know enough to tell a Schütte-Lanz from a Zeppelin, maybe three times out of five), it is the heavier-than-air flying beasts that win my heart, especially those fierce blériots, tamed but never broken.

But, still, even as we push into new territory, there are some entries in the anthology that stray beyond, to my eyes. They share some of the coloration of our native steampunk critters, but their internals are different enough for me to think them separate species. We have already seen this type of story with the Garth Nix. It happens again. Lavie Tidhar's "The Stoker Memorandum" has many of the motifs of steampunk, including lots of nineteenth-century figures, historical and fictional (Babbage, Bram Stoker, Mycroft Holmes), and tech (yes, yes, the floaty things). But it plays much more as an homage to Neil Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald," with its extraterrestrial reptiles seated on the thrones of Europe. Which does offer an excuse to send Stoker off to a creepy old castle in Transylvania, so it is not a bad shout-out to period literature, just more of a Cthulhu Mythos one than steampunk. Similarly, Bruce Sterling's offering, "White Fungus," for which he adduced the pregnant term "salvagepunk," is neither. It is a soft-apocalypse, near-future story, in which our corporatized world slowly, surely dissolves in its own acids, and the survivors simply drop out and start over, spreading guerrilla-style like a (see title). Yes, they use some of the pieces of our current world. But, painting bicycle lanes on streets that will no longer see much auto traffic is akin to burning the marble of the Colosseum to make cement. It does not reinvent the tech so much as it recycles it into raw material. The thread is broken, the engagement canceled.

In the case of "Urban Drift" by Andrew Knighton, we are given a cityscape that is clockworked, edifices arising and falling much like the marching figures of a great town square clock. Like Nix's "Peace in Our Time," it is not a gearing that arises from any of our old tech, real or imagined. It is imagined on its own. Gears alone do not steampunk make, else Harlan Ellison's "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" is owed some overdue ancestor worship. Still, I am happy to have it to read, as a story of the love of Art transcending even the preservation of self. "Some things are too beautiful to destroy. But I am not one of them" (227). Me, neither.

And "An Exhortation to Young Writers (Advice Tendered by Poor Mojo's Giant Squid)" by the collective Nelson, Johnson, and Swanson? Well, it is a surreal whimsy. Since it features a loquacious cephalopod (albeit terrestrial and not in SPACE!), it must perforce according to the standards of Locus (pace, Margaret Atwood) be science fiction. Who am I to argue?

All of which brings us back to the story that comes bundled with its own controversy and manifesto, Amal El-Mohtar's "To Follow the Waves." It is a meeting of two souls in a pre-modern Damascus. One is a gem cutter who carves dreams into precious stones; the other is her unknowing muse, drawn in by the power of the carved dream. Ms. El-Mohtar explains in her companion piece "Winding Down the House: Toward a Steampunk without Steam" that she encountered a lot of resistance to her story being identified as steampunk. It lacks steam, which, being set in Damascus, in the arid climes of Syria, is a quite reasonable lack. In an addendum, she adds that comments on the original manifesto posted on Tor.com suggested that she relabel her story "gempunk" or some such. She refuses to be chased out of the yard. And I think that she has a good point. To be hung up on "steam" is to miss the pipework for the pipes. The eponym is a metonym. It represents for us the idea of the old tech (allegedly simpler and macroscopic, therefore more accessible). But it is a metaphor, not a material. Can we do better, with our understanding of steampunk as engagement with old tech to reinvent it? Partly so. ("Clearly defined boundaries? Pah! Boring," disdains editor VanderMeer [11]. But, I like a bit of wall to hold up the roof over my head.) The gem cutter is using classical methods. But she bends them to novel ends. El-Mohtar invents! This novelty is where, I think, the trouble lies for her questioners. Psychic dream stones? Maybe we could appeal to Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, but that novel is more firmly lodged in the mystery genre. Novelty aside, though, it is the tech that mediates the interaction between the main characters. Without it, without the engagement of Hessa the gem cutter with the riddle of carving a dream of something unseen, this story comes out very differently. So, two out of three. Let us include it and instruct the steam-sayers accordingly.

Editor VanderMeer graciously places three more manifestos at the back, taking us deeper into the steampunk program, which involves the reimagining of technology and the burgeoning sense of a communal response, folks working together and sharing a vision, running contrary to the contemporary aesthetic of the mass-produced yet individualized item, creativity as solo genius artifact. Solo geniuses often have a tough time of it. Verne knew. On his deathbed, Nemo offers up his apologia pro vita sua: "I always did good when I could, and did evil when I had to. All justice is not in forgiveness" (595). Still, he frets, "Was I wrong? Was I right?" All his companions can say is "Captain, your error was in believing you could bring back the past," explaining that he fought against progress, a force that is "ineluctable" (595). Steampunks seek to make a more successful, or at least a more even, fight. Based on this anthology, I would say that they have a fighting chance.

Eugene Reynolds lives in Montclair, New Jersey, and often gazes upward for a glimpse of an airship.

Works Cited

Verne, Jules. The Mysterious Island (1874). Sidney Kravitz, trans. Arthur B. Evans, ed. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.

 Review David Hartwell 2014-09-17T22:48:25-04:00 Boneland by Alan Garner, read by Robert Powell, reviewed by Maureen Kincaid Speller http://www.nyrsf.com/2014/09/boneland-by-alan-garner-read-by-robert-powell-reviewed-by-maureen-kincaid-speller.html London: Fourth Estate Books, 2012; £16.99 hc; 160 pages Redhill, Surrey: Naxos Audiobooks, 2012; £11.00; 4:56 It is difficult to avoid seeing Boneland (2012) as a valedictory text. Not only does it represent an act of closure, completing as it...
London: Fourth Estate Books, 2012; £16.99 hc; 160 pages
 Redhill, Surrey: Naxos Audiobooks, 2012; £11.00; 4:56

It is difficult to avoid seeing Boneland (2012) as a valedictory text. Not only does it represent an act of closure, completing as it does a trilogy which began with Garner's first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960), but it feels too like an act of remembrance, revisiting the themes that have appeared in so many of Garner's other novels. In particular, we meet again the gifted but troubled adolescent male, intellectually precocious but emotionally stunted, who has figured in so much of Garner's fiction. We are also introduced once more to the landscape of Cheshire, Garner's home county, although in Boneland Garner will venture much deeper into its mythic past than he has ever done previously. Indeed, almost everything about this novel suggests more of the same yet carried out with so much more intensity than ever before. Perhaps most significant of all, Garner finally engages directly, or as directly as I think he is ever going to, with the story that has underpinned so much of his literary practice—Gawain and the Green Knight, composed in the Northwest Mercian dialect by an unknown poet around 1400 (that is, around the time Chaucer's Canterbury Tales were first published). The Gawain-poet, and indeed Arthurian stories generally, have been a shadowy presence in all of Garner's work, but here his work is more immediately present than it has ever been before.

On top of all that, Garner's ongoing fascination with orature and with the Cheshire dialect is well to the fore as the novel switches between a present-day setting in which Cheshire dialect appears rather strangely to still be in constant daily use (something I'll come back to) and the story of a shaman who seems to have become the first of the watchers at Alderley Edge, and for whom the power of story is a literal thing, for it is through story that he maintains the world. This is particularly appropriate given that this article is in part a review of the audiobook of Boneland.

Few of Garner's novels have been turned into audiobooks. We might conjecture as to why that is, though I suspect that one of the problems that might arise is Garner's heavy use of Cheshire dialect and, in the case of Strandloper, the use of thieves' cant, Aboriginal words, and the simple sound of the language. And his use of dialect has increased over the years: there are portions of Thursbitch in particular that are practically impenetrable unless one has a glossary of dialect words available. In artistic terms, I can understand why Garner might make such choices, but from the point of view of performance, getting the right actor for the job must be a nightmare.

Robert Powell, from Salford, Manchester's twin city, and himself an alumnus of Manchester Grammar School, is probably better placed than most to explore the nature of such an intricate net of words, and he does an excellent job with Boneland. The earlier two novels were read for Naxos by the late Philip Madoc, a wonderful performer (and one of my favorite actors, I admit) who did a marvelous job of voicing all the different characters except, alas, for Bess Mossock, and Gowther Mossock, perhaps unsurprisingly, given that they are quintessentially Cheshire characters while Madoc was unequivocally Welsh. (We can only wonder how it was that Madoc never came to read The Owl Service [1967]; I firmly believe his Huw Halfbacon would have been a thing of magisterial wonder, but it is alas forever lost to us.) As it was, his portrayals of the Mossocks, Gowther especially, seemed to me to be set rather closer to Birmingham than to Manchester. A similar problem has beset radio adaptations of the two novels; probably the most successful was the 1980s adaptation of Weirdstone (the 2011 adaptation included Powell as narrator, though the production left many listeners gasping with its failure to include the journey through the Earldelving, one of the most significant events in the entire novel).

Having said that, Madoc's attempt was undeniably warmer than Garner's own reading of The Stone Book Quartet (released on vinyl by Argo many years ago and never, apparently, converted to CD), which seemed to owe more to the influence of Manchester Grammar School and Oxford University in its clipped iciness than it did to Garner's early years on the Edge. Garner has spoken of having his mouth washed out with soap as a young child, for speaking "broad" at school, and seems to have quickly understood the need to switch codes according to setting. Yet while he prides himself on having retained the ability to speak "broad," his accent throughout that reading was much more of a conscious performance than I'd expected, and in the end became rather uncomfortable to listen to.

Powell comes much closer to addressing the problem of finding a Cheshire accent that is convincing without being incomprehensible or generic northern than anyone else I've heard. (Although it may be that I tend to hear Gowther in my own head as sounding like my late father-in-law, also a Salford man, so maybe I am a little biased too.) Powell also easily manages to negotiate the streams of jingling rhymes running through Colin's head and give them a rightness that does not exist on the page, where they often come across as being rather twee and self-conscious. According to one uncorroborated Internet comment, Powell is Garner's preferred reader, and if that is true I'm not at all surprised.

Powell's reading also skilfully handles a textual problem that arises a number of times in Garner's work, particularly what we might call the "fragmented" novels, those where Garner has more or less dispensed with the niceties of textual framing to show us who is speaking. Red Shift (1973) is the obvious example, with whole pages reduced to uncredited dialogue, requiring a very careful reading in order to be sure of who is speaking (glancing at my ancient paperback copy of Red Shift, I notice passages where my younger self penciled in the identities of the speakers, because it was at times so hard to keep track). Thursbitch (2003), the most similar in terms of narrative framing to Red Shift, presents almost identical problems. In Strandloper (1996) difficulties arise because so many different voices are in play, and Garner uses many different forms of dialect, cant, and language. In Boneland, the text comes in larger sections, and here the difficulty lies in spotting the transitions between the present-day and the deep past, which are often very sudden. Within the shaman's narrative, there is a further need to make a distinction again between the shaman's own voice and that of the Grey Wolf who aids him on occasion, and whom we must understand as a distinct character rather than a product of the shaman's imagination.

One of the most vexing questions raised by the publication of Boneland is the matter of the trilogy that didn't exist until Boneland was published. Yes, The Moon of Gomrath (1963), sequel to Weirdstone, ended with almost brutal abruptness, such that more about Colin and Susan seemed inevitable, almost necessary, although simultaneously it was difficult to imagine what there was left to say. While Garner has admitted in interviews over the last few years that there was supposed to be a third novel in the sequence, I doubt that he ever intended it to be the novel that is now Boneland; though Garner's novels are famous for their often lengthy gestations, I find it hard to believe that he could be playing such a long game right from the start. Garner himself fairly quickly took to dismissing his first two novels as poorly executed, and later critics tended to follow his lead. However, I think that the distance of years makes it clear that Weirdstone and Gomrath are as much a part of the whole Garner corpus as any of his later novels, and the appearance of Boneland seals that reintegration.

Elidor (1965), Garner's third published novel, turned out to be a very different beast from its almost bucolic predecessors, with its urban setting—a grimy postwar Manchester, pockmarked with bomb sites and in the throes of slum clearance—and its altogether much darker, more elegiac qualities setting the tone for much of Garner's later work. This might prompt us then to see Weirdstone and Gomrath almost as Garner's prelapsarian novels. Certainly, one might read the two novels as an extended love letter to Alderley Edge, the landscape of Garner's own childhood; indeed, at the time one reviewer commented rather dismissively that the reader was effectively following the young Garner as he scrabbled about, exploring the Edge. Having said that, Colin and Susan experienced unusually bruising and violent adventures for a children's fantasy novel of the period, with endings that were at best bittersweet, if not downright disturbing, even though they nonetheless appeared to come back to the quotidian world more or less unscathed. However, it would be fair to say that the reader has to trust to this idea for there is no definitively Tolkienian moment where a character declares, "I'm back." And, as we shall see, the reader would indeed have been wise to be cautious.

Most of Garner's subsequent novels have ended ambiguously, without much in the way of consolation or restitution, though he occasionally allows a glimmer of hope for the future. Often, however, Garner abandons his characters on the brink of a final revelation and leaves it to the reader to decide what might have happened. A prime example is the ending of The Owl Service (1967), where Roger convinces Alison, the avatar of Blodeuwedd, that the pictures on the china are of flowers rather than owls, thus breaking the curse, but we can never be sure; and I'll admit I've never been entirely convinced by that ending.

On occasion, the protagonist might accept the situation within the novel, while for the reader the ending remains too open-ended to be entirely satisfying. Here, an example might be the ending of Strandloper, when William Buckley returns finally to Cheshire, only to realize that his promise to Esther can never be kept because she has not waited for him. Bereft of that which has sustained him, all he can do now is to make peace with the land itself. There is a similar uncertainty of resolution in the ending of Thursbitch. And yet in these and other instances, one might as easily argue that Garner is suggesting that this, rather than a tying-off of loose ends, is how life really is, and how it should be reflected in fiction, and yes, even in stories for children. Even in those first two novels, although the world is restored and balance maintained, comrades are lost, and nothing is ever quite the same as it was before. Garner did not flinch from killing off characters whom the reader had grown to love—Durathror and Albanac in particular—while the death of Grimnir in Weirdstone was unusually powerful emotionally in what was after all marketed as a story for eight-year-olds.

One might then read Boneland as a revisiting of those apparently more innocent days with the intent to show just what those experiences cost the children in emotional terms. Because the most important thing to note is that Boneland is not a direct sequel to those earlier novels (though there is something pleasingly tricksterish in the thought of children beginning the Brisingamen Trilogy, only to find that volume three makes little if any sense until they're older). As 50 years have passed since the first two novels were originally published, so 50 years have passed for the characters. Bess and Gowther Mossock are long dead, as is Scamp the dog; Prince the horse was, it turns out, put down when the farm was finally sold, and I still find this one of the more shocking small details. Colin is, in late middle age, a respected astronomical researcher, working at Jodrell Bank telescope. This perhaps comes as a surprise as young Colin always seemed to be more preoccupied with the history and folklore of Alderley Edge; one might have perhaps expected him to become a historian in later life. He was clearly bright, but over the course of two novels, it would be fair to say that it was Susan who had the quickfire intellect and the ability to grasp what the others hadn't yet seen, and it was Susan who was eager and restless for new challenges. On the other hand, it was Colin who had the patience to mull over and finally track down the reference he'd seen to "the old straight track" in Gowther's book when someone needed to find the mothan plant. So, a thoughtful reader, yes; a scholar of some sort, certainly, but a scientist? Something clearly changed along the way.

It quickly becomes obvious that Professor Colin Whisterfield is by no means the Colin of the earlier novels. Instead, he is a man possessed of a ferocious intellect, with the apparent ability to recall everything he has ever read, and he has read extremely widely, as well as acquiring a string of postgraduate degrees in a variety of subjects, and contributing to a number of books. He seems to know something about most things, except perhaps himself. He can also describe everyday actions with an over-abundance of detail that might be read as precision, or else as a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He also appears to have acquired a highly developed sense of ritual (and an interest in theology and religions).

And most extraordinary of all, he lives on Alderley Edge itself, in a mountain hut that he bought and had erected there. There is no electricity and no running water, yet Colin seems to be content with his Spartan life. (It comes as no surprise to discover that in the early twentieth century there was an actual hermit, John Evans, living in a log cabin in Church Quarry on Alderley Edge. When Colin notes that his hut is built on earlier foundations, it's clear he's living on precisely the same spot.) It will take some time to understand why Colin chooses to live like this, but one thing is made quite explicit from the novel's opening pages, and that is that Colin believes that he cannot spend a night away from the Edge, not even if it means discharging himself from hospital after treatment.

During the course of the novel, the reader will come to understand that Colin has had a breakdown of some sort—indeed, belatedly we can see that the novel's opening sequence involves Colin emerging from an episode of electro-convulsive therapy intended to treat a particularly severe episode of depression. However, it is only when Colin finally consults Meg Massey, a psychotherapist, that the story begins to unfold. But what is actually happening? There is, undoubtedly, a medical intervention being staged by Colin's doctor—drug treatments, hospital visits, and so on—but what are we to make of Dr. Massey, a singularly improbable psychotherapist? Does she even exist? In the light of what is to come, this is not an unreasonable question.

Since he began the latest course of treatment, Colin has also begun to experience visions, which seem to take him far into the past. These visions follow the life story of a man, a shaman, whose role seems to be to tend the landscape and guide it through the seasons. He is alone—his wife and child are dead, killed in an avalanche—and he sustains himself through the carrying out of certain rituals, although he is acutely aware that he is now the last of his line, as there is no son to follow him.

Colin's visions serve to position him as the latest, possibly even the last in a long line of guardians of the landscape and its memories in Garner's writing, while the crane shaman was evidently the first of them, for though he arrived eventually at Alderley Edge, his story begins at what he refers to as Ludcruck, better known today as Lud's Church or Ludchurch, a deep chasm in an area of the Peak District known as the White Peak. Crucially for this novel, Lud's Church has been identified by the late Ralph Elliott, a scholar of Anglo-Saxon and also a friend of Garner's, as the Green Chapel, the setting for the final encounter between Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and thus the crane shaman becomes part of that ongoing dialogue with the Green Knight's story. (Garner and Elliott also had a little party trick in which they would simultaneously recite the Lord's Prayer, Garner in Cheshire dialect, Elliott in NW Mercian, the point being to demonstrate how closely allied the two versions were. And indeed the two versions meshed together extraordinarily closely.)

Other watchers include Huw Halfbacon in The Owl Service, who guards the valley wherein the tragedy of Lleu Llaw Gyffes, Gronw Pebyr, and Blodeuwedd, the woman of flowers, is doomed to be reenacted in every generation. In Red Shift, the guardian is marked by his epilepsy, his ownership of a stone axe head, and by his name—Macey, Thomas, Tom. The role of shaman is perhaps most fully explored and acknowledged in Strandloper, in the character of William Buckley, a Cheshire laborer transported to Australia, where he escapes from captivity and is eventually found by a group of Aboriginals who recognize him as the reincarnation of their shaman, Murrangurk. William, it should be noted, is like the three Tom figures, an epileptic.

In Thursbitch, the Turner family watch over the valley of Thursbitch, practicing a form of bull worship that reaches back to the Mithraic rites of the Roman soldiers (bearing in mind that the Romans in Red Shift are allegedly the remnants of the lost Ninth Legion, gone tribal in order to survive). The current guardian of the rites, John Turner, is the adopted son of the family, and like William, John has travelled, though as a packman his journeys have been shorter if more frequent. But like William, and Colin (and to some extent the contemporary Tom of Red Shift) he has been exposed to a broader range of ideas than his predecessors, suggesting that the nature of this guardianship is in part syncretic. Many of these guardians are psychically, rather than physically, damaged; Malebron, the ruler of Elidor, is unusual in carrying a physical injury that reflects the injury to his land, somewhat reminiscent of the Fisher King, and it is surely not a coincidence that among his kingdom's treasures is a cup. Only belatedly will we find that Colin also carries a physical injury, at which point his smashing of a crystal glass might possibly take on greater significance.

And what, in the end, is Cadellin, if not a guardian, tending to the sleeping knights beneath Alderley Edge? Again, that Arthurian connection is present, if one accepts that these knights are Arthur's, as one version of the story goes. One might indeed also want to reconsider Bert, the mysterious taxi driver who is always available when needed, whose meter never seems to tick over, and remember the name of the Green Knight's alter-ego, Sir Bertilak, while also bearing in mind that Colin, himself bearded, is the owner of a remarkably large and very sharp axe.

Whereas these other shamans might, in their various ways, seem to have come to their guardianship by right, through inheritance or apprenticeship, it is not initially clear how or why Colin has assumed such a role. As an astronomer, he is of course a professional "watcher of the skies," but from the outset there is a strong sense that his role may have been forced upon him—there is more than a passing flavor of a geas about it—or else that he has taken it upon himself as some sort of penance, because something else clearly troubles him. There is no Cadellin to guide him, Gowther is long since dead, and it is noticeable how quickly Colin adopts Bert as a surrogate father; those familiar with Weirdstone and Gomrath will immediately recognize Bert as an avatar of Gowther. Or perhaps that should be the other way round.

Indeed, one of the things that is so striking about Colin is that he has no family and no friends. He has colleagues at work, but his relationships with them are distant, and they obviously regard him as at best an oddity. One has an impression there was some sort of scene before he went on sick leave. In fact, Colin believes that he once had a sister, but those around him have consistently denied that he was ever anything other than an only child, and no records apparently exist to say otherwise. One might suppose that Colin's family would be in a position to confirm or deny this but, it turns out, at some point after the end of Gomrath, Colin's parents were killed in a plane crash (they were absent throughout the two novels), and he was adopted by Bess and Gowther Mossock. That they did so suggests there was no other immediate family who could take him in and who could provide Colin with a personal history.

It is only when Meg takes on Colin as a client that we finally learn two things: first, that Susan apparently rode away from the farm one night on Prince the horse. Prince was later discovered on the island in Redesmere with no indication as to how he had got there. Secondly, that at some point after Susan's disappearance, Colin was struck by lightning while out on Alderley Edge. After this, he acquired a number of unusual abilities, including the ability to recall what he was doing on any specific day after the strike, and something akin to an eidetic memory. Of his life before he was struck by lightning, he remembers almost nothing, although he has puzzling flashbacks which he doesn't understand. The reader in effect knows more about Colin's past life than he does. Which means in turn that we already know what Colin only suspects: that he did indeed have a sister, though it is Colin who reveals that Susan was his twin. (And this did surprise me; for reasons I can't quite account for, I'd always assumed that while they were close in age, Colin was the older of the two. Looking back at Weirdstone now, I can't see anything that overtly suggests this, and I suspect that this was just one of those assumptions one made about relationships in children's fiction when I was young. In fact, their being twins perhaps makes slightly more sense of the emotional tenor of their relationship in those two novels.)

Colin has always been haunted by the feeling that he has a sister, but as he reveals to Meg, it is only within the last few years that this has begun to play a significant role in his life. He has been plagued, he says, by visions of his sister riding into the Pleiades, Messier 45. As a result, he has been using the radio telescope to scan M45 in order to search for her. It is not clear exactly how this is supposed to work but, as we shall see, in some mysterious way it has. For the reader familiar with Gomrath, none of this will come as much of a surprise.

Two of the great set pieces in that novel involve Susan and what come to be called the Shining Ones. Much of the early part of the novel is concerned with Susan's being taken by the Brollachan, after lending her bracelet, the Mark of Fohla, to the lios-alfar. The Brollachan has driven Susan out of her own body, and it takes the Old Magic—here represented as a plant, the Mothan—to recall her to herself. Susan's account of her time away from her body centers on her meeting with a woman called Celemon, who wears a bracelet like the Mark, and who tells Susan that they are to ride to Caer Rigor. When Uthecar forces Susan to swallow the leaves, their bitter taste calls her back to her own world. Cadellin explains that Susan

 has ridden with the Shining Ones, the Daughters of the Moon, and they came with her from behind the north wind […] But the Shining Ones did not leave Susan of choice, for through her they may wake their power in the world—the Old Magic, which has long been gone from here. (69)

It is Colin, however, who actually sees the Shining Ones at this point:

 he could not say if they were stars, or what they were. The sky was a haze of moonlight, and in the haze it seemed as though the stars had formed new constellations, constellations that moved, had life, and took the shape and spangled outline of nine young women on horseback, gigantic, filling the heavens. They milled round above the farm, hawks on hand, and among them pranced hounds with glittering eyes and jeweled collars. The riders wore short tunics, and their hair gleamed along the sky. Then the horn sounded again, the horses reared and flared over the plain, and the night poured shooting-stars into the western sea. (65–66)

The Shining Ones return at the novel's conclusion, when Susan blows Angharad Goldenhand's horn because "All else is lost" (154). The horn summons the Einheriar, the Wild Hunt, to destroy the Brollachan, and Susan is caught up with them.

 In the distance, as over a field, she saw nine women with hawk on wrist, and hounds at leash, coming to meet her, and gladness carried Susan past all thoughts but one, the memory of Celemon, daughter of Cei, which the Mothan's bitterness had driven from her. (154)

However, Angharad orders them to leave Susan, for she "is but green in power," and

 Susan was left as dross upon the hill, and a voice came to her from the gathering outlines of the stars, "It is not yet! It will be! But not yet!" And the fire died in Susan, and she was alone on the moor, the night wind in her face, joy and anguish in her heart. (155)

Colin also observes this encounter, at a distance, and his view of it is much the same. He sees the Einheriar—

 Now the cloud raced over the ground, breaking into separate glories that whisped and sharpened to skeins of starlight, and were horsemen, and at their head was majesty, crowned with antlers, like the sun. (156)

Then he sees Susan, suddenly dropping behind, "and the light that formed her died, and in its place was a smaller, solid figure that halted, forlorn, in the white wake of the riding" (156). And finally,

 The horsemen climbed from the hillside to the air, growing vast in the sky, and to meet them came nine women, their hair like wind. And away they rode together across the night, over the waves, and beyond the isles, and the Old Magic was free for ever, and the moon was new. (156)

These encounters seem to suggest that while Susan sees Celemon and the other Shining Ones as actual people, Colin always sees them as stars or as figures of light, and his later interest in astronomy begins to make a little more sense, as though he has always subconsciously been searching for his lost sister, even before he could articulate that loss.

Looked at from a mythological point of view, these scenes are also interesting. Garner's novels draw on a broad range of British myths and folktales. Caer Rigor is a version of the Welsh version of the underworld, and Susan has now been sent back from it twice. Celemon is the daughter of Cei (that is, Kay) in the story of Culhwch and Olwen. And the Shining Ones are, it would seem, a version of the Seven (in this instance, nine) Sisters of the Pleiades. It is also worth noting that Meg's house is located on Seven Sisters Lane (and this is the actual name of the road).

One of the motifs at the heart of Red Shift is the constellation of Orion, which is a neighbor of Taurus, the constellation in which the Pleiades are situated, and it is Orion who pursued the Pleiades in their earthly form, before Zeus took pity on them, turned them to doves, and set them in the heavens. The constellation of Taurus also plays a significant role in Thursbitch (and the Pleiades make another appearance, this time as bees), so it would seem that Garner was making these astronomical/mythological connections from quite early in his fiction. Indeed, given that the Jodrell Bank telescope is literally at the bottom of Garner's own garden, it is perhaps not surprising that astronomical connections surface quite so often—this is explicit in the very title of Red Shift. In the end, we must surmise that Susan made a third attempt to join Celemon and that this time she succeeded. Given that Prince was found on what we know to be Angharad's island, one of the two Floating Islands of Logres, and there is no body, we might also assume that Susan was transported to Caer Rigor rather than that she simply drowned herself. And for Colin's purposes, Caer Rigor is transformed into the galaxy M45.

In all of Garner's novels, the acutely sensitive young man has had a woman in whom he can confide, be this Roland's extremely close relationship with his sister, Helen (Elidor), Gwyn's tentative relationship with Ali (The Owl Service), and most famously, Tom's love affair with Jan (Red Shift). The pattern is broken with The Stone Book Quartet where, with the exception of The Stone Book itself, the relationships are between the men of the Garner family, and focus on Joseph, grandson of Robert Garner, the "bazzil-arsed" mason of Garner family legend. It resumes with Strandloper (William and Esther) and continues through Thursbitch (Sal and Ian, and, to an extent, John Turner and Nan Sarah—though Turner's case is unusual, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment). What is also striking about each of these relationships is that in each case the girl or woman has a nurturing, quasi-maternal role within the relationship, but as the characters grow older, novel by novel, so the sexual tension grows stronger.

This is constantly alluded to in The Owl Service, which is based on a recurring cycle of love triangles—Lleu Llaw Gyffes, Gronw Pebyr, and Blodeuwedd; Nancy, Huw Halfbacon, and Bertram; Clive, Margaret, and Ali's invisible father; and of course, Ali, Gwyn, and Roger—but becomes explicit with Red Shift. Here, Tom's mother directly accuses Jan, whom she perceives as being more sexually experienced (correctly, as it turns out, but not quite in the way Tom's mother imagines) of seducing Tom (echoing the always invisible Margaret's concerns about Gwyn and Ali). On the other hand, it is clear to the reader that Tom is sexually frustrated, in part by his mother's insistence on continuing to treat him as a child rather than a young man about to go to university, and by her insistence that there will be time enough for girls after university. In the same way that Jan nurtures and supports Tom as he struggles to win his scholarship and make his escape from home, the goddess cares for Macey. Unlike his comrades Macey did not participate in her rape and honors the girl—there is though an ambiguity in their relationship. Did he deliberately choose not to rape her or was it simply that he was unable to? His epileptic fits, which transform him into a berserker on occasion, might in some cultures position him as a simpleton, and yet he is regarded by everyone as some sort of shaman, and is clearly more intellectually engaged than Thomas, the middle iteration of this fractured figure.

In an earlier period in Red Shift, Thomas Rowley's story is set during the English Civil Wars, and he participates in the most complex relationship of all. His wife Margery was previously courted by another Thomas, Thomas Venables who is now a soldier, and Margery is also an object of interest to John Fowler, son of the rector of Barthomley. John is teaching Thomas to read and write, though his reasons for doing so aren't clear (he is evidently some sort of agitator, like Edward Stanley, who is teaching Thomas Buckley to read and write in Strandloper). Thomas is evidently regarded as being slow-witted. although he suffers from what we would recognize as epilepsy, and there is evidently considerable puzzlement as to why Margery married him. Fowler deliberately taunts Thomas by claiming that Margery only married him because he was soft and malleable.

There is the same sense of fragility about William Buckley in Strandloper, whose "sitting up" on Saturday nights with Esther is accompanied by anxiety headaches. As Shick-Shack, William is required to take a prominent part in the local fertility rites but in his own life, he is as anxious about consummation as Tom. When William returns to Esther after many years, he finds that she has married someone else. Her son, now grown, is named for William, although the implication is that he was the son of Edward Stanley. (William the younger is, circumstantial evidence would suggest, the silk weaver, Old William, the "little maister," brother of Robert Garner the stone mason, just to establish another connection).

The pattern has apparently shifted in Thursbitch, where Ian and John Turner would seem to be the nurturing figures, but Sal Malley, the woman for whom he cares, and with whom he has perhaps had some sort of relationship, notes quite late in the story that Ian had joined a celibate order, the implication being that he was fleeing from any sort of sexual involvement. John Turner's relationship with Nan Sarah seems extraordinarily loving by comparison with other portrayals of relationships in Garner's work, but being a packman, he is often away from her and their relationship is more one of periodic ecstatic reunions than a day-to-day marriage. Nan Sarah may be pregnant with their child but the narrative seems to suggest that even such a comparatively happy relationship cannot be allowed to stand. Nan Sarah dies of the plague (although she gives birth to twins as she dies) and John Turner is driven temporarily mad by her loss. During this period he renounces his role within the bull cult and transforms himself into a charismatic if eccentric Christian preacher before finally returning to the older ways.

Again, in Boneland, the shaman has lost his wife and child, prior to the novel's opening, this time in some sort of avalanche. We learn less about this relationship than the others but there is something horrific in the shaman's being able to see his wife and child behind the ice without being able to reach them, and having to wait for the thaw in order to bury them in the appropriate way.

All of which necessarily requires us to reexamine the relationship between Colin and Susan, in part because of the hesitant relationship that begins to develop between Colin and Meg. This has clearly not prompted Susan's initial reappearance but it seems to fuel Susan's activities. This presupposes, of course, that Susan's presence is real, however far-fetched the scenario might seem to be. The other possibility is that Colin has imagined her from the start, as everyone tells him he has, in order to account for other experiences.

At this point it is necessary to backtrack somewhat and consider some of Colin's other symptoms. There, for example, is an obsession with crows and other members of the corvid family. Those familiar with Weirdstone and Gomrath will of course identify this as a residual fear of the Morthbrood, agents of the Morrigan who primarily manifested themselves as crows. It is, though, also tied to a flashback Colin has of finding a dying crow. Similarly, he has a fear of witches—an early scene in Boneland is set in the doctor's waiting room, where a woman is reading a story to her grandson, prompting Colin to counsel him urgently not to go upstairs—which recalls Colin's own imprisonment upstairs at Errwood Hall, in Gomrath. (His aversion to rhododendrons can be similarly linked to this episode, as the hall was surrounded by them.) Almost the first question that Colin asks Meg is whether she is a witch. She dresses in black, as did the Morrigan, or Selina Place, and the description of her house reminds us of both St Mary Clyffe and Errwood Hall.

With such similarities, one can see why "Susan" might be concerned to "rescue" Colin from the Morrigan a second time—"It's her, Col. She's come to get you. This time" (Boneland, 55); "I told you she'd get you. And this time I couldn't stop her. You say you don't want me now" (89)—but Meg's question to Colin is much simpler: "How is your sex life?" How, indeed. Does it exist at all? Based on the evidence of Garner's other novels, one suspects not (though one might also think of this in terms of a sacrifice having been deliberately made; in more than one respect Boneland makes me think of Ursula K. Le Guin's Tehanu, and the revelation of Ged's celibacy, his sacrifice in order to become a mage).

In which case, we need to think again about Meg the therapist and Bert the taxi driver, and the endless hints that dropped as to how they know one another ("Bert and I go back a long way" [Boneland 32]). If instead, we see Bert as Sir Bertilak, keeper of the castle at which Gawain stays before his second meeting with the Green Knight, and Meg as Bertilak's flirtatious young wife, who tries to seduce Gawain, for a wager, this makes a little more sense of what is happening in the contemporary part of the novel. Gawain's experience is a test of his loyalty and chastity (and this is not the only story in which Gawain is confronted by women who require hime to make or relinquish choices), and if as we surmise, Colin has devoted his adult life to searching for his sister, his consultations with Meg can be seen as a test of his resolve to continue. The clue might lie in the fact that in Gawain and the Green Knight, the entire enterprise was devised by Morgan le Fay, who is, according to some scholars, a later version of the Morrigan. It's also worth noting that when Morgan first appears, in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini, she is the eldest and most beautiful of nine sisters who live on the Isle of Avalon. And that "nine" points us straight back to the Shining Ones, and to the Pleiades.

How then should we see Meg? If Susan is the New Moon or Maiden, and the Morrigan the Old Moon or the crone, then Meg has to be the wife and nurturing mother figure. This is reflected in her therapeutic practice, but Meg seems also to suggest that she can no longer fulfil the expectations of the sensitive guardians. Rather, as Bertilak's wife is outrageously flirtatious, so Meg is forthright in her approach as a therapist, and as forthright in her private life, with little concern as to what people think of her. It is Meg who suggests, on the assumption that Susan's return is quite genuine, that her emotional development is as arrested as Colin's own. On that basis, an older woman dressed in black must be the Morrigan and she, Susan, must naturally save her brother from her depredations, whereas, 50 years on, is it not time that Colin found a more immediate happiness, without his sister's interference?

Except there are also those niggling references to the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus fetches his wife back from the Underworld, and will succeed so long as he doesn't look back at Eurydice, who is following him. Having returned safely to the upper world, Orpheus looks back, forgetting his wife has not yet emerged into the upper world, and thus he loses her again. That reemergence into the upper world reminds us of Colin and Susan's journey through the Earldelving in Weirdstone, and it is perhaps worth noting that it was Susan who led the way throughout the entire journey under Alderley Edge. As I commented earlier, it has always been Susan who led the way, Colin who followed.

And as it turns out, Colin has spent the last half century continuing to follow. It is Meg who forces Colin to travel back into his own past to understand the true nature of that lightning strike. And here we face the terrible tragedy at the heart of this story. In his grief at Susan's loss, Colin attempted to wake the Sleepers in order to find her, and as a result was cursed by Cadellin, and given the duty of watching over the Edge in his place. Cadellin has always been afraid of the volatility of the Old Magic, disliking its unruliness and the fact that he cannot control it. Similarly, he has always resisted the notion that the children were a part of the story of Alderley Edge, despite it being made plain by other characters that they were. The rescue of Susan in Gomrath is predicated on the need to get her back from the Old Magic ,and yet the entire second half of the novel rests on the fact that she cannot be controlled, nor indeed should she be. The world, Garner seems to suggest, needs the Old Magic, and yet Cadellin stands in the way of that. Cadellin's response to Colin's despair may thus come as a shock but possibly not as a surprise. It's a terrible curse to place on a 13-year-old boy who lost his sister to magic, but it seems also to be the final expression of a man who has sacrificed his own life to a dreadful burden; the one true indication of Cadellin's own sufferings and it is at this point that we realize just how little we know of this person who has struggled to keep control of magic.

There is a moment early in Gawain and the Green Knight when the Green Knight makes his first appearance in Arthur's court. Who, he demands, is the governor of this gang. It is an interesting moment for a couple of reasons. A king should be easily identifiable by his nobility, and one might read the Green Knight's question as suggesting that he can see no obviously regal person in that room (and we should bear in mind that the young Arthur is busy playing party games at this moment). Or is he deliberately ignoring Arthur because he is behaving in such a childish fashion, unbecoming to a king? We can read the Green Knight as an intrusion of old, wild magic into a contemporary and rational court, but we could as easily read the Green Knight as representing an older, more ceremonial way of conducting the business of kingship, one that recognizes the importance of kingly duty. When Gawain returns to court, he is sadder and wiser, knowing that he has failed in his duty to the quest, yet he is greeted with approbation by the court, simply for surviving. This, he knows is wrong.

Throughout Garner's work, the Green Knight's question is answered, over and over: "I am the governor of this gang" says Robert the mason, in The Stone Book, and in Boneland the "bodger" whom Colin encounters at what was once Meg's house, says something similar. Other characters use a similar form of words. These are all people who have control of their lives, and the implication is that the Green Knight represents a form of empowerment that cannot be found in Cadellin's formal magic.

Anyone who has read a number of Garner's novels will be aware of certain rhetorical devices that recur, not the least of which is the recitation of place names. It comes right at the beginning of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen when the farmer's second meeting with the wizard is described—"By Seven Firs and Goldenstone they went, to Stormy Point and Saddlebole." It is a description of a route across Alderley Edge. Variations of this particular route appear a number of times in Weirdstone and Gomrath, and reversed, it appears also in Strandloper when William Buckley returns to Cheshire. Boneland too has its variants—"Colin went along the old broad way by Seven Firs and Goldenstone to the barren sand and rocks on Stormy Point and Saddlebole and looked out across the plain beneath" (25)—although the adult Colin has also taken to his bicycle: "After the station he went by Brook Lane and Row-of-Trees, urging past Lindow Moss, along Seven Sisters Lane to Toft" (21).

But what begins in Weirdstone as a simple storytelling device has, by the time we reach Boneland been transformed into ritual and something even beyond that. It is in Strandloper that the recitation is obviously transformed into incantation. William Buckley, having been a shaman among the Aboriginal people of South Australia, brings home his new understanding of the power of the land (one thinks inevitably of Aboriginal songlines and it is worth noting that Garner has been quite heavily influenced by Aboriginal oral traditions). As a narrative, Thursbitch is most deeply tied to a landscape, and is indeed specifically about that landscape and its effects on its inhabitants. In Boneland, however, it is as though something has gone awry. Colin, as watcher, walks the bounds of Alderley Edge but in a highly ritualized way, wearing his academic robes. In doing so there is something in him that suggests Cadellin, but at the same time about the process that suggests that in some way the ceremony has become emptied of meaning other than in the ceremonial robing. Colin is desperate to be part of this land, but at the same time he cannot make proper contact with it, not even if he does the things that Cadellin did, dresses as much like Cadellin as possible, and so on.

The possession of the axe, the fact he has a beard, the green academic hood that he wears, position Colin instead as Gawain, as the Green Knight even, and suggest that he participates in a different story to Cadellin's, an older one that allows him to leave and return at will, if he can but recognize that fact. If, indeed, as Meg points out, he can ask the questions, which are "What is this thing? What does it mean? Whom does it serve?" (Boneland, 134): the grail questions. "You must not let yourself be prisoner to deep place; to the Edge. Or to Ludchurch" (135), Meg tells Colin. And in the dying moments of the novel, Colin walks by Seven Firs and Goldenstone and Stormy Point to Saddlebole, unadorned, simply himself again, the memory of his sister laid to rest finally, and accepting his part in the greater story.

At the end of The Stone Book, after Mary has gone underground into the heart of Alderley Edge, and witnessed the footprints that testify to the hundreds of her ancestors who visited the same spot, and seen the bull painted on the cave wall, she returns home with her father, pondering what she has seen. After he has answered her questions, her father comments, "I recollect it puts a quietness on you, does that bull" (TSBQ, 48). And that seems to me to be the most apt comment to make about Boneland.

Maureen Kincaid Speller lives in Folkestone, Kent.

Works Consulted

Garner, Alan. Elidor. London: Collins, 1965.

——. The Moon of Gomrath. London: Collins, 1963.

——. The Owl Service. London: Collins, 1967.

——. Red Shift. London: Collins, 1973.

——. The Stone Book Quartet (1976–78). London: Collins, 1983.

——. Strandloper. London: Harvill, 1996.

——. Thursbitch. London: Harvill, 2003.

——. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. London: Collins, 1960.

 Review David Hartwell 2014-09-17T22:40:55-04:00 NYRSF Issue 312 August 2014 Editorial: Chance of Face, Change of Heart http://www.nyrsf.com/2014/09/issue-312-august-2014-editorial-chance-of-face-change-of-heart.html In early August, the writer and editor Daniel José Older launched a petition on Change.org <www.change.org/p/the-world-fantasy-award-make-octavia-butler-the-wfa-statue-instead-of-lovecraft> to request that the World Fantasy Award administrators replace the current award statuette, a (haunting, grotesque, lovely) Gahan Wilson bust of H. P. Lovecraft,...

In early August, the writer and editor Daniel José Older launched a petition on Change.org <www.change.org/p/the-world-fantasy-award-make-octavia-butler-the-wfa-statue-instead-of-lovecraft> to request that the World Fantasy Award administrators replace the current award statuette, a (haunting, grotesque, lovely) Gahan Wilson bust of H. P. Lovecraft, with a statuette of Octavia Butler. As of today, the petition has just short of 1400 signatures, including mine. I signed it because it identifies a serious problem; I signed it with reluctance because the proposed solution is not the right one.

Older's petition offers a threefold argument: First, that Octavia Butler was an exemplary writer "across the imaginative genres from science fiction to historical fantasy to horror." Second, that Lovecraft was an avowed racist and that his image on the award is deeply discomforting to recipients, especially those who are among the races that Lovecraft held in particular contempt (i.e., any skin color other than white). Third, that Lovecraft was a terrible wordsmith.

On the third point, I will go so far as to say that Older is flat-out wrong. Lovecraft's position as a major figure in (the American strand of) fantasy is not accidental and not dismissible, and choosing to celebrate him as a major force for fantasy and horror was not accidental, either. Nick Mamatas has defended Lovecraft as a wordsmith in some depth on his Livejournal here <nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com/1893140.html>, which he tidily summarizes as "[HPL] had a pretty clear aesthetic and used polyphony well to build authority for the ineffable." I recommend you to his article for more. Lovecraft's place in the canons of both fantasy and American literature more broadly is secure, and deserved.

This is true even though Lovecraft's racism is not seriously in doubt. It's easy to focus on the astonishing, elaborately offensive, juvenile poem "On the Creation of N——s", but beyond that his casual anti-black and anti-Asian racism are frequently on clear display in his fiction, from the Teeming Asian Masses imagery of "The Horror at Red Hook" and the minstrel-show caricature in "Herbert West, Reanimator" to the systematic othering of blacks in stories as wide-spread as "The Facts Concerning The Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" and "The Call of Cthulhu." Lovecraft's racism is hardly unique in the world of letters, though it was pungent even by the standards of its time. And this matters. Nnedi Okorafor, a World Fantasy Award winner has written about how tiring and angering it is to learn, again and again, how many of the Elders of literature hated people like her and how, as a result, the honor that the Award is supposed to convey to its recipients is diminished by the ugly ghosts behind its visage (cf. <nnedi.blogspot.com/2011/12/lovecrafts-racism-world-fantasy-award.html>).

Hence the problem.

On the proposed solution: Octavia Butler was an exemplary writer, directly confronting issues of race, sexuality and gender, and institutional power when science fiction was reluctant to deal with any of them. However, she was never in her lifetime considered a fantasy writer. All of her novels, and all but one of her short stories, were published as science fiction. (Kindred, a time-slip novel, is arguably a fantasy, but was received as sf at the time.) Her memorial page on the SFWA site <www.archive.sfwa.org/members/Butler/> does not use the word. Fantasy simply is not part of her literary reputation.

I personally don't have a great deal of concern for the sf/fantasy divide. But institutionally, the World Fantasy Awards do. The WFA was created, in large part, to direct critical attention to fantasy as a distinct literary tradition. It's easy to forget, now, that in the 1970s fantasy was the poor cousin of science fiction, and it misses the point of celebrating fantasy to suggest giving its foremost award the face of a science fiction writer, no matter how brilliant the writer is. Given the diversity of fantasy, it's hard to imagine any individual writer encompassing the whole field, actually.

So. I strongly support the idea of the petition. I urge the World Fantasy Convention to decide quickly on a replacement that can fairly represent all of fantasy and all of its audience and creators, whether it be a iconic creature such as a dragon or chimera (Mamatas's suggestion); a map (my own preference) or a book; or something more abstract still. HPL's head should be retired as soon as possible, not out of disrespect for Lovecraft as a writer or as a central figure in fantasy, but as a courtesy to generations of writers whom the WFA hopes to honor.

—Kevin J. Maroney
speaking for himself

 Editorial David Hartwell 2014-09-17T22:39:00-04:00 Issue 312 August 2014 Table of Contents http://www.nyrsf.com/2014/09/issue-312-august-2014-table-of-contents.html Boneland by Alan Garner, read by Robert Powell, reviewed by Maureen Kincaid Speller Michael Bishop: Philip K. Dick, Alternate-World SF, and I A Darkling Sea by James L. Cambias, reviewed by David Mead Wind Angels by Leigh Kennedy, reviewed by...

Boneland by Alan Garner, read by Robert Powell, reviewed by Maureen Kincaid Speller

Michael Bishop: Philip K. Dick, Alternate-World SF, and I

A Darkling Sea by James L. Cambias, reviewed by David Mead

Wind Angels by Leigh Kennedy, reviewed by Jenny Blackford

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay: The Impossibility of Ian Watson's Miracle Visitors

Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution, edited by Ann VanderMeer, reviewed by Eugene Reynolds

The Complete Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks, and William Weaver, reviewed by John Crowley

Darrell Schweitzer: Drilling a Core Sample: Thrilling Wonder Stories, Summer 1945

Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone, reviewed by Greg L. Johnson

Photos

Editorial: Change of Face, Change of Heart

Samuel R. Delany, Contributing Editor; Kris Dikeman and Avram Grumer, Managing Editors. Alex Donald, Webmaster; Jen Gunnels, Theatre Editor; David G. Hartwell, Reviews and Features Editor. Kevin J. Maroney, Publisher.
Staff: Joe Berlant, Ann Crimmins, Heather Masri, Sophie Logan, Lisa Padol, M'jit Raindancer-Stahl, Jason Strawsburg, Eugene Reynolds, and Anne Zanoni.

 Special thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty and Eugene Surowitz.

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 TOC David Hartwell 2014-09-17T22:32:47-04:00