Introduction

Well, the seasons, they go round and round, and the output of the small presses continues to astound. The critical mass of new books from "alternative publishers" here at the Print Palace has resulted in the following review-explosion.

Novels and Novellas

Certainly science fiction has benefited from one hundred years of codification. Established tropes and consensus histories allow easy engagement by readers and writers alike. But there is a sense in which proto-SF was wilder and more outrageous, simply because no borders had yet been established. We can see such primitive vigor in Camille Flammarion’s Lumen (Wesleyan University Press, trade, $19.95, 153 pages, ISBN 0819565679), first published in 1872. According to Brian Stableford–who provides a masterful introduction, translation, and notes–Flammarion (1842-1925) was something of the Isaac Asimov of his day, a popularizer and philosopher as well as novelist. Cast in the form of five dialogues between Lumen, a scientifically minded ghost, and his naïve terrestrial interlocutor, this book journeys to the stars to examine matters of physics, biology, and ethics, charting the virgin territory that future writers such as Stapledon would fruitfully plow. Upon arriving at Capella shortly after his death, Lumen finds the natives raptly watching goings-on in France via their extended senses. Out of such glorious, egocentric quirks were the foundations of SF built.

In the novella Blood Follows (PS Publishing, trade, $14.00, 90 pages, ISBN 1-902-880-34-X), the British fantasist Steve Erikson (not to be confused with the US slipstreamer Steve Erickson) extends the vision of his fantasy land of Malazan formerly contained only in his novels. In the blackly comic Lamentable City of Moll, Emancipor Reese, henpecked, middle-aged husband, is looking for a job. But the position he finds with Master Bauchelain proves to be more hazardous than he first assumed. Blending the barbaric color of Leiber with some of Cabell’s drollery, Erikson propels his tale with vim and glee.

On Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, there lived a strange bipartite race. Half the race had the form of disembodied heads with some small appendages; the other half of the race were headless bodies. Of course, the former used the latter as vehicles. Out of this pulp cliche, Carol Emshwiller, in an unwaveringly futuristic voice, has fashioned a profound novel of amazing depth and intimacy. The Mount (Small Beer Press, trade, $16.00, 232 pages, ISBN 1-931520-03-8) takes place on a future Earth where an alien race of conquerors known as the Hoots employ subjugated humans as their rides. Our protagonist is Charley, a teenaged Mount who happens to be assigned to the Hoot child who will one day become the leader of the invaders. As the wild humans still at large launch a successful rebellion, Charley finds his loyalties torn between his master and his species. In the end, the pair forge a third way between the opposed camps. Dealing with issues of slavery and freedom and the awkward bonds between father and child, this novel belongs on the shelf with such classics as Tom Disch’s Mankind Under the Leash (1966) and William Tenn’s Of Men and Monsters (1968).

Lovers of the surreal will relish the reappearance of a 1942 novel by Maurice Blanchot in a crystalline translation by Jeff Fort. Aminadab (University of Nebraska Press, trade, $22.00, 202 pages, ISBN 0-8032-6176-4) is the story of a young fellow named Thomas who, walking through a strange village one morning, is enticed into a boarding house by the friendly wave of a woman in an upper-story window. Once inside, Thomas finds himself trapped in an impossibly huge warren of rooms and stairways and corridors, whose tenants form a society all their own, divided into renters, servants, and guardians of the obscure laws that govern their bureaucratic interactions. Like the quester in an allegorical tale by George MacDonald or David Lindsay, Thomas manages to pass through situations both weird and resonant that embody all the stages of life. Blanchot was exceedingly fond of Kafka, and here he manages to capture Kafka’s simultaneously somber and manic worldview with keen-eared precision, producing an affecting fable.

In her debut novel, Imago (Wildside Press, hardcover, $37.95, 312 pages, ISBN 1-58715-379-3), Amy Sterling Casil succeeds in channeling the spirit of primo early Philip K. Dick, the fertile fellow who blasted out such social satires as Solar Lottery (1955) and The World Jones Made (1956). In Casil’s just-around-the-corner scenario, Human Mutational Virus turns its victims into bestial parodies who become the subject of prejudice and legal maltreatment. Against this backdrop, the successor to Disney Enterprises, DisLex, under the rule of a megalomaniac named Harmon Jacques, strives to escape reality by creating a virtual environment known as PerfectTown. Harmon’s only trusted advisor is an imago, a virtual construct modeled on the personality of Richard Nixon. In the middle of all this insanity are Julie and Frank Curtez. Julie works for DisLex and Frank is a lawyer. Soon, thanks to Harmon’s schemes, they will find themselves running for their lives, their only friend a renegade Nixon. Employing a sharp, vigorous prose style, Casil propels her characters through her funhouse future with real zest.

A novel composed of linked stories, Chris Roberson’s Any Time At All (Clockwork Storybook, trade, $14.95, 213 pages, ISBN 1-932004-00-9) is a blithe and giddy romp across the multiverse. The story of Roxanne Bonaventure, who comes into possession of a mysterious artifact permitting instant passage across all worldlines, this light-hearted tale combines the intricacies of Keith Laumer’s Worlds of the Imperium (1962) with the sassiness of John D. MacDonald’s The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything (1962). Roberson threads his narratives with pop-culture brio–specifically, references to the Beatles and comics–and does not neglect his speculative physics either.

Single-Author Collections

On the evidence of his affecting, gripping, oftimes loony stories in Strangers and Beggars (Fairwood Press, trade, $17.99, 206 pages, ISBN 0-9668184-5-8), it would be fair to bestow on author James Van Pelt the revered title of fabulist. Van Pelt plays fast and loose with reality, conceiving of office environments where sharks cruise the carpeting and take down hapless workers ("Shark Attack: A Love Story"); and of a blow to the brain that allows an average man to suddenly see formerly invisible agents of death ("The Death Dwarves") and to become a Grim Reaper of sorts himself. But it is in such gentle pieces as "The Yard God"–a mix of Bradbury and Bixby, where a simple-minded girl with psionic powers must make a hard sacrifice–that Van Pelt shines with a kind of compassionate courage all too often lacking from much fantasy.

It’s been twenty years since the last collection from Frank Robinson, and that’s too long. But remedy is at hand with Through My Glasses Darkly (KaCSFFS Press, trade, $15.00, 115 pages, ISBN 0-935128-02-6). The five stories herein reveal Robinson to be fluent and adept in many modes. From the uchronia of "Causes" to the dystopia of "The Hunting Season," from the ecological disaster of "‘East Wind, West Wind’" to the fannish fantasia of "Hail, Hail, Rock and Roll," Robinson never fails to entertain while still delivering important messages we need to hear. Although his recent books on the history of the field such as Pulp Culture (1998) have somewhat eclipsed his reputation as a fiction writer, Robinson stands revealed as a natural-born storyteller first and foremost.

Editor Mike Ashley, with his usual scrupulous devotion to concealed literary history the rest of us never knew, resurrects the collected Arthurian tales of Theodore Goodridge Roberts in The Merriest Knight (Green Knight Publishing, trade, $17.95, 523 pages, ISBN 1-928999-18-2), having excavated the pages of the 1950s’ Blue Book to reclaim these high-spirited romps. The first half of the book concerns the adventures of Sir Dinadan, one of the least-serious members of the Round Table. With the light and witty hand of de Camp, Roberts sends his bard-turned-knight after giants and Saracen hounds, among other quests. The adventures in the latter half of the book are of a more serious nature, but still exhibit Roberts’s easy touch. This book deserves a place on any fantasy-lover’s shelf.

Four collections seem to go hand-in-hand, due to their shared somber, even morbid, worldview. From Brian Evenson comes Altmann’s Tongue (Bison Books, trade, $15.95, 251 pages, ISBN 0-8032-6744-4), a book whose themes are murder and natural death in many guises and the human repercussions thereof. Evenson aims for an unsettling journalistic gravitas and indeed achieves a kind of continental clinical detachment most often associated with Ballard. But in "Job Eats Them Raw, With the Dogs: An Undoing," where we find the skeleton of Job reanimated to wander Diogenes-like through the world, Evenson evokes a kind of Lafferty-like laughter at the indignities of death. In Kurt Newton’s Dark Demons (Delirium Books, trade, $15.95, 275 pages, ISBN 1-929653-27-1), the horrors are more pulpish and homegrown, but nonetheless still impactful. Half the stories here are making their first appearance anywhere, but all of them share the same loving attention to bloody details. Yet Newton manages to find horror in unlikely sources–a knitted afghan, a TV character called the Banana Man–and in a story like "The Pit," which begins "The pit came into existence several days ago. But, for me, it had probably been there all my life," he achieves allegorical levels of grace. The stories in Aaaiiieee!!! (Writer’s Club Press, trade, $14.95, 203 pages, ISBN 0-595-21504-1) place Jeffrey Thomas midway on the spectrum between Evenson’s chilly remove and Newton’s total subjective immersion. With brutal elegance and chilling subtlety, Thomas pulls his readers into his dark visions immediately from every opening line. Whether told from the viewpoint of a sentient pistol ("Gun Metal Blue") or from the perspective of a whole village that exiles its malformed children ("John Sadness"), a Thomas story leaps boldly into its narrative and deals unflinchingly with such issues as genocidal guilt, Oedipal madness and workplace slaughter. Thomas’s supernatural world is rife with terror, but also with mercy for the deserving. Finally, we encounter Brian Hodge’s Lies & Ugliness (Night Shade Books, hard-cover, $27.00, 386 pages, ISBN 1-892389-17-7). Hodge combines the grittiness of William Vollmann with the creepiness of early Ian McEwan and the savagery of Joe Lansdale to produce no-holds-barred assaults on decency, security and the American Way of Life. And this is generally, I think, a good thing! (Although reading this whole enormous collection in one gulp might lead to megrims and fantods.) When Hodge manages to factor in some Ray-Bradbury-style palliative tenderness, as in "Before the Last Snowflake Falls," which tells of a supernatural mortal debt between a young brother and sister, then he approaches perfection. And, as always, Jason Williams of Night Shade Books has turned out a collectible volume elegant in its presentation and a fine value for your money.

Paul Park doesn’t write many short pieces, but when he does, the world should sit up and pay attention. With the wit of Thomas Disch and the sensitive surrealism of James Sallis, Park produces stories that are deceptively calm on the surface but roiling with tensions and drama below. The bulk of his short work is now collected in If Lions Could Speak (Cosmos Books, trade, $15.00, 194 pages, ISBN 1-58715-508-7), thus filling an empty space on the shelf reserved for "Essential SF Collections." In a story like "Get a Grip"–which outdoes The Truman Show (1998) ten ways from Sunday–Park’s black humor comes to the fore. His social concerns surface in "The Last Homosexual," while the metaphysical quandaries of time travel get a workout in "The Tourist." Unafraid to utilize his own life metafictionally, Park proves that the quotidian and the fantastic intersect a thousand times during every time we blink.

The first Charles Stross story I ever really took notice of was "Dechlorinating the Moderator," from 1996, a wild con-report about an improbable nuclear fandom. But Stross is now a household word, deservedly so for his ultra-recomplicated and on-the-tip madcap extrapolations published in this magazine and elsewhere, and he’s been in print since 1990. So it’s somewhat remarkable that only now are we getting his first book, Toast (Cosmos Books, trade, $15.00, 188 pages, ISBN 1-58715-413-7). A scintillating foreword explains Stross’s working methods and his theory of accelerating changes within society and the SF field, followed by ten stories that will, put simply, rock your world. A little less baroque than his current stuff, these pieces nonetheless prove that Stross is the heir of the cyberpunk fascination with the way the world works–or can be made to dance!

Just turned eighty years old, Bob Leman finally receives the enshrinement in book form that his masterful stories deserve. Handsomely crafted in a limited edition by Midnight House, Feesters in the Lake (hardcover, $40.00, 330 pages, ISBN 0-9707349-5-6) collects all of Leman’s fiction, the majority of which first saw the light of day in the pages of F&SF. Combining many of the virtues of Clifford Simak, Avram Davidson, and Manly Wade Wellman, Leman writes stories that are not so much old-fashioned as timeless. Whether horrific or science-fictional, these tales are compulsively readable and authentic, solidly constructed entertainments that never pander. Whether the shocks delivered are swift, as in "Window," where an interdimensional doorway leads to a world of deceptive monsters, or slow and lingering, as in "Olida," which concerns the Selkirks, an inbred race of horrors, the ultimate impact of these tales will insure that they linger in your memory long after the book is closed.

I’ve been marveling over the compact, outré stories of Carol Emshwiller for more than thirty years now, ever since encountering her "Sex And/Or Mr. Morrison" in Dangerous Visions (1967). Thus the news that she has a new collection out, and that the collection includes seven hitherto-unpublished pieces, is joyous news indeed. Report to the Men’s Club (Small Beer Press, trade, $16.00, 270 pages, ISBN 1-931520-02-X) proves once more that Emshwiller has no peer when it comes to producing tiny, begemmed, self-contained universes, each utterly different from its sisters, yet somehow all bearing the unique Emshwiller stamp of off-kilter wisdom. Consider just one, "It Comes from Deep Inside," wherein a self-confessed "second-rate" painter manages to insinuate herself into an oddball artists’ colony, with life-altering results. A vivid landscape barely contains the humor and wisdom distilled here, and Emshwiller manages to make us laugh and cry simultaneously.

Anthologies

If Leviathan 3 (Ministry of Whimsy, trade, $21.95, 468 pages, ISBN 1-894815-42-4) contained only the single story by Jeffrey Ford titled "The Weight of Words," in which hapless Calvin Fesh gets entangled with the mad genius Secmatte, who can make printed words into instruments of his will, then this volume would still be an essential purchase and a bargain at that. Of course, such is not the case, since editors Forrest Aguirre and Jeff VanderMeer have actually assembled over two dozen wonderful stories from such luminaries as Carol Emshwiller, Brian Stableford, Michael Moorcock, and Stepan Chapman into an omnibus of wonder. Arranged with loving care into five divisions bracketed by the surreal bibliophilic fables of Zoran Zivkovic, these contemporary myths circle around matters of identity, love, wonder, and transformation like a flock of graceful hawks riding thermals. In "The Evenki" by Eugene Dubnov, a secret race of humanity with strange potentials is discovered lurking amidst homo sapiens. I think all the writers in this volume must belong to such a race.

The latest theme anthology from Circlet Press centers around the erotic uses of telepathy. Edited by Cecilia Tan, the stories in Mind & Body (trade, $14.95, 131 pages, ISBN 1-885865-21-X) run the gamut from near-mimetic to fantasy to cyberpunk, and reflect a variety of ingenious approaches to the topic. I particularly enjoyed Evan Hollander’s "ESX," a kind of Walter Mitty exploration of office sex on a mental plane, and "The Arena" by Nik Flandré, which takes the hoary notion of aliens using humans for combat sport and twists it through sexual angles. It should be noted that the eleven stories are split almost evenly between male and female authors, lending this collection a pleasantly heterogeneous ambiance.

Four aspiring graduates of Clarion 1998 have banded together under the group name of the "Ratbastards" and, in their pursuit of the literary life, now offer a sampling of their work in the collection Rabid Transit (Velocity Press, chapbook, $5.00, 46 pages, ISBN unavailable). Christopher Barzak’s "The Blue Egg" tells of the mysterious eponymous artifact and how it changes one woman’s life, much in the manner of a Kit Reed tale. "The Psalm of Big Galahad," by Barth Anderson, is a ribofunky quest tale that brings to mind Norman Spinrad’s work. Alan De Niro’s "A Number of Hooves" is a surreal tale that would have been at home in Moorcock’s New Worlds. And Kristin Livdahl’s tale of a miraculous garden growing amidst ghetto grief, "Even a Worm Will Turn," strikes me as something that might have flowed from the pen of Kris Rusch. All in all, a strong debut volume from some new talents.

Turbocharged Fortune Cookie (Turbocharged Fortune Cookie, chapbook, $3.00, 37 pages, ISBN unavailable), on the other hand, has more the feel of a wide-ranging magazine than a collective showcase, featuring an interview with Patricia McKillip as well as an assortment of prose and poetry and criticism. Gavin Grant’s "The Bird of Words" is one standout, with its unforgettable portrait of writer as a man haunted by a dire totemic beast.

Easily the most impressive debut of any small press original anthology in recent memory, Polyphony Number One (Wheatland Press, trade, $16.00, 219 pages, ISBN 0-9720547-0-7) features top-notch stories from big names such as Andy Duncan, Lucius Shepard, and Carol Emshwiller, as well as work by equally talented yet often overlooked folks such as Ray Vukcevich and Bruce Holland Rogers. Additionally, strong first appearances by Vandana Singh and Victoria Elisabeth Garcia herald a pioneering desire to usher newcomers into print. Editors Deborah Layne and Jay Lake state their brief passionately in their foreword: to tread the trail broken by such series as Damon Knight’s Orbit, venturing into slipstream waters for the best in fantastic literature. Their whole venture offers a breath of exciting freshness, and if subsequent volumes live up to this one, we may all one day look back at this first issue as a landmark in the field.

I wish I had the space to synopsize and comment on all the fine stories in Agog! Fantastic Fiction (Agog! Press, trade, AUS$21.95, 286 pages, ISBN 0-958056-70-6), but, alas, such is not the case. Let me nonetheless try to convey the merits of this important showcase from Down Under, compiled by editor Cat Sparks. Nearly thirty Australian writers–including such well-known names as Stephen Dedman, Damien Broderick, and Terry Dowling–contribute original stories in nearly every conceivable genre mode and style, proving that our austral neighbors understand and practice SF as wholeheartedly and inventively as we do here. There’s not a loser in the lot, and it’s unfair to cite just a few, but I’ll do so anyway. Claire McKenna’s "Stealing Alice" is a blend of Greg Egan and Cordwainer Smith. Deborah Biancotti’s "King of All and the Metal Sentinel" conjures up memories of Brian Aldiss’s "But Who Can Replace a Man?", Kate Orman’s "Ticket to Backwards" dramatizes inadvertant time-travel in the manner of Michael Bishop’s "The Quickening." And Geoffrey Maloney’s "The Imperfect Instantaneous People Mover" is a PKD-Sheckleyan romp. Send away for this collection and feel a new kinship with our Australian peers.

Miscellaneous Titles

Charles Platt is a legendary gadfly in our field, a combination of H.L. Mencken and P.J. O’Rourke. His heartfelt convictions about SF, expressed with sometimes savage wit, are on display in Loose Canon (Cosmos Books, trade, $19.95, 228 pages, ISBN 1-58715-437-4), a collection of his essays spanning the eighties and nineties. (Platt’s archived longer-length journalism, mainly for Wired magazine, is viewable at that magazine’s website.) Whether dismantling shibboleths such as commodified fantasy novels or exposing the illogical aspects of SF publishing, Platt is never less than passionate, funny, and sincere. His presence is needed to keep us all honest, and this collection remedies his lack of a more periodical column.

Those who know Ian Watson only as a superb writer of prose are in for a treat. His poetry, collected for the first time in The Lexicographer’s Love Song (DNA Publications, chapbook, $5.00, 60 pages, ISBN unavailable), exhibits all the same verbal facility and philosophical heft of his fictions. Divided into four sections, the books spans the realms of "love, trauma, otherness and lunacy." Yet what might sound like a mordant journey is anything but. Watson’s zest and sprightliness practically bounce off the page, and a poem such as "Marsupials in Our Midst," telling of an encounter between one lonely man and an alternate species of humanity, is ripe with melancholy laughter. Watson joins Michael Bishop and Tom Disch as one of our genre’s bards.

Another sly fellow with more than one arrow to his quiver is Stepan Chapman, winner of the PKD Award for his novel The Troika (1997). With Common Ectoids of Arizona (Lockout Press, chapbook, $5.00, 41 pages, ISBN unavailable), Chapman exhibits a flair for cartooning akin to William Rotsler’s. Ectoids, Chapman tells us, are wandering ectoplasmic lifeforms, and his book purports to be a guide to them in all their eerie variety. Droll captioned B&W cartoons illustrate many such lifeforms interacting with mankind, often to the dismay of the unlucky souls who encounter them. Chapman’s glee at his imaginary taxonomy is palpable and contagious.

Richard Moore’s charming graphic novel Far West (2001) about a tough female bounty hunter is now followed by Boneyard: Volume One (NBM, trade, $12.95, 96 pages, ISBN 1-56163-316-X), which exhibits the same genial adventuresomeness and easy-flowing, humorous B&W artwork. Youthful Michael Paris inherits from his grandfather a cemetery in the spooky, perpetually shadowed town of Ravens Hollow. But the boneyard proves to be inhabited by a sexy vampire named Abbey and her friends, who include a werewolf, a talking raven, several gargoyles, a witch, and other assorted Bradburyesque denizens of the night. The townspeople view Michael’s arrival as an excuse to demolish the cemetery and rid themselves of these unnatural citizens. But Michael ends up siding with his new supernatural friends, who must confront the real bad apple behind the anti-spook campaign. Combining the charm of Peter Beagle with the slapstick antics of Warner Brothers cartoons, Moore’s Boneyard is an all-ages trick-or-treat.

GIPSY: THE FIRES OF SIBERIA
by Enrico Marini & Thierry Smolderen
NBM, $10.95
ISBN: 1561633267

My one substantial face-to-face encounter with the legendary Judith Merril–author, editor, critic, and all-round vortex of energy–occurred during one Readercon some years ago. On a panel with the elderly leonine Merril, I sought to praise her with the old platitude about a new generation seeing farther because we stood on the shoulders of giants. Merril instantly shot back, "You’re not standing on my shoulders, kiddo!" And there you have the woman in a nutshell: prickly, witty, and justifiably proud of her epic accomplishments. These qualities and many others emerge blazingly from her posthumous autobiography, Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril (Between the Lines, trade, CAN$29.95, 282 pages, ISBN 1-896357-57-1). Assembled from scraps, fragments, previously published essays, and polished manuscripts by Merril’s grandaughter, Emily Pohl-Weary (who has done a superhuman job and deserves immense credit), this book ranks with Damon Knight’s The Futurians (1977) for its insights into the field, most essentially the SF of the late forties, early fifties, and swinging sixties. But Merril’s tale hardly ends there, and she has much to offer on later developments, including the caustic and damnably concise statement about 90s SF: "Science fiction has become a money field." Read this photo-filled book for a lesson in how candor, passion, and zeal can conspire with talent and history to produce a unique figure whose like we will not soon see again.

Publisher Addresses

Agog! Press, POB U302, University of Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia. Between the Lines, 720 Bathhurst Street, Suite 404, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 2R4. Big Engine Books, POB 185, Abingdon, OX14 1GR, United Kingdom. Bison Books, 233 North 8th Street, Lincoln, NE 68588. Circlet Press, 1770 Massachusetts Ave., #278, Cambridge, MA 02140. Clockwork Storybook, POB 200126, Austin, TX 78720. Cosmos Books, POB 301, Holicong, PA 18928. Delirium Books, POB 338, North Webster, IN 46555. DNA Publications, POB 2988, Radford, VA 24143. Fairwood Press, 5203 Quincy Ave SE, Au-burn, WA 98092. Green Knight Publishing, 900 Murmansk Street, Suite 5, Oakland, CA 94607. KaCSFFS Press, POB 36212, Kansas City, MO 64171. Lockout Press, POB 12434, Milwaukee, WI 53212. Midnight House, 4128 Woodland Park Avenue North, Seattle, WA 98103. Ministry of Whimsy, POB 36503, Canton, OH 44735. NBM, 555 Eighth Avenue, Suite 1202, NY, NY 10018. Night Shade Books, 501 South Willamette Street, Newberg, OR 97132. PS Publishing, 1 Hamilton House, 4 Park Avenue, Harrogate, England HG2 9BQ. Small Beer Press, 360 Atlantic Avenue, PMB 132, Brooklyn, NY 11217. Subterranean Press, POB 190106, Burton, MI 48519. Turbocharged Fortune Cookie, 329 Bellair Drive, Cocoa, FL 32922. University of Nebraska Press: See Bison Books. Velocity Press, POB 28701, St. Paul, MN 55128. Wesleyan University Press, 110 Mt. Vernon Street, Middletown, CT 06459. Wheatland Press, POB 1818, Wilsonville, OR 97070. Wildside Press: see Cosmos Books. Writer’s Club Press, 5220 S. 16th Street, Suite 200, Lincoln, NE 68512.