Firebrand Fiction Column #3
by Greg Beatty

Welcome, Firebrand Fiction readers. I hope spring is underway where you are. It is in Washington state, where I live. To celebrate the return of the season, it's time for another column. Once again, I'll look at a range of publications; this time it's Flesh and Blood , Strange Horizons , and Artemis .

I want to start with Flesh and Blood , since it is new to me. If you're unfamiliar with Flesh and Blood its URL is http://fast.horrorseek.com/horror/fleshnblood/main.htm . Their title gives some sense of what it contains (horror), but is misleading in at least one major way. Rather than focusing on splatterpunk or pure gore, as title might suggest, Flesh and Blood #10 contains a range of dark stories, many of which accent style, mood, dream states, and surrealism. Not all of them work, but there is a decidedly unified aesthetic sense to the magazine. I appreciate that. Even when individual stories didn't work for me, it was clear that editor Jack Fisher had a clear vision of what he wanted.

One of the dangers in focusing on works that accent mood and surrealism is that it is hard for the editor to know what to cut; how to make a story move faster without removing the lushness? I mention this because that was my first reaction to Sonny Fernandez's "The Adult Bookstore": a kind of impatience, a "yes, yes, it's a dark scary place, let's go." That's not completely fair, because the idea behind the story is that the ugly activities in an adult bookstore and the pervasive atmosphere of bleak desire spawns an unnatural creature that tears through the place. Fernandez evokes this well, but the distant narrative tone kept me from getting deeply involved in the story.

Several of the stories in this issue were partially successful, and failed as stories primarily because of their success in other areas, namely creating a dreamy logic to events. Katherine Harbour's "The Briary" falls into this category. The images were sharp, and the language seemed a semi-private poetry; I liked the boldness of naming characters things like "Wistful," and of giving Uncle Ethereal "no arms." However, events and emotions moved in a dream-like pace, now urgent, now drifting. "Weeping Willows," by Vladimir Miskovic, focuses on a completely different set of emotional issues, but is similar in results. It too features characters that seem more like personal dream fixtures (private archetypes, if you will) than fully developed characters; it too had extended literal dream sequences that felt like real dreams. And finally, despite the fine descriptions of the house, the willows, and the night, it too felt more like a sketch of a dream than a full story. As I couldn't tell precisely what was happening to Wistful, or why, so in "Weeping Willows" I couldn't tell why Thomas, the main character, was trapped in this particular dream state.

Two of this issue's stories address that surreal state that is elementary school. "Weirdmouth" by S.D. Tullis focuses on the way kids pick on one another, how acute they are at reading relationships among one another-and how scars from that period stay with us. The characters are a bit simplified, as fits this sort of story, but otherwise, "Weirdmouth" is a solid story that feels almost "EC Comics"-ish-lurid images coming around again at the end. "Miss Spyder," by David Anaxogoras, is at the other end of the spectrum. Short (only a page long), it too focuses on childhood pain, and on the magical beliefs of childhood, but it is more genuinely disturbing-a brief prose poem of despair.

Scott Nicholson's "The Night the Wind Died" overlaps with this category, and might well be discussed with these stories. Nicholson focuses on a character who is a bit older. Wendy is a teenager, and wrestling with the quicksilver lusts and intrigues of that period. However, in addition to dealing with those all too overwhelming stresses, Wendy has to deal with the responsibility of being different. Really different. Wendy is a maker; she makes the wind. Here I betray my tastes. I like wild metaphor and description, but I like it anchored in both the external world and shared experience, as Nicholson does. Wendy feels responsible for literally every breath, like many teenagers-but she is. She's different. The ending came too easily, but I was ready for it, and the great explosion of wind leading up to it was very satisfying.

The remaining two stories are very short, but they are also among my favorites. Forrest Aguirre's "Downstream Flow: A Fugue" is as richly descriptive as any of the dreamscape stories, but Aguirre creates a real and weird world, with touches of the mythic about it. Aguirre evokes half a dozen other works (Monty Python, the Old Testament), but in the process produces something new and nicely strange. And Kurt Newton's "Mad Dog" is joyously ridiculous, and perfectly paced for the one page it lasted. Newton used the American tall tale tradition, and clichés about rural violence, and created an amusing, surreal dark comedy. Seriously.

Strange Horizons publishes weekly, posting one or occasionally two stories each week on their website. This allows a good story to receive the reader's entire focus, and allows weaker stories to fade quickly. I'm sad to say that the first two stories of the month fell into that category. On February 2, SH published Liz Williams' "A Century to Starboard." It is intelligent, it is articulate, and it is fundamentally unfinished. The story is told in a diary format. A rich (and spoiled) woman goes on the ultimate sea cruise on the ultimate ship (even called the Ship). However, as they glide from port to port in luxury, things begin to go astray. There's an odd storm, and then they lose contact with the shore. After that, when they do land, nothing is what they expected it to be. Eventually the passengers, through our narrator, reveal that the Ship has somehow been traveling through time, carrying devastating diseases along with it. No reason is given for this time travel, and I'm fine with that, if the point is to throw in a "what if?" and see what happens. But the narrator was so shallow at the beginning, and the sources of information so arbitrary, that I didn't really care-or believe. (And, frankly, not enough happens.) Williams has written a lot of interesting, challenging work, but this story doesn't fall in that category. character was

Jennifer Guzman's story "A Season in Silence" is also fairly slight Let me hasten to add that it isn't due to the writing, or even the idea. The prose is clear and strong, and the descriptions evoke a sad, complex mood quite smoothly. And the idea itself is fine. However, the idea is a single note idea; once its essence is revealed, roughly half way through the piece, the rest of the story follows not just logically, but inexorably, with little tension or suspense. (I hate to even name the idea, because it would spoil the story.) "A Season in Silence" was well-written, but felt like a sketch or an experiment, not a full story.

By contrast, Paul Melko's "Doctor Mighty and the Case of Ennui" has a tone going on. As the title suggests, it's a superhero story; it might be considered in the category of postmodern superhero stories, like Watchmen or Tim Pratt's "Captain Fantasy and the Secret Masters" published in last April's Realms of Fantasy. However, while it is as arch, self-reflective, and up to date as those two stories, Melko is going more for laughs. Doctor Mighty does battle ennui, and some interesting comments are made on the clichéd nature of the battle between good and evil, but Melko is most successful with the humor. A fun romp.

To close February SH turned in another direction altogether, publishing the month's most successful story, "Genderbending at the Madhattered" by Kameron Hurley. It is the only story of the four to create an original world, and it does so immediately, opening with "My friends are cyclical, like the eight seasons -- always changing, always the same. I never believed this." Hurley goes on to evoke a completely convincing world that is at the same time alien, yet reflective of our own. In this society, people change genders literally throughout adolescence, the way that teenagers play at identities in our society. Adulthood is defined in part by settling on a single gender identity (at least while you can breed). To fall in love in this society is, to say the least, complicated, but what Kameron Hurley gives us is exactly that: a love story with all of its gender-political implications worked out. It isn't a perfect story; Hurley's need to be clear causes her to overstate things once in a while, and the ending moved too quickly. But it is a very good story indeed: serious in intent, efficient in execution, and beautifully written, with touches of humor.

Artemis magazine is subtitled Science and Fiction for a Space-Faring Age and this issue (issue #8/Winter 2003) focused on the non-fiction side of things. Yes, six stories were included, but several of them were short shorts (one page long), and there were six science articles, three columns, and several news notes, all devoted to some area of space exploration, as well as an editorial. While Artemis is generally forward-looking and optimistic, a number of these pieces dealt with the aftermath of Columbia.

Turning to the fiction, the first story, "Up and Down in Tycho" by Robert J. Santa, is a bit of a stretch. The golfing descriptions are well-done, and the technological details are clear and convincing, but the situation feels a bit forced. Santa tells the story of a mid-rank golfer trying to make the shot of his life against the odds while his space suit fails him, which, since he's playing on the moon, makes this literally the shot of his life. The execution is competent, but the concept is underdeveloped.

Though they head in different directions, something similar might be said of Edward M. Lerner's "A Matter of Perspective" and Lawrence M. Schoen's "Quantum Pen." Both are more conceptually ambitious than Santa's story. Lerner's requires a familiarity with a host of theories about different levels of reality (Gaia, black holes) and environmental crisis, while Schoen's story is a shaggy dog story about a pen that accesses alternative realities through quantum physics. Both are enjoyable; both are slight (only a page long each).

Only a page longer, but much more emotionally ambitious is Jerry Oltion's "The Glass Ceiling." The story is rooted in both factual knowledge of the history of space exploration and emotional understanding of the pioneer, and Oltion does a good job of showing the continuity between the pioneers on Earth and those who will settle the stars; what makes the story work is that Oltion shows not just a rhetorical connection, but the links between skills, character, and the sort of decisions they make.

Two light-hearted stories round out the issue. Both might be classed as yarns, and I have to admit, both were pleasant surprises to this jaded reader. When I found that John C. Bunnell's "The Pirates of Capella" was set at an SFWA banquet, I winced. Surely, surely, we've had enough stories about SF writers? And how, but how, could we believe that SF writers could foil space pirates? Well, in order, I was wrong, and they can. This became a kind of gentle mystery, with a range of in-jokes and twists. Not all of them worked, but enough did, and Bunnell knew exactly what expectations he was working against.

I also winced when I started Cat Darensbourg's "Jigsaw-Bubblegum." Something about the tone of the squabbling between the teenage characters struck me as wrong, but that quickly passed. I wasn't sure I ever believed that these teenagers were jetting around in their own spaceships, but I wanted to believe. The near-earth orbit background, the technology, the inventions, all rang true, and Darensbourg kept up a good Golden Age adventure pace throughout.

Whew. This month's column ranged all over the place-from dreams to waking, from time travel to the destruction of the Earth. When all is said and done, though, the nod for the best story out of these three publications has to go to Kameron Hurley's "Genderbending at the Madhattered." It was ambitious, and it was…lovely.

Firebrand Fiction Reviews: all content © 2003, Greg Beatty