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THE BIG BOOK OF MODERN FANTASY (4)
Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
PART FOUR OF MY REAL-TIME REVIEW CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/the-big-book-of-modern-fantasy-3/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE DRAGON
by Patricia McKillip
“She could lay out facts like an open road, or mortar them into a brick wall.”
…fantasies, as well as facts, a momentous blend of this whole book’s leap from lockdown, open road from wall, here glimpsed at one point as “bird and stone”, also like that creature on the book’s cover that’s bounded by Earth as well as bounding with wings towards a harper’s song. As we all are today. That duality adeptly runs through this McKillip story, a beautifully written fantasy quest, with many memorable phrases and concepts and riddles and fantastical sights, so much better than Tolkien, I find. Of five women courtiers (cf other women quests such as in Area X) asked by their queen to rescue her harper from a dragon’s lair, a harper by whose male body the queen seems captivated, much to her female warriors’ scorn, I infer, yet they do their duty. Or do they? One by one they all fall from the straight and narrow quest, one by a witch’s broth, another by seeming precious stones, another by Sapphic sorcery…. Till only the narrator herself reaches the lair, with intriguing outcomes.
“He parted stone with his harping,…”
“: the stillness did seem magical, an intention out of someone’s head.”
Pingback: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/09/09/our-bookworlds-first-tiny-leap-from-lockdown/
TROLL BRIDGE
by Terry Pratchett
“Worms? Hah? Since when could we afford to eat worms?”
A comic flibbetigibbet, gratuitousnesly included here and telling of a gruff old man like me acting as Don Quixote on a talking horse and calling himself Cohen the Barbarian, wanting the old days of goblin terror and real forests, as old men’s minds DO become again eventually. I should know. Getting mixed up here with bridges, billy goats and trolls. But, a mixed message, too, with bridges being to leaps and bounds what walking sticks are to simple steps and shuffles, I guess.
I now find Troll Bridge was not gratuitous but its ethos and goblin-golt terror now intrinsic to the novelette just read below, as was the five-female-quest of the McKillip ….and, what is more, the translated novelette’s ambiance of Bourgeois House now having an intriguing strong kinship with Bonnyville in my story that aptly follows it!
It almost seems everything was planned, although the stories in the Big Book are strictly in chronological order of publication dates!
LONGING FOR BLOOD
by Vilma Kadlečková (translated by M. Klima and Bruce Sterling)
“People may believe that suffering brings wisdom, but they ought to know better. All it brings is early senility.
The attacks from the Beasts Outside have continued, sometimes fierce and frequent and spoiling all my nights. At other times, almost like a long weary truce between us.”
This mighty novelette starts with echoes of what I said earlier above about The Mole King and is the perfect expression of this whole Big Book so far, with its explicit World Inside and World Outside, centred on sisters to match the McKillip questers, and featuring a Cinderella (a foster sister) lockdown, with all the plot accoutrements here of that famous fairy story, one other sister becoming a vampire, and the narrator/diarist sister as tempter by — and conspirer with as well as against — men and their curses and cures: Princes, Kings, their father, whoever… explicit descriptions of today’s co-vivid dreams, too, and sleepless reveries, beasts (like the pets and gulls in Bonnyville (please just read the diary entry of May 18, 636) pressed against the windows trying to get in, if not later eaten. …then a clock an even deeper lockdown for men. “The world of human beings, the Inside World, was made too small for them.” Human beings talking being no more than “the babble of brooks” and we all need to leap such brooks? … questions, questions, vortices of leading questions leading to this novelette’s own “Question” for men like me. A plot that widens into many avenues, all of which I tried to follow. ‘Dumb endurance’ and ‘convalescence’, ‘a mask of deep sorrow’…
“Other people will write about us now.”
A BRIEF VISIT TO BONNYVILLE
by me
A story first published in The Third Alternative #7 in 1995.
Contracted for the Big Book during April 2019.
Some of the words that appeared on my Bonnyville blog post HERE in June 2020 just before I actually received this Big Book in July:
“Just dawned on me that my own story […] is about a co-vivid dream of #Coronavirus self-isolation, tidal vent and coughing included. Sans smell.”
It now now seems more downbeat than what I said above about the McKillip, in that I ate the black seagulls and did not let them instead help me leap into the sky! That now seems highly appropriate, though, because our lockdown was re-intensified only yesterday with the Rule of Six by UK’s own Mole King!
Yet, my story also has “the point where two prayers cross.”
This particular review entry is in the spirit of all my previous self-commentaries (like DVD extras of “director’s cut” guidance?) all linked from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/self-commentaries/
TRAVELS WITH THE SNOW QUEEN
by Kelly Link
“Travel is hard on the single woman.”
A saga of quest akin to the McKillip above, where a man’s half-hearted attractions create a ‘girly’ purpose that later seems, well, half-hearted, when you, Gerda, meet the eponymous ice woman (borne on the sleigh pulled by geese) whom he ran off with, by dint of a kiss, but whose, his or hers? There is the Sapphic deliciously pent up in all of us? An amusing fantasy full of satirical references to such fantasy-story kisses, and pesky talking animals, that make fun of the pets in the previous story above, and much else, with modern intrusions and other vulgarities like ‘fuck’ et al. But I relished even more the description of maps and mirrors and feet (dragging, cut, ‘a female thing of blood’) and stone lockdown keeps and co-vivid dreams so in tune with this book’s evolving autonomous (perhaps unintended) gestalt. Just some wonderful examples…. “Part of you is always traveling faster, always traveling ahead […] The dreams pour steadily through the keyhole, and under the bottom of the door, […] you are almost flying, your feet are skimming over the night black forest floor […] the floor of the keep is dotted with indistinct motionless forms. One snarls in its sleep, and you realize that they are dogs. […] we burrow tunnels through the air like worms, but then the wind will come along and erase where we have been.”
A story you need to explore for its “alternative means of travel.”
My previous review of this author: https://horroranthology.wordpress.com/588-2/
THE NEUROSIS OF CONTAINMENT
by Rikki Ducornet
Quite a discovery, this. A remarkable work scrying the thoughts of a strait-laced spinster called Gertrude, who becomes faced with ‘rude’ things indeed, perhaps ever ruder than the previous story’s one-off expletive ‘fuck’. But things that, amusingly for us and tellingly in perfect descriptive language, promises to awaken her dried out, politically correct, racially prejudiced life, whereby she had scorned marriage, but not thought beyond it. And this book’s winged fantastic creatures brought their own ‘leap’ to her soul as well as potentially to her body, contiguous with genuine co-vivid dreams, including one with her own estranged sister’s flapper of a ‘vulva’ in the sky… and its seems to be so appropriate that the Freudian title of containment to this story should so perfectly match this book’s still strengthening gestalt. A story with a compellingly narrated relationship between her and her woman friend as host and the latter’s butler, and the onset of possibly tinnitus by being made to stay in a small, stifling room with potentially noisy dolls! A syringing of her ear to become highly symbolic?
My review of this author’s Netsuke: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/08/30/netsuke-rikki-ducornet/
I think I meant “politically incorrect”!
THE DARKTREE WHEEL
by Rhys Hughes
One of my favourite living writers for many years and all my reviews of his canon are linked from here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/494-2/
For this Big Book of Modern Fantasy, I have already reviewed — in full detail and outer context — the particular Rhys Hughes novella — here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2019/04/26/the-darktree-wheel-rhys-hughes/#comment-15573 under the heading MORTAR BABY…
From MORTAR BABY to the first fœtus with coiled spine that the next story starts by showing it springing up from the concrete where it was resting after first drifting down, floating down…as I do, too, tentatively upon and then up from this text…
FŒTUS
by Shelley Jackson
“—whether they spring up in our world self-generated, as sometimes new diseases appear to do, teaching us new pains, just because the world has left place open for them.”
This has a telling effect today, this visitation, an oxymoron of cures and curse, explicitly spying on our ‘sexual arrangements’ and making up numbers, or exceeding them, in the ‘members of our households’. And we drag a foot behind us, like them, to mark our paths. Or to piss out the margins of our surrounding territory? It hides its heart in a locked box. Always keeps its balance. A sort of Vice-God, from church to bedroom, and “we break out in a rash when a loved one comes near…”, “Was it driven from rest by some torment, a plague personal to it,…” with oversized heads needing pinions like the big-headed people among us. This story still captivates me and morphs in its meaning (“—always unfinished—perpetually […] all of space rushing away from us”) even as I write about it! Do we make Fœtus suffer again and again, like Christ? That now famous ‘neurosis of containment’ phrase again? And that first bucket of cement it pours for a tennis court?
“We think we want affection, sympathy, fellow-feeling, but it is the cold and absolute we love, and when we misplace that in one another we struggle for breath.”
TAN-TAN AND DRY BONE
by Nalo Hopkinson
“Duppy Dead people drag them foot when them walk.”
Well, straight off I recognised that dragging-foot connection straight from the previous Fœtus story! We’re all in Duppy Dead Town now, I guess, the way at the start it SEEMS to be described. And I believe this must be a great story or it wouldn’t be here. I know it is my fault, but I couldn’t read it. I often love avant garde stuff in prose, and Concrete poetry, or OuLiPo etc. But when I try to read some sort of dialogue narrative stuff, as this seems to be, whereby I know it’s INTENDED to mean something and DOES mean something, but I myself can’t get it, because of my failing to understand it, then I give up. Sorry. I know it’s a drag.
Just as an interim marker, this book started with a work first published in 1950, and we have now reached 1999, with the previous story’s publication date.
Other than simply checking these dates of publication, I am not reading the book’s introduction nor its individual story notes, until I have completed reading and real-time reviewing the whole book.
WHERE DOES THE TOWN GO AT NIGHT?
by Tanith Lee
“It’s like a bittersweet nostalgia for a memory you never had.[…] They think they dream it, you see, and I know it isn’t a dream. We’re Awake, and God knows there are precious few of us who do come Awake.”
This is a major entrancing discovery for me, not only because, by happenstance, I am simultaneously reading and reviewing Mathew’s Nostalgia’s Boat and part of this Lee work is told by a homeless tramp about a town that either idyllically becomes a boat or ship sailing off through fish or leaping from its own dullness into mer-made air, or perhaps, at its most negative, shedding part of its jigsaw through an earthquake, not only because this work has the genuine feel, ahead of time, of this Big Book’s pervading type of co-vivid dream so aptly described in that quote above, not only because it is a genuinely great fantasy story of the Awakers (“…he Woke”) and a poignant story of a man called Anton who is told by the aforementioned tramp about the genius-loci of this seaside town (that reminds me of the town housing Bonnyville) and a story of Anton’s problems with his own backstory that features a woman he does not love but whom he made pregnant with his only son Kays …. not only all these things, but also something else that I will leave you to read about on your own in private before you go off to sleep.
A photo I happened to take two days ago…now takes on a new poignancy…
by Joe Hill
“‘Is he a fairy or something?’
‘No, Dad. He’s inflatable.’”
“I want to see if it’s true. If the sky opens at the top.”
“He could really jump when he had to.”
The story of Art, and ‘my’ friendship at school with him, a true turn of the century fiction classic of which you will need no reminding. Now taking on a new duty as part of the still leaping-from-lockdown gestalt of this book (cf my findings regarding leaps, jumps, hops etc. when real-time reviewing in similar detail ‘The Big Book of Classic Fantasy’ last year) as well as my highly satisfying kinship, co-vivid, reading, during my own prior lockdown this year, of ‘Walking Horatio’ here. POP ART, a story of popping Art or turning a world’s deflating of Art into an apotheosis of what should unfold instead, thus obviating or enhancing (dependant on the reader) this Christ’s stigmatic nails or the possibility, as a Jew, of Art’s circumcision.
A gestalt of all the unspoken notes that Art itself has left me.
“Art didn’t have lungs, and didn’t breathe.”
“Someone had to think zero up.”
“Imagine falling UP.”
“I could no longer distinguish him from the gulls…”
An extramural intermission of literary madnesses…
STATE SECRETS OF APHASIA
by Stepan Chapman
“…vomit gushed out of her like magma, like a thousand Niagaras, like a tidal wave of hatred.”
An amazing novella, with all manner of post-Lewis-Carrollian nonsenses that thrill the narrative synapses of its readers, but now embodying, in hindsight, a serious prophecy of today’s ‘white’ supremacist of solipsism, Alba, aka Trump, whose mind imagines the world that includes the mind that imagines it as well as including other imagined minds … Alba who was once explicitly named Klump, with Alba persuaded by various bizarre characters to battle the node of Climate Change (as well as Covid?) – battling such a dire foe that is here in the shape of a Black Glacier, a battle involving, ironically, a secret piano with black and white keys.
Maurice Richardson and Rhys Hughes sieved and blended with Alba’s fugue states via “nephostrophic feedback algorithms.” The ultimate lockdown is solipsism, the only escape madness?
That story was first published in 2002, and my other review of Stepan Chapman: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/the-stiff-and-the-stile-stepan-chapman/
THE WINDOW
by Tatyana Tolstaya (translated by Anya Migdal)
“After the iron there truly was a qualitative leap:”
I think I now know the real reason why my favourite character in my seriously favourite ever novel (‘The Unconsoled’ by Kazuo Ishiguro) often went around looking discombobulated and wielding a full-sized ironing-board under his arm! This engagingly absurdist fable tells of the eponymous window that allows one to expand one’s humble lockdown into some sort of Whovian Tardis inside. As long as you follow the rules, not necessarily of backgammon, but of some ironic Tontine of Deal or No Deal destiny. Often expanding things not quite the way one would have wanted.
I did rather like Shulgin’s deal-acquired busty Nanny for his deal-acquired daughter, though.
And from the previous story by someone with the name Tolstaya…
THE WEIGHT OF WORDS
by Jeffrey Ford
“For instance, Tolstoy in a cheap translation, in Helvetica, especially the long stories, is peculiarly rich in phonemic chaos and the weights of his less insistent verbs, those with preponderance of vowels, create a certain fluidity in the location of power in the sentence.”
I somehow sense a “baffling synchronicity that stretched the possibility of coincidence to its every limit” and I have always thought this classic novelette from 2002 was actually written for me, and hence, retrocausally, for my belief, during the 1960s, in Wimsatt’s Intentional Fallacy theories and my later then subsequent beliefs in the processes of gestalt real-time reviewing of books that subsumed me in 2008. This work, meanwhile, as a plot in itself, is a highly recommended, most compelling one to read, about a woke man called Fesh, estranged from his wife whom he still loves, and who goes out to the cinema to see Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire, as well as to live lectures to calm his troubles. At one of the latter lectures Fesh listens to an autistic trumpy man called Secmatte who has demonstrable theories on words, these theories involving sublimations deriving from phonetics, semantics, syntax and appearance on the page, and I have ever based, at least in part, my gestalt reviews on such phenomena. Words as autonomous disintentions of patterned meaning. But words blinking in and out, is where this novelette extends such theories towards… a hidden snake that crept close to the ground in Eden. Yet, such creeping seems in ironic contrast — disintentionally on Secmatte’s part — to a hopefully sublimated unlocking of words from their prisons and to our attempted recouping (for ourselves as well as for Fesh) of inferentially close-bodied love via the leapfrogging of meaning.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/jeffrey-ford/ and https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/the-beautiful-gelreesh-jeffrey-ford/
ALL THE WATER IN THE WORLD
by Han Song (translated by Anna Holmwood)
“‘Creatures such as this are no different in substance to water,’ the old man said. ‘Their shape changes according to their substance.’”
“The surface of the water began leaping and jumping…”
… while there was nothing there to stop the water being stagnant. A beautiful story prophesying the ‘shape of water’, stemming, as water does, from a feel of Ancient China, the geographical airbrushing of the sea, and Li Daoyuan’ss cognitive grappling with water within water, its changing colours, an early Gaia involving the similar proportions of water/non-water in the earth as in man, water living as life forces, blood and water. Yellow River. Mirror Tao. One as one, and one as many. As words live within words, or between words, airbrushed or not, according to the previous story above. Politics gets you in the end, whatever the rapture of water – or words?
“Now, all we can do is piece together the surviving scraps that make up his [Li Daoyuan’s] description…”
My review, too, earlier today, here, of Nostalgia’s Boat, where I wrote: ‘— like moving tectonics or the sliding notes of same freewheeling jazz improvs… my review one such improv, I guess.’
by Dean Francis Alfar
“Then I must fly high enough to be among the stars themselves,…”
How far? All far, using an impossible kite, using an impossible list of things needed to make such a kite. A life’s quest with an unquestioning devoted assistant, to fulfil an impossible leap of dream, a leap of love. This is an utterly exquisite tale, possibly my favourite so far in this book, about a young woman and her ability to turn accidents beyond destiny, and with a tunnel-vision to be viewed by her loved one among the stars only (or specially) which he gazed upon…for me, an unwavering tunnel-vision of purpose as focussed on unlocking that very tunnel itself? And much else was learned along the path of that quest, like the ‘raising of seagulls’ and the eventual transcending of old age beyond even today’s Midsommar. (My review in 2013 of Mark Valentine’s book of poems entitled Star Kites here.)
MOGO
by Alberto Chimal (translated by Lawrence Schimel)
“who knows where”
….sometimes an expression as reference to a dirty place, according to inferences regarding the narrator Heroberto’s grandmother, the one everyone calls Mamá, and who likes being creamed over her face and neck by especially Heroberto, a boy who discovers, by masking his eyes with his hands, he becomes invisible, his sisters knowing about this, too, while Heroberto himself meets another girl called Pai, either an imaginary friend or someone who existed the other side of invisibility. Until a “lock him up” in something called Asylum is envisaged, as I envisage possibly things that are too dirty to infer beyond the title’s eponymous creature… and hints of other invisible things we weren’t otherwise told about, even in the deepest “who knows where’ of this haunting story.
Who wrote the narrator? I ask.
THE MALADY OF GHOSTLY CITIES
by Nathan Ballingrud
“; stars crawled across the pages as they would the natural sky;”
Possibly the shortest work in this book, so it must be worth its weight in preciousness. And it certainly punches above its weight. I first misread its title as ‘Milady’ and thus it elegantly dances, too. The tale of various travellers’ tales of being far from home and falling under the spell of an imagined or real, cured or cursed disease, not exactly an epidemic, more a case of freckles on geography’s face, I infer, by these travellers — one of them a member of Amundsen’s South Pole crew a few years before Spanish Flu — a disease with such travellers each becoming a ghostly city complete with each Individual traveller’s ‘backstory-plus’ turning covidual in the cities’ libraries, pages digging ‘iron-clad and concrete-clad’ city-existences into our ground, yet we gradually realise, by collucid scrutiny of these pages, that these genii-loci, like some of their inhabitants, are mere reflections, or something even more beautiful with wings, and the ending of this work gives me hope that stars didn’t crawl forever but ‘flew’ eventually to reach their rightful skies…
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/nathan-ballingrud/
THIS REVIEW WILL NOW CONTINUE HERE: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/24210-2/
The Big Book of Modern Fantasy
The five parts of my review:
ONE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/07/25/the-big-book-of-modern-fantasy-edited-by-ann-jeff-vandermeer/
TWO: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/907-2/
THREE: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/the-big-book-of-modern-fantasy-3/
FOUR: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/807-2/ (this one)
FIVE https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/24210-2/