So recounts Steve, one of the characters in Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem's fantastical memoir The Man on the Ceiling, about his wife Melanie. And Melanie's character, in one of her narrative turns, tells us how a strange and lost man did one night climb through her bedroom window, only to flee when she awoke. The Tems describe their book as "loosely autobiographical" (the book's jacket adds a parenthetical "maybe" to the common descriptor "A Novel") and we can guess that this episode may be one of those that are, as the word is typically understood, true. Given this starting point, a more creatively blinkered author or pair of authors might have left the "man on the ceiling" as a minor aside, a passing nightmare to be commented on and then dismissed. We would instead be holding a straightforwardly autobiographical account of the Tems, of the love and anxieties they have for each other and their family, likely titled "The Man in the Window." And everything in that account would be true. But such a mechanically truthful account wouldn't be the whole story, or the whole truth.

There are of course limits to the written word: we can seldom know, much less share, the whole truth. But we can approach it, and it is in approaching the truth that the man on the ceiling (and The Man on the Ceiling) become our guide. The man on the ceiling is the sort of quintessentially fantastic creation that, in Ursula Le Guin's impossible phrase, puts into words what cannot be put into words. But to attempt an approach: throughout the Tems' accounts of domestic joys and tragedies, the man on the ceiling serves as a representation of the imagination's need to represent what we imagine as meaningful units of Story.

In a book that includes a section on the importance of names, it is telling that the book's name is the naming of the imagination. Melanie's man in the window is a creature of "simple physics," a collection of biochemical processes bound by gravity. In those terms, his mutters are only "nonsense," his actions "not meaning me anything." It is the man on the ceiling who represents how "we make things mean." The gravity-defying man on the ceiling is impossible, obviously so: a creation of imagination. And it is our imagination that encodes positive possibilities for the future into stories we call hopes; our imagination that coalesces negative possibilities for the future (of which death is but the most obvious) into discrete units of story called fears. Our imagination stories the past as individual memories. It stories a house into a home; a stranger into a spouse; legal and biological relationships into a family. The man on the ceiling may be an angel or a demon, as the Tems variously suggest in their narrative, but in the end both identities amount to the same truth: both are "masks of God" (echoing Joseph Campbell), representations of the transcendent. The man on the ceiling is a "necessary angel," of meaning, of sense-making.

 

As the man on the ceiling represents the drive towards many types of story, so The Man on the Ceiling incorporates many types of storytelling. The book is divided into eleven thematic sections with titles that include "Naming Names," "Telling Tales," "Down the Dark Stairs," and a phrase repeated often throughout the book: "Everything We're Telling You Here is True." The third section, "The Man on the Ceiling," is closely based on the Tem's year 2000 novella of the same name that won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the World Fantasy Award. The other sections, and thus the majority of the book, are new. At different points these sections incorporate both fiction and non-fiction; The Man on the Ceiling is a mixture of fantasy and horror, an essay on where fantasy and horror come from, a family memoir, a how-to book for aspiring writers, and perhaps most abidingly, a snapshot of family life in contemporary America.

It is this last that marks the primary change between the original novella and the new book. The original "Man on the Ceiling" (now most readily found in Datlow and Windling's The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourteenth Annual Collection) was an obsidian knife of a story, knapped down to a raw and beautiful universality. In contrast, the new sections situate and ground the book firmly in early 21st century America. Many sections take familiar scenes of Americana as their starting point: sitting down to a family dinner; a visit back to the old neighborhood; a family road trip; the death of a pet; telling stories to grandchildren; a restless night in the large family house. The authors then riff on these scenes, giving their imaginations rein to make connections, add meanings. The road trip -- where "the route coincides with the map only occasionally and, even then, deceptively" -- becomes a metaphor for the imaginative journey of creating a family (the Tems' children are all adopted, but we come to realize that Melanie and Steve have conceived them all the same), and then a metaphor for creating a story. The death of a pet becomes a ghost story, and an essay on why we tell ghost stories. A collision between two small planes near the Tems' Colorado home becomes the man on the ceiling's defiance of gravity (he is "out there, on the ceiling of the world, masquerading as ... the wingtip lights of a doomed plane"), becomes, for post 9/11 America along with much of the rest of the world, a symbol of the looming uncertainty and fear of raising a child at a time when planes do fall out of the sky.

The impact of the additional sections on the original novella is nothing less than a fundamental transformation. "The most disturbing thing about the figures of horror fiction for me," writes Steve, "is a particular vagueness in their form." Yet the additions to the novella sufficiently name, shape, and ground the man on the ceiling so as to dispel a large measure of his vagueness. If the original novella was based in the affective language of horror fiction, the new book in both form and content captures -- indeed literalizes -- the more ambivalent theme of "making a home in the weird" that I noted in the Interfictions anthology of recent interstitial fiction. The Tems certainly realize the magnitude of the transformation, from the questioning of "A Novel" to their word of choice to describe their account, a "testament." Their story has become a self-conscious work of contemporary social observation. It is something we could imagine as the product of a more humanistic Milan Kundera (who shares a similar obsession with gravity), except that the Tem's novel has the layered redundancy of a distinctly collaborative construction. The change from the universality of the novella to the novel's grounding in the zeitgeist acts to highlight the Tems' understanding of the present: how difficult and scary, how impossible and necessary, it is to love in the 21st century; and the kinds of stories we require to do so.

 

All this largely works because the Tems have crafted a believably honest book. The expanded, sectional nature of the new edition does lead to passages not so much irrelevant as extraneous, artifacts of the Tem's need to fill spaces with tellings and explanations, with connections and meaning. But as this is precisely what the book is about, we are inclined to forgive them. As careful readers, we suspect that the characters of Steve and Melanie are to some unknowable degree both more and less than the authors themselves. (Given the subject matter, it would be surprising if the Tems did not ever engage in the storying of each other, as well as themselves.) Yet the book's frequent refrain that "everything we're telling you here is true" adds an implicit assurance: the we. The we asserts that everything here has been seen and verified not just by the characters of Steve and Melanie, but by the thing called "the Tems" that exists behind the characters, between the real people. What the Tems write may not be the whole truth, but the believable manner and form of its construction let us suspect that it approaches the truth.

The most truly horrific segment within The Man on the Ceiling occurs as we approach the end of the book. The maybe-novel has so far been narrated by Melanie and Steve. Then, a sudden shift of perspective: we're in the head of one of their children. The immediate sensation is one of profound invasion, a breach of trust that a parent would use a child so to tell a story. But then we pull back and realize that of course people imagine stories about those they love, that such imagining in the face of never knowing the whole truth, of never having full control, is one of the necessary attributes that make a good parent, or spouse, or storyteller. The fantastic imagination has ever provided a chronicle of all that humanity cannot know or control. With The Man on the Ceiling, the Tems have created an entry for our time in that chronicle.

-- Matt Denault

I was introduced to Jonathan Carroll through the insistence of two strangers. I’m not known to listen to people, indeed I’m a scoffer, but they wanted to be called Wiz and Grub – and since those are of my two favorite things to do I thought they may have been on to something. You add that one knew the Condor Man uniform on sight and the other had reading list that peaked curiosity itself (not just my own) and you had the beginnings of a recommendation that would be followed through. Some years – and what seems like a couple lifetimes later – Jonathan Carroll is one of those authors whose books I buy. That may seem anticlimactic, but Carroll is one of, and perhaps the first writer who went on that list of “all I need to know is that the book is out” authors. I don’t need to know what it’s about, I don’t need to know where or when it takes place, I don’t need to know if it’s called fantasy, mystery, horror or science fiction – because such questions, such words, cannot contain Carroll. Instead Carroll carries Liza’s bucket of pandora paint adding a stroke with a brush here, there and where.

Frannie McCabe is the chief of police in Crane’s View, New York a town he grew up in and the town he’d happily die in if given the chance, not that death was something that was on his mind until the death of an odd dog that he took in at his office. A dog that like McCabe has the marks of a creature that lived – not just existed – and upon its death he took it upon himself to bury ‘Old Vertue”. A small town, a veteran sheriff, a dead dog – it has the makings of a western or a bad country song. At an rate, the death of the dog, the disappearance of a couple in his town, a girl found dead in the school bathroom, his step-daughter’s new tattoo disappearing - the aroma of change in the air would set McCabe on a whimsical story where he will attempt to connect dots while retracing his steps. Like time travel stories? How about a story that captures the scent of American Pie? About love, family, a coming of age story and a going of age story. When you don’t have to meet yourself to disrupt the space-time continuum, but you may have to hang out with him and perhaps more than anything it presents the idea that there would be value in asking your prior self – a unique individual – questions to see the actions of that person and learn something is not just a cog in the present cumulative. If one could point at a fault there is a point where you think McCabe is going nowhere, where Carroll couldn’t seem to bring a conclusion big enough to pay-off everything he introduced. It may even seem – in reflection – a great opportunity for a more than quaint fictional work without Science Fiction and Fantasy elements missed. What I think actually occurs is that we see a reasonable and competent man by most standards completely functioning as a man we would rationally think would in an irrational – a magical - situation. So many times in fiction we are shown protagonists who become so by acclimating themselves, to rise to the occasion. To become something they aren’t and never were – something nobody could possibly be. In many cases there may be fall to overcome as well, but routinely we are described this relying on our preconditioned acceptance of this due to exposure in rather flat fiction. Carroll does not stumble in tying up The Wooden Sea, Frannie does, and related to that the end of such experiences are not end of eras in any way a calendar would understand. The Science Fiction element – a universal awakening – is so over the top for the a Sheriff of an escapist-alcove American town that you can feel the gravity of just how beyond being simply odd or disconcerting such situation would be. You would attack this how you know how – with McCabe, the experiences of a hell raiser as a child, a Vietnam Vet, a veteran of couple of marriages, who lives a more than stable life and now respected in the town he once was once ‘that kid’ of. Frannie is a man who had gone through his ‘cycle’ only to be thrown into something bigger. It is not because he does not have the qualities to identify him as heroic; it is that rarely do we describe the day-to-day, handle shit as it happens manner as such. He is not offered a mantle, he is, when looking back on his life a man with an understanding of service and what we have is a man who doesn’t have all the answers, indeed he doesn’t even know all the questions. For the fantastic to have an effect, you have to establish a base that we recognize and Carroll nails the towns so many of us live(ed) in. Where reputations matter, where people never seem to get away from – and if they do, everybody can recite you the specifics of it. Where downtown is distinguishable only because it has been always been called that, where you’re Smith’s daughter or boy. Where I certainly have no interest in going to such a place now, perhaps the person I will be one day will. It is in such places that America really resides:

From the beginning Carroll confounds us and it’s not just a mysterious 3-legged dog – man’s best friend – that enters his life. We are introduced to McCabe spouting one-liners, a wife and step-child showing up at the job with jibes and apparent issues and instead of getting a fractured soul, another broken cop getting by on booze – he did keep his smokes – that lives only to confound the world set against him we get a happy man, a loving husband, a pillar of the community, and man who is where he wants to be. We find a man not looking for anything, but not to the extreme of a man who fears what he may find – he has found what he wants. We are shown choices we can believe. What would you make god do to prove his power? What would you learn if you observed your father when he wasn’t at the moment being your father? What would you want to tell him? In the midst of events of global, and even universal gravity, McCabe is in his hood and confronting these opportunities as if they were what really mattered. So many times, we are told the world is worth saving in fiction, even if grudgingly, and in The Wooden Sea we see why McCabe’s world is. More than that, I’m not a reader who views it as a requirement of the author to make me root for the protagonist of a story to enjoy it, indeed even in my most get-along-gang of moods it’s still a quality that I can’t completely reconcile as not being a least a little slow, but obviously that isn’t to say such stories don’t often represent the best fiction has to offer and one would find it hard not to find some part of McCabe’s journey that is not relatable, that doesn’t at least brush up against something you carry.

The Wooden Sea shares characteristics with others Carroll books in that he rarely puts a new spin on genre conventions it just always seems like his is the right one we had yet to see, as if others were suddenly a heart beat off, a turn of phrase too early, a sentiment missed. There is also a clarity to Carroll’s work that I think is rather distinct. The Wooden Sea’s brand of wonder is one that questions what you see, feel and believe but never what you are actually reading. In fiction we are sometimes – I think – too enamored with stylistic conceit, and I while I agree with Hal Duncan in that style is substance in literature – but Carroll’s style somehow morphs into what should be fashion at the moment of reading instead of vying for next. I always marvel most at writers who are able to present several stories – many completely different thematically and even in tone –that don’t take away from one another in the absence of recognition. When I interviewed the wonderful Kelly Link she spoke of stories that could be read and reveal something new – a story that grows – and The Wooden Sea leaves more trees to climb, more secrets submerged.

The Wooden Sea is perhaps not Carroll’s most recommended work, but is still a notable chapter in the body of work of somebody who is in the argument of being the most noteworthy American Fantasist today.

So take a ride on a bicycle, grab an oar and watch yourself fly.

Jay Tomio
The Bodhisattva

There are fantasists and there are master fantasists; I'd like to suggest that the masters reveal themselves not only by their greatest works, but by what are -- for them and them only -- lesser volumes. Steps Through the Mist, the latest of Serbian author Zoran Živković's novels to be published in the USA, is a revelatory volume of this later sort; it confirms Živković's status as a master. The book's chief flaw is that there is simply not enough of it, leaving us wanting more.

In the United States, Steps Through the Mist follows 2006's Seven Touches of Music (both first appeared in English in the UK magazine Interzone several years ago, and were part of 2006's Impossible Stories omnibus from the UK's PS Publishing). Like the previous American release, Steps Through the Mist is an exquisite slim black volume from Aio Publishing; like that earlier volume, Steps Through the Mist is a mosaic novel, a story suite of short fabulations linked both literally and in thematic concern. Here Živković's concerns are predestination, fate and the future; in the five stories that make up his mosaic he builds a multifaceted view into how modern people might relate to having, knowing and choosing their own fates -- and those of others.

Many of Živković's best-known mosaic novels (the World Fantasy Award-winning The Library, Seven Touches of Music, Twelve Collections, etc.) have followed a similar pattern: a series of seemingly-independent short stories that are drawn together and into a greater aggregate by the concluding story. Steps Through the Mist however diverges from this pattern as a matter of artistic necessity given the themes of fate and future knowledge. Here the first story, "Disorder in the Head," foretells the following four.

"Disorder" tells of Miss Emily, a teacher at a girl's school, who is confronted with a teenage student who claims to have dreamed the dreams of three other students -- and of Miss Emily herself. Emily, orderly and unimaginative, will have none of it:

 

"Disorder in the Head" deftly encapsulates many of the thematic concerns that recur in Steps Through the Mist: the stubborn struggle for dignity -- and control -- of those faced with predestination; the burden on those who might know the future; a sly metafiction combined with the overarching, God-like consciousness of the writer over their characters, the dreamer over the dreamed.

Relying on dreams as a storytelling device can feel clichéd, but this is where Živković shows his mastery. The dream-nature of the stories is stated up-front: it is not used as a surprise, but as another layer, a symbol of fate. That Živković is able to generate such pathos for characters that we know are figments (even more than all fictional characters are) is a testament to his skill as a writer.

 

Displaying or interrogating complex concerns such as fate from multiple angles is a core literary use of the mosaic novel form; Živković does this in the four remaining stories via a variety of situations, points of view, and perspectives. We have (in "Hole in the Wall") a tale of a male psychologist's meeting with a suicidal young woman who claims to be able to see, and choose, the future; a short vignette ("Geese in the Mist") of a woman's encounter on a ski-lift with a man who claims her choice of ski run may have significant, if not dangerous, consequences for the world; we have, inevitably in such a volume, the tale of a female fortuneteller ("Line on the Palm"), aged and jaded, who is hired by a man sure he is fated to imminently die.

And we have "Alarm Clock on the Night Table," the longest story in Steps Through the Mist and a showcase for the style of symbolism that Živković relishes. An elderly woman, whose life for all intents and purposes ended with a choice made long ago, wakes to discover that her alarm clock has stopped during the night. The woman, Miss Margarita, does not need the clock to tell time nor the alarm to wake up, but she has come to need the ticking of the clock to fall asleep. The neighborhood watchmaker is able to repair the alarm clock to this degree -- it will tick, but no longer tell time -- but no further. The questions to be asked seem clear, but then we remember: this story, and Miss Margarita, are the dream of Miss Emily the teacher, one in a collection of Russian Matryoshka doll-like layers of story. Suddenly the questions to be asked come into question themselves. What do the dreams mean to the dreamers, and how do they reflect the larger story?

Those looking for clarity of meaning will likely struggle with Steps Through the Mist, even more than in Živković's previous mosaics. There is a deceptive simplicity to Živković's characteristic stark settings, his ordinary if rather neurotic characters, and his elegantly mannered prose (translated impeccably as usual by Alice Copple-Tošić). We notice trends and patterns in the stories, how all those who encounter the mist of the book's title, out of which knowledge of the future emerges, are women; ironic given women's historic struggle to control their own fate. We notice the descriptive focus on eyes, on seeing. We notice that the age of the mist-seers increases in each story, and we notice the corresponding shifts in how they view fate. We notice the interplay of the fabulous and the scientific, nods to chaos theory's "butterfly effect," and to the roles of observation and choice in quantum physics. Yet despite the patterns and the scientific references Živković's works are to be felt more than known, as the stories themselves often remind us. One judges these mosaics not by how directly they address their concern, but by how completely they encompass it. (And it is here that Steps feels somewhat slighter than most of Živković's other mosaic novels. Bluntly: there are not enough stories.)

Steps Through the Mist is perhaps not the best introduction to Živković's oeuvre, although it could certainly serve. Ideally though it would best be read after sampling some of Živković's earlier mosaics, both because of the variance its front-loaded form represents, and because in tone it bridges those earlier mosaics -- which often revolve around a certain natural order to the universe, even if it is unknowable to humanity -- with the author's later works that tend to be darker, more absurdist and abstract in their focus on human foibles.

Earlier I suggested Zoran Živković as a master fantasist. We know Živković is a true fantasist because his works use symbols and impossibilities to explore those human concerns that cannot be directly addressed by language. We know Živković is a master because his work is instantly recognizable as his own even as he varies and refines the forms of his work, as he does here; we know it because he makes common themes -- like fate -- his own; and we know it (now) because we now know a lesser work from Živković is still among the better novels we're likely to encounter in any given year. In the same way a puzzle with fewer pieces can feel less satisfying to complete, in reading the mosaic of Steps Through the Mist, especially initially, we are conscious that there seems a bit less to it than in Živković's best work. And yet when the finished picture is considered, we realize that in completing the puzzle we have in fact solved nothing: we have reached a beginning, not the end. The puzzle has three dimensions, and Živković has woven complex layers of meaning that linger in the mind long after reading.

-- Matt Denault

What makes certain writings "interstitial" is largely a matter of expectations, say Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss, editors of Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing. How, then, to set expectations for the anthology itself? For reader expectations may either highlight or camouflage that this is a good if somewhat homogeneous assemblage of literate, fantastic short stories.

To start with, interstitial fiction is not itself a genre or movement in the conventional sense: it has few inherent characteristics or identifiers. Ignore the back cover braggadocio that interstitial writing is "a new type of fiction"; it has been with us, contradict the editors, since at least Shakespeare. Ignore the frequent refrain that interstitial writing "crosses borders," as this is neither intrinsic nor exclusive to interstitial writing. Concentrate instead on the back cover's suggestion that interstitial writing "falls in the interstices of recognized commercial genres" -- and bear in mind Heinz Insu Fenkl's comments from his Introduction to the anthology, that "an interstice is not an intersection. [...] Literally it means to 'stand between' or 'stand in the middle.'" Not stand between separate genres, necessarily (a semantic issue that plagues many attempted explanations of interstitiality), but as the cover blurb hints, between the commercial aspect of a genre and its wider potential.

Interstitial fiction is a label for fiction in the space between the broadest theoretical basis of a genre or movement and the more narrow marketing category of what is easily sellable in that genre. Envision what we know, or think we know, about the world as a core; envision genres as mechanisms to sample this core, that group and emphasize, add and subtract to bring different aspects of our experience of the world into focus. Fantasy in the broadest sense, for example, can encompass any story that contradicts what we know, or think we know, about possibility in our world. Publishing being a business, publishers tend to favor those combinations of impossibilities that are proven sellers: imaginary worlds; magic; monsters. It is commercially difficult to find a publisher for a story set in our world where something impossible happens that is not in any way magical, or a story where magic exists but never directly does anything, or a story set in a place that may or may not be imaginary. These are some of the interstitial spaces of fantasy. (Genre hybrids -- Star Wars is a classic example -- may cross genre borders, but most are not interstitial because their genre elements are solidly in the commercial areas of their component genres, not these interstitial spaces.) Sometimes however a fiction in an interstitial space will become successful; sometimes such a story will even spawn a movement, a subgenre. At that point both story and space cease being interstitial. Borges's early work was interstitial until the success of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the late 1960s brought "magical realism" into a full-blown marketing category in English-speaking markets -- at which point Borges was retroactively reclassified. Delany's Dhalgren was interstitial before Sterling coined the term "slipstream." Interstitiality is thus potentially a transitory label, although not necessarily: works such as Peake's Gormenghast remain unique, interstitial. These stories fulfill something of the remit of a genre, without adhering closely to its commercially recognizable tropes and forms.

That definition made, it is easier to set expectations for Interfictions. The book, published by the Interstitial Arts Foundation and distributed by Small Beer Press, contains 19 original stories as well as the introductory essay by Fenkl and a concluding Q&A with the editors, Sherman and Goss. Each story is focused on the gray area between fantastic fiction in a broadly theoretical, non-mimetic sense and one of the common marketing categories of fantastic fiction: fantasy and fabulism; science fiction; horror. Of these the fantasy-fabulism set dominates.

Works that are interstitial with respect to a genre will reflect something of what that genre is -- and is not -- at the time they are created. They are the pieces of the puzzle that fit around the puzzle pieces of genre. In the fantasy stories of Interfictions there is an absence of the violent external conflicts, magical powers, immediacy of presence, and quests to change the authority structures of the world that characterize contemporary commercial fantasy. Instead, there are internal conflicts focused on absence and anxiety; magic that does things to people rather than being used by people, that poses questions rather than solving problems; there is the treatment of Old Testament-based religions as sources of fantasy just as Greek, Norse, etc. often are in commercial fantasy; there is a bringing of modern sensibilities to old stories and old sensibilities to new stories. Considering the broad territory available for interstitial writing you wouldn't expect overarching themes in the volume, but there is one, which proves problematic. There is, in nearly all of these stories, a "post-slipstream" sense of the need, the inevitability, of coming to terms with the often very strange anxieties of place (in a broad sense, not merely geographic) that characterize the modern world. Of accommodating, rather than conquering, the weird.

Christopher Barzak's "What We Know About the Lost Families of ----- House," the first story in the volume, takes this theme almost literally. A haunted house tale told from the collective voice of the small town that the house is part of, there is no protagonist in the traditional sense. Instead, the "we" of the town chronicles the history of ----- House, and the victims who have lived in it, with a parochial yet matter-of-fact tone; the town regards the house's presence as a regrettable but now inseparable part of itself. "If you know how to hear what those walls [of the house] are saying, you will hear unbearable stories, stories you would never imagine possible, stories we would rather turn away from. But we cannot turn away, for they will only follow us."

Other stories in Interfictions present more benign formulations of finding a home in the weird. In Leslie What's "Post Hoc," a pregnant woman tries to mail herself to her ex-boyfriend in hope of reconciliation; when he refuses to sign for her, she finds herself a resident of the post office. This, she discovers, is a better home than any of the more normal houses she might have chosen. It's an absurdist story, an impossible premise joined to realistic details of stamps and forms and labels. Matthew Cheney's "A Map of the Everywhere" is more wholly surreal, a man who wanders from job to job, place to place, before discovering a place for himself -- and love -- off the map of the expected. K. Tempest Bradford's "Black Feather" revolves around a similar sense of finding one's true place, a contemporary woman frustrated by an unrequited crush, who dreams of ravens and family and flying home. It evokes the Grimm fairy tales of the Six Swans/Seven Ravens, with a dash of Native American myth, the raven as a transformative figure. Joy Marchand's "Pallas at Noon" similarly uses myth to evoke a repressed sense of self, in this case the myth of Pallas daughter of Triton, who was accidentally slain by her friend Athena goddess of discipline and craft (and war). It is the story of a seemingly troubled woman struggling to keep herself in place, grounded in the expectations of a stereotypical housewife, at the cost of repressing her complex inner self.

Nancy Spungen, girlfriend of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious, was a troubled woman not known for repressing herself; Veronica Schanoes's story "Rats" presents a "fairy tale" version of Spungen's life, an ode to both the power of story (in giving us a sense of understanding the inner selves of others, of how even those people we find reprehensible may be driven by some need to accommodate the weird) and the essential falseness of story (the lie that people's lives are coherent stories, that end with resolution and have external meaning). Brutal and powerful, it is a story that eats itself alive -- one of the best I've read this year.

"Alternate Anxieties" by Karen Jordan Allen and Holly Phillips's "Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom" resemble each other, both featuring writers struggling with writer's block who are trying to come to terms with the current sources of their anxieties (in the former a geographically distant mother diagnosed with cancer, in the latter a husband taken captive during a diplomatic mission in a foreign land). In both cases a familiarity with the fantastic -- science fictional concepts in Allen's story, fantasy in Phillips's -- is not an escape from the world, but a way of conceptualizing the ambiguities of the world that must be accommodated. "Which world is the real world" is a question both stories ask, with the only possible answer being the world we live in. Vandana Singh's "Hunger" emphasizes this; it is a thoroughly realistic and tragically earnest story of a dinner party, of modern Indian culture, and of how alien the contemporary world can seem when given an external perspective. "Hunger" is a story you might share with someone should you ever wish to convince them of why the fantastic perspective is important:

 

In a reversal from most other stories in the anthology, Catherynne Valente's "A Dirge for Prester John" is a tale told from the perspective of the utter strangeness of the world, of a land that never was, its fantastic residents, and the human man who they take in. Valente is scrupulous in depicting the kingdom of Prester John as though it were a real land, just as (and yet not as) John's letter described it -- griffins, pygmies, the phoenix, the marvelous waterless river, and the Basilica with a ceiling of stars. Description, particularly visual description, dominates "Dirge": the use of simile and metaphor that Valente is often associated with is muted here, to good strategic effect. Simile is a way of putting the strangeness of the world into our own words and concepts; while it is used at the beginning of the tale, in Prester John's arrival, it is soon replaced by detailed description, the lists and tallies of Prester John's letter, as the man becomes acclimated to and accommodated by the land and its people. In this transition "Dirge" highlights the author's skill with deft moments of showing-not-telling that tell so much: "[John the Priest], ever the good teacher, tried to make eye contact with each of us in turn, but he could not look at my eyes" captures the so well the inner conflict of a man stranded in a land of the strange -- and the strangely beautiful -- who stridently lectures others to affirm his own fading belief, before gradually succumbing to wonder, becoming a student, making a home and family. (As in the other top stories of the collection, though, the character's initial anxiety never entirely dissipates.) The section headings of Valente's story correspond to the spheres of the Ptolemaic cosmos that had been adopted by Christianity in the middle ages; the ending section, however -- "The Spindle of Necessity" -- reverts to the earlier, pagan cosmology of Plato, indicating a sense of deeper truth, a deeper, non-divine judgment to be made on a person's life choices.

Taken as individual stories those in Interfictions are at the very least uniformly good: taken as "an anthology of interstitial writing," as an argument for interstitiality, their uniformity starts to work against the goals of the collection. The stories individually work as interstitial writing because their pathos stems largely from a thoughtful, adult sense of anxiety of place not often seen in typical genre fantasy, and because the characters generally do not triumph over their anxieties so much as learn to work within them. One starts to wonder, though, reading story after story with this theme, this journey: is this type of story all that commercial genres are missing; is this idea all that interstitial writing has to offer? The self-referentiality -- interstitial fiction about anxiety of place -- is pleasingly clever at first, but wanes on repetition, particularly in the stories that do not offer enough else. The summary of Leslie What's "Post Hoc" -- a woman mails herself to her boyfriend, finds herself living in the post office, and discovers it to be a good home -- more or less is the story. Csilla Kleinheincz's "A Drop of Raspberry" is a beautifully written story (translated by Noémi Szelényi) of a man who has a rebound friendship with a lake after being left by his fiancé...and again, that's it: the "lake" might have well been a human woman given how the story plays out, how there's not enough lakeness to add insight into quintessential humanity. Colin Greenland's "Timothy" is a shapeshifter romance without the romance, just the sex: the raw and instinctive versus the civilized and expected. It's a clever concept but all that remains after reading it is the concept, none of the story. In terms of fantastic stories made memorable by characterization, settings or themes stemming from diverse ideas thoroughly explored, multiple good ideas, or ideas that feel dangerous, the uniformity of the original stories of Interfictions suffers somewhat in comparison to the variety offered by other recent anthologies that also take a broad view of fantasy, such as Best American Fantasy and The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. And despite the broad potential scope of interstitiality, there are no stories here that play off non-fantastic genres such as crime fiction, thrillers, chick lit, etc.; despite the multidisciplinary, multimedia aspirations of interstitiality, there are only one or two stories here that challenge the basic forms of prose storytelling. Instead, the highlights of the anthology -- "Dirge" and "Hunger" among them -- tend to be the most conventional stories ("Rats" being a notable exception), that hew closest to established genres.

There is, within the established genres of the fantastic at least, the feeling that we've entered something of a feedback loop: that change has come to beget change, faster and faster. The transmission speed of ideas facilitated by the Internet combined with the slowness of traditional publishing mean that many movements are defined and codified before standard-bearing stories appear (such as Mundane SF); subgenres like cyberpunk and the New Weird spring fully formed from single works and end before they are fully understood. Our capacity to focus on narrower subgenres has increased ("steampunk" begets "clockpunk"; readers don't just read "fantasy," they read "epic fantasy" and "gritty epic fantasy") as has our ability to process genre hybrids (paranormal romance, paranormal mystery). On one hand this may mean that there are even more (if smaller) "spaces between," more need for interstitial fiction (Sherman and Goss report that an Interfictions 2 is in the planning stages). On the other hand, electronic cataloging systems increasingly are pushing us from a categorizing world to a tagging and linking world, and in this world the concept of commercial genres as immense gravity wells for fiction -- and thus the utility of the interstitial concept -- may become historical relics. Genre readers familiar with Small Beer Press, the distributor of Interfictions, and the authors it has published (among them Kelly Link, Alan DeNiro, and indeed Theodora Goss) will already have a fairly broad definition of the fantastic, fairly relaxed expectations. Fantastic fiction is also increasingly finding a home in mainstream bookshelves, and the mainstream so far seems able to accommodate marketing novels such as Never Let Me Go, The Road and Blindness (to say nothing of the fantastic short fiction published in magazines ranging from The New Yorker to McSweeney's) without needing to further divide and categorize by any standard other than reading enjoyment.

Pragmatically, however -- and interstitiality is first and foremost a movement born of pragmatism -- right now there are gaps in genre categories, gaps in how people understand the difference between genres and marketing categories. Interstitial fiction is important because it can both point out and fill in these gaps. While the somewhat limited thematic scope of this initial Interfictions volume works against it as a manifesto, celebration or sampler of interstitiality -- in some ways even as a collection of fiction -- readers willing to savour the stories of Interfictions individually will find their expectations largely met, and likely at times exceeded.

-- Matt Denault

"The Rose in Twelve Petals" begins Theodora Goss's newly-in-paperback collection In the Forest of Forgetting, and the story makes an ideal introduction to the the author's work. A retelling of the classic Sleeping Beauty story, it frames and then re-frames our expectations. The initial recognition of the familiar story pulls us into the the fairy tale mindset: of stories that map the small journeys and decisions that can unexpectedly lead to major life changes; of characters and encounters that we understand to be meant not quite literally, yet not as simple allegory either. As the story progresses, the postmodern telling of the tale, the way that every character and every side are given voice (reminiscient of Pamuk's My Name is Red), the way that the subtext of classic fairy tales -- gender, class, politics in the largest sense of the word -- are literalized, all serve to pull fairy tales into modernity, into history (often but not always our own). This mixture of old and new modes of storytelling recurs in the collection's other fifteen stories: there are times, settings, characters and themes that appear again and again, similar but different, the original fairy tales of a multitude of parallel worlds. Throughout, Goss's storytelling palette is made up of the strange day-to-day patterns of individual wants and desires, the certainties and uncertainties that make up our daily lives.

So it is with "Professor Berkowitz Stands on the Threshold," where the titular professor is given the chance to choose between the certainty of his humdrum, largely failed academic and personal life, and the uncertainty of passing beyond an ambiguous threshold into a new level of existence. And so it is with the World Fantasy Award-nominated "The Wings of Meister Wilhelm," about a man building a glider to reach an airborne city where his art will be appreciated (art and the appropriate audience for art are other recurring themes in the collection). For both Meister Wilhelm and Professor Berkowitz it is uncertainty, a lack of faith, that is the enemy of the artist.

 

The flip side (Goss again showing multiple sides to many stories) is seen in a pair of tales set in the author's native Hungary. In "Letters from Budapest," an art student rebels against the dull, utilitarian view of painting enforced by the Party's Art Committee. Lured by the thrill of artistic certainty offered by a decadent painter in hiding, he horrifically discovers that there are choices even more creatively sapping than following the Party line. It's a good story, and a brave one. "The Rapid Advance of Sorrow" is very much a parallel tale, of a similar place at a perhaps somewhat later time. A sparsely poetic, coldly beautiful epistolatory story, "Sorrow" is concerned with the certainty of revolutionary movements -- aesthetic, and thus inescapably political -- and the uncertainty that comes from rejecting conformity with them. I was reminded of Spook City's fall to the Nothing in Ende's The Neverending Story, as the silent revolution of entropy advanced across the artist's community of Szent Endre. The sun now shines with only a "vague luminescence," writes the nameless letter-writer who has refused to join the movement, and "I sit...not knowing if I will be alive tomorrow."

Death is life's great certainty; no surprise that the big D enters into many of these tales. Cancer is one of modern life's foremost uncertainties, and it, too, figures prominently here. It figures most prominently in the collection's title story, "In The Forest of Forgetting," where a woman diagnosed with "lumps" casts aside the certainty of past roles -- Patient, Daughter, Wife, Mother (which largely represent the cast of Goss's new fairy tales, replacing Kings and Queens, Knights and Princesses) -- in a mythologized journey toward a new, uncertain role and place. It is as heroic as it is tragic. "Lily, with Clouds" shows a similar journey from an outside observer's viewpoint, as the so-certain worldview of a small town Southern matriarch is fractured when her prodigal sister returns home to die. If there is an unambiguous statement in Goss's collection, it is expressed here:

 

Mind you, Goss's stories aren't all grim. "Sleeping with Bears" is the delight of the collection, as the sister of a new bride goes from uncertainty ("I don't understand why [my sister] decided to marry a bear") to certainty ("I finally understand why my sister is marrying a bear") in a story that pokes at notions of gentry and family history in the American South, while literalizing some of the earthy sexuality of classic fairy tales. "The Belt" also touches on issues of class, gender and sex, continuing the familiar fairy tale of the male noble who marries a beautiful common woman past the usual ending of and they lived happily ever after. In fact, what "The Belt" does is replace the certainty of that typical fairy tale ending with an equal certainty, grounded in modern notions of psychology and class, that no such unilaterally happy ending could now be possible when both sides are considered. The story is presented with such a feeling of earnest good advice, however, of empowerment for both women and men, that to me it felt optimistic rather than pessimistic -- some new, truer form of happy ending, the story suggests, may now be possible. Your mileage may vary.

 

The stories mentioned thus far involve characters coming to terms with external certainties and uncertainties. There is another type of story in Goss's collection: the wishing stories, stories where characters drive the outcome through their desires. Emblematic of these wishing stories is the recurring character of Emily Gray, an ephemeral fay spirit of enigmatic motivations. Miss Emily Gray's first, eponymous story is a fairly straightforward tale of being careful of what you wish for, and the danger of childish certainty; her second appearance, in "Conrad," is a straightforward tale of a beneficial wish granted to an uncertain child; her final appearance, in "Lessons with Miss Emily Gray," is a not-at-all straightforward tale of beneficial wishes granted and of being careful what you wish for. Yes, there is a progression here, an inner order to the collection's stories.

It is in the collection's penultimate story, the Nebula Award-nominated "Pip and the Fairies," that all the strands of Goss's storytelling come together most superbly. Philippa Lawson is abandoning her acting career and returning to the home of her childhood, where her mother wrote children's books, fairy tales. Philippa no longer knows whether those stories of Pip and the fairies were based on her own true adventures, told to her mother, or if her mother's stories have colonized her memories of childhood. "How did it begin?" Philippa wonders; the question is as important as how it ends, perhaps more so. The story is Goss at her best, speaking to both the child's love of fairy tale, and the adult's sense of survival and need to ascertain. It combines many of the themes and devices of the collection's previous stories -- the wishes, the threshold, the mother taken by cancer -- while stacking layer upon layer of certainty and uncertainty. It's good; it's very, very good, a heady mix of Pan's Labyrinth, Carroll's The Land of Laughs, and Goss's own unique magic. I'd very much like to tell you that the ending -- devastating, heartbreaking, and yet transcendent -- is uncertain, as I have with so many of these other stories...but I don't think that I can.

The way themes of certainty and uncertainty pervade In the Forest of Forgetting, it is no surprise that on the rare occasion a story does disappoint, it is usually because of issues with these same themes. In some stories the authorial certainty Goss exerts feels at odds with the uncertainty she seeks to evoke. The authorial certainty in dividing up "The Rose in Twelve Petals" into its twelve sections, for example, feels in conflict with the narrative uncertainty Goss uses to end the tale; the end feels a little too obviously a Statement. Similarly, for the section in which Professor Berkowitz must decide whether to pass through the threshold to be titled "Faith, like a Seagull Hanging in Mid-air" presages the nature of the professor's testing, signals too clearly that the author is in control and knows in advance what will happen. These are stories that reveal too soon that only one thing can happen, where Goss has left no room for the story to surprise herself. Or in some cases her readers: several other stories seemed to go on too long, to explain too much, too neatly. "I assumed it was perfectly clear," says Miss Emily Gray in her eponymous story: "I was sent to make come true your heart's desire." Miss Gray is saying this to a child, however; to most adult readers it will be perfectly clear.

The explaining permeates even the book's introduction. Goss here shares not only some of her personal history -- she and her divorced mother traveling from Hungary to Italy, Belgium and then up and down the Northeastern United States -- but also how she feels these experiences have impacted her writing in its concern with place and displacement, with borders and irrevocable crossings. It's useful and interesting information, but often the relentlessly biographical analysis does no favors. For some readers it may deuniversalize the stories, rendering the tales purely commentary on the author's personal experiences. It can also lead to lazy analysis. We can note that in nearly all of Goss's stories, you cannot, or should not, go home again -- but how do we explain the brilliant ambiguity of "Pip and the Fairies" in that regard? Or it is tempting to say that Goss's prose has the elegant, mannered precision of someone to whom English is not a first language, who learned not just (as most schooled from birth in the USA learn) how words are used, but also what and how they mean. This sort of simple reductionism, though, is unfair to the author. How many other non-native writers of English (to say nothing of natives) have Goss's lyricism? How many born abroad have her perceptiveness in identifying the mythologies of the United States: the Northeastern USA's fascination with the post-Civil War South, for example; or the way many of her older foreign characters regard service in Viet Nam as a badge of belonging. How many writers have her Peter Beagle-like ability to instantiate complex modern concepts via the language of story, making a place for the fantastic and fabulous in modern literature? And indeed, how many people have her drive to create and share stories?

For that is also, I think, one of the core themes of In the Forest of Forgetting. The transmission of story, and in particular of fairy stories, occurs throughout the collection: in some cases stories are shared by oral storytelling; in some cases by books, or letters; in some cases they are written on scavenged pieces of driftwood and cast out to sea. In all cases fairy tales serve to create, and to symbolize, a sense of personal history and place. Their value is not that they grant understanding, but that they encourage us to seek understanding, to see and act on the complex truths of the world. Paradoxically, the words of fairy tales tell us not to ignore that which cannot be directly put into words; they acknowledge our sense that there are certainties, even if we cannot always be certain what they are. If the modern world has become a poor place for classic fairy tales, as several of the stories herein suggest, the answer Theodora Goss proposes is not that we forget fairy tales altogether, but rather that we create new fairy tales for our new age. She has certainly created several excellent ones in this collection.

-- Matt Denault

Irving Goodman, self-confessed dirty old man, is 83 years old and has just fallen in love. Unfortunately, Justine Trimble, pert star of 1950s cowboy B-movies, has been dead for 47 years. He saw her first in Last Stage to El Paso, a black-and-white Western, and has been unable to think of anything else since. Desperate and undeterred, Goodman invokes the help of his old friend, Istvan Fallock, to see if they can't somehow conjure the 25-year-old Justine from a videotape. So with a test tube, distillation of frog, a soupcon of primordial soup mixed with a suspension of disbelief, they attempt to summon her back to life. To their surprise and consternation, she materializes with a hunger for blood so that she can live her new life. As a reward for lust and hubris, Irving gets a lot more than the affection and attention he'd bargained for.

Thus begins a tale of murder and mayhem in contemporary London, where sexy vampire cowgirls run amok, chased by men old enough to know better.

In the last 10 years Hoban has experienced an astounding burst in creative energy. At the age of 83 Hoban is producing some of the strongest fiction of his career as he knocks out almost a book a year. But this end run shouldn’t come as a surprise. The man hasnt stopped writing in more then 5 decades.

From his children’s book's which include the long running Francis the Badger series to his classic children’s novel The Mouse and His Child to his adult novels that run the gamut of literary fiction (Turtle Diary), Science Fiction (Fremder & Riddly Walker), Fantasy (The Medusa Frequency & Kleinzeit), Historical fiction (Pilgermann) to librettos, poetry, essays and short fiction Hoban has been continuously writing in as many styles as possible all the while producing one of the more impressive bodies of work.

Linger Awhile is one of the strongest of his late period books that ranks up there with The Bat Tattoo and Amaryllis Night and Days. It’s a highly original take on the vampire tale that is quirky, engaging and above all else fun. There isn’t a "stop and smell the roses" moment in sight as Hoban starts off running and maintains a quick pace throughout the book. The story was very compelling and once I started reading I couldn’t stop until I was finished.

I think that Linger Awhile may also be Hoban’s most accessible book. It provides a great starting point for someone who is new to his work. From the poetry quoting Detective to the Chinese restaurant named after the prophet Elijah, who makes appearances in dreams, to the central conceit of the novel itself there are a lot of Hoban's recurring themes and motifs present in Linger Awhile that are present in his larger body of work. Piled on top of all that are Hoban's wry observations on art, poetry, life & relationships mixed with a healthy dose of puns. There's a lot that’s happening in these 132 pages.

Though their styles are very different I would think that readers who like the works of Jonathan Carroll and Graham Joyce would also like the books of Russell Hoban.

--Brian Lindenmuth

Punktown, crime-ridden metropolis on the colony world, Oasis, is home to the scum of countless alien races. Stalking its mean streets is Jeremy Stake, the private detective with chameleon-like abilities he does not want and cannot control. There’s his wealthy client, Fukuda, whose company makes synthetic life forms as playthings for the rich. Then there’s Fukuda’s beautiful teenage daughter, whose priceless one-of-a-kind living doll has been stolen. And there is the doll itself, growing in size, intelligence, and resentment.


The destinies of all these individuals will converge, and collide, in Punktown.


MY biggest complaint about Deadstock is that I just couldn’t shake the feeling that Thomas was talking down to me as a reader. I don’t need an author to hold my hand all the time. In this book there are multiple instances where Thomas uses the same exact group of words and sentences to describe people, places and events. This isn’t done as a haunting refrain or as a link between what would otherwise be disparate or opposing images. This isn’t done to produce a mirroring effect or for humor. I'm not going to catalogue all of these occurrences but it does happen enough times for it to warrant attention. Here is one example.


There are a group of characters that are cloned soldiers whose main identifying feature is their blue skin.

Then just a few pages later we find the following passage.




Perhaps it’s just a case of me being too critical but I think that things like this should have been caught in the editorial process.


I question Thomas' decision to skirt the moral issues that are presented throughout. I do so because Stake, who is clearly presented as a PI protagonist, should be possessed of a personal moral code born from his personal code of honor. He is cognizant enough to notice the moral issues and even mention them, but then quickly drops the matter because, well, there isn’t really a good reason that the matters are dropped but they are.


As a thriller or again a PI tale the success of the story is at least partially contingent on the successes of the reveals. But, unfortunately, there wasn't a single plot twist or plot point that I didn't telegraph early on. The twists that are associated with Stakes client are especially maddening because they wallow in dramatic devices that only the worst soap operas use. **Spoiler** There are dead twins, dead wives, the daughter is the clone of the dead wife, the brother alive is really the one thought dead, vice-versa. The more it twists the more cartoonish it gets. **Spoiler end**


I've said before and it bears repeating that I'm a firm believer that the mystery/SFF mix is a tough one to pull off. If an author is going to write a book that is very clearly a mix of two genres then it has to pull double duty in clearly being identifiable as both. While there is a lot of imagination of display in Deadstock it does ultimately fail in its ability to present a credible PI tale.


One of the highlights of the book, though not without its own problems, is Thomas' success at updating the haunted house/ghost story. Two gangs find themselves trapped in an abandoned apartment building. They have to form a unified front against a group of faceless automatons that are programmed to defend the integrity of the building. These parts of the book are done well for the most part.


--Brian Lindenmuth

Fact: I like robots. Whether they are broken, sadistic, stupid, massive iron giants, or just downright sexy, I am constantly fascinated by humanoid machines. Yes, they fall on metal knees to robotic clichés: either they want to be real with a soul thingy or they are angry and revolt against their makers. Fine, that's fine. I can read through a couple versions of these stories again and again so long as everything else is fresh enough to keep me awake. Our gadget-enthused society (pretty soon cell phones will be able to microwave meals, tazer small dogs, and rewire bank accounts; I promise you, give it five more years and you’ll see) makes it quite easy to foretell a world where robots and humans co-exist.

With all this said, it’d be a no-brainer that I’d enjoy Robotika by Alex Sheikman and Joel Jason O’Chua, a story of discarded cyborgs, genetically-enhanced samurais, and biological experiments in a future far removed from the one we know today. Unfortunately, I didn’t fall as hard for it as I’d have liked.

It’s the future (though the year is unknown), and humans are constantly upgrading their latest stream of robots, tossing the old and outdated wayside. These discarded bots slink away to the edges of the universe where they begin their own existence, forgotten and ultimately uncared for. The Queen’s chief scientist has created a “biological machine” that could finally properly unite cyborgs and humans. Silly science guy, biological machines are for kids. He’s assassinated (rather abruptly) and his creation is stolen away. The Queen puts mute-face Niko to the task of returning the invention, and fast, as she has a meeting soon with some bigwigs and is unable to cancel. Queens, think everything rotates around them. Out Niko goes to steal back what was wrongfully stolen, make some new friends, and never say a goddamn word. Genetically-enhanced soulless ronin sellswords—what are they good for? Absolutely nothing.

Honestly, I learned more about Robotika from its Amazon page than from actually reading the hardcover book. Er, graphic novel. Graphic book? I don't really know what it is. Both the writing and art are so unconnected that it was hard to follow what was happening, why it was happening, and whether or not I was supposed to care. The writing is sparse and so stock that I just wanted to stab every character in the mouth whenever they spoke. Actually, of the three main "heroes"—Niko, Cherokee Geisha, and Bronski—one never says a word, the other talks in an unreadable manner, and the last uses such brainless phrases like "Take a chill pill!" The plot is very ho-hum and not the clearest thing to follow. I believe the two stories within Robotika are only the beginning, but even then I had no idea why anyone was doing what they were doing.

Let's take a moment to address the biggest problem for me with Robotika. That'd be Cherokee Geisha and her speech problem. To show that she's not speaking the same language of everyone else, Sheikman and O'Chua has her words written down, and I mean downwards as such:

T
H
I
S
!

Imagine reading like that for any number of pages. Enjoying yourself yet?

Sheikman’s art, along with O'Chua’s coloring, was a hit or miss with me. Some pages are clearly more detailed than others, and when it comes to futuristic landscapes or smoking deserts, the artwork is spot on. Buildings rise up into the clouds, flying mobiles zooming around them, or vast wastelands stretch out to the horizon, coupled by a pitch-perfect sky. But then a lot of the panels are merely talking heads with no backgrounds at all. Half the time the characters are barely colored in. There are a couple of "cover" shots that are impressive, but other than that I wished they had a more narrative feel to them. Seeing how one panel went to the next became a chore, especially when the action picked up. There are two bonus comics at the end, both drawn differently than the main work, and they are fairly enjoyable. They give some background information and offer complete stories where the others are part of a much larger epic.

Unfortunately, I can't recommend Robotika, especially at the price tag of $19.95. It's a story and world we've seen before (cough The Matrix cough), and there's little reasoning to care about those parading about in this adventure. Sheikman and O'Chua do have some interesting ideas here and there, but not enough to make their silent samurai and renegade robots stand tall above the competition.

To be honest, George Mann's introduction to the Solaris Book of New Science Fiction did little to entice me to continue flipping the pages. Turning in at just a couple paragraphs, it reads more as an introduction for the Solaris imprint than the anthology they are actually launching. I've always enjoyed a little looksee into why an editor picked a certain story, or even seeing them genuinely excited about 'em, and nothing pleases me more analytical dissections of the genre, but alas there is nothing like that within. And because of this, I'm to assume there's no interconnecting theme in the anthology (though there always is a theme, no matter how subtle), and so the Solaris Book of New Science Fiction comes off as more just a bunch of stories collected together in a book for easier distribution, simple as that. Thankfully, these are some damned good stories.

"In His Sights" by Jeffrey Thomas strongly opens the anthology, showcasing a subgenre of science fiction that wavers between cyberpunk and psychological horror. We have Jeremy Stake, a mutant from Punktown who is also a military returnee from a war fought between the blue-skinned Ha Jiin and the humans. Stake wears a mask to hide a power (curse) of his, stealing the faces of others. In this case, he's specifically wearing the face of the last man he killed, a Ha Jiin, which leads to problems fitting back into society. Though there was a section where the POV changed back and forth between two different characters, confusing me in an instant, the story is a good one. There's a heap load of tension, a monsters-living-among-the-humans sort of city à la Perdido Street Station, and in the end, explosive action that has some horrifying outcomes. Well recommended.

One of my favorite stories from the Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, "C-Rock City" by Jay Lake and Greg van Eekhout follows a man known simply as Porkpie living on an asteroid-melded planet as he searches for a mother he's never known. Events unfold rather rapidly, but the mystery of how C-Rock City exists and functions helps to fill in the gaps while Porkpie moves closer and closer to finding out where he came from. The characters are fun, and the relationship between Porkpie and Rocky adds a lot to the tension; Porkpie is clearly a loner, but the sort that just needs one person to know him and love him and treat him like he'd treat them. Rocky or his mother, in the end, Porkpie might not have either. I also believe I've spotted a quiet homage to Frank Wu, the Hugo Award-winning artist that has previously worked with Lake. In "C-Rock City" Wu is what Wu already is, an artist with a talent for creating mesmerizing pieces of work, paintings so powerful and telling that they themselves give names to the ships and sectors of the city. It's a nice touch though I doubt van Eekhout had a hand in it. There's enough history and setting in "C-Rock City" for further adventures, and truthfully, the ending didn't feel as complete as it could have been. This is not a complaint at all—I only want more.

"The Bowdler Strain" by James Lovegrove is the sort of story that seems down right silly when its premise is written out (or even described to someone), but the tale of a logovirus that eliminates the ability to properly swear worldwide is executed marvelously. It's Professor Hugo Bantling's fault, letting the virus escape on his watch, and he can only sit back and watch as it spreads from the Ideative Manipulations laboratory in Gloucestershire to soon all of England. Now it's not a deadly virus, killing folks off by the droves. But there is the fear of worldwide panic and all eyes tracing the blasted thing back to Chilton Mead and Bantling and his cohorts. To speak of how Lovegrove handles a story about swearing with swears in it (but not really) would ruin the charm of the "The Bowdler Strain." The ending is quietly done, but it suffices.

Paul Di Filippo's "Personal Jesus" is also another story with a premise (and outcome) that is borderline preposterous, but when handled profoundly within the mold that is science fiction it comes across as ninety percent amazing and ten percent haunting. In the near future, godPods are the latest trend, and everyone in the world seems to have one. Each godPod comes with its own personal deity (Jesus, Mohammed, Budhha, etc.), and it acts as a living conscience, a voice to turn to for advice. Some people never turn theirs off. Shepherd Crooks believes his to be broken, but forgets about that problem instantly as his personal Jesus tells him that he'll finally score with Anna, the woman he's been pining over. Things seem like they're all going to turn out for the better, but the godPods have something else planned. The revelation of what and where and who felt like a throwback to the golden years of SF, back when pulp was all there was to know. Much like Di Filippo's "Wikiworld" from Fast Forward I, he presents another future where the technology has become more important than the users, frightening and plausible and a subject that will never ever go away.

"A Distillation of Grace" by Adam Roberts is a story of scrutinized breeding done through a line of specific generations in order to achieve a Unique, a being embodying grace itself. This is said to happen by the words of Shad (bless his memory!), and the task of overseeing all this falls upon Cole. He is to make sure Medd, a boy of fourteen, impregnates a young girl named Rhess. Unfortunately, Medd claims that he does not love her and will not help to create a being of grace. Roberts' storytelling is fluid and engaging, never losing itself amongst all the religion and theology. There's even the hint of humor sprinkled in, but I did not find the ending to be satisfying after such a tremendous setup. Others might see it differently, and I'd still suggest them reading it even though it didn’t blow me over.

To say I didn’t get a little emotional over Stephen Baxter's "Last Contact" would be a lie. The end of the world is to happen on October 14th, and everyone knows it. To their dismay, nothing, absolutely nothing, can be done to prevent it. Maureen and her daughter Caitlin are doing much like others: living their lives as if they knew nothing at all, but it is much harder on Maureen who is receiving garbled messages from space. There are no twists here, no sudden revelations that make things worse or better. "Last Contact" plays out like you're told it would, with the world ending, but that doesn't make watching Maureen and Caitlin's lives shatter any easier to experience.

Of the longer stories in the anthology, "Zora and the Land Ethic Nomads" by Mary Turzillo (who dropped her middle initial here and is quickly becoming one of my favorite short story writers, closing in right behind Tanith Lee and Ursula K. Le Guin) and "The Accord" by Keith Brooke were the best of the bunch. Turzillo's story is an intricate study of society, traditions, and the adaptations life has to make to survive. Plus, it's set on Mars, which only a confident voice can pull off, and just like she did with "Pride," a far-fetched idea about raising genetically-crafted saber-toothed tigers, she's flows with ease. "The Accord" reminded me a lot of Tanith Lee's earlier novels, Don't Bite the Sun and Drinking Sapphire Wine, which revolved around the perfect of most perfect worlds, where one only had to suffer if they chose to. Aldiss' story kickstarts off perfectly with Tish Goldenhawk, a local, encountering a mysterious fellow in her bar who just so happens to bring trouble with him. The twists and turns are plentiful, but more so, they are interesting which kept me turning the page.

Eric Brown's "The Farewell Party" rounds out the anthology, doing a fine job of bringing the book to a close. It's a quiet story set in England about a group of people surviving out their nights through social drinking. A mysterious stranger (aren't they always?) arrives, gives them the name of Gregory Merrall, and is instantly welcomed into their clique. Slowly, the back story of the alien race Kéthani and why they've chosen Earth as their new home is revealed, along with Gregory's secrets. Throughout "The Farewell Party" a thin air of uncertainly hangs overhead, and for good reasoning. Though the ending itself is not something terribly new to the "aliens are invading our planet" bend, it is satisfying in that it confirmed my suspicion of Merrall all along. Definitely worth a read.

Some stories didn't work for me, which does not necessarily mean they're terrible compilations of words and adverbs and plot devices, just tales that didn't quench my SF thirst, so to speak. Neal Asher's "Bioship," a piece that heavily plays out the tropes now associated with the New Weird, did little to impress me and it eventually lost me in its absurdness and unclear characters. The narrative style of Peter F. Hamilton's "If at First…" turned me off. And "Four Ladies of the Apocalypse" by Brian Aldiss, while aptly written and more than effective for its length, felt out of place in a book that seems more focused on science fiction than horror.

There are some strong stories in Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, enough to warrant justified praise, and my only major gripe with the anthology is that it ultimately feels unfocused. That, or I've been reading too many genre anthologies lately and everything is blurring together now. I mentioned earlier how there is always a theme, even if it's very subtle. To say death would be the easy way out; a lot of the stories here were rooted in ideas of people's places in society and learning to adapt to whatever ways they are supposed to. Whether it's coming back from a war with the face of a dead man or learning about alien traditions on Mars, it all comes back to being human, reacting naturally, and surviving by any means.

But really, that Stephen Baxter story, completely worth purchasing the book. I am not a member of this year's Worldcon so I cannot vote for it to win a Hugo. I am also not a full-fledged member of SFWA, and alas, cannot nudge it for a Nebula vote. If any of you out there have the power to do these things, read "Last Contact," let the world know its greatness, and make all things right.

The Taking, by Dean Koontz, is an interesting book to read on a rainy day, because the first sign that things are awry in this suspense novel is an odd downpour. More than a downpour, in fact, a worldwide torrent of luminous, sweet-smelling rain that causes unusual behaviour in animals.

The novel's protagonist, Molly Sloan and her husband are awakened by the storm, and as communication with the outside world is cut off, and the sense of threat builds, they leave their isolated house to head for town.

The novel is well-written, with a poetical turn of phrase. The first half is an adept, intriguing and suspensful thriller, as you see glimpses of bad things (an alien invasion) happening in places faraway, and close to the Sloans. The second half lost some of the suspense for me, but stayed as interesting, and I found the end quite satisfying.

The book treads a fine line between seeming supernatural events and the thought of alien invasion, although Koontz early on quotes the famous line of Arthur C. Clarke that sufficiently advanced alien technology could seem supernatural.

The only real problem I had with the book was some ham-fisted authorial intrusion - a message against the idea that global warming is man-made, and another about the leniency of the liberal prison system. Apart from that, it's a pleasant and easy read in a few hours.

Unlike a reviewer on Amazon, I don't have an issue wi