Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 7: March 2014 (28 page)

***

4) Henry Slesar, then 42, at Jay Garon’s annual Christmas party in 1969 in Garon’s huge apartment on Central Park West in the high '90s. One hundred, two hundred, three hundred (who could tell?) writers, editors, reviewers, crashers dispersed through that yawning space. Slesar weaving drunk, me close, we found that we got along splendidly as we exchanged bitter, admiring, sometimes foul comments on the editorial community which lurched around us. “I am
Playboy
’s biggest fucking contributor,” Henry co
n
fided. “I have sold more stories to that magazine right now than anyone has or anyone will. Have you read my latest? Little number called ‘Melodramamine.’ It’s very good. All of my stories are good.” He bestowed a handshake, staggered
away,
I passed him ten minutes later, necking furiously with a middle-aged editrice from Ace Books. He seemed happy, or at least preoccupied. Never saw him again. “The people that you never get to love,” that Susannah McCorkle song.
“The best friend that I never got to have,” a sequel.

***

5) James Holmes, the
Wildcat
editor from Oklahoma who gave me my first sale (11/19/65, “The Bed,” $100) and then rejected my prospective second and third without comment before finally responding to the fourth: “Our readers are hardworking truck drivers or day laborers or the like who when they come home exhausted and want to read, do not want to see depressing, downer shit like this. Please tell the author to lighten up.”

***

6) Eleanor Sullivan, (1928-1991) successor editor to Fred Dannay at
Ellery Queen’s
but then editor of
Alfred Hitchcock’s,
rejecting “The Twentieth Century Murder Case” in 1979: “In my opinion readers do not like to feel stupid, but this story makes me feel that way and my job is to be surrogate for my readers.”
After twenty sales, never sold her again.
Ed Ferman took the story and the next year Ed Hoch included it in
The Best Mystery Stories
, thus proving that nothing in this business proves anything.

***

7) Lying next to my wife the evening of the day I had made my second sale to Ed Ferman, the 9,000-word “Death to the Keeper” (August 1968). “I am going to be like Roger Zelazny with ‘A Rose
For
Ecclesiastes’ in that magazine,” I said. “I am going to smash my way into science fiction.” That I did, but as Larry Janifer might have asked: “Who is the smasher and who the smashed?”

November 2013: New Jersey

Copyright © 2014 by Barry N. Malzberg

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Paul Cook is the author of 8 books of science fiction, and is currently both a college i
n
structor and the editor of the Phoenix Pick Science Fiction Classics line.

.

.

Osiris
(Book One of the Osiris Project) 

by
E.J. Swift

Night Shade Books, 2013

ISBN: 978-1597804189 (Trade paperback)

Amazon Link Paper (may not work on all readers)

Amazon Link Kindle (may not work on all readers)

*

Osiris
is the first novel in a trilogy by first-time novelist E.J. Swift. It’s handsomely produced by Night Shade Books with a spectacular cover by a person called “Sparth,” and should find a wide audience among younger science fiction readers—readers I suspect under the age of 40. This is not to say that
Osiris
is a YA novel (though there are aspects of the quest contained within). What I mean to say is that Ms. Swift has given us in this opening work of her first trilogy a standard dystopian vision, written and conceived quite conservatively, using tropes and conceits we’ve been familiar with for about three decades now. This is a first novel, however, and we can forgive her impulse to rein in her imagination in order to get published.

Osiris is a floating city, the last city in the world, which has survived a Great Storm. There are only two classes in Osiris—Citizens who live in privilege and ease in the East, and an apartheid-like ghetto of re
f
ugees and extremely poor who live in the West. The animosity felt by the West toward the East fuels much of the character motivation in this book.

Our heroine, Adelaide, is a member of the Rechnov family who founded Osiris. In the beginning her brother commits suicide, which Adelaide doesn’t know; she spends the novel searching for him. Her counterpart in the novel is Vikram Bai, a revolutionary and parolee. He and Adelaide meet and spend much
of the novel trying to stop or mitigate a possible uprising that could destroy the city.

Little in this novel is new. In fact, it’s one of many such stories being written today even by our best writers. In the last eight months, I’ve read similar books of global warming, wild, massive storms, and rising seas by Alastair Reynolds, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ben Bova, and Nancy Kress. And if you’ve seen
Waterworld
you get more than the general idea what’s at work here.

To Ms. Swift’s credit, she does try to milk the tensions between the haves and the have-nots, but her writing lacks the depth (or the potential) for metaphor. Like most science fiction written today it’s realistic and exact. She wants something like
Brave New World
but her focus on her characters lacks the kind of ironic distance that
metaphor (and allegory) demand
. Most of the novels of Philip K. Dick work as met
a
phor, for example. They are about the characters of those novels, but Dick’s narratives implicate the problems of our current culture.
A more current example of science fiction working as metaphor is the movie
District 9,
which is all about apartheid. You cannot watch that movie without knowing that (unless you’re too young to have known what isolation and segregation did to the blacks of South Africa by the white minority in power). That the main character in that movie becomes “transformed” by his experience is about as stunning a metaphor for how we are affected by those we keep prisoner, those we keep down.

I really can’t fault Ms. Swift for not elevating her novel to something she probably didn’t intend. But the messages are there. That said, her other miscalculation is that she chose to stretch this story into a trilogy. One of the disadvantages of being a new writer (or anyone under the age of 40) is that she (and every publisher everywhere) feels the need to tell a story in several volumes. The downside of Book One of
Osiris
is that about three-fourths through the novel, she stops all forward motion and lets all the threads of her narrative peter out. She does this so she can continue the story in following volumes. Thus, this is not a stand-alone novel.

I would have much preferred another one hundred pages as she wraps up her tale, but she and her pu
b
lishers have opted (like most writers and publishers today) to go for more money in selling further a
d
ventures of these characters and this city-on-the-water. Osiris, the city, to me is rather
de rigeur
for science fiction. It’s not the Riverworld or Arakis or Larry Niven’s Ringworld where we love to go back to see what
else
is there. If the city had been fascinating, I’d be interested in seeing how it all turned out, but I’ve seen this city before. (If you’ve seen Fritz Lang’s classic
Metropolis
,
then
just picture the great city there on the water. That’s Osiris.)

As a first novel, however,
Osiris - Book One
is a pleasant read. Ms. Swift knows how to write and plot, but my sense is that it’s quite possible that she is being guided by marketplace forces (and the influence of her publishers rightly or wrongly) to sell rather than to invent. I would encourage her, after this trilogy is over, to just write a stand-alone novel and turn her imagination loose. I think she’s got a lot more to say; it’s just that this trilogy, for us old-timers who’ve seen it all,
Osiris
is not as fresh as it could have been.

***

Future Perfect: Six Stories of Genetic Engineering

by
Nancy Kress

Phoenix Pick, 2012

ISBN: 978-1612420639 (Trade Paperback)

Amazon Link Paper (may not work on all readers)

Amazon Link Kindle (may not work on all readers)

*

I’ve stated in these pages and elsewhere that I think Nancy Kress, for at least three decades, is our current master of the long short story. This includes the novella and the novelette. Her ideas are most judiciously contained (and explored) within this tighter format. The long short story also allows her to enliven her narratives from multiple perspectives without getting lost in-or having to pad out—a wider story wherein dramatic tension gets diminished. I have yet to read a bad collection of Ms. Kress’ shorter work.

This includes the collection under consideration here. These are six longish stories that come in at 245 pages of fine entertainment. As the subtitle suggests, the stories in
Future
Perfect
each involve some aspect of genetic engineering, including aspects of human biology and sexuality—and, of course, how these things affect the fragile dynamics of families in the future.

The stories are: “The Flowers of Aulit Prison” (
Asimov’s
1996), “First Rites” (
Jim Baen’s Universe
2008), “Trinity” (
Asimov’s
1984), “Margin of Error” (
Omni
1994), “Dancing on Air” (
Asimov’s
1993), and “And No Such Things Grow Here” (
Asimov’s
2001). All of these stories involve the complexities of fa
m
ilies and guilt, even among aliens and altered humans. Kress is deftly able to show compassion for her characters, even when they may or may not have committed murder of a sibling as in “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” a story of a character driven both by guilt and by the need to find a solution that transcends the strictures of barbaric civilization codes. “First Rites” dovetails three different narratives of divergent characters initially with no relation to each other,
who
come to depend on one another in an attempt to control the disastrous consequences of genetic modification experiments. This could have been a novel, but it’s also the best example in this collection of Kress’ ability to stay focused, stay briefly, then move on to the next narrative moment without slowing everything down. This story is also one of the true tragedies in Kress’ canon. “Trinity” parallels two stories of humankind’s destruction of Africa (and how biological
species change because of it) and experiments on how the human mind experiences transcendence. Again this
involves sisters—one who is
trying to understand, as a scientist, her own sister’s involvement with a possible religious cult. This is one of the rare stories where Kress looks at our desire to know the U
n
knowable. “Margin of Error” is from the extinct
Omni
Magazine and is a brief
aperitif
about two sisters, one who injected herself with nanomachines to improve cell development, the other
who
chose to live the life of mother and housemaker. It’s all Kress. The fighting siblings, one the Control part of the Experiment and the other the Experiment itself. My favorite story is “Dancing on Air,” about genetically altered ba
l
lerinas. It’s got all the psychodrama you’d expect from mothers and daughters and scientists arguing about what these changes do to young women, but the story is also a very clever examination of how we’re to judge art. Kress asks the kind of question that everyone asked when Prozac and other anti-depressant medicines were invented in the late 1980s: How do these biochemical (or nanotechnological) processes alter human thinking but especially human creativity? This is the central topic that weaves throughout these stories. How are the inevitable changes in human engineering going to affect us? How are we going to remain human? Or will some of us stay back and others of us move forward? This is an excellent collection of stories that show Kress at her creative and narrative best.
Future Perfect: Six Stories of Genetic Eng
i
neering
belongs on the shelves of everyone with an interest in mainstream science fiction by one of our finest writers.