March 2, 2025

SHORT STORY REX Feb 2025

SHORT STORY REX Feb 2025

1. “Green”, Ivy Grimes

I have an unending fascination with the fiction of Ivy Grimes in pretty much all of its aspects, but one in particular are her narrators and the peculiar pronouncements they make, so confident, so deceptively intuitive. Our narrator in “Green” (well, it’s kind of complicated, but…) is no exception:

People aren’t much smarter than other animals, so the trouble comes with expecting too much from them.

Every man has some want inside him, something that’s just plain wrong.

Madness in the guise of wisdom or vice versa. Somewhere in Alabama, archetypal figures are playing out a pantomime: an innkeeper and his wife, a stranger in town, the stranger’s “boss” and more, each one helping or refusing or cuckolding(?) the other until some uneasy equilibrium can be reached

2. “Out of All of Them” and “Atch Ere Kokkero”, Nelson Stanley

Massive month of February for us Nelson Stanley fans. For those who don’t know, Nelson’s bio states that he “comes from a Romany family & lives & works in Bristol, UK” and this month we’ve been blessed with two of his stories, one in The Dark (extremely metal cover art of this issue, btw) and the other in UK literary magazine Northern Gravy. Both stories drop the reader into a landscape which, like the characters that populate it, feels both familar and estranged (estranged family in some cases). Yank that I am, I had to look up what things like ‘gilet’ and ‘Joey Grey’ meant, but dialectal boundaries notwithstanding, the relationships of these people to these landscapes—the waste ground, the scrap cars, the wire fences—all come across with stark clarity in the tales they tell themselves, the spells they cast on others. Read these stories!

3. “The Elevator Down”, R.T. Ester

Slight change of pace from the usual fare, and from the last RT Ester piece I recommended (“After Stasis” in Interzone Digital). Where that story was tense, haunting, and claustrophobic, this one (about an AI tour guide gone adorably rogue) is giddy and loquacious…but also still pretty tense? We get a sort of one-side conversation—or rather, interrogation—like a Bob Newhart routine (look it up, children), full of false starts and hemming and hawing that captures the naturalistic rhythm of transcribed speech without feeling contrived or antagonistic to the reader. A fun trick which Ester pulls off with ease, while also giving us (as the prefatory editor’s note puts it) a “dark commentary on capitalism and artificial intelligence”

4. “The Island of the Hands", Margaret St. Clair

It was with great surprise that I found a copy of the British Library’s short story anthology Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird in the ‘Narrativa anglesa’ section of my local library (this not being the usual sort of fare the library system has me accustomed to). And I look forward to coming to grips with the new-to-me writers in this volume, but I pray the reader will forgive me for having skipped straight to this story by the great Margaret St. Clair.

Yes, this bonafide Weird Tale (originally published in the September 1952 issue) is the sort of mid-century sci-fi/planetary romance where people with names like “Dirk” or “Ross” or “Joan” travel to places with names like “Larthi” or “Zavir”. Our protagonist, the aforementioned Dirk crosses the vast open seas of the water-world Garth looking for his beloved Joan, whose plane has disappeared a la Amelia Earhart.

When he reaches the titular island, there is a strange little scene in which an elderly woman dances with a “huge young man” who has the “bland impossible perfection of a dummy”, while three other young men who are “as alike him as peas” all wait their turn, and I can’t help but imagine them dancing to Yma Sumac or some other theremin-heavy 50s exotica soundtrack. We enter a dream sequence in a b-movie, a lost world inside a Lost World. The presence of Miranda, an uncanny-valley double of Joan, adds a kind of Vertigo, Mullholland Drive frisson to the proceedings. And that’s before we get to the hands…

Not-short story rec: Pattern Recognition, William Gibson / Not-story recs: Shelved by Genre podcast, No Maps For These Territories (2000)

Been having a rather Gibsonian moment so far this 2025. It was around New Year’s that a podcast called Shelved by Genre first drifted across my feed, an episode about Gibson’s short story collection Burning Chrome (still my favorite Gibson book, I think). They split it into two episodes, both of which are entertaining and insightful and which I highly recommend. That inspired me to sit down with the documentary No Map For These Territories, from 2000. Towards the end of this fascinating little film, Gibson recounts how, when Michael Jackson married Elvis Presley’s daughter Lisa Marie, a friend contacted him and said “This makes your job more difficult”. And if something as innocuous as the King of Pop marrying the King of Rock ‘n Roll’s daughter makes a writer like Gibson’s job harder, one wonders how much harder his job became a couple of years after this documentary was filmed—after, say, 9/11?

Well, Pattern Recognition is kind of about that.

I was already in the midst of this personal Gibson mini-renaissance when I came across a used paperback of Pattern Recognition for 2€. There’s something so striking about the way the book turns the futuristic SF writer’s toolbox onto the (then-)present day, and how that influences the way the novel holds up twenty years later (compare to how all the ‘80s stuff about the Soviet Union and all-powerful zaibatsus holds up), and through it all there’s this sort of elegiac air of a man of a certain age, in a society of a certain vintage, looking back at the century (the 20th) that created him, getting a glimpse of the coming century he and his predecessors in the SF lineage had predicted, and feeling stuck at this awful hinge point in history, adrift in a timeless, atemporal ‘now’ saturated with symbols in all their beauty and horror. I have now read the first book in all of Gibson’s major trilogies (Neuromancer, Virtual Light, The Peripheral, and now this one), and I seem to be far from alone in saying Pattern Recognition is my favorite of his novels.¹ Maybe I will even break tradition and read the other novels in the Blue Ant trilogy if I come across them used, who knows