SHORT STORY REX May 2024
SHORT STORY REX May 2024
1.”About Face And”, Ben Lockwood
Still thinking about this story a long while later. Specifically, my writer/editor brain is thinking about the meaning and purpose of the rain, symbolically within the story, whereas my reader/normal-person brain is left to think about the meaning and purpose of, like, everything in the universe. As well as thinking about who we are and what it means to have friends and to have an identity and to recognize the Self in the Other, and also what is preventing any one of us, at any given time, from being snatched up and taken away.
2.”The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video”, Thomas Ha
At the risk of making my short story recs an “all Thomas Ha, all the time” affair, and although I was a bit late in getting around to this one, I was unsurprisingly very taken with this latest piece in Clarkesworld.
Before reading it I assumed that the titular abbreviation was for “Saint” instead of “Street”, which I have to feel was intentional. Anyway, I dug the way Ha weaves a meta-narrative about a cowboy riding the wastelands into this story of a dystopian New York, a dystopia all the more sinister for how subtle it is, how close at hand it feels.
A story about impermanence, about the weaponized ephemerality of the digital now, and about facing the inevitable with clear eyes and on one’s own terms. Also when he said “People have a tendency to confuse change with improvement. So alteration seems like creation to some” as a writer I felt that lol
3. “A Planet Named Shayol”, Cordwainer Smith
I’ve seen the name Cordwainer Smith (famously the nom de plume of CIA agent, godson of Sun Yat-sen and pioneer in the study of psychological warfare Paul M.A. Linebarger) has come up a bunch recently: in blogposts and podcasts and Atlantic articles and discussions in Discord servers. In the latter case, someone was asking where to start with the fiction of this SF literary titan.
“Scanners Die in Vain” and “The Game of Rat and Dragon” (possibly “The Ballad of Lost C’Mell”) would be the go-to’s, the most well-known and anthologized of his short works, but I wanted to recommend this one, “A Planet Named Shayol”. But before I did, I wanted to have a re-read because when it comes 60-year-old SF short stories you haven’t read in a while, it’s always best to make sure you’re not recommending something that in 2024 would read as foul bullshit.
I am happy to report that (as far as my cishetwhitemale ass can tell, granted) “A Planet Named Shayol” passes that cursory smell test and remains as great of a mindfuck as it was the first time I read it.
In it, our protagonist Mercer has been found guilty of “the crime without a name”, and is sentenced to confinement on the planet Shayol, “the final and uttermost place of chastisement and shame”. It’s a world of grotesque mutations and organ harvesting and unspeakable pain tempered by “a drug so powerful the known universe has forbidden it”, administered bu “a homunculous hashioned out of cattle material” named B’Dikkat.
At some point in Mercer’s stay, the group of prisoners he’s with introduces him to
the girl of the herd. She had grown one body after another, pelvis turning into shoulders and the pelvis below that turning into shoulders again until she was five people long. Her face was unmarred. She tried to be friendly to Mercer.
He was so shocked by her that he dug himself into the soft dry crumbly earth and stayed there for what seemed like a hundred years. He found later that it was less than a full day. When he came out, the long many-bodied girl was waiting for him.
“You didn’t have to come out just for me”, said she.
If I’m quoting so extensively it’s because with Cordwainer Smith more than half the fun is the texture of the prose, his descriptions, the bizarre tics like those “said she” dialogue tags.
The story, like most of Smith’s oeuvre, appears to be in the Canadian public domain so, uh, make of that what you will!
Non-fiction rex: Typebar
Issue #2 of Typebar magazine is out for Patreon subscribers, and should be available shortly for the rest of you mere mortals! If you have not read it, you should, as editor Matt Wolfbridge is assembling a powerful roster of essayists and thinkers attacking an array of topics in trenchant, often polemical fashion. I could highlight Gwen C Katz and Simon MacNeil’s essay in both issue #1 and #2—I was wowed by the former’s relentlessly researched "Science Fiction and the Death of the Sun”, and the latter’s essay “Nobody Wants to Buy the Future: Why Science Fiction Literature is Vanishing” raised loads of hackles when issue #1 dropped, and I’m excited to what happens when issue #2 breaks containment. Also, if you’re hungering for Nostalgia Critic-focused content boy do they ever have you covered.
Not-a-story rec: “The Guy Who Invented Fire”, Shellac
I won’t bore you with anecdotes about mixtapes received from friends in the eighth grade, nor will I wax ecstatic about the drum sound on The Jesus Lizard’s Goat album or get into specifics about which records I owned when or which editions of Primavera Sound I saw Shellac at or what year I kinda (for whatever reason) stopped paying so much attention. I thought I would be treated to many more years of Steve Albini’s incorrect takes re Steely Dan and Prince and his very correct takes about many other things, and was very sad to learn that’s not going to be the case. I never really consciously had “influenced by Steve Albini” as part of my personality in any explicit way but upon further reflection, that’s shit been in there since that old 8th-grade mixtape. fuck, what an icon, a legend. RIP
Self-promo rec: “Some Reflections on the Abstruse Campaign”
If the talk above re Cordwainer Smith and psychological warfare interests you, please check out my story “Some Reflections on the Abstruse Campaign” from issue #4 of Propagule. It’s very directly based on Smith/Linebarger’s book Psychological Warfare, and asks the question “what if you were doing psychological warfare but your enemy was straight-up whooping your ass”