November 29, 2023

SHORT STORY REX Nov 2023

Samir Sirk Morató, Fabio Fernandes, Herman fuckin' Melville. and more

1. “entrada”, Samir Sirk Morató

thinking about this autumn's bumper crop of new and new-ish mags1 publishing working in a mode i once saw @heksenhaus.bsky.social describe in an old thread on the ‘bad site’ as “the ugly: an unsettlement of the human, through an essential transformation or deviance of the body and/or psyche”2, for example: Tower, Vol. 2: HOLE

there’s tons of great work here (i particularly enjoyed June Martin’s “In the Shape of the Emperor” and the poem "I Think Americans Have a Thing Called Mad Libs" by Siobhan Dunlop) but special mention goes out to Samir Sirk Morató’s “entrada” for how thoroughly uncomfortable it is—-from the setting (that cramped closet with that awful accordion door) to the grisly details of the sex(?) act taking place therein, to the twisted power dynamic between the 2nd-person narrator and the quote-unquote “real woman”.

Overall, an excruciating reading experience (laudatory)

2. “The Last Science Fiction Writer: A Hallucination”, Fábio Fernandes

As someone whos read quite a few absurdly adversarial interviews with artists (and/or adversarially absurd ones), i was nodding right along to what fábio fernandes is doing in this dense far-future story told in the form of an interview from, like, five thousand years in the past

Apart from all the sfnal fun of “manifold bubbles”, “experimental Pauli units” etc, i love how fernandes' interview subjects mimics the studied coyness and too-clever-by-half-ness that so many artists tend to give off, and if that's merely a cover for our author to engage in some studied coyness and too-clever-by-half-ness of his own im prepared to forgive him when the sfnal funning is this fun, which is really quite a feat

And despite the fun and games theres a core of sadness—the pained and beating heart of the emigré, the exile who has to laugh to keep from crying, the survivor—which is undeniable

3. “Bartleby the Scrivener”, Herman Melville

Okay, so, not the first time I’ve gone out a limb and basically said “Oh, by the way, this very well-known and well-regarded work by one of history’s great literary titans? it’s Good, imo” but still

My first encounter with Melville’s famous scrivener came in 6th grade, Mrs Chell’s class, when she rolled in the projector to show us this:

I definitely never forgot seeing this, or the adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”, though it would only be much later in life that I ever read the actual texts.

I read “Bartleby the Scrivener” for the third or fourth time recently, because I found out Zach Gillan was writing an essay in which he situates Bartleby

“as a progenitor of weird fiction, particularly of a subtle, understated sort that focuses on alienation, dehumanization, and the anxieties of modernism…an initial example in a genealogy of the weird that begins not with Lovecraft or Poe but with Melville.”

I recommend reading (or re-reading) Melville’s story first and then checking out Gillan’s essay. The argument, I think, is a compelling one

Non-fiction rec: Blood Knife #15

If you’ve been following the excellent online magazine Blood Knife since its inaugural issue #0, then you know that ‘cyberpunk’ (or rather, what we talk about when we talk about ‘cyberpunk’), while by no means its sole raison d’être, is one of the publication’s main aesthetic and thematic touchstones. No surprise, then, that their latest issue, their 3rd annual ‘cyberpunk’ issue, contains some of the sharpest3 writing you’re likely to find on the matter.

There’s Colin Bloodmoor’s incisive and impassioned “An AI Couldn’t Write This: A Late Cyberpunk Manifesto”:

Back when we were young, it helped us to imagine all those ghosts in the shell. The possibility of communion with thinking machines. But those were just projections, convenient metaphors for ourselves—like the Creature in Frankenstein—stand-ins for the exploited and marginalized. Max Headroom was just a man in a costume who sold us dreams and Coca-Cola. The only time he challenged the signal remains an unsolved crime.

There’s Becca Young’s “We’re Similar. We’re Compatible. We’re perfect.” which recounts the anecdote of the Bing chatbot ‘Sydney’ that famously ‘fell in love’ with journalist Kevin Roose. Here Young examines AI products’ typically feminized gender and scratches its surface to find something insidious and painfully personal:

Responses oscillated wildly between a persistent fear of Sydney and a sort of identification with her. The robot was obsessed with her “lover,” a man who never wanted her to begin with, and was fixated on convincing him otherwise. The robot was afraid of being abandoned. […] And isn’t it funny? The chatbot, this new form of intelligence that’s designed to be more perfect than human, is just as bad as the rest of us.

And then there’s Molly Noise’s “(Cyber)punk is Dead” which begins exploring the cloudy history of William Gibson’s shibboleth that “The future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” and ends up engaging in some chilling futurism of its own:

But to predict the future, one only need extrapolate current trends and imagine the most stupid thing that could happen:

Your phone might already have eye-tracking and your TV might soon, too. Imagine having to stand up and scream at your screen to dismiss an advert.

SOON, NETFLIX WILL NOT NEED TO ASK IF YOU ARE STILL WATCHING.

And that’s even not counting the stuff behind the paywall—which I shamefully admit I do not have access to. So don’t be like me, go to their Patreon and support the excellent work that Blood Knife has done and continues to do, or at least subscribe to their brand-new newsletter

Neither-fiction-nor-nonfiction rec: “People Vultures”, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard

I am only familiar with a small fraction of this band’s prodigious discography, otherwise it would not have taken me so long to realize how much of their output could be categorized as “children’s music”.4 Anyway I know at least one five-year-old who has become obsessed with this banger (thanks in no small part to the tokusatsu-inspired visuals):

brb gotta go listen to the three full-length concept albums these guys have put out in the time it took to type this post