For 30 years, Lewis Shiner has consistently produced compelling fiction that has explored the numinous: those flashes of the overwhelming vastness of reality that are revealed in slivers through the interaction with the fantastic. Before terms like "slipstream" and "interstitial" were coined, Shiner was creating cross-genre fiction that defied easy categorization, a move that occasionally has been a detriment to his career. Time after time, his stories and novels have been praised for their brilliance, yet this has not led to the recognition appropriate to such encomium, and prior to the very recent past, his books all quietly went out of print soon after publication. But this trend is hopefully to be rectified with the release of Collected Stories from Subterranean Press, a comprehensive collation of his short fiction.
In the book's introduction, Karen Joy Fowler aptly describes the main character of a typical Lewis Shiner story:
The Shiner protagonist is often a man for whom things have not panned out. This man longs for connection. He longs for a future he won't find, for a past he didn't have. [ . . . ] The Shiner protagonist most likely won't get what he wants. Or he will and it won't be what he wanted after all. The emotional world of these stories feels very like the real world to me. (pp. 2-3)
One gets the sense when reading Shiner's fiction that he's writing for the little guy, the person who continually gets screwed over by economic circumstance, or ideological struggle, or racial inequality. Shiner is truly at his best when tackling themes political. He writes about these issues with such exactitude that he reveals unexpected beauty hidden within. In his stories, politics always favor the wealthy and powerful (much like the real world), but his characters carry on regardless, always on the search for Truth kept hidden by those in power (although it must be said that none of Shiner's stories approach polemic; each still firmly prioritizes the narrative itself).
The pieces in Collected Stories range from flash fiction to novelettes, 41 stories which run the gamut from hardboiled crime to pulp fantasy to socialist parable to indefinable fantastika. The collection is organized neither chronologically nor thematically (except in the overarching sense), but more for a sense of flow. This mixed-up approach may make it harder to track Shiner's progression as a writer, but any disadvantage is compensated for by the way in which it encourages a reader to view the collection more as a musical playlist, with highs and lows, with short pieces and long, balanced to give a holistic view of Shiner's career.
Of particular note are the following four stories, for their narrative power and political exploration: "Perfidia" (2004), "Primes" (2000), "Love in Vain" (1988), and "The Death of Che Guevara" (2009). As such, it will be necessary to discuss the plot of each story. (Although you have no excuse to be spoiled, as you can find each of these stories at Shiner's free fiction project, The Fiction Liberation Front). These four tales are a good representative sample of Shiner's preoccupations and thematic obsessions, as well as his masterful yet understated writing style.
The lead-off story, "Perfidia," speculates on the death of jazz musician Glenn Miller. An antiques collector named Frank Delacorte comes across a rare wire recording of what sounds like Miller being beaten to death three days after he supposedly disappeared on a plane flight from London to Paris in 1944. Delacorte follows the trail to an antiques market in Paris and, through a series of connections, to the recording's original owner. What follows is the revelation of a conspiracy by the U.S. Army to cover up Miller's death, and intimations from a shady government operative that serious financial and legal consequences could arise from this information being made public.
Though the story is only 32 pages long, it is novelistically layered. Not only a complete and suspenseful thriller, "Perfidia" includes a brief romantic affair between the narrator and a British woman on holiday, and links to the actions of the narrator's father in World War II when he helped to liberate the work camp at Dachau. The narrator's progressive politics (quite transparently a stand-in for Shiner's own views) are both confirmed by the French antiques dealers with whom he interacts and challenged by his British paramour.
What results is an unmasking of U.S. government cover-ups that stretch all the way back to WWII, and that reflect directly on the secretive face-saving policies of the Bush administration, which was still in power when this short story was first published. Such topicality is perhaps why such a recent story was chosen to open the collection, but Shiner's more remarkable feat here is to knit these various ingredients into a humanistic and entirely probable whole.
In "Primes," the population of the Earth has doubled overnight as a result of the merging of two parallel worlds. One Earth has intruded upon the reality of another; Earth has been invaded by Earth Prime. In one, Dan Quayle is the president; in the other (presumably ours), it's Bill Clinton.
Nick is a computer programmer working for a small software company in North Carolina, and he arrives home on the night of the "Prime Event" to see that his wife Angela's first husband David, who had died in the Earth Prime universe, is living there instead. As the world tries to deal with twelve billion people's demand for resources, Nick must deal with getting laid off from his job (as they can't afford to pay twice as many people) and the resurfacing of Angela's feelings for David. He becomes a refugee in his own house and his own city, and must take on the disassociation that comes with being unwanted.
But what makes this story more than just a tale of overpopulation is the reaction from the residents of the "original" Earth. The "primes" (those who have come from Earth Prime) are treated with resentment and scorn, taking up space and resources that don't belong to them. Hunting season opens up for gang bangers and military juntas to kill duplicate versions of people that have already been executed. The U.S. government (led by Quayle; Clinton is appointed Special Advisor on Prime Affairs) declares martial law and sets up a volunteer-run peacekeeping force to "protect private property, safeguard human life, and provide an orderly transition" (p. 101). That is, "Primes" explores the intolerance and bigotry seen around the world whenever a large group of refugees arrives from foreign shores. Nick's truck get "repossessed" by one of these volunteer peacekeepers at gunpoint, and as Nick hands over the keys, the man says:
'You prime fuck. You think if I did kill you, anybody would give a good God damn?' Nick saw then that the man was more afraid than Nick was, that Nick had caught him off guard by showing up so unexpectedly, that the man had failed to think through what it would mean to point his gun at someone. (p. 108)
In contrast, "Love in Vain" doesn't seem overtly political at first. Charlie Dean Harris is an imprisoned serial killer with a singular gift: the ability to bend reality to bring into existence murders that never originally occurred. He is visited by the narrator, a prosecuting attorney named Dave McKenna, who travels to Austin hoping to trap Harris in a lie. Instead, Harris not only discusses the details of a fake murder that McKenna has invented, but leads McKenna and the local authorities straight to the imagined victim's buried corpse.
In the midst of this incredible case, McKenna is dealing with a marriage thoroughly on the rocks, and the feelings of nostalgia that come from returning to Austin after a long time away. He hooks up with Jack, a lawyer friend whom he'd met at the University of Texas. Jack's flamboyantly misogynist comments echo those made by Harris, but McKenna seems more willing to forgive his old friend. Jack reintroduces McKenna to Kristi Spector, the object of McKenna's unrequited lust in high school, who is now dancing in a strip club and living in a trailer park.
Sex and death, eros and thanatos, permeate the story, and the interaction between these thematic opposites challenges our notions of them. Near the story's beginning, as Charlie Dean Harris is graphically detailing his murder of an 18-year-old student, he justifies his action by saying, "I killed her to have sex with her" (p. 230); similarly, the story ends with Jack watching the blonde guitarist in a Heart music video and saying, "Sweet suffering Jesus. Couldn't you just fuck that to death?" (p. 244). The idea that Harris and Jack, despite their differing circumstances, have such similar views towards women is a chilling one, especially in light of Jack's encouragement of McKenna's sexual liaison with Kristi, an act that becomes the final nail in the coffin of McKenna's failing marriage. And if politics can be seen as behavior and beliefs within civil group interactions, the politics of this story are as ironic as it comes.
Lastly, "The Death of Che Guevara" was written especially for Collected Stories, and explores a fascinating alternate post-revolutionary life and death for the Argentinian guerilla, diverging from our own history when, according to Shiner's author notes, Tania, one of Che's lieutenants during his disastrous Bolivian campaign, "avoids the ambush that killed her in our reality, and thus is able to save Che" (p. 470). The story, told in interview format, is a fascinating account of how the rest of Che's life might have spun out had he not been executed.
Because Che survives, he helps to usher in a revolution for his native Argentina, repels a U.S. invasion that leads to the U.S. election of Eugene McCarthy and an early end to the Vietnam War, overthrows Stroessner in Paraguay, and sees much of Latin America (Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala) freed from imperialist rule through socialist rebellion. McCarthy is assassinated by the CIA after winning a second term, and the USA is plunged into chaos, ending with a coup d'état by the U.S. Army led by General Westmoreland, which transforms the country into a third-world dictatorship. A wall is built along the US-Mexico border, not for keeping Mexican illegals from entering the U.S. (as it is in our present reality), but to prevent U.S. refugees from flooding into Mexico. The Berlin Wall comes down in 1975, and West Germany is welcomed into the Eastern Bloc.
But what is even more remarkable about Shiner's revisioning of Américan history is the effect on Che of a French mystic who calls herself Agochar and convinces Che to rethink revolution in favor of non-violence. Agochar's charismatic persuasion, and her reminders of Che's compassion for the common man, convince Che that he is the next successor to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. In the eyes of Tania, this means that Che has betrayed the Revolution, which leads to her decision to martyr him before he can undo all the good they have done.
Tania's evocation of Shiner's alternate world, from the point of view of someone who knew Che closely and was actually there, is a fascinating thought experiment in how socialism, rather than free-market capitalism, could set free the underclasses of the world. An intriguing hypothesis, and one that would likely gain more agreement outside of the USA than within (if the furore surrounding the word "socialist" in contemporary U.S. politics is anything to go by).
But even if you're not a fan of fiction strongly influenced by politics, there's still a lot to enjoy here. "Mozart in Mirrorshades" (1985, written with Bruce Sterling) takes the Many Worlds hypothesis explored in "Primes" and applies it to the trope of time travel, setting up humorous commentary about corporate exploitation in a slick and fast-paced package. "White City" (1990) gives a poetic alternate account of Nikola Tesla's appearance at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. "Oz" (1988) is a flash piece with the impact of a grenade, which presents the truly jarring conflation of Ozzy Osbourne and Lee Harvey Oswald. And "The Tale of Mark the Bunny" (1999) manages to tell a socialist parable using talking rabbits.
With Collected Stories, Lewis Shiner cements his position as one of the SF field's most accomplished practitioners. His humanism and his compassion are evident in even the more pessimistic explorations of power struggles, and reveal a thoughtful and erudite exploration of how and why human beings treat one another the way they do. Shiner's prose sparkles with humanity, with empathy, and with clarity. Taken as a whole, the collection is a gift of narrative, a multifaceted examination into what it means to be a human being in any universe.
[Postscript: In addition to this formidable collection, Subterranean Press plans to bring all of Shiner's novels back into print as trade paperback "Definitive Editions"; the first four of these, Frontera, Deserted Cities of the Heart, Glimpses, and 2008's critically-acclaimed Black and White, are now available.]
Jason Erik Lundberg is an American expatriate living in Singapore, and the author of The Time Traveler's Son (2008), Four Seasons in One Day (2003, with Janet Chui), and over 80 short stories, articles, and book reviews (several of which can be found here at Strange Horizons). In addition, he is the co-editor of Scattered, Covered, Smothered (2004) and A Field Guide to Surreal Botany (2008), both published by Two Cranes Press. His solo work has appeared (or will soon) in such venues as Subterranean Magazine, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, The Third Alternative, Sybil's Garage, Polyphony, Electric Velocipede, and Qarrtsiluni, and has been honorably mentioned (twice) in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, nominated for the SLF Fountain Award, and shortlisted for the Brenda L. Smart Award for Short Fiction. A graduate of the Clarion Writers' Workshop and the Creative Writing Master's program at North Carolina State University, Lundberg now teaches English language and literature at Hwa Chong Institution.