According to a blurb from Michael Bishop found on the front pages of Polyphony 1, "polyphony" means "many voices" or "two or more independent melodic parts sounded together." In the spirit of polyphony, then, I offer this polyvocal review of Polyphony, volumes 1, 2 , and 3. I'll sound my overall themes here, separate out my many voices, and return to my themes in my coda.
My melodies, if you will, are that you should probably buy and read all three volumes of Polyphony. They won't be quite what you expect, nor will you like every story, but all the stories are well written, and some are very lovely indeed. The series is important, and if you want to know where speculative fiction is going, you'll want to read all three volumes.
That said, what is Polyphony?
According to a blurb on its back cover, Polyphony is—
"a new biannual anthology of original short fiction" and the stories included in it "skate gracefully across the boundaries of science fiction, fantasy, magical realism, and literary fiction."
According to the editorial foreword in Volume 1, Polyphony's editors—
"love the unusual stories that strike the readers a glancing blow and shoot off into the darkness of the cracks between literary categories." And they "love to find venues that publish these cutting edge stories—what some people call 'slipstream.'" Later, they say they want "to publish stories that might not fit neatly into literary categories."
As a book, any volume of Polyphony is—
lovely. Publisher and editor Deborah Layne and associate editor Jay Lake have found ways to shape grace, dignity, and continuity. The grace comes from the presentation of the material. Each story is prefaced with biographical notes on and in some cases by the authors, followed by a blank page. Each story is also followed by a blank page. Lest this seem minor, I want to accent the air of dignity it gives the books; the stories are presented as deserving our attention. Likewise, the choice to have a single front cover design for the first two volumes, a flowering branch, but presented against different background covers, leads to continuity. The cover design changed for the third volume, becoming darker and mechanistic, but maintained the same typeface for the name. Combined with the practice of putting the names of all the authors on the cover, these volumes are each recognizably part of a larger whole.
As a product of the small press, Polyphony is—
impressive, a model, and still recognizable at times as a product of the small press. The line-up is impressive. My god, the names here! Taken together, these writers have won just about every award in speculative fiction, not once but many times over, and some, like Carol Emshwiller, are so good that they deserve more to have awards created just for them. I haven't the space to list them here, but any series that includes Carol Em, Andy Duncan (World Fantasy Award), Leslie What (Nebula), Lucius Shepard (World Fantasy, Campbell, Nebula), Alex Irvine (three awards for best first novel), and a host of others is going to be good. (The table of contents for each volume is available on the Wheatland Press website.) Given the Polyeditors' insistence on seeking out new authors for each volume, and the presence of newer writers like Theodora Goss (eligible for the Campbell this year), this series is a good place to find new authors, or authors who are new to you.
I call it a model for the small press because the Polyeditors have planned well, from support, to the release dates, to their dealings with the contributing authors. They are timely and clear, and Jay Lake (more often the public face of the pair) adds notes of humor to his interactions with authors. (Jay also made a point not to include his own work in this volume, though his writing would fit well within it; I respect that.) Finally, it's impressive that P2 was larger than P1, and that P3 is larger still; the success of the series is literally tangible.
When I say Polyphony is still recognizable as a product of the small press, it's because there were more typos than I expected, a small but distracting point.
As a writer, Polyphony makes me feel—
glad, thankful, compelled to be honest, and a bit confused and sad. The foreword to P1 mentioned above discussed the contraction of the mid-list and a desire to pay professional rates. I'm glad anyone's doing this, and I'm thankful that it's folks who seem open to the sort of strangeness I write—and many of these stories are joyously strange.
I must be honest. Polyphony 1 featured invited writers only, but Polyphony 2, 3, and the upcoming Volume 4 were open submissions. I submitted three stories to P2 and P3, and one to P4. All were rejected. Find bias where you will.
I was a bit confused and sad because of the gap between Layne and Lake's version of slipstream and my own. I love many of these stories individually, but I'm not sure why they see slipstream as the editors do, and I'm not sure I want slipstream to go where these volumes suggest it is headed. That said.
Judged by its stated goals, Polyphony is—
confusing, but a success. It is confusing because that foreword to which I keep referring makes it sound like this fiction will cross genre boundaries, and perhaps these stories would be unlikely to find a home in either existing genre publications or the mainstream/literary magazines. Neither is the case, for several reasons.
Most of the work in these volumes is not cutting edge in the sense of being new. Most of it does not cross boundaries in new ways; much of it does not cross genre boundaries at all. Alex Irvine's story "The Uterus Garden" (P2) is straightforward near-future science fiction, and would be at home in any genre publication. Please understand: that's not a criticism. That story is quite good. Its gritty moral perspective and willingness to take a stand on political issues makes it one of my favorites. But the fact remains—the story stays within the genre. Ditto Honna Swenson's "Animal Attributes"—it is very good science fiction which raising serious moral questions. But it crosses no genre boundaries.
The same is true for many other stories. Barry Malzberg's "The Men's Support Group" (P3) is a well-written piece about, as the title suggests, a men's support group. It is an intelligent, articulate examination of gender, AIDS, and storytelling—and it is a completely mainstream story, of the sort that was staged by every socially conscious theater group in the nation twenty years ago, when the AIDS epidemic first entered national consciousness.
Something similar could be said for James Van Pelt's "Do Good" (P1). A teacher himself, Van Pelt captures the strained, ambiguous relationships in the school system among teacher, faculty, and administration well. His main character is haunted by his own ideals, by the past, and perhaps by a ghost. It's a fine story, and would be welcome anywhere.
I'd say that at least ten of the stories through the three volumes are straightforward mainstream fiction. A few others are mild riffs on existing genres, and/or ambiguous. For example, the werewolf in Maureen McHugh's "Laika Comes Back Safe" (P1) could be real, or could be a claim made by a disturbed adolescent. If real, the lycanthropy functions as a symbol of exclusion, isolation, and desire, rather than that of wonder or the weird.
Structurally, most stories in Polyphony are—
conservative. Yeah, I'm sure a number of the writers included here would object, but they are. These stories are artistically successful, and thematically striking, but almost all of them are structurally conservative. All stories in all three volumes are told in either the first or third person, except for stories like Barth Anderson's "The Mystery of Our Baraboo Lands" (P3, in which there is a shifting, collective narration) or Michael Bishop's "Andalusian Triptych 1962" (P2), which shifts points of view. There are no second person narratives, no streams of consciousness, and no metafictional/cybernetic dismantling of the idea of character.
By contrast, the few stories that are structurally daring draw attention to themselves. For example, "Dead White Guys" by Bruce Holland Rogers (P2) delights for its ambition. It is a symmetrina, a form in which the larger whole is made up of a set of shorter pieces linked by theme and governed by specific mathematical rules. When Rogers combines this with his riffs on the American founding fathers, placing and re-placing them and their words into different times and contexts, he adds the allure of the riddle with a near fractal design to that of his fine prose.
The characters in all three volumes of Polyphony are—
believable, rendered well and sensitively, and clumped into odd demographic clusters.
When I say that they are believable, I mean that these authors do an exceptional job of making even strange or intense characters realistic. I had never read anything by Sally Carteret before, but her two stories featuring her rock star heroine ("Carlos Manson Lives" (P2) and "Handsome, Winsome Johnny" (P3)) are stunning. She captures the dark, fast intensity of rock and its lifestyle amazingly well. I found myself slowing down as I read her stories, trying to stretch them out, and I'll be seeking out more of her work. Equally impressive was Leon J. West's treatment of an autistic character in "A Grand Unified Theory" (P3).
These characters are rendered both well and sensitively, as are the sad poltergeist (perhaps) child in Nina Kiriki Hoffman's "Wild Talents" (P3), all the characters in both of Vandana Singh's stories, and a host of others. One might even define a Polyphony author in part by his or her sensitivity to the small bends and twists of character.
And these characters clump into odd demographic clusters. There are an awful lot of artists in these books: multiple painters, singers, writers, even speculative fiction writers, and arts less common, such as Dreaming in "Dreaming for Hire, By Appointment Only" by Dianna Rogers (P2). There are also a lot of academics. Most characters are middle class or above, which removes a lot of the possible political edge. Most characters are white; most are heterosexual. I mention this not out of a sense of political correctness, but more to note what the series does and does not do: this is not on the cutting edge of gender politics or any other politics. It focuses on the personal implications of the fantastic, rather than, say, the political.
If they don't cut edges, what do the authors in Polyphony do?
As mentioned, they evoke character exceptionally well. Beyond this, they do three things with special grace and force: they use the fantastic as metaphor, incorporate the fantastic into the social, and they write good prose.
The fantastic as metaphor is visible throughout these series, but the example that leaps to mind is "Wounds" by Celia Marsh (P3). In this story, the main character's body heals with exceptional speed, so when she wishes to keep some memento safe, she secrets it under her skin. Summarized that way, it sounds almost ridiculous; I assure you it is not. Marsh describes this ability with a bravura style that made me stop reading and clap my hands (literally).
The fantastic is incorporated into the social in a variety of ways. Vandana Singh does it in both "The Room on the Roof" (P1) and "The Wife" (P3) by describing Indian familial interactions vividly, providing key details that sketch in a larger context. Van Pelt does it in "Do Good" by capturing the layered tensions of a high school, observing how they reveal themselves in even the way chalk is used.
As for fine prose, I am happy to report that this is too common to single out examples, though I enjoyed the flexible humor of Victoria Elizabeth Garcia's "Anthropology" (P1), the energy of Sally Carteret's stories, and the lovely, lovely lines of Carol Emshwiller's stories (both "The Doctor" in P1 and "Coo People" in P2).
If the stories in these volumes are slipstream, what do the stories in Polyphony tell us about slipstream?
They tell us its focus, and how slipstream differs from magical realism and other genres.
Repeatedly, these stories focus on two interwoven themes: the human heart and beauty. These stories use the fantastic as methods to evoke emotion. They focus on the personal, the interpersonal, and the social. In doing so, they strive for, and often achieve, beauty.
In their introduction to Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, editors Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris note that in magical realism, "Societies, rather than personalities, tend to rise and fall." That's not the case in Polyphony, or rather, it is rare, and striking when it is the focus. Lucius Shepard's "The Same Old Story" (P2) focuses here, as does, in a more whimsical and charming vein, Jesse Walker's "A Short History of the Roosterville Poetry Massacre" (P3). A few other stories touch this theme, but they are in the minority. If this is slipstream, it differs from magical realism through its focus. Slipstream focuses here and now, and domestically and socially, rather than magical realism's explosive intrusions of the repressed past, and its focus on entire societies.
The fantastic elements in these stories tend to be domestic and . . . psychological. I oppose these qualities to the metaphysical qualities of the fantastic in the works of Jewish fabulists (Kafka, Singer, etc.) or some of the South Americans (Borges), but also to the ethical challenges faced by the heroes of high fantasy (Tolkien is the obvious example here). We know what the characters experience, and what this means to them; we rarely know the ethical or philosophical issues at stake. (These are some of the places where I differ with the editors over what slipstream should be.) Finally, the fantastic elements spring from character, rather than growing out of the external physical laws, as in hard science fiction. This makes this collection more immediately recognizable as artistically ambitious, and aligns Polyphony with various high art traditions.
What have I left out about Polyphony?
Too much, too much by far. I managed to get this far and not praise the lovely bravery of Alan DeNiro's "Our Byzantium" (P3) which blends the fall of societies and personalities perfectly, or the fun of stories like Lisa Goldstein's "The Arts of Malediction" (P2) or Don Webb's "Doc Hawthorne's Beautiful Daughter" (P3), the latter of which recasts, as the title suggests, Hawthorne's story "Rappaccini's Daughter" in the American West. But I hope I've given you enough of a sense of what Polyphony is and why it matters for you to go find the books yourself.
And so, in conclusion, I say about Polyphony Volumes 1, 2, and 3—
that you should probably buy and read all three of them. (If you can only afford one volume, I'd suggest P3, for its variety.) It won't be quite what you expect, or everything I wish a slipstream series to be. Nor will you like every story, but all of the stories are well written, and some are very lovely indeed. The series is important, and if you want to know more about one of the major directions speculative fiction is going, you'll want to read Polyphony.
Works Cited: Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community.