I read the first twelve issues of Clarkesworld Magazine more or less as they came out, October 2006 to September 2007. Each issue featured two short stories (literally—there was only one piece over 7500 words the entire year), with no frills except a "cover" illustration (recent issues include more stories and articles, essays, and interviews). This focus on stories alone worked because they are what so many genre magazine stories are not: memorable.
I wondered which the editors would select for this first year's anthology, but of course, since they're so short, no selection—that is, no deselection—was necessary. We get the entire year's run of the magazine in one volume, in the exact order the stories were published.
Presumably, given the magazine's stated policy, the first of each pair of stories was commissioned by editor Sean Wallace, the second selected by editor Nick Mamatas from open submissions. I don't see any particular pattern to them, if that's accurate, except that the commissioned stories tend to be longer, and only they go over a 4000 word limit. If that's a pattern.
There's also no particular pattern to the type of story to be found here, except that fantasy outweighs science fiction, which is perhaps par for magazines that run both. We have alternate history, near- and far-future science fiction, fables and fantasies derived from other cultures, traditional secondary world fantasy (or at least, fiction that appears to be set in such), modern and historical fantasy, horror, and one or two tales with no speculative content. Many stories verge into that loosey-goosey catch-all, "slipstream," meaning genre fiction that has abandoned many genre markers and central genre concerns, is for the most part literary rather than popular fiction, but still plays with genre, borrows from it, or plays off it. The storytelling runs from straightforward and traditional to postmodern to surrealistic to the downright opaque and obscure.
The avowed intention of the editors was to catch the audience's interest and to entertain. The first year of Clarkesworld delivers on this more often than not, more often than could be reasonably expected. Do the stories always work? Not for me. But that would be a bit much to expect. In fact, it would be a bit creepy. But those that do, do so admirably.
The book's one alternate history, Lavie Tidhar's "304 Adolph Hitler Strasse," is one of the stories that has stuck with me since I first read it. Triumphant Nazism has made Jews fetish objects for a new generation, which reincarnates them through dress-up and slash fiction. The bond between oppressor and oppressed lies in an ineradicable underlying humanity that, when denied, resurfaces in twisted form. Through the connection: oppressed—suppressed—forbidden—prurient, the suppressed, as it often does, has assumed erotic force. The fetishizing is outlawed, forbidden, but the fantasy, in a way, subsumes and takes over the story in which it is supposedly overcome, undercutting the victory of the forces of suppression, triumphing, however pathetically.
Both "Clockmaker's Requiem" by Barth Anderson and "The Beacon" by Darja Malcolm-Clarke take us to worlds so alien that at first they almost seem to escape the truism that all stories, no matter what they seem to be about, are about people and their relations. Of course, they don't, quite. Anderson's dream-like, precise, ornate, and complex world of manipulable, individual time and living "companion clocks" is reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland (particularly the Mad Tea Party and the Mad Hatter's description of relations with time), with a flavoring of M. John Harrison's Viriconium, Ruthven Todd's The Lost Traveller (itself Carroll-influenced?), and the late fairy tales of James Thurber. The story is about freedom and its loss, but in a context that's hard to relate to. Perhaps for that reason it's more intriguing; the strangeness puts us beyond "business as usual"; we can't simply breeze through this story and nod in passing. The same can be said for Malcolm-Clarke's story of a crisis in a society of intelligent insects living in a city amongst the clouds, the book's most interesting science fiction story.
Other science fiction stories include Jetse De Vries's essay-like "Qubit Conflicts," about post-singularity AIs confronting their limitations, and Erica L. Satifka's "Automatic," a dour story about post-apocalyptic humanity living marginally off aliens that goes nowhere because the world of the story gives one nowhere to go. Both are good, if not remarkable.
Another story that stayed with me, "The Moby Clitoris of His Beloved" by Ian Watson and Roberto Quaglia, dances on the edge of fantasy without, I think, ever dipping into the truly impossible. On the surface, it's about a man's obsession with consuming whale clitoris sashimi, and the various stratagems he employs to attain this almost unreachable goal. The underlying subject is the vexed relationship of fantasy, with its mingled aspects of eroticism and power (since that's the way fantasy tends to run, when it doesn't go in the direction of safety and solace), to the real: the enhancement of the real by fantasy, the usurpation of the real by fantasy, and the gravity, seniority, and ultimately, the unremitting attraction of the real. It's a provocative slap and tickle of a story that, while somewhat transgressive and intentionally shocking, is still not (through lack of prurience) offensive, to my mind. Despite the subject matter, it's funny and even sort of charming.
Among the stories tending more to identifiable fantasy is Caitlin Kiernan's "The Ape's Wife," the longest story in the book, a post-modern examination, in effortlessly strong and graceful prose, of Ann Darrow "after Kong" that tries out many possible fates for the fictional heroine. I don't consider myself particularly qualified to give feminist readings, but it seems pretty obvious that this story is about, among other things, shifting from a male-dominated myth (the godlike Kong) to a female- and goddess-dominated myth. But the final privileging of one story over the others is somewhat confusing, nor is it easy to see, knowing what came before, how this particular fate came about. Nor do we know how Ann fell into the hell of unrealized possibilities we find her in. But the whole is quite readable.
Also very readable, and charming, among somewhat "slippery" fantasies, is Jenny Davidson's "The Other Amazon," about the Amazon that can supply books that don't exist—and about the magic of wanting and being open to what comes. It's thoughtful, intelligent, and, especially for booklovers, a sheer pleasure. Vylar Kaftan's "Lydia’s Body," a fantasy about a modern-day woman caught in the body of a pioneer girl living alone with her father in 1838, is a dark parable about being trapped by a wrong desire or wish in a progressively worsening situation. The writing—economical, even tight, without being ostentatiously spare—mirrors the tension inherent in the characters’ predicament. Like several stories in this collection, it has a devastating emotional sting.
Elizabeth Bear's "Orm the Beautiful" tells about a last dragon sacrificing itself to save the heritage of his kind. Bear avoids the threatening Scylla and Charybdis of the maudlin and precious and pulls off a sweetly pretty story about beauty, loyalty, and loss, though an occasional straining to move the reader renders certain passages more obscure and less graceful than they might have been.
Several stories imitate or play off the fables and fairy tales of other cultures. In "Urchins, While Swimming," Catherynne M. Valente mutes her sometime tendency to verbal excess and opaque surrealism, dancing gracefully on the edge of poetic delicacy, to give an affecting fable about the descendants of a Slavic water-spirit trying to live in the world and be "normal." The story reflects on how the strangeness within us must be adapted or controlled so that we can live among others, and how at times it threatens to destroy us or to overwhelm those who become close to us. Ekaterina Sedia's "The Taste of Wheat" is a sometimes disturbing but still interesting Slavic/Buddhist mix about enlightenment, reincarnation, the oneness of life, transmigration of souls, diligence, loyalty to family, and that great mystical/New Age truism, "What we think, we become" (p. 206).
In his introduction, Mamatas says, "my primary goal was to cultivate the audience of a popular magazine and not the audience of a literary journal," but these stories are rarely what I would call "popular fiction"; I think I'd put only Cat Rambo's "I'll Gnaw Your Bones, the Manticore Said," a fantasy set in a generic-sounding, roughly pre-industrial fantasy world, firmly in that category. This is not to dismiss this entertaining story because of its relative accessibility. Its best element is the worldly, pragmatic, down-to-earth voice of the female protagonist, who is not necessarily nice, but is quite likeable, and sounds like someone you or I might know. Rambo is a writer to watch, remarkable among "writers to watch" in that she really is a writer to watch.
In general it seems we disagree either on the nature of these stories or on the meaning of "popular." Or both. Or perhaps by "popular" he meant not "adapted to the understanding, taste, or means, of the people ... not seeking to appeal to refined or classical taste" but rather "liked or admired by the people or by people generally or by [a] specified class" (definitions two and three in The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1982), the "specified class," in this case, being people who regularly read genre short fiction. This seems to be a diminishing group but increasingly literate, not individually, perhaps, but overall, as the less literate fall away, and more and more print ceases to be the preferred means for the conveyance of "story." Written fiction is returning to its elitist roots, before the period of its mass popularity—say, roughly, 1830-1930. As the written story falls out of importance, its most artful form, the short story, becomes a niche item. The genre short story, at this point, is a pimple on the neck of popular culture.
Some other secondary-world fantasies move away from the “popular" mode of Rambo’s in ways illustrative of how the popular and literary can differ. Holly Phillips's "The Oracle Spoke" is concerned with character, ideas, and emotions, in the manner of mainstream literary writing, more than with fantastic elements or plot, though not more so than, say, the writing of Ursula Le Guin. The story’s secondary world seems to be at about the World War I level of development, but some magic—at least, the power of an oracle that speaks through an unwilling channel—operates. The background reminded me slightly of Garth Nix's Sabriel, but Phillips's is a far more grim, downbeat story, about the use and misuse of power, in which power, in the form of the oracle, almost seems to take on a life of its own. The story is quite well done; the effect of a first reading was to make me immediately put Phillips on my mental "get more" list.
Jeff VanderMeer's "The Third Bear" has some strong, even haunting details, but as a story is not really satisfying. It tells of a bear-like but sentient creature invoked (perhaps) by hatred and anger, that terrorizes a rural community. It could be summarized as, "Bad stuff happens. Really, it's quite bad, and there's nothing much you can do about it, except maybe run away or wait it out. The End." Even Camus' La Peste (1947), which features an overwhelming plague that will almost certainly return, gives the characters more room to struggle and the reader more to hold onto than this. In popular fiction, story is predominant; in literary fiction, it’s often dispensable.
Sharon Mock's "Attar of Roses" is narrated by a sorcerous princess speaking to her lost betrothed. Mock tries to achieve effects of allusive mystery and suggestive wonder by withholding details and explanations, by suggesting more than she tells, one way of making a story seem more complex and “literary"—sort of the opposite of “dumbing down." But the story would have been more enjoyable if it were a bit more accessible.
Horror is represented in Realms by several stories. Carrie Laben's "Something in the Mermaid Way," a tale of a cold-blooded family of women surviving through the gruesome concoction of exotic keepsakes, starts as grotesquely whimsical and ends as grotesquely disturbing. It’s reminiscent of the Ambrose Bierce story "Oil of Dog," but without the creepily jovial tone.
Michael De Kler's "The First Female President," which has no speculative content besides a gesture toward a science fictional concept, is brutal and hard to read, but in case one is or becomes desensitized to the brutality—and part of the story’s point is that we are desensitized—the crushing last line slams home the anguish, suppressed rage, and sheer despair inherent in the story throughout.
Even if the meaning of "popular" in genre short fiction has shifted with the concomitant shrinking and increase in sophistication of the audience, I retain my own dinosaurian opinion: real popular fiction, like popular music from the period of "The Great American Songbook," is readily accessible to the mass of people and, moreover, has the indefinable quality of being "hummable." The stories in Realms? Not so much. The enjoyment they provide is more like that of visiting an art gallery compounded with the pleasure of doing a puzzle. It is primarily "literary." In some cases the effort of solving the puzzle seemed to me to outweigh the potential reward. Paul Tremblay's "There's No Light Between Floors" seems to be a cautionary tale about man-made disaster, for instance, the use of atomic weapons. Despite some good lines, it mostly remains obscure and therefore unaffecting. And I am not sure what Darren Speegle's "Transtexting Pose" is about. On the surface, a man buys a picture—a sort of LCD wall display—from three oddly creepy girls. He then seems to enter into it, encountering or observing various unsavory groups of people, leading to an obscure denouement in which he seems, in circular fashion, to come back to the little girls. It seems to be about, as the little girls say, "Our Virtual World" (p. 197), about the unmaking and refashioning of reality in art, dreaming, and drug-induced visions: "Promise of something that delights when inhaled, that numbs when exhaled, that dissolves when regarded" (p. 204). I assume the point was clear to Speegle, and perhaps Mamatas and Wallace, but it isn't to me (after two readings and a skim) and without meaning to flatter myself, I don't think it will be to a lot of other readers. The point of this kind of "difficulty" in writing, mostly an invention of the twentieth century, has always escaped me.
As I've said, not every story will please every reader. But generally these stories have a strength and vitality that makes them worthwhile. They are not airless (to use a Stephen King term), and even when difficult, do not usually give the impression of preening, of being difficult merely to impress us. They do not strain to be weird or uncouth or provocative or even meaningful. They are not self-indulgent or self-important. There is no sense that the editors had some dogma about a particular type or mode of story that drove their selection, other than what they thought good. As a result, perhaps, many of the stories are distinctive and memorable, and the best are powerful.
Even if not quite "popular."
Bill Mingin, a graduate of Clarion West, has published seventeen short stories, with more forthcoming, and more than two hundred nonfiction pieces, including reviews in Publishers Weekly. He currently reviews audiobooks for AudioFile Magazine. He's married and lives in central New Jersey, where he runs a small book-export business.