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handful_ofdustNot quite pissing rain outside by it is coming down, fairly steadily. Last night at choir, we tried to put a bunch of really complicated songs together; I kept up as well as I could, though I think planting myself next to the right people would be a smart move from now on, because when I blend with all four sections, I often tend to completely lose the part I'm supposed to be singing and revert straight back to the main melodic through-line. Harmony isn't something I've ever tried to do before, and it's pretty fascinating. Meanwhile, my choir-mates continue to run the gamut from fun and friendly to eccentric, dour and rejecting; lucky for me I'm just as happy if/when people leave me alone. There's something useful about being an introvert, occasionally.
Anyhow: I'm up now, noodling around on my desktop and trying to move forward with various things. At 2:00 PM I have to leave for school, so I can pick Cal up and escort him to that "Reconciliation" class in the library before rushing back home, changing and getting ready for BodyCombat/YogaFit. This will be the first time I've worked out in a week, functionally, because of all that crap over the weekend and my subsequent drama. Should be...fun, yes, that's what I'm aiming for. Fun.
Okay, on with the entry: Having decided that covering the entirety of my selections from Nighttouch may well be just a tad beyond my capacity right now, and having come home to find Steve watching our Prometheus BluRay again for the fourth time in a row, I've decided instead to talk a bit more about Science Fiction, the Dark variety. Now, as those of you who've been following along may or may not know, I actually once aspired to write SF (mainly because I was nine when Star Wars first came out, I think), but called that game pretty quick on account of having all the fine scientific acumen of a chimpanzee who reads a lot. Being math-phobic/innumerate probably didn't help, though I keep getting told that I.Q. tests have revealed me to have a naturally logical mind. At any rate, given my sensibilities, I sort of enjoy feeling my way through SF as though it were a remarkably well-lit yet still difficult-to-navigate gallery packed full of impenetrable jargon and mysterious tableaux, an exhibition to which I have no guide-book, conducted in a language I can barely comprehend. It's a bit like when I used to deliberately watch films on the French or Multicultural channels and tried to figure out what was happening by watching people's faces, deriving contextual plot through emotional mechanics, except with 100% more aliens and gadgets.
Here, therefore, are some more of the other stories I selected for this category, along with what caused me to select them:
“Salvage” by Halli Villegas
Full disclosure: I know Halli, and did some copy-editing on her CZP-published first collection of short fiction, The Hair-Wreath, from which this story is taken. Our main character is part of a team who go around "cleaning out" spaceships found drifting the space-lanes left mysteriously uninhabited, like so many far future Marie Celestes--an unexplained phenomenon which apparently happens far more often than interstellar travellers might like to think, though no one knows exactly why. While packing up one particular cabin, she begins to go through its passenger's personal effects and trips off a holographic "window" display that shows her an incredibly disturbing scene; soon after, she begins to hear noises and have dreams, dreams she eventually realizes are being shared by the other members of her team, who she had previously thought complicit in a plan to scare her with pranks. And...well.
What I love about "Salvage" is its clear sense of all the things which scare me most about outer space: The silence, the emptiness, the distance. I'm agoraphobic, so the tense juxtaposition of a tiny, ultra-functional inside and an unknowable outside makes me itch all over; I'm also afraid of death, like most people, so the idea of a journey made without reliable maps towards places that might well be gone by the time you reach them is another sort of awfulness. But I'm similarly impressed with Halli's ability to create images of startling originality, specific and universal, things you never would have thought of yourself but that ring with utter organic naturalism. More people need to read this story, and read her, in general.
“The Reach” by Stephen King
Like "Salvage", "The Reach" is about the dangers of travel, though in this case, that travel is teleportation via dimensional shift with an implied perceptual time-lag. People who go between two points through "the Reach" are routinely sedated, since staying conscious means that you will do yourself irreparable mental damage, and with his usual E.C. Comics stomach-punch short fiction flare, that's exactly what King has happen to one of our protagonist's children. But the far more interesting part here, for me, is King's run-down of the teleportational system's research and development phase, especially in terms of its being tested on animals and (later) criminals. No one gets out looking very good, here--science is used in the service of the corporate mindset, producing a horror that's mainstreamed in such a way that it can be used almost daily an no one will think twice about it, until it goes wrong. It makes you wonder about the things we take for granted that may prop up our systems of luxury and utility, and the price others may be paying for those same routine perks.
“The River Styx Runs Upstream” by Dan Simmons
Simmons's short fiction is always interesting to me, not least because he often uses it as a jumping-off point to spin out whole novels (Carrion Comfort, The Hollow Man, etc.). Though this is a far more elegiac piece than King's, almost Bradbury-esque in the way the prose flows and some of its observational moments, it also deals with technology That Man Was Not Meant to Develop, let alone use. In short, it's set in a world where you can pay to bring your loved ones back from the dead as sort of organic robots, which is what happens with the narrator's mother--but the emphasis is on how his father's inability to process and let go of grief slowly poisons everything and everyone around him, leading to the mental deterioration and deaths of other family members. Eventually, the narrator is essentially left as caretaker of his mother's corpse, an object of extreme horror to him, but still the one remaining signifier of someone he knows he used to love. Is it worth it? Almost certainly not, but it's hard to refute the idea that if this process existed people wouldn't be using it constantly, no matter what.
“Something Passed By” by Robert R. McCammon
Finally, here's another shocker, from McCammon's Blue World, which I believe is still his only short fiction collection. The tale sketches a world irretrievably altered by chance, like "It's a Good Life" without anybody to blame; what used to be natural has been rendered un-, with potential danger everywhere, madness rampant, and the few survivors struggling with heart-felt ridiculousness to cling to a lifestyle of rural simplicity that cannot possibly sustain itself in the face of encroaching chaos. Much like "Close Behind Him", it's a story that I remember with surprising immediacy long decades after the book itself, which I know I had a copy of, has been lost to the mists of time, maybe because of the sheer stupid randomness of it all: No blame, no shame. Shit just happens, as we damn well knows it does. And then--you're screwed, each and every one of you, forever.
Okay, back to it.
Anyhow: I'm up now, noodling around on my desktop and trying to move forward with various things. At 2:00 PM I have to leave for school, so I can pick Cal up and escort him to that "Reconciliation" class in the library before rushing back home, changing and getting ready for BodyCombat/YogaFit. This will be the first time I've worked out in a week, functionally, because of all that crap over the weekend and my subsequent drama. Should be...fun, yes, that's what I'm aiming for. Fun.
Okay, on with the entry: Having decided that covering the entirety of my selections from Nighttouch may well be just a tad beyond my capacity right now, and having come home to find Steve watching our Prometheus BluRay again for the fourth time in a row, I've decided instead to talk a bit more about Science Fiction, the Dark variety. Now, as those of you who've been following along may or may not know, I actually once aspired to write SF (mainly because I was nine when Star Wars first came out, I think), but called that game pretty quick on account of having all the fine scientific acumen of a chimpanzee who reads a lot. Being math-phobic/innumerate probably didn't help, though I keep getting told that I.Q. tests have revealed me to have a naturally logical mind. At any rate, given my sensibilities, I sort of enjoy feeling my way through SF as though it were a remarkably well-lit yet still difficult-to-navigate gallery packed full of impenetrable jargon and mysterious tableaux, an exhibition to which I have no guide-book, conducted in a language I can barely comprehend. It's a bit like when I used to deliberately watch films on the French or Multicultural channels and tried to figure out what was happening by watching people's faces, deriving contextual plot through emotional mechanics, except with 100% more aliens and gadgets.
Here, therefore, are some more of the other stories I selected for this category, along with what caused me to select them:
“Salvage” by Halli Villegas
Full disclosure: I know Halli, and did some copy-editing on her CZP-published first collection of short fiction, The Hair-Wreath, from which this story is taken. Our main character is part of a team who go around "cleaning out" spaceships found drifting the space-lanes left mysteriously uninhabited, like so many far future Marie Celestes--an unexplained phenomenon which apparently happens far more often than interstellar travellers might like to think, though no one knows exactly why. While packing up one particular cabin, she begins to go through its passenger's personal effects and trips off a holographic "window" display that shows her an incredibly disturbing scene; soon after, she begins to hear noises and have dreams, dreams she eventually realizes are being shared by the other members of her team, who she had previously thought complicit in a plan to scare her with pranks. And...well.
What I love about "Salvage" is its clear sense of all the things which scare me most about outer space: The silence, the emptiness, the distance. I'm agoraphobic, so the tense juxtaposition of a tiny, ultra-functional inside and an unknowable outside makes me itch all over; I'm also afraid of death, like most people, so the idea of a journey made without reliable maps towards places that might well be gone by the time you reach them is another sort of awfulness. But I'm similarly impressed with Halli's ability to create images of startling originality, specific and universal, things you never would have thought of yourself but that ring with utter organic naturalism. More people need to read this story, and read her, in general.
“The Reach” by Stephen King
Like "Salvage", "The Reach" is about the dangers of travel, though in this case, that travel is teleportation via dimensional shift with an implied perceptual time-lag. People who go between two points through "the Reach" are routinely sedated, since staying conscious means that you will do yourself irreparable mental damage, and with his usual E.C. Comics stomach-punch short fiction flare, that's exactly what King has happen to one of our protagonist's children. But the far more interesting part here, for me, is King's run-down of the teleportational system's research and development phase, especially in terms of its being tested on animals and (later) criminals. No one gets out looking very good, here--science is used in the service of the corporate mindset, producing a horror that's mainstreamed in such a way that it can be used almost daily an no one will think twice about it, until it goes wrong. It makes you wonder about the things we take for granted that may prop up our systems of luxury and utility, and the price others may be paying for those same routine perks.
“The River Styx Runs Upstream” by Dan Simmons
Simmons's short fiction is always interesting to me, not least because he often uses it as a jumping-off point to spin out whole novels (Carrion Comfort, The Hollow Man, etc.). Though this is a far more elegiac piece than King's, almost Bradbury-esque in the way the prose flows and some of its observational moments, it also deals with technology That Man Was Not Meant to Develop, let alone use. In short, it's set in a world where you can pay to bring your loved ones back from the dead as sort of organic robots, which is what happens with the narrator's mother--but the emphasis is on how his father's inability to process and let go of grief slowly poisons everything and everyone around him, leading to the mental deterioration and deaths of other family members. Eventually, the narrator is essentially left as caretaker of his mother's corpse, an object of extreme horror to him, but still the one remaining signifier of someone he knows he used to love. Is it worth it? Almost certainly not, but it's hard to refute the idea that if this process existed people wouldn't be using it constantly, no matter what.
“Something Passed By” by Robert R. McCammon
Finally, here's another shocker, from McCammon's Blue World, which I believe is still his only short fiction collection. The tale sketches a world irretrievably altered by chance, like "It's a Good Life" without anybody to blame; what used to be natural has been rendered un-, with potential danger everywhere, madness rampant, and the few survivors struggling with heart-felt ridiculousness to cling to a lifestyle of rural simplicity that cannot possibly sustain itself in the face of encroaching chaos. Much like "Close Behind Him", it's a story that I remember with surprising immediacy long decades after the book itself, which I know I had a copy of, has been lost to the mists of time, maybe because of the sheer stupid randomness of it all: No blame, no shame. Shit just happens, as we damn well knows it does. And then--you're screwed, each and every one of you, forever.
Okay, back to it.
