Birthday Review: Stories of Jack Skillingstead

Birthday Review: Stories of Jack Skillingstead

Today is the birthday of my old co-worker Jack Skillingstead. Well, we weren't exactly co-workers, but we both worked at Boeing -- only Jack was in Seattle, and I'm in St. Louis. I didn't know that when I started reading his work, back in around 2004, but I did know he was an exciting new writer. Here's a selection of my Locus reviews of his stories (not including a story I included in one of my early Best of the Year volumes, "Everyone Bleeds Through" -- I can't find a review of that in my files.)

(Locus, August 2018)

Jack Skillingstead’s "Straconia" is an effective sort of Kafkaesque look at a man drifting though life, not much engaged with his marriage, who mysteriously ends up in the title city, struggling to deal with its very strange rules. He tries to find a way back  but, well, I mentioned Kafka. (I should also note that somehow the story also reminded me as well of Gene Wolfe’s great early novella "Forlesen".)

(Locus, September 2004)

Jack Skillingstead's first few stories have been consistently impressive, "Transplant" being the latest. The narrator is a genetic freak who may be immortal  he can regenerate any injured part. A rich man sponsoring a generation starship uses parts harvested from the narrator to maintain his life, hoping to survive the journey. The story concerns the narrator's attempt to make an independent life among the short-lived passengers  difficult both because of the other man's insistence on having him near at hand, and because of the traditional difficulty immortals have dealing with the constant losses of mortal friends.

(Locus, May 2005)

"Bean There", by Jack Skillingstead, is a sweet story of a skeptical coffee shop owner in a world apparently gone mad. Strange news stories abound  levitated bicycles, teleporting people, Jerry Garcia returned from the dead. Burt refuses to believe, but his girlfriend Aimee, a sculptor, talks of "Harbingers of Evolution". We can all see where the story is headed, and it gets there nicely.

(Locus, January 2006)

Jack Skillingstead’s "Are You There?" is about a parapoliceman tracking a serial killer. His best lead is the "Loved One" he finds  a "copy" of the killer’s mother’s brain, preserved on a computer. It works well enough as a crime story, and it works even better as a story about the detective and his relationships with women: his ex-wife, a woman he has met in a chat room but not in person, and the electronic copy of his quarry’s mother.

(Locus, April 2006)

And Jack Skillingstead’s "Life on the Preservation" tells of a girl from a future Earth destroyed by aliens who penetrates into Seattle, which has been maintained in a time loop as a sort of reminder of what Earth was like. Her job is to destroy the alien time loop machinery  but this is complicated when she meets a boy … I think this may be the best story yet by this fine new writer.

(Locus, August 2006)

Jack Skillingstead’s "Girl in the Empty Apartment", about a Joe Skadan, a failing writer in a near future troubled by "Harbingers", mysterious entities that seem to manifest in dreams, and that may be linked to multiple disappearances. Joe’s girlfriend dumps him, apparently for a Homeland Security agent, and then Joe becomes a subject of investigation. At the same time he encounters a mysterious young woman, who may offer his only, ambiguous, hope for escape.

(Locus, November 2007)

In Jack Skillingstead’s thoughtful and effective "Strangers on a Bus" a woman taking a bus back home to escape her abusive boyfriend encounters an odd man with a rather solipsistic life view  he thinks the stories he tells become reality for everyone.

(Locus, July 2009)

The Spring On Spec has finally arrived, with nice pieces from Jack Skillingstead and Tony Pi. Skillingstead’s "Einstein’s Theory" is a quiet story, in which an alternate Einstein regrets an act of adultery with a co-worker at the patent office and reflects on his wasted life (namechecking Hugo Gernsback along the way).

(Locus, August 2013)

Jack Skillingstead, in "Arlington", describes a solo flight in a small plane that ends up in an alternate world, but a terribly dangerous alternate world, with menacing creatures apparently kidnapping people. The general outline is familiar, but the resolution is effective.

(Locus, March 2017)

I also was intrigued by Jack Skillingstead’s "Destination", a dark story about the widening gulf between the privileged  even quite minorly privileged  and the have-nots. Brad is a game designer, which gives him access to a decent place inside a corporate enclave, and one day he is summoned to a mandatory training exercise, a real world game called "Destination", which involves a fairly random (perhaps?) trip to the "outside" world. Brad’s trip is (a bit too predictably) eye-opening, and he is given an ultimatum of sorts.

(Locus, August 2018)

Jack Skillingstead’s "Straconia" is an effective sort of Kafkaesque look at a man drifting though life, not much engaged with his marriage, who mysteriously ends up in the title city, struggling to deal with its very strange rules. He tries to find a way back  but, well, I mentioned Kafka. (I should also note that somehow the story also reminded me as well of Gene Wolfe’s great early novella "Forlesen".)