Leviathan
3
Edited
by Forrest Aguirre and Jeff VanderMeer
Ministry
of Whimsy Press/Prime Books, Tallahassee, FL, Madison, WI, Canton, OH, 2002
476
pages, $21.95
ISBN:
1-894815-42-4
Jeff VanderMeer was born on July 7, 1968. He's best known, certainly, for his fiction, including the Southern Reach trilogy (the first of which, Annihilation, became an intriguing movie just last year) and Borne; but he has made major contributions as an editor as well. And one of my favorites among his projects was the Leviathan original anthology series. So here's a review I wrote for Locus back in 2002.
One of
the more interesting recent anthology series is Leviathan, two issues of which appeared in the late 1990s, each
edited by Jeff VanderMeer with a different collaborator, and published by
VanderMeer's small press, The Ministry of Whimsy. After a slight delay, Leviathan 3 is out. It's now available
directly from The Ministry of Whimsy (www.ministryofwhimsy.com) and will soon
be available at other bookstores. VanderMeer's collaborator this time is
Forrest Aguirre.
Leviathan 3, as with its predecessors, seems a
"slipstream" anthology, full of stories propelled by fantastical
imagery and by unusual narrative strategies, but usually not set in overt or
consistent "Fantasy" or "SF" worlds. I think the central
image, the central concern, of SF is the encounter with the "alien",
(whether the "alien" be an actual alien being, or altered humans, or
an alien environment, or simply a different time). SF treats the
"alien" in two ways. Some SF is interested in the alien for its own
sake – as a marvel perhaps, or as a revelation of some feature of the universe.
Other SF is interested in the alien as a sort of contrast with humanity or with
the present environment. Thus it might exaggerate some human trait, or it might
provide a contrast against which human traits are more clearly displayed, or it
might provide a testing ground, as it were, in which human traits can be
revealed. Slipstream, it seems to me, is mostly work of the second kind, in
which the "alien" aspect might be nothing more than unusual narrative
techniques, and in which often the "alien" is inserted with little or
no explanation into a contemporary setting. Indeed, perhaps that is how we
recognize a "slipstream" quality in certain mainstream stories –
either the imagery or structure are sufficiently unusual as to create the same
sense of displacement from the norm that we find in SF.
One
valuable place to look for stories with a different sensibility is in the too
often unfamiliar fiction of other languages. Here there are several translated
stories. Most prominent are six linked stories about libraries by Zoran
Živković (translated by Alice Copple-Tošic). These also serve as thematic
anchors for the various sections of the anthology. These stories are arch and
metafictional, very recognizable as Živković stories. In each story an unusual
library is encountered. One contains all the books to be written, including the
author's own future books. Another contains stories of people's lives,
including of course the narrator's. And so on. Wry, deadpan, clever, enjoyable
stories. There aew two stories by 19th Century French writers, Rémy
de Gourmont and Théophile Gautier; both translated by Brian Stableford. De
Gourmont's "Phocas" is a retelling of the story of the capture of St.
Phocas, who fed the poor and even the soldiers sent to kill him. Gautier's
"The Divided Knight" is a fairy tale, about a man born with two
separate natures. My favorite of the translated stories, though, is a
delightful comic story set in the Soviet Union: "The Evenki", by
Eugene Dubnov (translated by the author with John Heath-Stubbs), about a man
who becomes convinced that the title ethnic group is undermining the Soviet
state, and who then becomes head of the Department of Evenkology.
Perhaps
inevitably, I found a few of the stories incomprehensible – as likely a fault
of the reader as of the author. Rikki Ducornet's "Buz" is reasonably
intriguing to read, but I failed to understand it – it appears to be about
adultery. I was less impressed with Michael Moorcock's "The Camus
Referendum", a Jerry Cornelius story, to do with future corporatism and
war, which frankly reduced me to pretty much reading sentences without
assigning them meaning. This happened to me with a similar Jerry Cornelius
story in Interzone a couple years
back. I can only conclude that I am out of sympathy with Moorcock's aims here.
There is also a Moorcock novel excerpt, "The Vengeance of Rome, Chapter
3", which is nicely written but which reads like a novel excerpt and not
like a complete story. Michael Cisco's "The Genius of Assassins" is
beautifully written, even to the point of bravura technique, and it seems fully
comprehensible, but not terribly rewarding – it is three narratives about
brutal senseless serial murders and their perpetrators, and in the end the
point of it all escaped me.
A few
more stories can be described as intriguingly weird, but not successful. In
each case the very strangeness of the imagination revealed makes the stories
worth a look, even if I felt they didn't really work. Jeffrey Thomas' "The
Fork" describes a curious individual, injured and apparently trapped in an
affectless landscape, who eventually finds his way out. Lance Olsen's
"Village of the Mermaids" is about a woman who seems to have become a
mermaid, but who is somehow trapped on land, always struggling to reach the
water and swim away. This is tied to a real world experience in the end, but
rather tenuously. "The Progenitor", by Brian Evenson, might be the
strangest story here, about a life form (alien race? mutated humans? who knows?)
who live tethered in the air, or working on the ground, in the service of the
mysterious huge "Progenitor".
In the
category of "really weird, but also successful" I would certainly
place Stepan Chapman's "State Secrets of Aphasia", a wild ride about
a land of clouds, ruled by the ancient Queen Alba. This strange land, home to
ectoids and sneeflers and such aristocrats as King Skronk, High Khan of the
Cactus Trolls etc., comes under threat from the Black Glacier, and the Queen is
forced to review her own history, and confront the real nature of herself and
her kingdom. The resolution is interesting though not very original, but the
imagery and the wild ride to the end is, in typical Chapman fashion, absurd and
compelling, and the story manages also to be quite moving. Just following it in
the book is "Up", by James Sallis, another curious and intriguing
story, about a man in a world much like ours, where people are beginning
suddenly to go "up" – to vanish literally into ashes. This man is
dealing with the death of his wife, and his life seems more and more lonely and
constrained. Perhaps the story is about his plight only – or perhaps the story
is about the plight of all of us.
One of
the defining features of "slipstream", to my mind, is a deliberate
blurring of genre lines, mostly the lines between "mainstream" and
the fantastic. To be sure, all such lines are blurry anyway. And so a few of
the stories in Leviathan 3 seem to me
to be clearly across the vague SF/mainstream border. Still, they are good
stories and even if they are set in our world and time (as it seems to me) they
are told so that their milieu seems different anyway. They make the real
fantastic, as it were. Tamar Yellin's two stories here are examples.
"Kafka in Brontëland" is a quiet and evocative story of a woman in
North England who imagines that a man she sees in her town is Franz Kafka.
"Moonlight" is a striking and moving story about the life of a
popular artist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
hinting at a mysterious obsession behind his work. Another story from just
across the borderline is "The Swan of Prudence Street" by Scott
Thomas. An adolescent becomes infatuated with the beautiful young woman in the
upstairs apartment. Familiar stuff, in its basic outline, but well executed and
evocative.
"While
Wandering a Vanished Sea", by James Bassett is decidedly Ballardian in
imagery and affect. The memory artist Mimpi comes to the seaside city Runevan
to practice his art, which involves altering people's memories, while claiming
that he has been given Runevan's sea. One day he dies, and the sea seems to be
gone – or was it ever there? Where did all their memories come from? A nice
story. Brendan Connell contributes "A Season with Doctor Black", in
which the title character, a dwarf and a scientific genius, spends his summer
at his country home, and there encounters a beautiful woman, marooned by car
trouble, and they enter into a relationship of ambiguous and shifting
character. I found it interesting but not exceptional. Carol Emshwiller's
"The Prince of Mules" reminded me just a bit of her recent SCI
FICTION story "Water Master", in telling of a older single woman
living in a dry rural place, who becomes intrigued by an isolated man who has
something to do with water distribution. This is quite a different story,
though, and it's a neat piece, telling in Emshwiller's characteristic deadpan
voice of the woman's rather excessive obsession with Jake Blackthorn, who at
least loves his mule.
At last
we come to the stories that most impressed me. They do come, I will say, from
names I expected a lot from: Brian Stableford, L. Timmel Duchamp, and Jeffrey
Ford. Stableford's "The Face of an Angel" tells of a master plastic
surgeon, sometime in the near future, who is confronted by a mysterious man with
an unusual proposition. The man has a copy of a book created by the
"comprachicos", who were notorious in the 17th Century for
buying children and surgically deforming them for use as circus freaks. This
man asserts that they actually had a more ambitious goal – to learn to
surgically create a perfect face, the face of an angel. Now, with the modern
surgeon's technology, and these old secrets, perhaps this goal can actually be
reached – but at what costs? In "The Fool's Diary" Duchamp, as always
fascinated by gender roles, purports to present an account of a diary kept by a
dwarfish woman employed by the wife of King James I of England as a fool. The
diary includes much comment on the position of women in the King's court, but
also an extended description of a command performance of Shakespeare's
"Twelfth Night", complete with much discussion on the curious gender
switching of the characters in that play, and on the rather ambiguous future
happiness of the women. And, finally, the Fool's abilities extend to something
stranger – a trip (in some sense) to the "world" of "Twelfth
Night", perhaps to hear directly from the characters their real feelings.
It's a fascinating and thoughtful story. Finally, Ford's "The Weight of
Words" is, I feel, the standout story of Leviathan 3. The narrator is despondent because his wife left him,
and he attends lectures in his loneliness. One lecture is given by an Albert
Secmatte. Secmatte advances a theory that the particular arrangement of words
in printed matter, including such aspects as the font, influences perceived
meaning in a way that can be quantified. (The key equation is given as
"Typeface + Meaning x Syllabic Structure – Length + Consonantal Profluence
/ Verbal Timidity x Phonemic Saturation = The Weight of the Word or The
Value".) He thinks Secmatte a crackpot, but after a demonstration he
becomes convinced that the theory has some value. He asks Secmatte to rewrite
his love letters to his departed wife so that they will be especially
convincing, and in exchange agrees to help Secmatte with his business, which
naturally involves advertising, eventually including some rather slimy
political ads. The central idea here is not exactly new, but Ford's working out
of it is intriguing, and the writing is beautiful, particularly the lovely
closing. We are left thinking not just about subliminal advertising, but about
good writing, and love.
Leviathan 3 promises to be perhaps the
outstanding original anthology of 2002. Its focus, from a genre reader's point
of view, may be a bit narrow – there is no hard SF here, and only the
occasional story would readily fit even traditional "soft SF" or
"fantasy" categories. But what the anthology promises it delivers,
and story after story is intriguing reading.
