TRAVERSING Z

Margo Lanagan

i’m always late to these things

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but there was an interesting review in the LA review of books, on some 2012 best of SFF anthologies:

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type&id=904&fulltext=1&media

i haven’t been reading much fiction, and in fact have my lovely signed margo lanagan to dive into when i do feel the need to go fiction again.  but, the argument is interesting.  some time ago i had a debate about a critique i had offered, in which i thought the overall story was pretty solid but it could have been set anywhere, not necessarily in the dystopian island community that was its designated backdrop.  it was funny too, because the story-writer had made remarks about lit vs. genre, when really their piece was a rather standard litmag tale transplanted onto this island . . . whatever.  these things, these arguments, they are an ourobouros.  the question i ask now is this: how does the change of locale affect this story? what makes it different than if it had, say, happened in modern staten island instead? 19th century isle of man? and i am not talking about the overall narrative arc per se: but locations, times, cultures, they put their mark upon you.  they mark your decisions, and they mark the framework within which you are approached and wooed and dismissed and judged.  boy may still get girl, the witch may still get kicked down the mountainside, but how we get there will be inflected by the when and where.

to not think about these things seems wrong.

sick today but:

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wanted to record for posterity that “the queen of lakes” is writ, and writ well.  i think my finished short story count for this past year or so has now exceeded the last eight years put together.  which is not that difficult, but still.  this has been a really, really hard year and i need all the encouragement i can get.

plus, as the fabulous margo lanagan pointed out yesterday, it is very nice to get something done, to remind yourself that you can finish something, especially when you’re knee-deep in a monster project like i am.

the other nice thing about my little queen is that she is clocking in at 6005 words.  i try very hard not to think about word counts because the story is the story, period, and it’s going to take however long it damn pleases to say itself and that’s that.  but i was very hopeful as this one began to shape up. to have this plus a story that’s less than 4k (“littoral drift,” now cooling her heels at a pretty biggish mag that i am trying not to think about because the chance is so slim but WHAT IF ahhhh) really opens up a whole new area of the market.

there is one small bit of the setup that i’m not sure if i should rearrange or not, so once i get my congested head back in some semblance of order (i’m contemplating my third nap of the day) i will catch up on critiques and then see if anyone on the workshop trips over the placement.  also i feel like there’s room for a little more detail . . . but again, i’d like to wait and see what confuses people first, before i start putting in more textures willy-nilly.

margo lanagan’s “the goosle”

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so the other night i couldn’t sleep, a regular problem for me (my head runs like a hamster wheel), and i decided to tackle an older anthology, the 2008 del rey book of science fiction & fantasy: maybe a few stories would help to stop the hamster wheel, right?

wrong.

i know “the goosle” made a splash when it came out, with a great deal of back-and-forth as to its appropriateness in the anthology, moral standards, shock value and so on.  and i am reminded, again, of what it takes to get that result.  it’s a really freakin’ well-written piece of fiction, one of the best thus far in the anthology (i’m reading it straight through). it gets under your skin; it turns your stomach; it makes you want to cry.  also, to my eye at least it is one of the few stories thus far that felt very whole, very homogenous in its construction.  while so far the various stories has been of good quality overall, many are forgettable, and some of them have what i see in a lot of speccy stuff: the thing that makes it speculative isn’t really necessary to the tale.  you could change the speccy-part, sometimes even remove it entirely, without affecting the story overall.

“the goosle,” however, is a different beast.  it is a whole tale, rounded and full at all points; more interestingly, it is the realistic aspect that is the speculative piece here, and no, you can’t take it out without making the story the same flat puddle as the many varieties of its forefather, the versions that tell you in candy-colored pictures about a cannibal woman who checks the readyness of her kidnapped child victims by pinching their fat, all the while nattering about the sheer butchery and pain she’s going to inflict upon them.

i was in college many, many years ago, over a decade before “the goosle” came out, and i was in a seminar on art and censorship.  the dialogue hasn’t changed a jot, trust; we were debating things like piss christ and american psycho in exactly the same framework as was deployed on both sides of “the goosle”.  the framework hasn’t changed, but what it takes to invoke that framework seems to have.  i’ve never rated the ellis, i thought the serrano was a cheap shot (lol just remembered he did those ejaculation photos as well, the unintended puns of too little caffeine . . . ) but now we have a far greater amount of sex and violence in works everywhere, many of them celebrated and with fandoms of their own.  it takes a little, well-crafted story to remind us just how horrible these things are, and to provoke all the old responses, both good and bad.