Zombies vs. Unicorns (Review)

"Unicorn Drops," ca. 1853. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Let me state for the record, that I am solidly Team Unicorn. From the ages five to, oh, eighteen, I had unicorn stuffed animals, unicorn T-shirts, unicorn notebooks, unicorn puffy glitter stickers and unicorn daydreams. Possibly also a unicorn Trapper Keeper and a purple rainbow unicorn pencil with a scented eraser. Since I was still in the throes of this fascination well into the 1990′s, albeit somewhat ironically by then, I should probably count myself lucky that I didn’t end up with a unicorn tattoo. (It was this close. Truly.)

I am such a unicorn girl that when I moved to a new school in the 2nd grade and the music teacher (a lopsided troll of a man with a penchant for green suits paired with coordinating green ties) bade us cease tooting our plastic recorders and join him for a rousing sing-along of “The Unicorn Song” — I actually cried. Have you heard this song? It’s so appalling, and so Christianity trumps magic-pagans-and-all-things-fun that it should give the Potter-is-AntiChrist sect divine ecstasies. I’ll leave you to look up the full lyrics for yourself, but try this verse on for size:

The ark started moving, it drifted with the tide
The unicorns looked up from the rocks and they cried
And the waters came down and sort of floated them away
That’s why you never see unicorns to this very day

THE UNICORNS CRIED! Because they’re GOING TO DIE. Not only that, they’re going to DIE FOREVER, all of them, GO EXTINCT. Yeah, great song for 2nd graders. Especially sensitive horse-lovers who live a little too strongly in their imaginary world. And my new classmates? They LOVED this song. It was, like, their favorite song ever, right up there with “Little Rabbit Foo-Foo,”(which, oddly enough, didn’t bother me at all. Look, I never said I was consistent.) We sang this song at least once a week for the next 6 years. I managed to get the snivel response under control, but the zeal with which my fellow students happily belted out the celebration of the extinction of an entire species may well have been the seeding of my continuing DISTRUST OF THE ENTIRE HUMAN RACE.

Later on in high school, I had a summer job at a Miniature Horse Farm – which is sort of like a circus crossed with a riding stable  – where I was paid minimum wage to braid colorful ribbons into pony hair, lift sniveling kids on and off the mechanical pony ride, be abused by illiterate shift supervisors, scoop (miniature) poop, and walk in the performance show three times a day, leading the unicorn (whose foam horn I attached with an elasticized shoelace backstage, right after I painted her hooves with silver glitter glue). Fascinating Gender Note: Though there were male and female employees, only girls were allowed to lead the unicorn. No such bias applied to leading the bad-tempered quick-spitting llama, thankfully.

So you can see, my unicorn credentials are SOLID.

That said, the stories I enjoyed most were the (cringe) zombie stories:

• “Bougainvillea,” by Carrie Ryan
• “Cold Hands,” by Cassandra Clare

Best unicorn story?

• “A Thousand Flowers” by Margo Lanagan

Honorable Mentions go to:

• “Prom Night,” by Libba Bray for use of Zoroastrian funeral rituals
• “Princess Prettypants,” by Meg Cabot for the cameo by my most-favorite-ever summertime ice cream shack of social equalization, “The Chocolate Moose.”
• The cover and endpaper art!

So, I did it. I read an entire 415-page anthology of short stories and it didn’t kill me. I even liked some of the stories. But if it had been 415 pages of novel, I would have had a much better time.

Maybe next time, I can try reading by the light of a unicorn’s horn. If all else fails, I can still get that tattoo.

NPR’s Top 100 Science Fiction, Fantasy Books

Le Sortie de l'opéra en l'an 2000 / A. Robida. c. 1882

Inspired by Apogee Dwell’s confession that he has only read 31 titles from NPR’s reader-nominated list of the Top 100 Science Fiction & Fantasy books, I decided to post on the same topic. Because who doesn’t like quantifying their entertainment choices, intellectual credibility, and ultimate worth?

Disregarding the fact that some of the “books” on the list are entire series (R.A. Salvatore, I’m looking at you), I’ve read 45 out of 100. A careless survey suggests that I’ve covered most of the classics (Wells, Verne, Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Miller), most of the stuff that’s considered literature (Orwell, Atwood, Huxley, Burgess, Bradbury, Vonnegut), and highlights from the 90s to the present (Gibson, Stephenson, Gaiman, Moore).

So what am I missing? Basically the bulk of popular science fiction from the 1960s right up until about the mid-90s. During the formative fanboy years (i.e. age 12) I was busy reading about gothic castles, brooding noblemen on horseback, and plucky governesses (*blush*), not spaceships and monsters at the end of the world. No wonder there were so many times this summer when I felt like I wasn’t sci-fi enough to be at Clarion West.

But that’s my problem. Let’s take a little look now a more important problem with the list -and one that is not unique to SFF publishing:

Women writers on the list? 13 out of 100 (Ursula LeGuin is the only woman with 2 books on the list: The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.)

Writers of color on the list? 0 out of 100 (At least, as far as I know. Please correct me in the comments if I’ve overlooked someone.)

Seems that old trope about white men in Hawaiian shirts might just have some truth in it. Does this mean that the books on the current list aren’t any good? Not necessarily. What it might mean is that readers (and publishers) might want to try to actively broaden the canon. After all, the SFF experience is about people and places that are unfamiliar and, as a consequence, the genre should be doing better than mainstream publishing when it comes to diversity, not worse.

Off the top of my head, here are a few books I would have liked to see on the list:

• The Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler
• The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick
• The Female Man, by Joanna Russ
• Beggars in Spain, by Nancy Kress
• Orlando, by Virginia Woolf
• The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester
• The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham
• Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami

Sadly, classic science fiction doesn’t have a lot to offer by writers of color, so I’m going to suggest checking out some potential future classics by Nnedi Okorafor, N.K. Jemisin, Nalo Hopkinson, Hiromi Goto, Helen Oyeyemi, Minister Faust, Ted Chiang,  Colson Whitehead, or Mat Johnson.

Let’s remember, folks – the future is for everyone.

New directions

Back home after six mind-blowing, indescribable weeks at Clarion West in Seattle, and it’s time for some changes to the blog. Not sure what kind of changes yet, all kinds of ideas swarming around in the head, but definitely a mandate to read more short stories, and I expect I’ll be talking about them here.

Supernatural Noir, edited by Ellen Datlow

Can’t wait to get my hands on this new anthology, edited by Ellen Datlow. A great line-up, with new stories by Jeffrey Ford, Elizabeth Bear, Lucius Shepherd, etc and etc.

The TOC and a chance to win a copy are posted on Underwords. Who wouldn’t want to read a story titled, “The Maltese Unicorn” (by Caitlín R. Kiernan)?

“Beautiful White Bodies,” by Alice Sola Kim

Fashion model underwater in dolphin tank, Marineland, Florida (Library of Congress)

I stumbled on this story via the website for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. I meant to read it after lunch, but once I had the page up in my browser, I read the first line. And then I read the first paragraph, and then…you get the idea. It did what a story is supposed to do – sucked me in and made me keep reading.

So what’s it all about, besides Busby Berkeley? Well, Justine’s a ‘boomerang’ twenty-something, living with her Mom and working at a coffee shop in her hometown when she notices that the local high school girls are coming down with an epidemic of preternatural anime-style beauty. Epidemic turns out to be the right word. Cue officials in face masks, and white isolation tents.

I especially liked four-eyed, snub-nosed, vintage-wearing, theater-kid Pearl. She was just the right mixture of attitude and self-pity. I liked the little interlude in Justine’s self-reflection when she talks about the “Different people marooned on different islands inside of you.” I liked the CDC guy’s line about “the beauty sickness no longer [being] co-morbid with popularity. I liked that I didn’t quite know what the end result of this epidemic actually was – just that it was a change, and a change with teeth (real or metaphorical, take your pick.)

Return

I’m doing some intensive reading in the run up to Clarion West, and I also think I’m going to give my writing schedule a rest until then. So it seems like coming back here for the next two months and talking about what I’m reading might be a good idea.

In the meantime, I read a poem by Paul Park. I like the juxtaposition. I also like Iceland.

The Gentle Octopus

The octopus is a cephalopod. Wikipedia says that “Cephalodpod” means “head-feet”. It is also fun to say.

I am thinking about the octopus because it is neat. It very awesomely looks like this.

Lynda Barry uses an octopus. A lot. It is cuddly, maybe, when she draws it. In her pictures it seems to stand for the “I don’t know” that is the un-heart of creative activity. The octopus does not know, but that is okay. Is it an octopus because it changes shape, because it lives in the murky dark, because it has so many arms? I don’t know. It seems the right kind of mysterious.

In Gail Carriger’s, ‘Parasol Protectorate’, a brass octopus is the symbol of the evil scientists who want to do Wrong Things with Technology.

A real octopus is very smart. It can carry a coconut, walk on two tentacles like legs and pretend to be a coconut, pretend to be a branch of algae drifting across the ocean floor, and open a jar.

I cannot remember seeing a real octopus in real life. In the Natural History Museum in the Smithsonian, there used to be a case with the remains of a giant squid. I remember a case of water, with its white flesh arms, sort of pulpy and disintegrating. I remember thinking it was sad. Maybe I don’t remember right – if it was already dead, why would they keep it in water? Does anyone else remember this? It was in the front rotunda, somewhere near the doors, along with Henry.

A few months ago, I wanted to write a story called “The Secret Heart of the Octopus.” I don’t know what that means. Saying those words, knowing those words, makes me feel good in the way walking in the woods makes me feel, the way seeing a the disappearing tail of a salamander makes me feel, the way the Big Dipper is always there at night when I walk the dog makes me feel. It is a good feeling, and it is potent. Waiting. I am small, in a good way. The secret heart of the octopus is very big.

I like this picture

Pieter Hugo Escort Kama, Enugu, Nigeria, 2008 From the series Nollywood Digital C-Print © Pieter Hugo, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York

See the rest of the slideshow of Pieter Hugo’s portraits of Nigerian film stars at Flavorwire.

Ambivalence

I haven’t been here for a while. I’ve pretty much come to the decision that I’m not cut out to be a blogger. Which, you know, I’m fine with.

I want to keep the blog online for a while, if only because I can’t bear to take down Irina’s beautiful header. I came here today to approve a new comment on my Raymond Carver short story post (my all-time most popular post, by far. Students doing papers, maybe?) and was surprised to find that I get about equal the number of visits when I’m posting regularly as when I’m not. Go figure.

It seems that reviewing short stories may be something of a public service, so maybe I’ll keep doing that. I’ve been reading Strange Horizons again lately, and I know there’s some great stuff out there in the Nebula award nominees. Gonna have to track them down.

What I Saw in the Woods

For those of you who don’t know, that’s a bear track. The picture was taken two days after Christmas in the woods behind my Mom’s house in Pennsylvania. When I was growing up, there were no bears there. When my mom was growing up, there were no bears there. Now, there are bears. Well, at least one bear. I find it…unsettling. As an adult I have discovered that I am only OK w/ scary animals to which I became inured during my Appalachian childhood. Copperheads, OK. Rattlesnakes, OK. Cobras, so freaking not. Coyotes, I am working on, as there is a whole pack living in the field behind my current house, and they howl like mad when I am out walking the dog at 11pm. But bears? Seriously, that’s the kind of thing I read about in Reader’s Digest ‘Drama In Real Life’ when I was 9: “…and then the grizzly just put my entire head in her mouth, and I realized that the crunching sound was actually my skull breaking under her terrifying teeth…” It seems the world is always changing, and not necessarily in the direct I expect.