It's fitting, I suppose, that this column wraps up in the same way it began. The more wonderful and attentive readers among you may remember the first "Please Kill Me", which featured comments from Michael Cunningham, the literary writer who was thrilled and amazed that some science fiction qualified, to his mind, as literature. And the guy wasn't just faking the funk; his readings inspired his subsequent pretty good semi-SFNal novel-in-stories Specimen Days.
Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan were inspired too. After an issue of the literary journal Conjunctions coined the unfortunate and misleading term "New Wave Fabulism" for its science fiction and fantasy issue, Morrison and Keegan, publishers of contemporary poetry via their small press Omnidawn, launched a new wave fabulist anthology of their own. For years they solicited stories in the back pages of Poets & Writers magazine, and in 2005 even attended the World Fantasy Convention in Madison, Wisconsin. The result, Paraspheres: Extending Beyond the Spheres of Literary and Genre Fiction -- Fabulist and New Wave Fabulist Stories (yes, it has two subtitles) is...pretty interesting, especially if you've not read much science fiction or literary fiction. Of course, that's a lot of people, isn't it? Mutual willful ignorance is the order of the day.
Unfortunately, as Paraspheres took its inspiration from "New Wave Fabulism", a reader who enjoys both literary and genre fiction will probably need to wear a bicycle helmet or boxer's headgear while reading the anthology -- it's either that or earn a concussion from all the forehead slapping. The first problem is that "New Wave Fabulism" has nothing to do with anything. The "New Wave" is about as dead as taffy pulls and evenings on the parlor davenport or somesuch with a handsome suitor and grandma's stereoscope. ("My my, Reginald, it's almost as though we were in the same room with a living, breathing, African Negro!") Fabulism doesn't necessarily involve the fantastic; plenty of Calvino's work is fabulist and realistic all at once, for example.
The second problem is Keegan's silly editorial note, which actually starts off as an introduction and is then expanded in the form of a lengthy afterword. There's actually a jump, like in a newspaper. In the piece, Keegan explains that there is quality realist literature, and cheap genre fiction that is produced primarily with profit in mind. Literary fiction is both morally and psychologically complex. Thus, "readers often finish a literary novel with the feeling that they have a more compassionate understanding of other human beings than when they started," he tells us. On the other hand, genre fiction is simple commodity production. We're told that "Some of the most famous [genre] writers, when faced with [two-book-a-year] deadlines, have typically secluded themselves and written novels totaling several hundred pages in a month or less." No compassion for our fellow human beings can emerge from such sausage-making, to be sure!
If you're like me, your skull is now both well-bruised and full of "but but buts." Does realism really make readers feel more compassionate, or at least feel that they feel more compassionate? If it's only the latter, is realism a worthwhile project? Are the characters in realist fictions all that well-developed, or do they just suit the readerly prejudices of realism's audience of middle-class neurotics? Middle class neurosis is one of the genre tropes of realism, along with epiphanies and provocative details -- you can write realism to formula too, as the MFA programs show us. Why should it receive the bye Keegan gives it?
And are there no prolific literary authors? Joyce Carol Oates has published forty-four novels, seven novellas long enough to be sold as novels, twenty-eight short story collections, eight published volumes of plays (a volume often containing more than one play), eleven books of non-fiction and criticism, eight volumes of poetry, and six books of juvenile fiction. Unless she's three hundred years old, Oates is writing two books a year.
Anyway, Keegan sets up this "good lit" versus "bad genre" dichotomy in order to introduce --by way of afterword, remember -- the concept of the third kind of fiction: fantastical stuff that manages to be good. Paraspheres is thus an exercise in canon-building, and isn't a bad one for it. A fair number of the stories are reprints, some of them quite popular and even fairly recent, like Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Birthday of the World." Angela Carter's "The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe" is an inspired inclusion, as it hints at a common ancestor for the taxa Keegan attempted to build in his editor's note. "The Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of Poetics" by Rudy Rucker either saved my life (or ruined it, if you ask my folks) when I was ten years old, so I was thrilled to see it again in Paraspheres.
There are odder choices as well, like "The White Man," an early story from Jeffrey Ford that was originally published in the micropress horror zine Aberrations. It's a nice story, but Ford has written about 2392047560465 better ones, a couple dozen of which are available in his collections The Empire of Ice Cream and The Fantasy Writer's Assistant and Other Stories. "Cake" by Michael Moorcock was first published just last year, and is a very good story, but is marred by an editorial postscript reading "The editors have placed the above work of narrative realist literary fiction, 'Cake', at the end of this anthology in order to assist readers in their return to reality." Ugh. Not only is the note silly and cloying, but is also rather insulting to much of the work that came before. Plus "narrative realist literary fiction" is an unnecessary mouthful.
Paraspheres is on firmer ground with its originals, and is thus well worth buying and reading. "An Accounting" by Brian Evenson is a black comedy horror tale about someone who accidentally declares himself Jesus in a world that recalls both the founding of Mormonism and the Donner Party, but done so artfully that even people who don't like stories about cannibalism and shooting a dog will enjoy. Charlie Anders' "Power Couple or, Love Never Sleeps" is a giggle-a-page satire, and the sort of thing that would have otherwise gone unpublished unless it had been miraculously found in a foot locker that once belonged to John Cheever.
Paul Pekin's "The Magnificent Carp of Hichi Street" is a good example of a story that actually almost fits the term "New Wave Fabulism," or would if that term actually made sense. Cute story. Laura Moriarty's "Maryolatry" isn't all that great, but I'll marry her anyway, for this nifty graf, which reads like the world's first semi-successful R. A. Lafferty pastiche:
Martians in rows fall down one by one. Everyone plays a part in the war. Ada finds them. Their pictures and statistics. She finds them and counts them. "There are many kinds of Martian but one kind of war," she writes. "Things explode for no reason or for reasons of their own. The dead are all soldiers once they have died. The world is littered with them. An incursion occurs or has occurred of light into a dark place. Too much light. Beams or rays razor-like go through everything. There is a lack of air in the screams. A lack of conviction in the eyes of the victims as they turn red or blue or gray depending on the weapon and on the speciation."
Many of the other stories are also very good, and a few are especially intriguing in that they are excerpts of forthcoming novels. There are a few flops, though. Robin Canton's "B. Longing" b. longs in a freshman poetry primer as an example of line break abuse. It's also a novel excerpt, which makes me shudder. I wanted to like Laird Hunt's "Three Tales," since I got such a kick out of his book The Impossibly, but if that story were my next-door neighbor I'd move out of town. What can I say other than this: Paraspheres is an uneven anthology, just like every other anthology ever published.
Paraspheres essentially succeeds as an anthology, as it collects enough entertaining-to-amazing stories to impress ol' purple-headed me. But does it succeed as a challenge to the literary status quo? Does it extend beyond the spheres of literary and genre fiction, like it claims to on the cover? The answer is a qualified "Sure." If two-decade old stories by Kim Stanley Robinson and Alasdair Gray count as "beyond the genre," and if literary fiction really is little more than dexterously phrased reportage of everyday life, climaxed by feature article-style kickers about sunsets or a wrinkled hand extending for a friendly shake, then Paraspheres is the Revolution, the Counter-Revolution, and the Political Reconstitution of the Last International as the Party of the World Reading Class all in one.
If not, it's still worth the price, because some of the stories will stay with you after reading them . . . . and beyond! And speaking of the beyond, please kill me.
