Binding Energy by Daniel Marcus

Occasionally, say once in a blue moon, you stumble across a collection of stories whose range, intensity, passion, and inventiveness simply knock you off your feet. And then you get up and start seeking out whatever else the author of those stories has written.

Last time it happened for me it was Glen Hirshberg, whose collection, The Two Sams, blew me away. Before that there was James Blaylock’s collection, Thirteen Phantasms and other Stories. And some time back in the late 1980s, there was my first encounter with Lucius Shepard in the stories that made up The Jaguar Hunter. In this magical, wise, and humane debut collection, Daniel Marcus proves himself a storyteller of similar range, skill, and imagination.

Marcus has been publishing stories in places like Asimov’s, F&SF, and Realms of Fantasy since 1993. Most are included among these nineteen stories, alongside three previously unpublished works. That it has taken a UK small press to bring together these stories in book form is nothing short of astonishing. Maybe it’s because Marcus is a writer whose work resists pigeonholing, or perhaps it’s down to his having somehow managed to elude the opportunistic gaze of those who would name and quantify the next big thing in genre. Kudos then are due to Elastic Press for giving Marcus the platform he deserves.

While many of these stories seem, initially, like straightforward science fiction—and make no mistake, Marcus demonstrates a clear understanding of the genre’s tropes—his willingness to engage with, challenge, and transgress its ideas and conventions give his stories a more literary and emotionally charged sensibility than most mainstream SF. If he deploys the mechanics of SF and fantasy, it is as a mean to explore worlds and mental landscapes defined by disconnectedness and isolation, by degradation and deceit, by love and its absence. This is not to say that these stories are filled with gloom and despair. Quite the contrary, most of them, despite their degraded physical or spiritual terrain, are marked by a sense of hope and possibility.

Take, for example, “Ex Vitro,” in which Marcus delineates the tenderness and increasing tension between Jax and Maddy, two scientists/lovers stationed on Titan. Both are absorbed in their work—she charting the moon’s topography, he studying the behaviour patterns of dog-sized, slug-like creatures—until news of impending war back on Earth begins to unnerve them. Maddy fears for the embryo they have created, suspended in vitro, waiting to be born. It represents not only their future, but a link to their past, to home and family. As tension escalates back home, she becomes increasingly unsettled and talks about returning to Earth. Jax, feeling that he is on the verge of discovering evidence of awareness in the slugs, is more stoic, viewing their ties to home as “nothing more than electromagnetic ephemera.” When they hear that the war has begun, with more than a billion dead, they have very different reactions, and Marcus sets up a troubling existential dilemma: to stay on Titan or return to the ruins of Earth. For Maddy, the choice is clear, but for Jax, who, even before the war, had begun to see home and its inhabitants as ghosts, the only context in which their relationship can have meaning, is where they already are. This beautifully rendered story ends on the acceptance of a lie and the bitter severing of ties, not just to the past, but to the future. It’s not so much that it undermines the idea of the competent scientist-cum-hero, more that it renders him irrelevant.

“The Dam” is also SF but of a very different kind. Set in an environmentally degraded near future, the story has a brooding, almost biblical texture, with the narrator serving as witness to the secret and not so secret sins of past and present. Through him we learn of the weaknesses and desires of some of those who refused to leave the four towns of “Machinery and Prescott, Alice and Thor,” submerged when the valley was flooded after the building of the dam. There’s a wonderfully bizarre passage in which we are told of a “catfish the size of a man” with massive arms that it uses to open the doors and prowl through the drowned houses of the four towns. Someone once tried to catch the creature, much to the grim amusement of the locals who witness the doomed enterprise. The sorry fate of a visiting scientist is mentioned in passing, murdered by a local for his radio, his teeth worn, trophy-like, as a necklace. Troubled by dreams of the residents of the sunken valley, the narrator begins to envisage a means of setting them free. Their sins, it is suggested, were no worse than those who inhabit the town on the edge of the lake. When one man, Oscar, more someone the narrator takes pity on than a friend, is dealt an awful punishment for fathering a deformed baby with another man’s wife, the narrator’s own guilt prompts him to carry through his intentions to reveal the hidden secrets of the four towns.

Both “Chimera Obscura” and “Conversations with Michael” speculate on the attractions and hazards of a virtual existence, and while the idea is central to both stories, it is not what either of them is about. In the former, it’s tangential to the nascent relationship between Spike and new housemate Sarah. In a near future San Francisco in which the random acts of guerrilla violence have become as familiar a part of daily life as shopping in a local flea market, Spike, Shin-yi, and Echo can’t afford to pay the rent after a former housemate has left. There’s a fourth housemate, Bardo, but he exists primarily in a virtual world of alien shoot ‘em up games, attached to an IV line for sustenance and a catheter for waste. As Spike delicately observes, “Bardo doesn’t particpate much in the house, uh, culture.” Sarah, much to their surprise, agrees to take on the spare room, and soon she’s confiding in Spike about her own troubled past. She studies failure, demise mechanisms which disrupt the successful working of political systems, social and cultural movements. In one key scene, when she accompanies Spike to a virtual reality café, she notes that rather than a place where people come to socialise, it’s a point of departure. Implicit here is the notion that in this disconnected near future, where people feel more alive wired to their machines than they do communicating to real flesh and blood, they are in effect, already dead. Bardo’s fate brings the point home and helps forge a stronger connection between Spike and Sarah. This is not to suggest that the tone is didactic or hostile.

In “Conversations with Michael,” Marcus contrasts two aspects of virtual existence, one, like Bardo’s, as escape, the other as therapy. Stacey grieves for her child, Michael, dead from Leukaemia. Holding herself responsible for his death, she attempts, through psychotherapy, to come to terms with her guilt. But it’s only when therapist Alice encourages her to converse with Michael in a virtual environment that Stacey is able to accept what happened and, ultimately, to see through the wreckage of her marriage to Keith, himself seeking his own release from grief through “mainlining” on information in the virtual world. Marcus uses the paraphernalia of VR and cyberspace adroitly, but without letting it get in the way of his real concern, which is to portray a woman numbed by grief rediscovering her identity and her strength, and moving on.

“Winter Rules” is set in Reno at a science and engineering convention, and offers the protagonist, through an anomaly in a golf simulation program, an horrific glimpse of a post-nuclear Winter. It’s a quiet, subtle examination of scientific doubt, of unease over the direction and potential consequences of the military applications of science, and once again, Marcus asks the pertinent questions without preaching at his readers.

A number of stories operate in a region on the edge of fantasy, where events in the natural world are sometimes disrupted or distorted by phenomena which resist rational explanation. “Breeding Lilacs” opens with a quote from T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland which encapsulate the theme of the story, the possibility of something good being born out of desolation. Estranged from her father since her teenage years, Laura is confused when, some hours after his death, he shows up in her apartment, not asking anything of her, just lying there, weak and silent. Despite her bitterness, she finds herself trying to care for him, to make him comfortable. The act generates a memory of one moment of closeness, of shared happiness, and that is enough for her to let go her hostility.

In “An Orange for Lucita,” dreams of transformation and memories of the dead allow Lucita a glimpse of hope. The pagan—through the Aztec belief that when we die our souls live on in the form of butterflies and birds—and the Christian—through the festival of the Day of the Dead—collide to miraculous effect in saving the life of her son, Pablo.

Moths are central to “Lepidoptera,” a surreal and darkly humorous fantasy which alludes to a number of transformation stories, most notably Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, but also, in its strange analysis of desire, to works as diverse as The Silence of the Lambs and Thomas M. Disch’s story, “The Roaches.”

“Prairie Godmother” and “Random Acts of Kindness” hover somewhere between SF and fantasy. In the latter, in a similar future to that posited by Marcus in other stories—a world marked by environmental degradation, societal breakdown, a lack of political cohesion, and a pervasive sense of disconnectedness and lurking danger—strange, unsolicited gifts are bestowed on Blair, a kind of backwoodsman who survives through doing odd jobs for the other surviving inhabitants of his small rural community. A stranger tells Blair a story about an encounter with what he believes to have been an angel. He suggests they are coming back to reclaim the despoiled Earth. Blair is sceptical, but later, after visiting his wife’s grave, he’s forced to question his own assumptions. “Prairie Godmother” also has a widower as its protagonist, an old man who drives out into the wilderness to spend some time at a favourite spot. Listening to Hank Williams—the poet laureate of loneliness—and drinking beer, Will reflects on the emptiness that has opened up inside him since his wife’s death, an emptiness this journey is an attempt to fill. He regrets that they never had any kids—radiation at his workplace had affected his sperm count but he’d never told Rose this, let her go to her grave thinking it was some fault in her. He sees something shoot past overhead and crash among the prairie scrub. Investigating, he hears a voice in his head urging him on. He finds a crashed spaceship with a dying alien. The creature has a child, unharmed but vulnerable. She senses Will’s loneliness and so charges him with looking after her baby. It might sound trite but it isn’t: Marcus treads a fine line between banality and wonderment, and doesn’t shy away from showing us small miracles.

In “Angel from Budapest,” Claude has spent his adult life running from his childhood: brought up in Budapest by a brutal father and protective mother, he has never quite got over what he sees as her abandonment of him during the 1956 Soviet Invasion. Now, a mathematician at an American university and a serial philanderer into his third marriage, he’s haunted by visions of a woman who resembles his mother. Like the other ghosts in these stories, she serves both as a conduit to truth and a means of redemption.

“Those are Pearls that were his Eyes” focuses on Suki, a woman who lives among the Ken, breeding and raising exotic, empathic creatures for sale to the alien race. Her lover, Tam, was killed in an accident, but not before his persona was digitalised and uploaded into cyberspace. He calls her every day, wanting their relationship to continue, but Suki is in search of love and thinks she might find it with Roan, a Void Dancer, a human especially adapted for travelling through Wormholes. The story traces the elements of loneliness and hope, charts our willingness to reach out and grab possibility as if it were something tangible, only to see it slide through our fingers like the promise of a cool Summer breeze.

“Heart of Molten Stone,” with its journey down a river of volcanic lava, is a science fictional reworking of Joseph Conrad, in which company man Martin is sent to Altair V to find out why their mineral extraction operation has ground to a halt. The answer lies with Schwartz, a charismatic, Kurtz-like company agent turned renegade with his own tribe of committed worshipers who just happen to be a bunch of insensate company droids.

“Blue Period” has fun with a young Picasso in Paris at the time of the H.G. Wells Martian invasion. A commission with which he has been struggling, a routine depiction of the crucifixion, is transformed into an early masterpiece by what he witnesses of the destruction of the city.

“Love in the Time of Connectivity” explores the difficulties inherent in forming a meaningful relationship in a virtual world of proxies and avatars.

“Quality Time” and “Echo Beach” both hinge on time travel. In the former, Brian travels back to the Mesozoic era at the point of orgasm, an impossibility he puts down to a rift in the space/time continuum caused by his improbable success in getting a lease on an apartment in an exclusive development. The tone of the story initially resembles some dumb, high school comedy, as Brian realises that in order to return to his own present, he’ll have to masturbate his way back, but once home, the mood shifts, becomes more sombre as Brian becomes fearful of the consequences of having sex with his girlfriend. As in so many of these stories, Marcus once again wrong-foots the reader, taking us somewhere other than we expected. The latter story is set in a bar at the end of the world, or rather the end of the solar system as our sun goes into meltdown. The narrator tends a bar which exists in a protective bubble outside of time. Its clientele is made up of beings of all shapes and sizes who travel from all over the place to witness what seems like the most spectacular light show since Pink Floyd played their last major arena gig. There are baroque echoes here, as in other stories of Samuel Delany and of Steve Erickson, particularly the latter’s Days Between Stations.

The book which most comes to mind when reading “Halfway House” is James Tiptree, Jr.’s Up the Walls of the World, in that, like Tiptree’s wonderful novel, the story features a vast, sentient creature drifting through space, swallowing up entire systems. An interstellar ship’s computer, Abigail, becomes aware of an anomaly on their journey between Sol and Centauri, a black hole where none should exist. She wakens Abbot, one of the crew, but he is troubled by horrible dreams. Soon, Abigail too is sharing his dreams. As the ship nears the black hole, the dreams become more powerful, more consuming, hinting at a malevolent intelligence lurking somewhere inside or beyond the anomaly.

The title story, “Binding Energy,” re-imagines the late career of Edward Teller, creator of the hydrogen bomb. Here, disguised as Emil, the narrative traces his increasing paranoia and isolation as he becomes marginalised from the heart of power in Clinton era America, having once had the ear of Ronald Reagan. Haunted by the memory of a character based on Ethel Rosenberg, executed, along with her husband, in 1953 for selling American atomic secrets to the Soviets, Emil ponders the fate of others whose caution and liberalism conflicted with his own, increasingly militaristic and right wing worldview. When he finally meets the Rosenberg character face to face, her eyes remind him of his last meeting with his one-time rival, Robert Oppenheimer. Instead of the loathing he had expected to find in the cancer-ridden Oppenheimer’s eyes, he saw instead compassion and forgiveness, something from which he had recoiled. She reveals to Emil his own, imminent fate. This is a fascinating and troubling story about the seduction of power, human weakness, betrayal, and mortality. If it’s a fantasy tale, then it demonstrates the extent to which the fantastic can reveal profound truths about reality and the human condition. The story, like the collection as a whole, is outstanding.

Publisher: Elastic Press (May 2008)
Price: £5.99
Paperback: 200 pages
ISBN Number: 978-0-9553181-6-0