Challenging Destiny #25

Our first story in issue #25 of Challenging Destiny is Suzette Haden Elgin’s “Death and Taxes.” Bill loves his StarSpangly motor home. It is the perfect confluence of convenience and freedom, and it sure beats the alternative: a cramped and dingy room in an orbiting retirement home. The problem is, the StarSpangly isn’t his. The government gave it to his wife, Vanessa, and, now that she is dead, the government is going to want it back. His only hope is the legendary Tall Pines, a slice of heaven on Earth where widowers and their motor homes can live out their years far beyond the government’s reach.

I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the message of this story is. It shouldn’t be this difficult. A story that opens with someone stuffing his dead wife in the refrigerator so the government won’t repossess his StarSpangly is not the sign of a subtle work. Yet, Bill is too sympathetic and the government is too humane for either of them to be the clear problem here. Maybe the problem is that families are pushing elder care off on the government, but, if so, Bill should really express more interest in seeing his family than he does. I don’t know. I’m probably just over thinking. In the end, “Death and Taxes” was thought-provoking and enjoyable, and that’s enough for me.

Question: You’ve dedicated your life to creating a worldwide socialist utopia, and you’ve succeeded. You also have a time machine, which you use to jump 100 years in the future. In the future, you meet a clone of yourself, who tells you the world of the future sucks. Do you:

A) Do a bit of research to make certain your clone is on the level?
B) Jump forward another 100 years to see whether the problems are temporary?
C) Go on a kamikaze mission to the past in order to destroy everything you’ve ever worked for?

If you chose C, then C. A. Gardner’s “Kelmscott Manor: In the Attic” is for you. Science fiction genre pioneer H. G. Wells creates a working time machine and enlists fantasy genre pioneer and socialist organizer William Morris to help humanity avoid the dreadful fate awaiting us. The only question is whether Morris’s future is any better than what Wells saw.

If you chose A or B, you’re going to have problems with “Kelmscott Manor: In the Attic.” Maybe I’m more cynical than most people, but it’s going to take more than someone telling me that the future is bad for me destroy my life’s work, even if that person happens to be a future clone of me. I’m going to have to see the badness and, more importantly, feel it. By the same token, it’s going to take more than an author telling me that a character would do that for me to find it believable. The author has to show that character, and me, the badness and make at least the character feel it. Unfortunately, Gardner does neither here, and the story suffers for it.

Before I write off “Kelmscott Manor: In the Attic,” I have to admit one thing: I’ve not read The Time Machine. I know, I know. How could I have read nearly the entire Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman oeuvre and missed The Time Machine? I was young, and the never ending torrent of Dragonlance books had shinier covers. Anyway, it’s possible that all the problems I see in “Kelmscott Manor: In the Attic” are a brilliant statement on The Time Machine, and I wouldn’t know. Gardner is a Clarion grad, which lends weight to the “basic errors in storytelling are really a clever comment on the source material” theory. On the other hand, even the best authors have off days. So, if you’ve read The Time Machine, “Kelmscott Manor” might be worth checking out. Otherwise, I recommend skipping it.

The story behind “God of Lemons” is clever. Author Arwen Spicer has three well-known dead European men—Peter Abelard, Charles Darwin, and T. E. Lawrence—join up with a modern Asian teenage girl for a trip through the afterlife. There are some nice subtleties with how the trip progresses, and I think there is some value to the underlying message. Unfortunately, everything good is all buried underneath one of the most annoying narratives I’ve read. Bratty teenaged narrators and lecturing twelfth-century monks do not an enjoyable read make. While part of me wants to recommend others read this story, this is the same part that thinks, “Wow, this milk smells bad, I should have others smell it.”

“Expectations” tries to be a story. James Wesley Rogers gives it a first person narrator, a vague sort of plot, and even a few characters. However, these are just bolted on to an essay about how modern technologies, the inadvertent effects of genetic engineering, and “kids these days” may change society in the near future.

Does this make it a bad story? Well, Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” and John W. Campbell’s “Twilight” are of this same mold, and the membership of SFWA voted to include them in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Of course, those two stories did help inspire modern speculative fiction and, arguably, the explosion of innovation that characterized the last half of the 20th century. This does make them important stories, justifying their inclusion in the Hall of Fame, but I wouldn’t call them good. By the same token, “Expectations” can be seen as a charming nod to the origins of the speculative fiction gene, but I’d have preferred less essay and more story.

Is Marcelle Dubé’s “Jhyoti” the “bestest story evah”? No. But, after the last three stories, it sure felt like it.

“Jhyoti” is a nice bit of space opera/murder mystery, complete with a maverick fleet academy cadet protagonist who happens to also be psychic. It’s spiced up a bit by basing the world’s society on the Indian caste system, which may make it more palatable for those strange readers who object to space opera. That probably won’t help them get past the gaping plot hole (note to villains: it’s a bad idea to let the protagonist just walk out of your palatial estate after they know all your secrets), but there are times where you just have to relax about such things. Hardcore space opera fans might feel that the setting is a bit cramped, but the mystery makes up for the loss of expansiveness. So, give it a read, if you get the chance.

In “Pretty Birds,” A. R. Morlan had a nice eerie vibe going. Arna, and several other women in the area, lost her baby before it was born. It wasn’t stillborn; it disappeared from her womb. Poof. Now, several months later, a baby keeps appearing in her backyard, and she can’t quite convince herself that the baby isn’t her lost child. Clearly, this not a cheery story, but the eerie vibe worked.

And then came…The Explanation.

It fell from on high: A massive meteor of exposition. There was no warning. Not the slightest hint so I could prepare. The impact obliterated the interesting dark fantasy/horror story, leaving only awkward musings on popular cosmology. Maybe if the explanation had been set up earlier, drifting slowly to the ground in manageable flakes, the story could have been saved and had a happy, science-fictiony ending. But, it wasn’t to be. The devastation was too great. We are left with only a smoking crater, and the memory of how great “Pretty Birds” could have been.

Boy wishes to be a writer. He arrives at the all-powerful wishing box to have his wish fulfilled. He gets into argument with the keeper of the box about why the all-powerful wishing box hasn’t been used to make world peace. The argument tells us a whole bunch of clichés about making world peace but only shows us two people being annoying. We then learn that writing stories can make the world a better place. That’s all there is to “The Keys to the Yellow Kingdom” by Matthew Sanborn Smith.

When a writer writes a story about a writer and the message is that writing stories can make the world a better place, the more mischievous bits of my brain wonder if the poor chap had to shave his palms in order to type it. Now, that’s not really a fair comment. Besides 90% of all writers write a story like this at some point in their career (and I suspect the other 10% are lying). It’s perfectly normal. It’s just that the lack of plot, the annoying characters, and the uninteresting dialog left me unfulfilled.

I hope, by this point, you’ve gotten the idea that I didn’t enjoy Challenging Destiny #25that much. Was it bad? No. The stories just weren’t my mug o’ chai. There were interesting ideas underlying each of them, but, even in the two stories I liked the most, I didn’t find anything interesting in how they were told. That said, I know there are many readers out there for whom the interesting ideas are enough. If that’s you, feel free to laugh at my silly objections and give Challenging Destiny #25 a try.