CrossTIME Science Fiction Anthology, Vol. VI, edited by Anthony Ravenscroft

The CrossTIME Science Fiction Anthology VI publishes the best of the stories contributed to the Crossquarter Annual Short Science Fiction Contest in 2006. The competition has been running since 2001 and is organised in memory of Paul B. Duquette, a friend of the publisher’s and an sf fan. The Crossquarter competition specifies that it seeks stories that highlight the “best of the human spirit”—so there’s no room here for horror, dark fantasy, or gloomy tales of human desperation under the steel-capped boots of dystopian oppressors. This anthology features the top four prize-winners and eight honourable mentions.

There are a number of stylistic curiosities in this volume. A note from the publisher states that “for simplicity” the stories are presented alphabetically, in the order of their author’s name. As two authors each have two stories in the final anthology, it feels slightly strange to have their stories presented side by side. The version reviewed here lacked a contents page and contained a fair sprinkling of typos, which made the reviewer’s job slightly more complex than it needed to be.

The first author up is one of those with two entries. Henry Hack’s “Alone” starts the anthology and is immediately followed by his third place effort, “The Second Coming.” On this evidence, Hack is a technically competent writer whose stories may lack originality and raw emotional punch but who is able to tell a likeable tale. Both these stories take well-worn sf themes and treat them in rather old-fashioned ways.

In “Alone,” the narrator wakes up to discover that he is the last human alive on the planet. Indeed, not only is humanity gone, but the entire planet appears sterile, apart from the narrator and a hungry family of mosquitoes. The appearance of aliens and a direct reference to The War of the Worlds leaves the reader clear about what’s going on, but the stoicism of the narrator in the face of unspeakable loss borders on the autistic, and the fact that he doesn’t do anything to contribute to the unfolding of the plot leaves the reader feeling unengaged with the drama.

In “Alone,” the protagonist is a 68-year-old retired New York detective, while in “The Second Coming,” the protagonist is a 69-year-old retired New York detective (Hack is, you guessed it, a retired New York policeman). In “The Second Coming,” the slightly decrepit protagonist meets Jesus in Central Park, runs the marathon in record time, and becomes the harbinger of a second coming that turns out to be a little more subtle than the reader might expect. This is definitely the stronger of Hack’s stories. It is also perhaps the one story in this collection that directly addresses the competition guidelines to promote the “best of human nature.” “The Second Coming” has something of a good episode of The Twilight Zone about it and achieves a genuinely feel good ending. Some might protest that a story that deals with religion in this day and age and doesn’t even address mankind’s collective experience of zealotry and fundamentalism is, at best, anachronistic and at worst dishonest. However Hack’s good humour and likeable characters just about do enough to allow him to get away with over-simplification here.

Less successful is “Mind Over Measure” by John A. Holt, Jr.—despite the fact that Holt’s story was awarded second place by the award’s jury. This is a hard story to like. It starts with a fundamentally silly premise—that in some distant future a mind-reading band of police will decide that it is necessary to ban the production of new music—and proceeds to follow their attempts to enforce this law with all the sophistication and realistic forward planning that one might expect of a group of people capable of formulating a law this ludicrous. From this opening flaw, all the other story’s faults accumulate, snowballing downhill until the story ends with a defeat for the oppressors that squeezes every last ounce of messianic, Matrix-ish wish-fulfilment from the premise. None of this is helped by Holt’s plodding style that never misses an opportunity to drop heavily written exposition into the reader’s path and to relate the action in the most confusing way. A good editor might have pointed out to Holt that he needs to work much more carefully on control of point of view, which shifts incontinently throughout the story (page 48 features no less than seven dizzyingly unheralded shifts of POV between the protagonist, the antagonist, and a third person omniscient narrator; it also features a character yelling “NOOOO!”). It is immensely distracting.

Tim Hoppey’s story, “Something Wild,” is another of the competition’s honourable mentions, but was this reviewer’s favourite. It’s not quite clear how “Something Wild” fits the stated aim of showing “the best of the human spirit” unless that spirit is defined as the unstoppable determination of two teens to have sex no matter how creepy their surroundings, but the story does feature the anthology’s most convincing attempt at creating an alien life-form backed up with a solid story of isolation, fear, flight, and a nicely indeterminate ending. The characters are realistically flawed but likeable, and the way Hoppey make’s the most everyday and unthreatening items the subject of a growing sense of unease is effective. The female character does teeter dangerously close to becoming a stereotypical scream queen, and there is a sense that the whole narrative is too firmly fixed on rails so the characters don’t appear to have any choices to make, but this is an enjoyable story.

Evan Inboden is the other author in this anthology to feature twice. His first story is “Jack”—about a man held in a mysterious facility who is possessed of visions that he cannot understand and who finds himself compulsively writing messages no one can make sense of. “Jack” is hamstrung by a setting in which very little happens and which gives the protagonist little to do. It also relies on the reader to accept that aliens capable of fantastically advanced science are improbably incompetent and that the first lesson an alien would learn from humanity would be the immorality of murder. Inboden is, if nothing else, optimistic.

The second Evan Inboden story is “November’s End,” which invokes some quantum hocus pocus, unlikely time travel, and a good shake of mysticism to tell the unconvincing tale of a man given a second chance at happiness with the wife he thought he’d lost. The problem with “November’s End” is that it purports to be a science fiction story but ultimately falls back on quasi-mystical mumbo jumbo to try and get us to buy a happy ending that isn’t earned by the protagonist and isn’t satisfactorily explained to the reader. Why does the protagonist end up on Mars? How does he survive there without a spacesuit? What is his dead wife doing there? And what the devil did Jenkins have to do with any of this? All these questions are left unanswered by a story that’s a tough and ultimately unfulfilling read.

There’s no real way that Gary Jugert’s story of a woman whose life is fulfilled only when she’s playing the part of an all-powerful queen in a World-of-Warcraft-style RPG can be fairly classified as science fiction or fantasy. There may (or may not) be a ghost in “Many Lives,” but it serves no role in advancing a plot. The story requires the reader to accept that an employee who spends her time at work playing role-playing games and cheating on her (apparently saintly) husband by indulging in illicit cyber-sex in the staff toilets is somehow an innocent victim when her bosses fire her. But, even if the reader is willing to accept that the protagonist deserves our sympathy (and the author jumps through a number of hoops to convince us that they should), the story still fails because the plot is resolved not by the actions of the protagonist but by the intervention of forces beyond her control. In this case, Jugert gets to write an improbable happy ending when the software gods descend from the machine to empower our heroine and allow her to have her cake and eat it. Like many of the stories in this anthology, the passivity of central characters robs the reader of the opportunity to emotionally invest in the plot or the people involved. It’s not incompetently written, it’s just not very exciting.

“Thursday, with a Twist of Thyme” is a sweet enough little story by Anne Kohl about a girl enjoying a stroke of supernaturally inspired good fortune in depression-era America. The story perhaps uses the word cherub too often, and it’s not clear whether it works on anything but the most shallow, feel-good level. The ending is a bit of a head scratcher, and the story lacks a really powerful sense of time or place.

Edward McKeown was awarded the top prize by the CrossTIME jury for his story “Medi-evil”—one of a series about a modern-day Knight Templar battling demons and the like in Middle America.

“Medi-evil” is a disappointment. The plot wouldn’t be out of place in one of the weaker episodes of Scooby Doo (probably one of the ones with annoying sidekick Scrappy in it). The dialogue is encrusted (apparently at random) with a scattering of “thees,” and the scenery is studded with magic swords and fey folk aplenty as evil forces take control of a travelling “Renaissance Fair” for purposes that are never adequately explained.

The combat is so ritualistic that you half expect the narrator to tell you what score he rolled to knock the evil black knight’s helmet off (there’s no head underneath!), and just when the bad guys look like they’re doing something dramatically interesting and breaking the rules of this sort of thing, a god literally descends to stop them.

The mythology is a horrendous jumbling of Norse, Christian, and sub-Tolkienism thrown together in the shallowest possible way. The Norse goddess, Hel, appears alongside a Christian angel and a host of faeries, orcs, and other creatures plundered from various mythologies without any comment on what this all might mean or how such different creatures might interact. McKeown appears to be lazily picking pretty things off the shelf and tossing them into his mix without caring about where they come from or what they might signify.

None of which might matter if the characters were engaging. Sadly, they are not. The protagonist is one-dimensional, his omni-competence and obvious moral rectitude draining any sense of tension from the story while the supporting cast, though getting a share of some nicely witty dialogue, appear only as glorified cheerleaders. At least Buffy and Scooby had support from people who actually contributed something to the story.

Everything about McKeown’s story, from the awful punning title to the neatly stitched up ending, grates. This isn’t so much a vision of the best of humanity but a whitewashed, airbrushed, photoshopped version of the world that pulls the teeth of “evil” by making it bland and puts in its place smug notions of heroism and unquestionable moral certainty.

LeAndrea R. Potter’s “On Your Wings” is another disappointing tale that again features protagonists doing very little to move their stories forward. “On Your Wings” begins with an odd choice by the author, who writes most of the tale from the perspective of Sandy—a genius physicist dying of ALS—while really being about Jessica. This choice leaves the author with a very awkward coda to her story; Sandy dies, and Potter has to introduce a third person narration to sketch Jessica’s subsequent life in the last few, italicised, paragraphs. It’s a particularly awkward piece of writing.

“On Your Wings” starts with Sandy in hospital, waiting in his grumpy (but lovable, really) genius way to die when Jessica, a genius Caltech student, visits and attempts to enlist his help with her very difficult problem. Troubled introductions predictably blossom into love via some pretty ropey dialogue (Sandy has a tendency to sound a bit like Humphrey Bogart: “That’s what I’m saying, ain’t it kid? Come ‘ere and let’s see what you got.”), but Sandy’s lesson to his protégé is unconventional. Rather than encouraging her to make the most of her gift for physics, he persuades her that physics isn’t worthy enough for her and sets her on the path to finding cures for other people like him. Then he dies, leaving Jessica an unconvincing fortune (how many academics are that rich?), and she sets up a medical institute and lives happily ever after. The most basic problem with the story is the unconvincing central relationship. It’s not clear why Sandy softens for this girl and not clear why Jessica would devote her subsequent life to fulfilling the wishes of this man.

It’s hard to know what to make of James M. Thompson’s “In Your Turn,” set in a world where most people are capable of swapping gender. Almost the entire human race have become hermaphroditic, and women are rare because everyone chooses to be male. Bob and Frank are an unlikable pair of slobs who decide to have another child for unbelievable reasons but then have to decide who will be the woman. An unlikely plot, burdened with heavy lumps of exposition and unrealistic dialogue, unwinds via shipwrecks and infidelity, and in the end, everything is made right by the discovery that on returning home from their wanderings, a new law gives them six months paid maternity leave. Some of the suppositions underlying this story (well, of course, everyone would choose to be male if they could) are crass, and much of the internal logic of the story falls apart on the slightest scrutiny (Bob and Frank’s decisions seem to be driven by a shortage of money, but they can embark on an exotic holiday at the drop of a hat). Thompson’s story is neither funny enough to excuse its chauvinisms nor a convincing piece of science fiction.

Sadly, the CrossTIME anthology doesn’t finish on a high note. “Eve” by Vern Wilcox features Grace, a clever girl from a poor background whose good looks and brains earn her a place at university. Then, after graduation, tragedy strikes as Grace discovers she has a serious heart problem and will need a transplant. But Grace learns that she has strange benefactors who claim to have given her the genetic boost that allowed her to rise out of poverty (because, obviously, the only way poor people can get ahead is through genetic manipulation by aliens) and who are here to help her now. Grace is to be the first of a new wave of humans designed to provide better company for three million aliens coming from a dying planet who don’t want to be bored talking to (or presumably looking at, since they made her beautiful) normal, stupid (and ugly) humans. Or was it all a dream? Once again, this is a story where the protagonist does almost nothing but have stuff explained to her by a cast of people who know more about everything than she does. Are the aliens real? This reviewer honestly didn’t care.

CrossTIME Anthology VI is a distinctly mixed bag. A good number of the stories are competently written, and a smaller number feature genuinely nice ideas fleshed out into more than serviceable stories. But there are a number, and surprisingly a number of those rated highly by the judges, that are less than competent. Indeed, there are a number that bear the marks of the kind of serious mistakes that fledgling writers are apt to make. Too many stories here feature passive protagonists and plots that are advanced only though painful expository passages.

Congratulations to the folks behind this competition for encouraging short fiction and for offering a route for less established writers to see their work published. However, it would be difficult to make the case that this anthology offered a particularly rewarding reading experience to anyone except those who entered the competition and the friends and families of the winners.

Publisher: Crossquarter Publishing Group (Aug. 2007)
Price: $12.95
Paperback: 180 pages
ISBN: 1890109096