Electric Velocipede #12

Electric Velocipede (No. 12, Spring 2007) is a very well put together little magazine. It is straightforwardly but comfortably designed, there’s nothing in the way of internal art, but the presentation and sensible typography mean that the plain pages of text are easily navigated and contribute to a pleasurable physical experience. The quality of the writing helps, too. There’s a scattering of names that will be familiar to those who read short fiction magazines, like Boston, Caselberg, and Tidhar, and as that list suggests, Electric Velocipede tends towards the softer edges of sf, the slipstreamish, and the literary. There are sfnal and fantasy tropes used here, but there’s the confidence to twist them and test them to their breaking point and beyond.

Rules accrete to the skeleton of a genre as writers find ways of giving their audience what they want. They construct a path made of easily accessed stepping stones over which both the reader and the writer may skip in the telling of the story. The rules set limits on where the story can go, but they also act as signposts taking individuals to material they trust and know they will like (and helping them avoid the new and the unpleasantly challenging). But they are also useful in helping the storyteller keep on track and not get lost, preventing him or her from wandering off in ever decreasing circles through the quagmire of faltering plot and overly-precious writing.

It was precisely this fate that I feared had befallen Luke Jackson when, about half way through his “Reduction Descending,” the protagonist, Pradeep, falls into a drugged stupor and experiences an out-of-body experience. Dream sequences and drugged interludes have been done badly so often that it’s hard not to groan when another psychedelic vision hurtles over the horizon. Such trips are exceptionally hard to write convincingly, and, because they are necessarily internalised experiences, they are often accompanied by the whiff of narcissistic self-indulgence. Jackson’s story had already lost points by opening with a somewhat lengthy discussion that takes seriously the Myers-Briggs classification of psychological types (pseudo-scientific horoscopes for the self-improvement generations) and was staggering under the weight of a complex structure. There’s a lot going on in “Reduction Descending”—there’s Pradeep’s work, Pradeep’s relationship with his lover, Kurt, Pradeep’s relationship with their son, Gideon, there’s a mysterious orphanage, a virtual world, a lightly sketched but complex political background in a much changed India, and there’s illegal cloning. It’s almost too dense and fractured to hold together; the parts seem doomed to shatter and sunder. And yet, running through the centre of the story is a relatively simple human tale about a father’s concern for his child. In the end, that’s just about enough to pull “Reduction Descending” through and deliver a final moment that remains curiously touching.

Bruce Holland Rogers’s short-short, “Omens,” is a neat little story about a would-be bride who just can’t quite make it to the altar. It’s a satisfying piece of flash fiction that manages to construct a rounded, knowable character through an economic use of language, and it leaves the reader with a wry grin.

For Europeans, Michael Jasper’s baseball set tale, “A Miracle in Shreveport,” is unlikely to have the same resonances that it might have for American readers. Even those Europeans who’ve wondered at the mysticism of The Natural or Field of Dreams are unlikely to grasp every nuance of this tale. The story is set in 1917, and the narrator leads a multiethnic, multinational team who are playing their way around the racially divided southern states. The premise reminded me a little of James Sturm’s Jewish baseball team in his excellent graphic novel, The Golem’s Mighty Swing—which is not necessarily a bad thing. There’s something slightly off-kilter about Jasper’s story. The looming war is neatly dealt with, but the author doesn’t really follow through on this theme. The racism—we discover about halfway through that a black man was lynched in the town where the team are playing the night before they arrive—is ominously traced out. But in the end, the story just stops. Mendez plays a few notes on his coronet and all the tensions dissipate. Now, in a story with “miracle” in the title, the author may suppose that he has bought himself the right to just do something grand, but the hopeful upturn in the ending still feels forced, and little in the story is resolved. Crucially, while dragging us onto the baseball diamond to experience this miracle, the resolution doesn’t have anything to do with the game. Mendez might as well have been a kicker in an American football team or on the bench at a basketball game while waiting for a moment to shine. The story is still enjoyable, but it’s not quite satisfying.

Part of the weakness of “A Miracle of Shreveport” may stem from the fact that Jasper has written a whole novel featuring these characters and, having fleshed them out more fully elsewhere, is content to leave things rather sketchy here. Much the same problem afflicts Brendan Connell in “Dr. Black and the Village of the Stones,” which is at least the fourth story by this author featuring the eponymous doctor. Dr. Black is a turn of the (twentieth) century multipurpose genius—part Freud/part Fort/part Holmes who becomes embroiled in a strange case of bloody rainfall in a peculiar Swiss town. Connell appears to be having lots of fun playing around in this mittel-Europa setting—to the point where the actual plot is almost redundant, and the mystery is peremptorily dispatched with a flick of the wrist.

Newcomers to this series are asked to take a little bit too much on trust. The doctor is given no particular defining characteristics other than his penchant for cigars and his inevitably flawless reasoning. But Connell’s Switzerland is populated by some very odd characters, and the doctor is a compelling chap, and while everything does falls together far too easily, it’s still an entertaining journey.

“Crater Beach” is a story of teenage angst and prejudice. John Mantooth’s world is made up of birthies (normal humans), cyborgs (who are prone to rages), and clones (who are despised). Harris, the narrator, is a shallow young man caught in a complex relationship between Elkie (for whom he lusts) and Sarah (who loves him), wasting time and money on the beach. The approach of a man who claims he’s had his memory stolen—and who is subsequently revealed as a clone—leads Harris into a dark world of prejudice that puts Sarah in mortal danger. There are elements of this story that don’t quite mesh; the sudden introduction of a dangerously stereotypical private investigator in the last quarter awkwardly shifts the story’s gears from a rather slow-moving character study into a slightly unconvincing action-adventure. Slight stutterings of tone aside, “Crater Beach” manages to construct a complex universe in which to tell a personal story. Through the course of the story, Harris first becomes aware of the “racism” that’s surrounded him—coming to terms with the changes technology has wrought on his father and to an understanding about what he wants from life. And if all the answers aren’t quite nailed down and the final parcel isn’t exactly neatly wrapped, well that’s just how life is.

Karac begins Paul M. Jessup’s “The Alchemy of War” by slaughtering alchemy turtles in an obsessive desire to learn the secrets of eternal life against the backdrop of a mighty industrial city. By the end of the story, the city is destroyed by war, and the turtles have become a symbol of hope and rebuilding for Karac’s wife, Kym. This is a short story told in a fractured way, but it is affecting. The imagery of these enigmatic, magically powerful turtles as the perfect product of “natural” evolution against the polluted and war-ravaged background of the city could have easily been handled too crudely. Jessup wisely approaches the matter obliquely, and the flowering of Kym as the last of the turtles is released is an appropriate climax.

Bruce Holland Rogers’s “Look, There He Is” is, in this era of Pop Idol and Big Brother, a suitably modern parable on the vacuity of fame. Not, perhaps, the most original idea or the most engaging story in this collection, but still an enjoyably diverting piece of flash fiction.

Lavie Tidhar has contributed a host of strongly written, engaging short stories across a large number of magazines in recent years (his novella An Occupation of Angels from Pendragon Press was one of the highlights of this reviewer’s sf reading last year) so expectations were high for “The Prisoner in the Forest.” The story, sadly, doesn’t deliver on its promise. Israeli children find a soldier and place him in a prison, only for one of the boys to mysteriously become trapped in his place in what has become a sprawling camp that threatens to spread across their land. This is all (too clearly) intended as a metaphor of the dangers we pose to our own freedoms by denying them to others. But the metaphor is stretched too far, the mystical elements of the story serve to confuse rather then reinforce the point, and the circular nature of the story just doesn’t make sense. Disappointing.

More satisfying is “The Garden of Earthly Delights” by Jay Caselberg, which features Bosch, the supremely confident ambassador to Earth from an advanced alien species. Caselberg does a very nice job of allowing us to see humanity through the eyes of this alien and only very slowly, and with some skill, reveals that Bosch might not be quite as clever as he thinks he is. “The Garden of Earthly Delights” is, perhaps, the most straightforwardly sf tale in this issue of Electric Velocipede, but it might also be the best.

Electric Velocipede also features five poems. One, “Houseguest” by Megan Messinger, deserves particular mention for being an affecting chiller (that was particularly apt to read, as I did, on Halloween) that creates a tremendous impact in a very economical way.

Editor John Klima is producing a highly polished and enjoyable magazine. It feels good, it looks good, and, overwhelmingly, it reads good, too. Electric Velocipede is recommended to those who enjoy intelligent sf and fantasy.

This reviewer liked it so much, he subscribed.