PS Showcase #3: Mad Scientist Meets Cannibal by Robert T. Jeschonek

In his introduction, Mike Resnick sets the tone for PS Showcase #3: Mad Scientist Meets Cannibal by comparing author Robert T. Jaschonek to R. A. Lafferty, “possessor of the most unique and idiosyncratic voice of his era.” For Resnick, Lafferty and Jeschonek are much alike “because nobody sees the world quite the way Robert T. Jeschonek does.” That may be true, judging from the five stories in this collection. Distilling Resnick’s introduction to a couple of words, this collection is “weird” and “funny” at the same time, though the humor can be very bitter at times.

The first offering, “Something Borrowed, Something Doomed,” bears out Resnick’s guarantee from the first sentence. Beginnings are tricky things to pull off. Jeschonek does it well, describing something as corny and common as a marriage. The first sentence reads like a postmodern angst-youth story:

Back home, we had a tradition: the worse the weddin’, the better the marriage. That’s why our people worked so hard to ruin each other’s weddin’ days.

But, of course, things don’t stay like this for long. When the protagonist, Vicky, explains what her brothers did to spoil her wedding, we really get the story’s measure:

Like the end a’ the world, for example. That was the monkey business my brothers got up to on my weddin’ day.

They figured, if they could pull it off, they’d set me up for the greatest marriage of all time, because how could you ruin anybody’s weddin’ day any worse than endin’ the world?

This just goes to show how dirt-suckin’ stupid my brothers could be.

These are a family of hillbillies (or genebillies, as they dub themselves) who revel in wrecking each other’s weddings. The thing is, they are post-human and have mastered the secrets of nanotechnology. When they release a new “world-eatin’ bacteria,” things go haywire—far more haywire than they expected. Before they are consumed by the bacteria, her brothers tell her she will be the last person left in the world, except there won’t be a world, but they are pretty sure she can create a new one.

“Something Borrowed, Something Doomed” is a madcap story reminiscent of another great author not mentioned by Resnick, William Tenn.

“Dionysus Dying” is a beautiful tribute to an old, dying jazzman who wants his biggest follower to be “his breath.”

Bobby is called upon by the famous musician Omar Wild to record his last album for him, an album Wild will never be able to record because he is dying of cancer. In order to record Revelations, however, Bobby will have to play the Wild album Wild now loathes, an experimental piece of the ’70s called Nyneveh. Bobby, who has drinking- and anger-management issues, feels like letting the old man die, but the temptation is just too great for him, and he ends up accepting the task, even though it that means trouble:

“The ‘Solomon’ solo is forty-five minutes long,” said Bobby. “And it’s all freestyle. Everything’s random. About the only way to play it is to memorize every note.” “Sounds…about right.” Omar had trouble with his next breath. He gasped and shuddered, then finally pulled in oxygen on the third try. “Except…not all random. There’s a…pattern…a code.”

“Dionysus Dying” is reminiscent of Julio Cortazar’s novella “El Perseguidor”; like the Argentinean author, whose passion for jazz led him to pay a marvelous homage to Charlie Parker in the abovementioned story, “Dionysus Dying” also talks of jazz and its convoluted ways. Unlike Cortazar (or not), Jeschonek guides us to “A code, a key to open things.” For Bobby will have to unlock the code in Nyneveh to get what he wants, but the code may also be a burden because, among other things, it makes the player have visions of past things and things to come.

A weird, old-fashioned story (Jeschonek really seems to be more attuned to Lafferty, Leiber, and company than with China Miéville, but is that a problem? Not at all.), “Dionysus Dying” is Jeschonek’s “Shape of jazz to come”—even though the ending, beautiful as it is, disappointed me a bit. Too much sturm und drang in the beginning to end with a whimper. But maybe that’s an all too real metaphor for what happens to Bobby throughout. A certain dulling of the senses.

“Food Chains” is a straightforward story of space exploration and of what happens to the crew of a crashed ship on a desert planet. The spaceship is called Puerco (Spanish for Pig), for crying out loud! And it’s all about food, of course; their mission is to go to the forlorn planet Polvo, “dust bowl of the galaxy,” the final resting place of two of the protagonist’s brothers. And maybe her third brother’s as well.

We were going to look for my brother, Roto, who had disappeared a month ago on Polvo, at the height of a rash of attacks by a man-eating alien monster. Guapo and Frogface thought we’d been hired to kill that man-eater, but no one had hired us. I was taking us to Polvo to find Roto, though I’d gladly gun down any man-eater that came between me and my brother.

They eat Rations, which are humanoid but apparently not human—in fact they can roast part of their bodies and give them away to be eaten—which reminded me of Li’l Abner’s shmoos.

Rations were genetically engineered to be delicious and nutritious. They could use body chemistry to cook and season their flesh to taste, infuse it with a seemingly limitless number of flavors…then regenerate and replace every bite taken out. They were happy to do it, too.

The protagonist has issues with Rations, however, because they are not only genetically engineered to be nutritious. If the wrong person eats them, he/she can die if the Ration is attuned only to the DNA code of the original user—which is what happened to her two brothers, Miguel and Oswaldo, when they were children. Everything goes wrong on the mission, of course, and she is forced to eat the Ration, a man-shaped humanoid called Manny. But she eats it because it’s the only way she can survive to find her last brother.

The ending is predictable but well written, bringing together the themes of hunger and love, two things we can all relate to.

“The Day After They Rounded Up Everyone Who Could Love Unconditionally” is told in first person by a guy who was left behind when the people Who Could Love Unconditionally were asked to leave. Life gets so much easier for those who stayed. After all, “so few people were taken. Not much disruption at all.” Except the protagonist finds that he misses his loved one.

This story required a certain amount of balls to write; it’s very hard to write really original short-short stories (or flash fiction) these days. Nobody did it like Fredric Brown, as Resnick points out very well in the preface, or even Robert Sheckley in the 1950s. Short, sad, and well-rounded—Jaschonek even managed to write a good, surprising last sentence—I enjoyed this immensely.

“Playing Doctor,” the last story of the showcase, is a variation on the age-old theme of the mad scientist. And Jeschonek does it right from the very beginning:

The problem with having a crush on your mad scientist boss is, every day she doesn’t see how wonderful you really are seems like the end of the world.

And that’s not the only problem poor Glue has to face. Not when the mad scientist community is prejudiced:

In the good old days, mad scientists weren’t considered public enemies like they are now. They were tolerated, in fact, because the government loved getting its hands on their way-out inventions after their crazy schemes were thwarted. But not anymore. Not since the terrorists.

Hildegarde Medici and her assistant, Glue (his last name is actually “Glugor,” which is what she used to call him because it reminded her of “Igor”), were next-door neighbors in childhood when they “played doctor” together—but not in a naughty way. They played “mad scientist,” and Glue cherishes those moments because all he wants is to be near her. Even if that means being used as a guinea pig in her experiments:

On purpose or by accident, I’ve been shrunk, enlarged, divided, multiplied, irradiated, roboticized, made invisible, and turned every color in the rainbow. She’s managed to reverse every change, but only after plenty of drama and destruction.

Naturally, the main goal of any mad scientist is to conquer the world, or to destroy it. Hildegarde Medici has just finished the construction of a doomsday weapon, which she fully intends to use—if she has the time to. The problem is that she’s discovered that she has cancer.

But what if her assistant has a plan of his own? Madly in love, he will do anything to make her happy. Even if it means turning himself into a guinea pig again. But it’s okay to be mad, as he tells her later, “Mad is good.”

And if you are Robert T. Jeschonek, then mad must be truly an excellent thing, because this collection is pretty good. May he uphold the legacy of Lafferty and Tenn for a very long time.

Publisher: PS Publishing (2008)
Pages: 83
Hardcover price: £10.00 [$20.00]
Jacketed hardcover price: £25.00 [$50.00]
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1906301651
Jacketed hardcover ISBN: 978-1906301668