The Maker’s Mark: Remnants, edited by Jon Garrad

The Maker’s Mark: Remnants, edited by Jon Garrad, is, we are told, an exercise in “world-building.” Every story in this volume is set on the same desert planet inhabited by robots that scattered from the City that lies at the centre of their world at some indeterminate time (a “generation” at least) in the past. In the desert, the robots have created a facsimile of the American “Wild West,” but now more and more are feeling an irresistible urge to return to the City, and the communities they created in the desert are dying.

The faux-Western setting is entirely inauthentic; none of the authors demonstrate any sense that they understand that milieu or that their research has gone beyond adding a few more “ain’ts” and “ma’ams” to their dialogue and chucking in a scattering of props picked from watching John Ford or Anthony Mann oaters on daytime television. In the post-Deadwood-era, that is hardly enough. But then, this is a land populated by robots, so there is no need to be “authentic,” and all clichés and anachronisms can be conveniently (perhaps too conveniently) passed off on the unusual setting—the Maker’s will, as it were.

What is the appeal for a writer of binding their imagination to a universe created by someone else? The lure of Star Wars or Star Trek fan fiction is fairly obvious; it provides beloved characters in a familiar setting with the mechanics of a universe worked out in the most minute detail, allowing the budding author to avoid much of the spade work of creating a world and get straight on to the “fun” stuff with their favourite toys. And professional writers of spin-off novels get to do the same thing while hopefully selling their work to the huge market of fans.

But The Maker’s Mark universe offers no such pleasures. Where a Star Trek fan can look up the melting point of Dilithium crystals down to half a dozen decimal places, the writers here can’t decide whether their robots are practically mechanical immortals (“Crowdance”) or whether they fall apart at the drop of a hat (“Legacy of Life”). Do their parts decay in an instant (“Legacy of Life”) or will they keep working weeks and months after the robot dies (“Inheritance”)? In “Crowdance,” the return to the city is a “silent exodus” where robot eyes glaze over, and they wander into the desert empty-handed. But in “Cayuse,” those preparing to return are a confrontational mob, packing up all their belongings to set off in a heavily laden wagon. In “My Brother’s Keeper,” the robots have a steam-punkish edge—with mechanical parts and “boilers”—while in “Top Night Out,” they’re clearly electronic. In “Legacy of Life,” the robots seem to die like humans if they are slashed or cut, while in “Perfection,” they are clearly machines capable of reconstruction in ways that would kill a human.

These contradictions highlight a flaw at the core of The Maker’s Mark; it is not a fleshed out world where writers must make their story work within the rigour of an existing physical and psychological universe, but the reader will, justifiably, expect it to hang together more convincingly than it does. Worse, though, is the way the writers in this anthology have responded to the rather sparse setting provided to them. Rather than use it as an opportunity to experiment, they have been timid both in the style of their prose (which tends everywhere towards the competent but stodgy) and in the world they develop (an indistinguishable string of dusty towns and scrubby deserts). It is as if a thick layer of sand has been blown across the authors’ imaginations.

Gregory A.T. Morris gets the collection off to a painfully slow start with “Crowdance.” Set in the eponymous mining town, three men—a miner who struck his lucky seam and retired, the barkeep of the saloon, and the town doctor—pass a slow day playing cards before a stranger wanders into town and reveals that the reason that the mail coach is late is that the neighbouring towns are being abandoned. And not only is there no post, but no one will be coming to buy the ore from the town’s mine. This is essentially a story of people sitting around while nothing much happens very slowly. That might be forgivable if the slow storytelling built to some remarkable insight or revelation, but what it builds to is some people sitting around for a while longer.

There is nothing intrinsically science fictional about “Crowdance”; the characters are described as robots but behave like humans and might as well be flesh and blood as wires and metal, for all that it matters to the way the story progresses. It is a recurring fault with the stories in this anthology.

It is certainly true of “My Brother’s Keeper” by Robin Kate Harding, in which a charming young man comes to town on a quest to find the last member of his family, who the boy assumes is his brother, to pass on the news about the death of their father. The young man’s quest is sidetracked when he falls for Chel, the classy girl who came to town years before. They make a beautiful couple. The only shame is the boy was actually looking for his sister…

However, since robots have no DNA and since they don’t reproduce sexually (in other stories we see them building their “children”), the fact that Chel and the young man happen to have been built by the same robot should be no block to them having a good time. Why would robots have a prohibition against “incest”? The question is not explored. Nor is the question of why these robots appear to have “sex drives” when they don’t reproduce sexually. It raises the question of why, if the writers are going to treat the robots as perfect analogues for humans, they bother to write about robots.

One element shared by “Crowdance,” “My Brother’s Keeper,” and Lawrence Duncalf’s “The Price of Gold” (and several more stories in this collection) is that of the stranger wandering into town. Maps don’t seem to be a feature of the Remnants world, and the desert’s roads don’t appear to have signposts (nor are any of the robots fitted with GPS), so this wilderness teems with lost souls who don’t know where they are or where they’re going. In “The Price of Gold,” the stranger is a prospector who wanders into one of the last thriving towns with a stash of gold to sell. The prospector soon runs afoul of the town’s family of ruffians, the dim-witted Polternecks, who he proceeds to outsmart with a routine so old and so obvious that you can’t help wondering who Duncalf thinks is more stupid, the Polternecks or his audience.

Picking a winner for The Author Who Crammed the Most Clichés into a Single Story prize in this anthology would be a close thing, but Nick Westwood’s “Legacy of Life” would be a contender, if only because—not content with rendering yet another bog-standard set of Wild West locations in his description of a memory impaired young woman’s attempt to continue her father’s archaeological search for a hidden robot Nirvana—Westwood also manages to lever in yet another overused stand-by: the lunatic serial killer. He even chucks in a mob of (metaphorical) pitchfork-wielding locals. Perhaps the most confusing element of “Legacy of Life” is the fact that Westwood’s robots seem to decay in a flash, though why bits of electronics should so suddenly lose all potency is not explained. Still, this romp is one of the books more enjoyable stories.

“Cayuse” by Colleen Weare starts promisingly with young sheriff Josie keeping law and order in the desert on her trusty steed, Paint. Josie faces problems when some of the locals surrender to the urge calling them back to the City and become aggressive. Then Ruby, the daughter of one of the departing families, goes missing, and a stand-off begins, which is (somehow) resolved when Ruby turns up having had herself transformed into a horse by the local doctor/robot horse builder. This, apparently, contents the previously fractious family who go on their way while their daughter runs off to frolic in the sand dunes. Ruby’s transformation is handled without reasonable foreshadowing or depth and takes place offscreen, while Josie, who we’re led to assume is the protagonist, doesn’t actually do anything, and all the other characters are horrifyingly one-dimensional. It’s impossible to know what we’re supposed to take from this story or what the author thought she was doing, but the result is a disappointment, despite some nice images.

“Perfection” by William Isgrove and Jon Garrad (the first of two stories by the editor) is very much of two distinct parts—neither of which fit satisfactorily together and only one of which is interesting. The opening, longer, and less satisfactory section sees Eldritch on a quest following the trail of a young woman whose letters to her lover have been scattered across the towns of the desert. Years before, the woman set off on a quest, urging her beloved not to follow, and now Eldritch is following a trail of crystals, seeking answers about what became of the lovers. Eventually, in the desert, he finds a cult dedicated to perfection through the breaking down of robots to their most basic functions. This is by far the most interesting part of the story—and perhaps the single most interesting idea in the entire volume, as it at least hints at some of the potential for strangeness that could have been milked from this odd world. Most references to religion in the novel are to the ersatz-Christian “Maker”—with preachers and churches—but here, we see the robots creating a type of spiritualism which would be unique to them. Sadly, the authors only scratch the surface of the potential of their idea in a story which resolves itself much too neatly and quickly.

Preachers and the quasi-Christian “Maker” religion feature strongly in both of the next two stories. In Jeffery Pagenton’s “Every Sheep Needs a Shepherd,” a preacher wanders into a desert town and finds himself in huge demand from the fervent congregation. But the town of Norton’s Retreat has a secret; people are dying, torn to shreds, and the townsfolk can’t stop it from happening. The preacher, however, comes up with a plan, but to save the townsfolk he’ll have to sacrifice himself. I liked the conclusion to “Every Sheep Needs a Shepherd”—which is cleverly handled and a neat twist on the Wicker Man outcome I was expecting. Even here, though, I found myself wondering how much more effective this story might have been if the characters had been human.

In “Top Night Out,” Jon Garrad’s second entry, another wandering preacher arrives in another town, this time named White Crow—though you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference from descriptions. White Crow is a forlorn place, and most of the population have no interest in the preacher’s fire and brimstone, finding the newly arrived carnival of freaks and deviants a far more interesting proposition. However, when the town awakens one morning to find the carnival gone, and with it all the town’s children, they turn to the preacher for leadership. But in a showdown with the charismatic ringmaster, the preacher finds that he has nothing to offer these people, and he loses not only the children but the whole town. “Top Night Out” is a strong story, but it introduces too large a cast too quickly—so that the characterisation is reduced to sketchy outlines. The result is that the crucial central character of the preacher isn’t given enough room to develop and teeters perilously close to the stereotypical, while the clash between the competing philosophies of preacher and ringmaster can’t be fully realised— especially as the townsfolk, whose future is at stake, are never given a real voice in the story.

Anthony Burn’s “Escape from Migration” is the penultimate piece in this anthology, which makes it somewhat confusing in that it seems to refer to events that occur right at the creation of this world. “Seems to,” because this is a story of broken memory and uncertainty, and there is, therefore, a certain amount of confusion—partly, this is supposed to be the case (there’s something of the film Memento in the construction of this tale) but also, sadly, because Burn’s writing is probably the least assured of any of the writers in this book. The result is that his ambitious story is undermined by clumsy writing, and any revelations “Escape from Migration” might hold are abandoned among a desert of dry metaphors and repetitious text.

Erin Hockings’s “Inheritance” is the collection’s last and, while not perfect, best. It wins out because it possesses a simple emotional core, and it is a story that could only have occurred in this land of robots.

Thom comes back to his homestead to find his beloved Viv shut down, the victim of a (robotic) snake attack. Thom morns for weeks, then sets about taking the parts from his love and creating a new child—Vivyan—but to do so, he has to use a part from the snake that killed his wife.

The snake is a silly invention. How do you poison a robot? What “flesh” does the snake bite into? Why would robot snakes have venom? Who would make them, and why? But they appear elsewhere in The Maker’s Mark, so presumably they are part of the shared world, and Hockings is not solely to blame.

However, Hockings is responsible for the unconvincing moral quandary at the heart of the story. It’s hard to see what possible argument there could be against scavenging parts from the snake to make the new child, and because the story does not communicate Thom’s position effectively, “Inheritance” lacks a really powerful sense of conflict to drive it forward. Despite this, I liked “Inheritance.” I would like to have seen more focus on what reproduction means for these robots and their relationships with each other and on expanding the emotional conflict in the story, but this, at least, is a story that could only be told in the universe of the Maker.

The biggest disappointment with The Maker’s Mark: Remnants is that too few of these stories do anything other than retread the mythos of the Wild West with “robots” who feel and act just like humans. Too few bring anything new or even show that they are aware that there is the potential here to explore this world quite differently given the tools at their disposal.

Very few of the stories in this collection seek to explore the potentially interesting, and certainly more sfnal, questions of how this robot “Wild West” might be fundamentally different from the “real” Wild West because of the differences between humans and robots. Throughout The Maker’s Mark, the robots behave like humans because that is what’s easiest for the authors. It doesn’t take long for this “path of least resistance” approach to begin to feel like woolly-mindedness, or worse, laziness. If the authors here had wanted to write about protagonists that just behaved like humans, why bother introducing the robots? If no one was really interested in exploring the sfnal aspects of this setting, why not write historical fiction? But of course, historical settings require proper research, and readers of historical fiction would demand much greater verisimilitude in the description and detail of the setting, language, and characters, and that would mean that editors and authors would have to do much, much more work. There’s a sense here that some of the writers have decided that writing fantasy lets them off the hook so they can write as sloppily as they please.

The editor’s afterword tells us that this book was “originally going to be a surreal, stylised allegory for industrial society, a collection of short stories about the androids who couldn’t or wouldn’t go to the City and become good, mindless, little workers.” Now that would have been a book worth reading. Instead, The Maker’s Mark: Remnants is a collection of disjointed short stories put together by a group of friends “from university courses or the Internet,” giving the whole thing a whiff of vanity publishing (made worse by the editor including two of his own stories, even if they are relatively strong entries), without any overarching vision or any sense that it wants to engage with “industrial society” or anything else.

Publisher: Freak Ash Books
Price: £4.79
Paperback: 216 pages
ISBN: 978-0-9553403-5-2