Myth-Understandings, edited by Ian Whates

What a great title with a multiplicity of meanings! Myth-Understandings. Editor Ian Whates has roughly divided the stories in this anthology into two segments. “Myth: A traditional story dealing with supernatural beings, ancestors, or heroes that serves to explain the worldview of a people” covers the fantasy part. “Understandings: Accurate interpretations and comprehension of meaning through the use of intelligence” runs closer to science fiction. The overall theme is “Communication: the imparting or interchange of thoughts, opinions, or information.” But of course you can read it as “misunderstandings,” implying a disruption or distortion of communication, whether deliberate or accidental. Or even “miss-understandings,” as in the worldview of an all female group of authors.

We begin with the Myth section:

Opposites attract, but their coming together may portend sparks, and the resulting fire is likely to cause pain. In “Owlspeak” by Storm Constantine, we see a clashing of cultures, an attempted meshing of two diametrically opposed ways of life. Can love bridge the gap? Sometimes love isn’t enough.

The girl is a Nixie, a follower of the hedonist Lady Onyxx. She and her companions are focused on love, pleasure, magic, arts, and literature. They sound like a group of idealistic college students, talking all night about ways they will change the world, thinking themselves and their way of life superior to all others, but really not doing much of anything. The boy, Shay, is from a family that follows Strixion. This joyless religion rejects art, literature, and anything not part of a narrow, plodding existence. People are animals, their only purpose to reproduce and die. Although Shay claims not to follow his mother’s religion, and even shows signs of yearning for more, his upbringing and family loyalty hold him caged.

Owls are associated mythologically with wisdom, but even more so with bad news, evil omens, and proclamations of doom. It’s hardly an auspicious beginning that the star-crossed lovers meet when the city turns out to view an unexplained influx of owls. The girl, fervent as a true evangelist, tries to persuade the boy to her way of life while never really understanding how he feels. The boy, although curious about a different worldview, never quite comprehends the message and resists change. Their relationship seems as doomed as the owls, who eventually commit mass suicide like so many feathered lemmings.

This is a sad story, about failed communication. The two have been at cross-purposes all along, not truly listening to each other or engaging in meaningful dialog. Perhaps the title, besides referring to the owlish omens, also refers to a bit of owlish wisdom: for a friendship to flourish, there must be acceptance and understanding.

“Seaborne” by Kari Sperring explores an effect communication may have: it can change one or both parties into something more—or less—than they were before.

A shipwrecked sailor is rescued by some sort of spirit-being. She is totally innocent, having no knowledge of anything beyond the small spit of land she inhabits. She is aware of cold but doesn’t truly feel it, has no knowledge of hunger, has no language except the words she has taken from the minds of the drowned who are occasionally cast up by the tide. She dances in the moonlight, in the sand dunes and on the shore, in a timeless limbo virtually devoid of thought. For the most part, she simply “is” without need for defining herself. There’s a vague fear of “wolves” who might destroy her if she left her allotted area, but otherwise little curiosity about what might lie beyond.

Enter the sailor, whom she finds on the shore. She has never encountered a live human, so far as she remembers. When she realizes he is alive, that he can see her, and that he isn’t afraid of her, she’s frightened but also intrigued. She pulls him up beyond the tide line, so the sea can’t take him back.

Unable to keep away from the strange new creature, she gradually learns of his needs for warmth and food. She brings him wood and tells it to ignite, brings scraps cast up on shore that she transforms into good food. He tells her about places and things beyond the realm of her imagination. With the best of intentions, or at least no evil intent, he tames her as one might a wild animal. Gradually she begins to become something else, something closer to human.

One of the tests of a really good fantasy story is suspension of disbelief. No matter how far it may be from reality as we know it, the reader is compelled to accept the author’s presentation as “real” for the duration of the story. Sperring weaves a beautiful, poetic tale of a creature as innocent as a flower bud, slowly blossoming into a more solid and perhaps more painful reality. I enjoyed the music of the words as much as the fascinating look inside the mind of an alien creature.

“And Their Blood Will be Prescient to Fire” by Freda Warrington is a vampire love story, or lust story, depending on your interpretation. Maybe both. It has some graphically erotic moments. It’s partially narrated by a young woman who is obsessed with the ballerina Violette, partially told in “real time” from Violette’s point of view.

The young woman has figured out that Violette is an immortal and thinks of her as Lilith, the Death Lily. She loves her anyway. But it’s the woman’s sister, Ruth, who is seduced by Violette, because she resembles Violette’s lost love, Robyn. To add to the Midsummer Night’s Dream air of confused love interests, there is Violette’s friend/lover Charlotte, the one who changed her into a vampire in the first place.

I can’t fault the storytelling quality but found the subject matter not to my taste. It was difficult for me to muster up much sympathy for the self-centered Violette or to empathize with either Ruth or her smitten sister.

“Do You See?” by Sarah Pinborough is a wonderfully creepy story about missing children, shadows, monsters, and magic words. The little old lady who tells the story seems perfectly innocuous. She dresses well and has an air of middle-class respectability. She likes to sit on a bench at Paddington Street Gardens, enjoying the sunshine and fresh air, and watching the children play. People are so used to her being there, she says, that most of them no longer notice her. She has become, in a sense, invisible.

When another woman begins sitting on the bench, it’s a long time before they speak. Manners, you know. Mind your own business. Don’t talk to strangers. And when the conversation does begin, and the younger woman shares her bizarre story about children supposedly carried off by monsters, the old woman takes it in stride, unperturbed.

But there are interesting yet disquieting little tidbits dropped in here and there. I wondered about her thousand-year lease on her apartment; is that standard in some areas? What did she whisper to the little boy? Is it significant that she knows the name of the younger woman, who once played in the gardens as a child, or does she just have a very good memory and an eye for faces, however changed by age? Who or what is this woman anyway?

As I said, wonderfully creepy. It was a pleasure to read.

Most of us see the world as we expect to see it. It may be that we simply gloss over those out-of-the-ordinary sights that our minds reject as “not normal.” But an artist, open to whatever sights and experiences may come his way, might see things most of us would not. In “Queen of the Sunlit Shore” by Liz Williams, an artist visiting the seashore spots an intriguing woman, one whom he would love to paint. She’s wearing unusual clothes and doesn’t look as he might expect either a local woman or a vacationing society woman to look. He next sees her, or someone very like her, in an old painting, surrounded by seagulls in a sunny land, near a white temple. Surely it can’t be the same woman? But who is the woman he saw walking the shore? Is she real, or did he imagine her? Where did she come from, and why is she here?

When he spots the woman again, in the company of the white gulls that sailors associate with a premonition of death, he begins to suspect that she is a supernatural being who lures sailors to their deaths. Possessed of more courage than common sense, he tries to stop her.

I enjoyed seeing through the artist’s eyes, experiencing the world a little differently, and sharing his adventure.

I’m not familiar with the mythological background of “Heart Song” by Kim Lakin-Smith, but it definitely reads like a fairy tale. A jilted lover, Juho, sits on the edge of an old well, pouring out his heartache (and hurt pride) in music as he plays his kantele. With his eyes closed, he doesn’t see that the girl who joins him climbed out of the well, nor does he apparently have the good sense to realize she’s not just an ordinary peasant girl. Pirho is a pitiful creature, who once accidentally dropped a spindle into the well, and threw herself in after it for fear of her mother’s retaliation. Now she lives in Vanaheim, a limbo world somewhere between life and death, and she has traded her heart to Mother Reija in exchange for the lost spindle. Mother Reija has sent her up to the surface world to bring back the essence of Juho’s music.

This is a harsh world, where a young girl would drown herself rather than face the loss of a spindle. Juho may simply be a product of his environment. Still, if Juho’s arrogance and gratuitous cruelty are indicative of his usual behavior, then it’s no wonder the fair Eeva dumped him. I feel he richly deserved everything that happened to him; in fact he got off easy.

“The Grass Princess” by Gwyneth Jones is another fairy tale that doesn’t quite follow the traditional forms. There’s a Sleeping Beauty-type princess, for example, but she’s been held captive by a patch of grass since infancy and isn’t about to respond to a touch or a kiss from some empty-headed handsome prince hoping to make his fortune. No one knows what caused her predicament, much less how to do anything about it. No evil fairy or witch, no spellbound spindle, no enchanted tower. Not even a poisoned apple. Some speculate that the princess did it herself. But the story, in spite of its title, isn’t really about the princess—it’s mostly about the prince who comes to rescue her.

Young Damien is the only prince to come seeking the princess’s hand. Things aren’t going too well at home, and this seems like a possible alternative. The dollar signs light up in the eyes of the king and his magician, and Damien is sent questing after many objects of great value. It’s only after years of hardships and injuries that Damien realizes it’s all a scam, that the king and his advisor are only using him, keeping the quest going as long as possible because they have no clue how the enchantment might be broken. Damien goes off to become a mercenary soldier, through with questing forever.

And there the story might have ended, but the magician’s involuntary prophecy “that the princess must and will be freed… by one bound as she is bound, and scarred as she is scarred…” still holds, and will call him back. No longer a rebellious youth nor a young adventurer with questing fever, Damien grows up to be the sort of gentle, compassionate man who would never think of a princess as property or hold her to a bargain made without her consent. I liked this ever so much more than the traditional tales; may we all be so fortunate as to have Prince Damiens in our lives.

And now, onto the “Understandings” portion, which is just as imaginative as the fantasy stories, but contains some traditional elements of science fiction:

“Tales From the Big Dark: Found in the Translation” by Pat Cadigan takes us to a way station somewhere in space, where people (or beings) of all sorts are dropped off for rehabilitation after an alien abduction. The norm seems to be that such people have their memories wiped, but Hannah appears to have at least some memories of Earth. There’s no going home—all the people here are refugees who have settled into a new life. Hannah and her partner, Charlie, are medical assistants involved in the initial processing of newcomers.

Hannah has gradually adjusted to being surrounded by aliens. Perhaps because she expects them to be different, it’s easier to accept the differences. Her biggest problem seems to be with humans—people like her—who behave in unexpected ways.

There’s a lot going on here, but the recurring theme seems to be communication. Can all these different beings, having so little in common, ever come to truly understand one another? Everyone has an implanted translator, but how accurate are the translations? The tentative answer is that by focusing on our commonalities and accepting each other’s differences, familiarity will gradually result in greater understanding. The way station then can be seen as a metaphor for spaceship earth, where humans from many different cultures can eventually learn to understand each other as well.

“TouchMe™: Keeping in Touch” by Heather Bradshaw looks at another form of communication. Teri is a TouchMe™ Lost Devices Location Tracking Operative working in a Dilbertian cube farm of a call center. The device provided by her company seems to be something beyond a cell phone: a personal device meant for communication between lovers that somehow sends touches by telephone.

So much for the science part. In a hilarious spoof of the modern workplace, we follow Teri’s chaotic day, from disgruntled or irrational customers to unreasonable supervisors to malfunctioning robots and contaminated coffee. Bradshaw also takes a few well-aimed punches at electronic communication in general and offers the comment that “The human voice is an amazing phenomenon… It can be heard across whole offices without any assistance from electronic transmission or amplification.” An astute observation, and a fun read.

“We Shelter” by Leigh Kennedy is full of unanswered questions. We don’t know where it takes place, except that it’s some sort of shelter, perhaps a refugee camp, and the main language spoken appears to be Spanish. It may be a post-apocalyptic world. Perhaps there has been a war, a plague, some unimaginable catastrophe. The narrator speaks almost entirely in the first person plural, not differentiating herself from the group. “We” do this; “one of us” does that. This muffles the action, reduces its impact. The exception arises when a strange craft—a spaceship perhaps?—of unknown origin lands with a cargo of dead and a handful of survivors. One of the dying newcomers speaks in a language most of the receiving crew don’t understand. But the narrator understands their words, and moreover finds herself mistaken for her sister, whom we may assume is dead. At that point, the narrator switches briefly to first person, again when she recounts her dream of home, and yet again when she holds the man’s hand as he dies.

The dramatic effect of the switch from “we” to “I” makes one think about the nature of language and how much our perceptions are affected by word selection. The reader will never find out what’s really going on here, yet that simple change of wording lifts the story from a vague recounting to a strongly felt personal tragedy. As Ayn Rand once pointed out, there is great power in the word “I.” Impressive.

Is the next story, “Dinosaur” by Deborah J. Miller, science fiction or fantasy? Here we’re dealing with paleontology, but we’re also dealing with a child who can call fossils back to life, who has some sort of mystical relationship with dinosaurs. Little Mina accompanies her paleontologist father on a dig. He chips out a lizard fossil and lets her hold it.

As she traced the lines, Mina brought the tiny creature into being. She had done it before and knew her father was unable to see the electric lines of animation which sparked from her charmed fingers.

As the now-living lizard slithers away, Mina informs her father that it was yellow, with black stripes. Naturally he doesn’t believe her, having missed the transformation as well as not seeing a brontosaurus that has been hanging around the area, possibly communicating with Mina. Mina knows her father wants to find a brontosaurus, so she steers him toward a site her large, green friend must have told her about, a place where an entire herd was suddenly buried. Her father isn’t inclined to believe that either, but Mina’s fervent insistence, as the unseen (except by Mina) dinosaurs urge her on, persuades him to take a look—and leads to a major discovery.

Years later, Mina has long since lost or misplaced the magic, but follows in her late father’s footsteps studying fossils. Then people begin seeing dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures, always in places Mina has recently been, although she never manages to quite catch up to them. Are they looking for Mina? Is she somehow responsible for the destruction and deaths that occur when such massive beasts materialize, even temporarily, in a crowded, urban area? What do they want?

Children tend to be fascinated by dinosaurs, as they are by so many things. This story urges us to bring back the magic, to rekindle our sense of wonder.

“Further Orders” by Elizabeth Priest features a young woman trained in the martial arts. She’s armed with a sword, throwing stars, and bow and arrows. She is a lifelong member of a religious sect that expects absolute obedience. Her extensive training has even included telekinesis on a limited basis. Her superiors have sent her to a tiny meadow in the middle of a large forest to await further orders. She has no idea what sort of mission she’s on. Most of the story details the petty irritations, the boredom, the impending insanity that results from being forced to wait a long time in a small area with little or nothing to do. I won’t give away the ending, but it did make me laugh.

In “The Tollhouse” by Claire Weaver, somewhere among the asteroids is a warehouse and processing center where all the things people sacrifice are stored, at least until they get shipped out to Left Wanting or The Dreamhold to be recycled. It all comes through the meta-link: a purse, a gun, a human brain, a fetus:

The bag handed over to the mugger to appease his knife-hand. The favourite hunting rifle ditched in a river because revenge was more important. The brain sacrificed to find a better party, more booze, harder drugs…The child for the career.

We follow a lowly inventory taker checking off the contents of storage pods while leaving a trail of popcorn crumbs. His boring routine changes when he opens a pod that’s supposed to contain six hundred pounds of chocolate and encounters instead a live human girl.

I could empathize with this lowly worker, seemingly trapped in a dead-end job but even more afraid of losing that job. I suspect most of us have felt that way at one time or another. I was intrigued by the idea of the warehoused sacrifices. Oh yes, it also made me hungry for popcorn.

“Body of Evidence” by Justina Robson explores what might happen if you were wearing a miniature lie detecting device—one that commented on everything you saw or heard—including your own thoughts and actions. Supposing such a thing were possible, what would be the affect on society in general or on individual lives if all the polite lies we constantly tell ourselves as well as others were exposed? Would it make for better communication, or just irritation and an eventual breakdown of all social relationships?

Rachel agrees to participate in a test run because she desperately needs the money. You can put up with anything for 12 hours, right? Especially if you try to avoid people during that time. But after 12 hours of being bombarded by the ugly truth, can you ever regain blissful ignorance? Even truth can be overdone, and the device seems to accentuate the negative. Doesn’t anyone ever have a positive thought, or more likely mixed emotions?

In the long run, I’m neutral on this story. I’ll give it credit for presenting a somewhat believable case, but dock points for its pessimistic and simplistic attitude.

“The Ecologist and the Avon Lady” by Tricia Sullivan presents a skewed reality that’s about forty degrees out of synch and constantly shifting. The Avon Lady of the title doesn’t sell cosmetics, although she does hand them out as gifts. She also carries a jackknife, sword, mace, pistol, shuriken, hand grenades, and a blowgun. In essence, she’s a licensed exterminator of shape-shifting, homicidal monsters. She’s not the first agent sent after this particular monster, and she won’t be the last.

“Reality slippage” seems to be an expected part of dealing with such monsters. The landscape is constantly changing, sometimes presenting multiple realities simultaneously. The intrepid Avon Lady deals with it as best she can, all her energies focused on killing the monster. She’s opposed by the ecologist, or perhaps the witch who took the ecologist’s place, who tries to warn her that killing the monster will cause the end of the world. It’s a little like taking a nightmarish carnival ride, while wearing kaleidoscope goggles. I enjoyed the trip, but I’m still not sure just what it meant or even if it was supposed to have meaning.

Publisher: NewCon Press (March 21, 2008)
Limited edition hardcover price: £18.99
Paperback price: £9.99
Hardcover ISBN: 0955579112
Paperback ISBN: 0955579120
Pages: 224