New Genre #5

Before the fiction starts, New Genre #5 sets the stage with an essay, “Assimilate This” by Jan Wildt, that is a paean to SF that dares to draw from influences beyond its usual fare. This is no manifesto of any particular school of thought or movement, but simply a celebration of those things SFnal that aren’t as readily celebrated by the SF field. I mention this not to review the essay, but simply because it helps place the stories that follow into context.

By far the longest story, Joseph A. Ezzo’s “The Strange Summer of Duke Bogardis” tells of two middle-aged losers—the narrator and his friend, Graylin—in a Florida beach town. They earn what they can by stealing or sponging off the narrator’s girlfriend, but mostly their obsession is with the batting cage where they spend most of their time. Or rather it’s Graylin’s obsession, and the narrator doesn’t have enough of his own initiative to do much else but tag along.

This obsession takes over the story when a silent man, whom Graylin dubs “Duke Bogardis,” shows up, and the two begin a bizarre duel to be the greatest at the batting cage. The strength of the story is in the obsessive buildup as the two battle back and forth. Some of the earlier parts felt overly long, not helped by how completely pathetic the narrator is. The ending also peters a bit, though there, finally, the narrator comes to life. But it’s the duel—with some SF twinges around its edges and in its denouement—that rescues this story and that lingers after the reading is done.

In “Honeymoon” by Jamie Corbacho, the narrator, Silvia, wishes to set the record straight about the week she spent living with wild dogs when she was eighteen. The trigger that sends her to the woods is her alcoholic grandmother, who verbally abuses everyone in the family. The story flashes between Silvia’s time in the woods with the dogs and her recounting of her home life.

Silvia’s time with the dogs, including its stunning and excruciating climax, is beautifully told. Each dog is its own minor character, and their interactions among themselves and with Silvia are delightful. The juxtaposition with the abrasive grandmother gives it an odd feel—there’s no clear parallel between the two, no attempt to make them comment on each other superficially, a device that could have resulted in a facile commentary rather than an interesting story. There’s no clear speculative element to the story, but it does leave a “feeling-strange” aftertaste that makes it fit in with slipstream work.

“Dialethia” by Anil Menon is the strongest story in this issue. In it, the narrator, Carl, is an Australian studying mathematics and logic in Germany in 1930. Because both Carl’s wife and his mentor are Jewish, the growing anti-Semitism provides a key part of the backdrop, while the rest is supplied by the real historic figure of mathematician Gödel, whose revelation of his Incompleteness Theorem undermines the work of Carl’s thesis.

No, it isn’t necessary to be familiar with Gödel to appreciate this story (though I imagine a mathematician would greatly enjoy those parts). At its core, this is a story about myth and stories. As Carl digs down to the heart of mathematics, he finds that beneath the numbers are stories, a more primal reality that unites myth and math. And while the speculative element within the story itself is slight, it’s ultimately a celebration of the speculative that should cut across the spectra of fantasy- and SF-readers and appeal to them all, as well as those who normally stay away from works labeled with those genres.

From that high point we go to “Splitfoot” by Paul Walther, which I found to be the weakest in the issue. It is a horror story of three people caught in a snowstorm, trapped in the rental house one hoped to sell to the other. The tenants of the rental are taciturn, and two of the visitors believe that they’re responsible for the strange nightly sounds. It’s clear from the thoughts of Violet, our point-of-view character, that they’re not, so this insistence of the other two is a stretch.

Perhaps the intent of the story is to explore how people will refuse to accept anything inexplicable, and as such, it does an acceptable job. The horror of the climax is never really frightening or even all that engaging, and neither is it ever explained in the end. It simply is, it happens, and the characters leave.

These stories get progressively shorter, so “The Third War of Information” by John Rubins is a very short work and the only one in the issue to take place away from Earth. In a distant future, an unnamed man is sent out to examine something strange that robotic surveys on a new planet have uncovered. At first it seems nothing fossilized remains that the survey mistook for signs of more recent habitation. But he and his ward, an unnamed girl whose presence isn’t immediately explained, are trapped there for the evening, and other revelations follow.

On its surface, it’s a pretty simple story. But there’s a lot going on beneath the surface, much of it tied to the information war of the title, which has resulted in strictures on the way people speak, and through that, how they’re supposed to think. This isn’t the first SF story to explore the various theories on how language defines the way we think, but it joins those ranks confidently. A part of that, and part of what makes this story fascinating, is the point of view, which initially seems a typical third person viewpoint (though in present tense), but is gradually revealed to be something else.

Short as it is, Rubins’s story provides a very strong ending to this issue of New Genre.