Space Magic: Stories By David D. Levine

I must admit that I had not encountered David D. Levine’s work before I was offered this assignment, and suspect that most of those reading this have not done so either—a point on which Bruce Holland Rogers lingers in the introduction, wryly titled “Some Guy Talking About Some Other Guy’s Stories.” As he notes there, “Novels build name recognition. Stories generally don’t,” which I guess can be added to the other troubles short fiction faces in today’s market. “To the average book browser,” he goes on to quip, “this introduction is Some Guy writing to introduce the stories of Some Other Guy.” (Incidentally, Rogers is himself a multiple-award winning short story writer, whose prizes include two Nebulas, two World Fantasy Awards, and a Bram Stoker.)

Nonetheless, that is exactly the reason why collections like Levine’s Space Magic are more important to the genre’s creative vitality now than before. They may not sell the way the big publishers wish they did, but they go a long way to correcting that problem by making the stories in them more easily accessible, not just individually but as a set.

Having read this one, I hope that the volume does more to make this very worthwhile writer better known to the reading public. The variety of the 15 stories included here, and something of the sensibility in them too, often reminded me of Michael Swanwick, whose work they are comparable with at their best. I also suspect Rogers is right when he suggests that there is something important to science fiction’s future here—a transcending of generic boundaries, and even the constraints of a science that seems far less friendly than before to the idea of a “life among the stars.”

The stories here have another asset Rogers does not mention. A story like Charles Stross’s “Lobsters,” with its veritable blizzard of ideas, can certainly entertain hardcore readers, but may frustrate readers not steeped in the thought-world of the pre-Singularity that fans and futurists take for granted. Levine’s pieces, fresher for eschewing that language, are accessible to anyone willing to travel along for the ride.

The first story in the collection, 2001’s “Wind From a Dying Star,” also happens to have been Levine’s first sale (purchased by Rogers himself for his anthology Bones of the World). It is set in a distant future, in which a tribe of humans “swim” among the stars, foraging on the thinning energy of a cooling universe. The tribe’s eldest member, Old John, announces his intention of heading off to an Earth that only he is old enough to have been born on to see it before it is consumed by a sun gone red giant, confronting tribe leader Kula with just the beginning of a dilemma—and an adventure.

“Wind” is nothing short of Stapledonian in its cosmic, far-future setting, but written with far greater warmth and intimacy than Olaf Stapledon brought to books like Last and First Men or Star Maker. Its beautiful images and often poetic language (in contrast with Levin’s usual plain and straightforward, but always lucid, prose) only enhance that very pleasing effect.

“Nucleon” is only marginally science fiction, being a story about a commercial artist’s friendship with a junkyard owner whose collection of antique odds and ends he looks to for inspiration. The “Nucleon” of the title is an old, nuclear-powered concept car that turns up in that yard, and while the idea has a retro interest, it is just a prop that had me wondering if it was tossed in just to make this slight, but highly readable, charming story appropriate to Interzone (where it first appeared, though it has since been repeatedly anthologized).

The next story, “I Hold My Father’s Paws,” shifts to a near-future San Francisco in which Jason Carmelke finds the father who abandoned him and his mother in childhood—just as he is in the midst of having himself biologically converted into a dog (this now being a “lifestyle”). At first glance, the situation is absurdly comic, but “Paws” proves to be a surprisingly poignant story about the reconciliation between a father and son.

In “Zauberschrift,” Levine shifts to a more conventional fantasy setting—a rural, Medieval, German setting (Levine tells us on his website that it’s the 1400s), namely the village of Lannesdorf. Young Ulrich, a wizard whose apprenticeship was cut short when he took over his father’s business following his untimely death, has just returned there, and predictably, all is not well. The local daemons, mastered by a spell, have given the village two decades of good weather. Now they seem to be out of control, the stormy weather threatening their harvests and their livelihood, and it is to Ulrich that the locals look to set things right.

This is a simple enough premise, but one made interesting by Levine’s handling of the concept. Far from a generic tale of sorcery, Ulrich here is a man of reason and learning, solving a cleverly crafted mystery that, with the change of a few details, could easily be a scientific detective story of the sort Isaac Asimov’s “Robot” stories were often structured around, complete with a looming menace from ignorant book-burners—exactly the kind of transcendence of the lines between fantasy and science fiction that Rogers extols Levine for in his introduction.

“Rewind” opens with an assault on a military hospital in the opening to a tale of a corporate-totalitarian America, which results in special-ops soldier Clark Thatcher finding himself in the hands of the “Committee for the Liberation of the U.S.A.,” an underground movement against the new order.

While “Wind” offers fantastic, outer space adventure, “Rewind” demonstrates Levin’s ability to write action and suspense of a harder-edged variety. Additionally (mild spoiler here), while the key trope (a time-travel system that lets the user go back in time a few seconds) is not a new idea, Levine resists the temptation to go the route of parody (as in Galaxy Quest), playing it straight with excellent results, especially in the climax.

Levine’s use of this setting is also noteworthy. One might imagine it to be a dark future (given how such concerns have been revived in recent years), but it is in fact an alternate history, this skewed timeline produced by a right-wing coup in the late 1970s. Some readers may find that aspect of the story timelier today than it was when it first appeared in 2002, given the similarities of today’s situation with that of the time—an economy in the dumps, record oil prices, quickening inflation, Middle Eastern troubles, and worries about a security state out of control. And others may wonder if this is not just a cracked mirror held up to what “Haig” and company really did pull off, some of the essence of what happened here certainly being part of history as they know it.

“Fear of Widths” opens with the nameless protagonist and his wife arriving at a Midwestern airport from Portland. He is there to sort out the affairs of his parents, who have just died in a car accident. The story is so sharply and convincingly detailed that, especially coming from the Minnesota-born Portland resident, it has the ring of autobiography—up to the last page, on which a surprising twist turns this drama into a piece of slipstream fiction. Despite the visceral depiction of the landscape leading up to that moment, the change felt so abrupt as to leave me wondering if this was not two stories glued together (albeit skillfully), though given the nature of grief, the conclusion later struck me as oddly appropriate.

The setting of “Brotherhood” is a Pennsylvania steel town in 1937 where mill worker Tony Collina finds himself increasingly torn between his role as a company spy— without which he cannot earn enough to support his family—and his loyalty to his coworkers—now in the midst of organizing to protest their intolerable conditions, which have just claimed the life of Tony’s brother (whose ghost Tony is now seeing).

However, the historical setting felt a bit flat compared with the rural Germany of “Zauberschrift.” Though they are not inconsistent with the kind of penchant for the fantastic that Levine demonstrates, the downbeat, the depressed, the gritty do not seem to be his strong suit, and this is a story that loses something as a result of that. Still, Tony is a sympathetic figure, and while this is a more serious tale in its tone, the climax will appeal to those who enjoyed the episode Joe Dante directed for the Showtime anthology series Masters of Horror, “Homecoming.”

“Circle of Compassion” is set in a “pseudo-China,” as Levine calls it, just as so much fantasy is set in “pseudo-Europe,” in a time analogous to the Period of the Warring States. On the eve of what may prove to be a decisive battle in the history of this land, priestess Su Yuen finds herself, and her magical talents, drawn into the fight on behalf of her rescuer, General Chang.

Once again, the development of the setting is a bit flat (apart from its skillfully handled magical elements), and I have to admit I didn’t realize that this was a pseudo-China right away; I just wondered why it didn’t track with my recollection of this patch of Chinese history. (Admittedly, that may be more my fault than Levine’s.)

By contrast, the effective handling of the setting is what makes Levine’s Hugo winner, “Tk’tk’tk,” work as well as it does. The tale of an interstellar software salesman named Walker, it covers his assorted comic misadventures on a bewildering planet far from home. Clever and funny, it is, along with the very different story “Wind,” it showcases Levine at his best.

In “Charlie the Purple Giraffe is Acting Strangely,” Jerry the squirrel has noticed that his friend, Charlie the purple giraffe, is acting strangely. He’s starting to suspect that they’re characters in a comic strip, existing only for the readers who are always watching them. The result is a metafictional exercise of a kind I usually have reservations about, but I did enjoy this one. (In fact, I felt sorry for poor Charlie.)

In “Falling off a Unicorn” (which Levine co-wrote with Sara Mueller), Misty Bell, a young unicorn rider whose selfish “Show Mother” drags her around the country on the professional circuit, is injured at the National Championship. Making things more complicated, the unspoken love between her and her trainer Caroline is increasingly finding expression—a problem even bigger than usual because only virgins can ride unicorns. It seems like a terrible cliché to call something a “coming of age story,” but that’s exactly what this is, ably and imaginatively told in Levine’s trademark way.

In “Ecology of Faerie,” Dora Huntleigh, a young woman dealing with her mother’s lengthy illness, finds her neighborhood menaced by tiny, supernatural attackers. Like “Zauberschrift,” this situation seems like the stuff of conventional fantasy, but Levine again turns it into a scientific detective story. “Ecology” is not as cleverly or dramatically plotted as the other story, but it does prove that the idea can translate well to an urban setting, and as usual, it is a brisk read.

The next story, “At The Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of Uncle Teco’s Homebrew Gravitics Club,” takes place at a convention of “gravitics hackers”—enthusiasts of extravagantly custom-designed spaceships (one of the characters appears flying in a ship looking like the Nautilus from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, complete with the giant squid from the film versions) in a cheap orbital hotel. The story doesn’t maintain the opening’s sense of whimsy, however. Following a space junk collision, two old friends who had a falling out years before, Gary and Mira, find themselves locked in a bathroom waiting for rescue. While Levine never bores, the results are admittedly predictable, and I wished the story had gone in a direction more consistent with the premise’s imaginative flair.

In “Love in the Balance,” what remains of humanity lives on in the airships of Great Houses vying for dominance in the course of the struggle to keep the species aloft. Theophile Nundaemon of the Guided Musings, a captain of one of these airships, finds himself confronted with the prospect of having to kill an old love in order to save humanity from the overlordship of a longtime adversary.

The allegorical “Love” is as thoroughly lived-in and richly detailed as any of the stories in this collection, and while it may initially confuse the reader, its brisk pacing and wild imaginative flow produce one of the collection’s most memorable pieces.

“The Tale of the Golden Eagle,” another Hugo nominee, is a beautiful, touching far-future fairy tale about the odyssey of a bird of the titular species in a universe where humanity has found a life among the stars. Along with “Wind,” the spirit of which it shares, it makes an appropriate bookend to the other stories in the collection.

A final note: some of these stories, including “Tk’Tk’Tk’” can be found at David Levine’s website, which also has plenty of other material of interest to fans (including an MP3 interview, an online journal, a listing of news items updated with admirable regularity, and plenty of background to his published work).

Publisher: Wheatland Press (May 2008)
Price: $18.00
Trade Paperback: 288 pages
ISBN: 978-0979405433