Triangulation: Taking Flight, edited by Pete Butler

Triangulation: Taking Flight is the fifth Triangulation anthology produced in conjunction with PARSEC’s Confluence, Pittsburgh’s venerable (this anthology accompanies its twentieth iteration) annual “literary sci-fi convention.” Editor Pete Butler and his team have gathered together 20 short stories (some are short enough to qualify as flash fiction) from 19 authors writing around the broadly interpreted theme of “taking flight” and packed them into 132 pages wrapped up in a very handsome Vincent Chong cover.

Before proceeding, it is necessary to address up front the fact that this volume contains a short story by The Fix editor, Eugie Foster. For the reviewer, writing about your editor’s work is a no-win situation—if you like it, and say so, then there’s the risk that the reader will simply think that you’re sucking up to the boss. If you don’t like it, and say so, well…it can be a lonely time waiting for that phone to ring. And if you’re lukewarm about the story or write something bland, then no one is happy.

So, despite the fact that Eugie Foster’s “The Life and Times of Penguin” is the last story in this volume, I’m going to review it first and get it out of the way.

If author’s had to pitch their work to editors the same way scriptwriters do to studio executives then “The Life and Times of Penguin” would inevitably end up being sold as “Toy Story meets Voltaire’s Candide.” Told from the point of view of a balloon animal penguin, the toy’s brief but eventful life manages to jam in enough existential angst to give Kierkegaard indigestion, an astonishing emotional depth, and yet fully embrace the essentially absurd nature of her story. I’d say the ending was genuinely uplifting, but someone would accuse me of making a stupid joke about balloons.

It’s good. Or I’m sucking up. You decide. Let’s move on.

Going back to the start, stories that rely on wordplay and puns are a risky undertaking at the best of times, as there’s a large proportion of readers and editors who appear to hate puns. On the other hand, there are others, like me, who love nothing better than really bad, groan-inducing punning. Sadly Reesa Brown’s “The Reap Assessors” probably won’t satisfy either camp. That the story is built around the fact that “taking flight” can have two meanings will be enough to put some readers off, and for the rest, the punch line just isn’t painful enough. Fortunately, the story is sensibly brief.

Amy Treadwell has two stories in this anthology. Her anonymously submitted stories “Guinea” and “Nine Is Her Number” were picked out of the slush pile of the 2008 Parsec short story competition by editor Pete Butler for this anthology (and then went on to place first and second in the competition). “Guinea” won, and the judges were right, it is the better of Treadwell’s two offerings. “Guinea” is the story of an old woman who finds late love thanks to her relationship with an unusual bird—a West African Guinea Fowl, to be specific. There’s more to the bird than meets the eye, of course, but the cleverness of this story is in the way that Treadwell opens up her protagonist, Ursel, as the story develops.

“Peacock Hour” is the story of an Arabian family that becomes obsessed with taking to the skies on a flying carpet, recovering the legacy of their family and their oppressed peoples. Haylaa, the narrator, watches seven of her brothers die in attempts to fly before she recovers the “secret.” Author Elizabeth Barrette is clearly aiming for something liberating and uplifting, but her story never really soars—the ending is telegraphed, the emotional impact of the family’s sacrifice seems oddly underplayed, and the roots of their obsessive behaviour are never really convincing. Like most of the magic carpets it contains, this story unravels before the end.

“Touchdown” by Katy Darby transposes the legend of the Flying Dutchman to the era of the jumbo jet. It’s a smart idea, but it’s unconvincingly delivered. The story isn’t gripping enough to work as horror, and the characters’ situations don’t carry enough emotional weight for it to work as personal drama. When the plane finally lands, the number of conveniently available and trusting terminally ill patients willing to take the word of strangers and jump on a plane to who knows where seems unbelievably high—even if the plane does land in Las Vegas.

Rachel Swirsky’s “Into the Air” isn’t really a story—it is two pages of mumbo-jumbo instructions on how to fly. That said, there’s some evocative writing (”The earth weeps in particles of cinnamon and jasmine and gasoline”) and a smart warning that the supplicant will not be satisfied if they complete their quest and take to the skies, because the restlessness that drove them to this point will never be satisfied.

The contrast between “Into the Air” and Paul Stefko’s “What Are The Odds” could hardly be greater. Stefko’s story is all plot and bluster as wartime superheroes the Major and his probability-busting sidekick Scout leap onto Zeppelins, dodge hot-lead from “Rat-zi” machine guns, and battle a beautiful Aryan villainess with the power to bend men’s minds to her will. This is a fun adventure story in an old-fashioned style—there’s no irony here, no knowing winks and no hidden depths—everything the story possesses is on the surface, but it’s more than competently written and there are moments that should bring a grin to even the most sour face. One thing, though, everyone (and I mean everyone)—enough with the zeppelins now, please!

Gail Sosinsky Wickman’s “The Winner” is hamstrung because it features shallow, stupid central characters who behave in shallow, stupid ways—which isn’t endearing, it’s just annoying. It’s the story of young, fabulously rich plutocrats who seek to amuse themselves through gambling and who make a casual bet that sends a slave off on a wild goose chase for years while failing to understand the most obvious consequences of their bet. The story is about as shallow as the central characters; the only person here with anything really at stake is the slave, and he is banished to the periphery. The ending is obvious from the outset and that it still comes as a shock to the story’s character just highlights how dim everyone here is.

“Seeing Stars” by Shanna Germain is a very rare thing: a science fiction story that deals with sex without making the reader want to curl up in a corner and die of excruciating embarrassment. Sadie works for a company that facilitates the extreme sexual preferences of its wealthy clients. Specifically, Sadie is a medic who ensures that no harm comes to those who get their kicks from mixing sex and sadomasochism-perverse (in the non-pejorative sense, of course). My only (slight) criticism of this smart, adult story is that perhaps Sadie makes her leap from rejection, even fear, of her clients’ habits to neophyte explorer of the wild side a little too swiftly for her conversion to be entirely convincing.

It’s hard to know quite what to make of “The Face of the Waters,” in which Jewish geneticists, faced with the inevitable defeat of Israel, develop a hybrid Jew with gills, capable of living in the ocean. The religious, political, and ethical elements raised in Matthew Johnson’s story don’t seem to fit together. Yonah—the aged, desperate scientist who is the story’s protagonist—argues with the ghost of his dead son about his actions, but there doesn’t seem to be a logical connection between the points made. Yonah tells us that Jews are losing the struggle with the Arabs for Israel. As a result, many young Jews are abandoning their country. But then he says, “What good is the Promised Land if there are no Jews to live in it?”—which suggests that the Jews are being wiped out. And he justifies the creation of a species of underwater Jew so that they will always have a homeland, whatever happens in Israel, even though this seems to fly in the face of the Torah (”Whatsover hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination to you”). At best, these assertions are a series of non sequiturs, at worst, some of them seem to be contradictory. Whatever the case, they don’t seem to add up to a reasonable justification for what Yonah has done. Since the argument about the justifications of Yonah’s work forms the heart of the story (the “action” features the child’s bris), the fact that his argument is full of holes is a major problem for Johnson’s tale.

Jacob Edwards’s “Stone Cold” is an exploration in a quantum multi-universe. It has a nice play on the fate of an explorer in a reality where every possible eventuality is possible—so every mission must succeed at least once, guaranteeing a safe return—but must also fail an infinite number of times. The problem is that the story starts off at a high emotional pitch and has nowhere left to go except into overwrought melodrama.

Amy Treadwell’s second piece, “Nine Is Her Number,” tells of young Tisa, the ninth daughter (her name means ninth) of an African family living by the Congo in what appears to be a pre-Colonial time. Tisa is chafing against the burdens of her position, put upon by her sisters for being the youngest and the daughter of the fourth, and least powerful, wife in the family and finding the restrictions of tradition hard to bear. Rebelling, she is sent on an errand to collect eggs, does battle with a winged serpent before returning to her village to take a position of power. I’d have liked to have seen Treadwell do more with the exotic setting here; the jungle environment feels sparsely described and never really comes to life, and perhaps Tisa could have done with a more powerful justification for her discontent—she comes perilously close to being just a whining teenager rather than the young woman with real problems that the story demands. Despite this, Tisa’s final transformation is impressively achieved, and the writing is strong throughout.

Gerri Leen could be accused of false modesty for titling her story “Nothing To Crow About” because it is certainly worth a caw or two. Mirel is the leader of the crows, and she is able, with a peck that draws blood, of turning ordinary men into were-crows. Steven is her crow-pecked husband. He earns a living scaring crows in the farmer’s field—a job he’s remarkably good at thanks to Mirel’s help—but one night each month, he transforms into a crow and spends the night in the tree with his wife. Unfortunately, Steven’s life is one of frustrated longing, for Mirel only wants to sleep and crows mate for life.

In a collection that leans heavily towards fantasy, David Seigler’s “Graveyard of the Cloud Gods” stands out as an excellent piece of science fiction, which succinctly but effectively describes a complex alien world with two distinct but linked cultures and some convincing speculative biology. The Llaunu float in the clouds high above the planet below—they regard the world below the clouds with dread, descending there only when mortally wounded. But Ju’utu is curious about what happens when their gas sacs finally fail and they tumble below. His desire for knowledge takes him on a terrifying visit into the world of the filthy creatures that dwell on the earth, and we get an insight into the culture of a species that is frequently visited by great creatures descending upon them from the skies above. Ju’utu briefly rejoins his people, bringing an unpalatable truth that at first seems to be rejected but finally changes two worlds on one planet. Seigler mixes strong speculation with muscular writing to good effect and delivers a very enjoyable story, one of the best in the anthology.

Of the flash fiction pieces in Triangulation, I liked Ian Creasey’s “Rush Hours” best. A wry story about traffic jams and teleportation, it explains perfectly why, when technology keeps changing and improving, nothing seems to get better.

In “Ex Libris,” the library has become a very dangerous place to visit. Things are escaping from books—deadly, impossible things. And the only thing standing between these things and chaos are the world’s most highly trained and deadly ninja-librarians. Marc Vun Kannon plays this story with an admirably straight face, which turns out to be a good idea; otherwise, the story might collapse under the weight of the silliness of the original premise. The only slight disappointment is that some of the action sequences were a little hard to follow.

“Before the Ink Is Even Dry” begins with a young girl, Deena, taking a seat on the plane beside Frank. Frank is a crook who tried to pay his debts with property he didn’t own, but unfortunately for him, he’s tried to con the wrong people. Deena is here to deliver a warning via her tattoo. When the tattoo begins to talk, it seems like a cool device and Matt Betts’s story seemed to be heading in an interesting direction, but when bullets shoot out of the tattoo, he stretches credulity beyond the breaking point and then other parts of the story start to grate—like what possible mechanism between Deena’s body and the tattoo would have her get younger as she used it. Once thrown out of the story by this improbable twist, I found I didn’t care what happened next.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the current Republican candidate for the Vice-President of America, Sarah Palin, doesn’t read science fiction. But if she ever did, perhaps in one of those numerous magazines that frequently appear in front of her but whose names she can never remember (I’m guessing The National Enquirer), then I’m willing to bet that she might quite approve of Stephen V. Ramey’s “It Takes a Town.” Ramey has written one of those folksy American SF tales where small-town Yankees apply their boundless ingenuity to achieve something magical that all the huffing and puffing of big government and big city folk could never manage. In this case, they launch a rocket to Mars. And they do it despite living in a post-fossil fuel, globally warmed society (okay, so Ms. Palin might not understand that bit). This is sentimental, hokey, and familiar stuff that draws on the marrow of American science fiction, and yet it is also irresistibly, infuriatingly appealing. Ramey makes no effort to hide the preposterousness of his story—with a cast of ever more unlikely characters, including an obligatory child genius laying the plans, farmers plotting to grow carrots in Martian soil, school teachers organising bake sales—and all shown through the eyes of the ever more exasperated town curmudgeon, and failed pig farmer, Tom Piper. Of course Tom is won over. And of course those plucky townsfolk do the impossible. This is, after all, America.

There is a temporal discontinuity in Lavie Tidhar’s “Post” and letters are falling through time to pen pals and family members separated by generations. In one era, Mich and his cat, Mr. Pokey, are moving closer and closer to investigate the rift—regardless of the cost to the woman who loves him. Meanwhile, in other times and places, people are sharing information and changing history while trying to come to terms with the man who delivers the post. Tidhar’s a very, very good writer, and this is a touching story that even managed to make this reviewer forgive him for introducing another cat to science fiction.

It is definitely time for some sort of moratorium on cats and zeppelins.

The penultimate story in Triangulation: Taking Flight (remember, the last was reviewed first) is Shweta Narayan’s Indian set tale of a father sacrificing himself to allow his son to escape a life of servitude. “Dancing In Air” is very brief, but Narayan paints a vivid picture with the barest sprinkling of words, leaving space for the reader to construct a complex background to the simple action she presents—which is the knack in writing the best flash fiction.

Triangulation: Taking Flight is, like most anthologies, a mixed bag. The “taking flight” theme is so loosely defined that I’m not sure that it gives any sense of continuity to the stories at all, and so I was left wondering why the editorial team had bothered with the theme at all. Nevertheless, there’s a very great deal here to be enjoyed and a handful of stories that are genuinely excellent.

Publisher: PARSEC Ink (July 2008)
Price: $12.00
Trade paperback: 132 pages
ISBN: 0615235409