Is it just me, or do all “ideas” sci-fi short stories read like the author was smoking something potent?
Normal speculative fiction doesn’t necessarily have to be mind-bendingly weird. I mean, you can have a plot with dragons and eight-eyed aliens from Neptune, but the plot still moves in a logical progression, and you have some idea of what’s going on.
But somehow, the literary people (I’m looking at you, Harlan Ellison) have this way of writing short stories that makes you feel like someone’s trying to unscrew your head.
Case in point: I just read Tim Powers’s Strange Itineraries. What the freck was this guy on? Excuse me while I go look for my marbles, I think they’re under the couch somewhere.
Could you give some specific examples? I’ve read Strange Itineraries and don’t remember being particularly weirded-out by it, although I don’t remember many details of the stories now.
Let’s see, the title story was about guy who… actually, I’m not sure what that one was about. He heard a voice on the telephone, his house exploded, apparently his soul was living outside his body under an assumed name- and it turned out he was the guy on the phone. A statue of a duck and an avocado tree come in there somewhere.
Pat Moore was about a bunch of people named Pat Moore, and a chain letter. There was this professor named Pat Moore who was killed by her students, but she was trying to come back through the other Pat Moores. The only part I understood was Maxwell’s demon, and that’s because I read about it in Science News.
Night Moves- this guy’s imaginary friend tries to trap him and his parents and this homeless guy in a fantasy world. The imaginary friend turns out to be the narrator’s aborted older sister. She may be the reason his parents abandoned him. At first the guy is fine with living in her fantasy, but then he changes his mind and tries to escape. The introduction to Strange Itineraries says this story has to do with an evil psychopomp, but last time I checked a psychopomp was a spirit that escorts the souls of the dead. I don’t see how anyone in the story is a psychopomp.
Where They Hid has two twins who apparently can time travel and chance history. One thinks he’s the ruler of the world, the other almost gets eaten by a sentient pile of garbage. I kinda see where Powers is going with the plot, but knowing that A -> B does make A or B any more logical.
We Traverse Afar- like the first story, I have absolutely no idea what is going on in this one. There’s a guy, a snow globe, and a train set. That’s all I could figure out.
I got The Way Down The Hill. It was the most linear story in the collection. I think I got 50* Cents*, too, although looking at the Amazon reviews everyone else seems to have come to a different conclusion.
It may just be that I’m bad at reading surrealism. Or maybe I’m not smart enough to get it. But I think I’m going to stick to ordinary dumbed-down sword & sorcery for a while.
My WAG : I expect that it’s harder to keep up mind bending weirdness for a full novel without degenerating into incomprehensibility. And from a practical point of view, a hard to understand short story is more likely to be tolerated by the readers than a hard to understand novel.
Well a lot of the more interesting ideas will also necessarily be a bit more mind bending. And of course, a lot of the authors (Philip K Dick, Rudy Rucker, Burroughs) are on drugs.
SF is one of the genres that allows innovation in form as well as content, so I’m not surprised to find “weird” work there. I agree that as a reader, I want the world of the story to be internally consistent and the action not to be random. I’m not sure that that means “logical progression,” but it does mean “internally coherent.”
I was being metaphorical. People often say “on drugs” when they mean weird. I could have just as well said the author was schizophrenic, or had been hit very hard on the back of the head. Regardless of the metaphor, some things read like the writer was mentally disturbed at the time.
I don’t recognize many of them either, and I KNOW I’ve read Strange Itineraries. Some of the stories I’ve no doubt forgotten, but of the ones I remember then Malleus, Incus, Stapes! has described them very badly. It’s almost like he was trying to make them sound as nonsensical as possible.
If you have read the book you may remember “The Better Boy”, which is the one that stuck in my mind the best. It’s about a man trying to keep the worms away from his prize tomato with the help of a science fiction device. You may also remember “The Way Down The Hill” (which Malleus mentioned but did not summarize), a story about a meeting of a group of immortals who don’t live forever in one body but, after dying, can deliberately reincarnate themselves with all memories intact. Being born again in this way displaces the existing soul of a developing fetus. Late in the story the main character learns that a woman is pregnant with his child and worries that a rival immortal will reincarnate himself in that child’s body.
I remember this one pretty well too and will do my best to explain what it was about, although I’ll probably mangle a few details. I don’t know where you get the soul living outside his body business, it’s basically a time travel story. (Most of the stories in this collection are to some extent about either time travel or ghosts.) The protagonist winds up in a kind of time loop or otherwise outside the normal flow of time.
At the beginning of the story the protagonist gets a phone call from an old high school classmate who he doesn’t really remember. The classmate seems genuine though, as he mentions events from the protagonist’s past. Shortly afterward there’s an explosion. The protagonist survives, but his house is destroyed so he moves back into his childhood home. Many years ago some unknown person had stolen a duck statue belonging to the family, then secretly returned it along with a photo showing the duck outside an unfamiliar, run-down looking house. The narrator still has this photo and realizes that the “unfamiliar” house wasn’t a different house at all – it was his family’s house in the future, the way it looks now that the narrator is an adult. When he was a kid there was an avocado tree outside the house, but it’s no longer there and wasn’t in the photo either. The photo had somehow traveled back in time.
The protagonist tries to call his old phone number. When a man answers he realizes that he’s talking to himself just before the explosion. He figures there’s no point saying who he really is or trying to change the past* and instead introduces himself as an old high school classmate. At the end of the story he plants an avocado seed outside the house, knowing that it will grow into the avocado tree he remembers from his childhood.
*The movie 12 Monkeys deals with a similar time-travel situation.
I’m sorry- like I said, I don’t do surrealism very well. After a while, my head starts swimming.
Thanks for summing up Strange Itineraries. I think I’m going to have to go back and see if it makes any more sense now that you’ve said what it was about. (I coulda sworn the sister told him to go back to hospital where his body was. Didn’t she?)
I did like The Way Down The Hill. Straight-foward serial-reincarnated immortal cabal thingie.
Really, maybe I would understand the stories better if I had some idea what they were about from the start.
I don’t remember that happening, but it’s been about three years since I read the book. What I remember as being significant is that the narrator is outside the normal flow of time. I guess that could be because he’s a disembodied spirit. That would fit in with some of the other stories in the book, but I’d have to re-read it again myself.
Now that I think about it some more, your original description may have been more accurate than I gave you credit for. Does it turn out at the end that the protagonist was either killed or left in a coma in the explosion, and the story after the explosion was actually from the perspective of his spirit in a sort of limbo state outside time?I may be mixing it up with another story though, I’m not sure. I should see if I can get that book through the library here.