Mad, · bad · and · dangerous · to · know

I am glad I got up this morning!  Otherwise, I should have forgotten to post free fiction for International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Wretch Day.

So, Free Premium Sampler from Book View Cafe (MANY Freebies).

Also, extraordinarily sick Mayan fantasy "Heart of Jade," first published in Black Gate Magazine, Issue #2 (!!) and "To Kiss the Star," 2002 Nebula Award nominated story, with over 150,000 readers to date and still counting.

And as to "Amy Sterling Casil - bad reviews" please feel free to let the fur fly <G>.

There's hope for every man.

127,000 / 150,000 (84.7%)

As of today. It'll be different tomorrow. I really am moving toward the end.

I knew it was going to be released soon, but I learned this through reading Elizabeth Bear's blog. It's a good thing she's on top of everything (she has a great story in this issue as well - it's one of the first featured so you can read it right off if you want).

Coyote Wild

Elizabeth is very good about speaking about her work (and many other things). I have remembered several times in recent months that I was on a Shakespeare panel with her, and she said, "So, tell us why you write about . . ." and I said, "I can't talk about what I write. Everything is there on the page."

In general, this is true. But I can say about "The Renascence of Memory" that it tells the story of Carol, who at the end of her life has been caught in the end stages of Alzheimer's disease, and has forgotten all the tragedies she endured in her life - all the regrets, sorrows, mistakes, lost loves, and found loves. Carol has been brought back with the help of NED, a form of nanotechnology that has a life of his own. NED is in Carol's head - literally and figuratively, and bit by bit, Carol's body is not only made young again, she remembers all the times and days of her life.

My grandmother died of Alzheimer's disease and I went through nearly ten years of the disease's terrible progression with her. But the one good thing I could say about it is that the person with the disease does not suffer as much toward the end as one might think, as they have forgotten everything. And Carol does, for better or worse, have a few things in common with me.

I might well be writing my first comments on a story that was reviewed previously by others online. According to one well-known SF/F reviewer, "Sci Fiction presents the wonderful and whimsical nostalgic reveries of a dying man in "Small Houses" by James P. Blaylock."

I can think of some words to describe the dying man Mr. Johnson and his reveries, but "wonderful" and "whimsical" aren't chief among them. Another reader, Jed Hartman, wrote that "'Small Houses' is a very nice, and sad, barely fantasy piece."

"Small Houses" is very nice, and it is a little sad, but not really. Maybe you have to have had a grandfather who was handy like Mr. Johnson, and also a fig tree in the back yard, in order to find a sense of order in the story, as opposed to sadness. I am not sure why Jed wanted to mention that the story was a "barely fantasy piece." I think it's fairly clear that Myrt (Mr. Johnson's deceased wife) is showing herself to her husband in the fish bowl. And, I wondered if Johnson had in fact not already died, and simply wasn't accepting it yet -- for he found the other sherry glass, and the anniversary card -- except he does sit down and "pass away" at the end of the story.

According to Flaubert, God was in the details.

The details collected in "Small Houses" pertain to Mr. Johnson's life. He has built a very small treehouse in an avocado tree in his back yard, into which he places his makeshift fish bowl and his fish, Septimus, and, if one reads carefully, himself. He has shut up his house after his wife's death -- and it's really not certain for how long, but probably a long time.

As time passed and the foliage thickened, the natural light had dwindled, which was to be expected, since that was the way with everything.

"Small Houses" is a story about organizing one's life, the way it has to be in a small house. Today, I think people are sometimes surprised by the tiny spaces previous generations made-do with. Little 800 square foot houses with three bedrooms and a single bathroom were considered fine for families in years past. Today, a single person has trouble "making do" with that amount of space. I know how things were also precious to people as well. For forty years, Mr. Johnson has built a toolbox with compartments that he's always planned to convert to a coffin as the end draws near.

He envisioned compartments for hammers and saws and planes, for squares and levels and a set of bits and augers; cubbyholes for nails and screws and wood dough; slots and panels that could be arranged and rearranged over the passing years until, when the sun was setting at last, metaphorically speaking, he could remove the interior complications more or less altogether, leaving only a nook and a cranny for the few things, beside himself, that he wanted to take along to the afterlife.

As everyone knows, "You can't take it with you," and throughout the meditative, careful pace of Mr. Johnson's preparations, you know that he's not going to be able to take the sherry glasses, the sherry, the cribbage board, or the "Desert Island books." The story is more about his acceptance that he's dying, and how he finally comes to make his peace with his life and his death.

I knew a couple like this. More than one, actually. Sometimes when a couple has been married for many years, and one partner dies, the other one scarcely knows how to go on. I felt this about these two. The doorknob, the saved sherry label, the sherry glasses and garage sale bargain treasures. But people don't much build treehouses in avocado trees like that -- he set the redwood lumber in the tree branches themselves, putting the posts in concrete pilings. Over the years, the tree grew around the posts, shutting them in, closing down the light. And as the light dwindles, so does Mr. Johnson's life.

The details one might call "ordinary," but they are not. They are as unique as fingerprints, as the freckles on someone's nose, as the flecks in another one's eyes, as the pitch of a laugh, and the way one mother folds her daughter's t-shirts and sprinkles them with lavender.

I'll just close by saying, stories like this are their own reward. Everyone who reads it will receive it.

Small Houses by James P. Blaylock, published by Ellen Datlow in SciFiction.

Amy Sterling Casil
9 January 2007
Los Angeles, CA

82,743 / 125,000 (66.0%)

Far below the high spires of the White City, in a darkened room buried deep in the catacombs of the Alchemists and the Conjurers, sat a man of note, gazing at a filigreed cage.

The cage contained a frayed and nervous chicken. That morning, the man, who called himself a Conjurer, had purchased the chicken -- or poulet -- at a fair price. It was not the best poulet in the White City's marketplace, where many wondrous things could be bought. Neither was it the worst. The Conjurer had seen and declined a number of inferior creatures.

Plucked and drawn, the poulet may have made a good meal for two or three people. But this poulet was meant for better things.

So, I read "Hula Ville" by Jim Blaylock.

When I was 12, I woke and saw shining lights flickering at the foot of my bed and I was covered in electricity that made all my hair stand on end. For a long time I thought it was the spirits of Indians coming from their burial ground out in the wash. I have a hard time understanding why "Hula Ville" is in Sci Fiction. It's plain it's a true story. The problem is that most people don't understand what goes on out in these places. I guess they never heard that God does live in the desert. I know about those people that went out to Angel's Peak to get baptized. They all acted differently when they came back. Considering the pretty near total lack of what all went on in my town back in those days, it was a good thing.

As Jim writes about this fellow who went out to Hula Ville,

When I was twelve years old, I awoke in the night to find a strange man standing at the foot of my bed, regarding me as I slept. Moonlight through the window cast what appeared to be the shadow of wings against the wall behind him. Instead of being terrified, I was filled with a radiant joy, and as he faded from existence it came into my head that I had been visited by an angel.

Of course he was.

"Hula Ville" has some of Jim's most beautiful writing, and that's saying a lot. It's as stark and graceful as the Mojave itself, where the story is mostly-set. People might not understand that the fellow who visits Hula Ville and who made the desert trek to see what he could see, lives in a terrible place as the story begins. Not magical at all, and not much the kind of place you'd expect angels to visit. Open to wonder, the fellow journeys to Hula Ville and gets a map of the desert and all of its magical places. His journey starts and ends at the amazing Hula Ville - and the thing about places like Hula Ville, which to my knowledge you see only in the Mojave, is that they are testaments to human dreams. The dreams might not make sense to other people. They make sense to their single-minded creators. Scotty's Castle. That lady that has the Opera House in Death Valley. I saw a fellow who had surrounded his house with giant desert rocks, out by Baker.

This road that the fellow takes, where Hula Ville once was, was Route 66, and everyone knows what kind of road that was. It's I-15 now, and mostly, it's the way to Vegas. Thousands of people drive that way every day, chasing a certain kind of dream.

But real dreams are out there in the desert, hidden in crags -- found by distant desert oases. Some people chased gold. Others -- angels.

This is one of Jim Blaylock's most evocative stories. Do read it.

"Hula Ville" by James P. Blaylock, published by Ellen Datlow in SciFiction.