By Catherine Cheek
It has been argued, rather convincingly, that the novella is the perfect form for science fiction. Novellas are long enough to flesh out a world, but not so long that one grows tired of the strangeness. Yet to me, a novella in a collection of short stories seems overlong, a story that has outstayed its welcome. A novella published by itself, as a book, seems too short, as though the author shortchanged the reader. The best compromise is to showcase them on their own. Panverse One is the first of a series of anthologies dedicated strictly to science fiction and fantasy novellas.
The first novella, Waking the City, by Andrew Tisbert, provides all the wonder and mystery that one could expect in a science fiction novella. Kuyo is a young student who has fallen in love with Liana, a girl who lives in his village. His teacher, Geo, has forbidden them from consummating their love until they turn fifteen, which seems severe considering that villagers don’t expect to live to be much older than thirty. One day Liana disappears, and Kuyo thinks that she has been taken to the derelict city hidden in the jungle that surrounds their village.
Kuyo travels through the jungle, accompanied by his deformed (mutated?) friend Castor. Soon he learns that Castor, whom he first saw as an object of pity, holds sway in the jungle, and can control the upright panthers who prey in it. When he reaches the city, he learns that he’s been a genetic pawn in Geo’s far-reaching plans.
On one level, the plot follows well-worn paths; youth goes on a journey and leaves behind his mentor to realize his own worth, young man sets out on a quest to save his true love. But with the odd setting, and the addition of Castor and the upright panthers, the standard tropes get pulled off center. Also, the plot took unexpected turns. I expected Castor to be Kuyo’s Samwise, but his role shifted. I expected that Kuyo would either defeat Geo, join with him, or come to some kind of emotional plateau after Geo’s symbolic death. But Kuyo doesn’t act like he’s read the standard-hero script.
The prose of this story is as lush as its jungle, as in this passage, when he encounters the city for the first time:
“I saw arms of the jungle slithering into the outer reaches of the city, overtaking a vast network of arches and streets. I saw jagged buildings like lines of broken, rotting teeth. I saw the city’s food gardens struggling to produce rancid meat.”
One of the strengths of this novella is that it hints at much more than it reveals. It was well-written enough that it didn’t feel like a chore to finish it despite the folktale-like strangeness, but I felt the world sketched lightly, details against a hazy background. Meticulous readers will find much richness, even on a second reading.
The second novella in Panverse One was Shiva Not Dancing, by Uncle River. It felt like a weaker version of Carl Hiassen’s novels, with many different characters, each with their own motivations, who all come together in a car-wreck of misunderstandings. It had a developer hungry for someone’s land, a hippy commune, the parents and little sister of a disgruntled teen, and a banana cream pie. The science fiction element—so faint that in another venue no one would have noticed it—concerned one of the characters who seemed to predict chaos by the images that appeared in her mind when she meditated.
The narrator hyped up the events in the prologue with a folksy “now y’all listen and I’ll tell you what really happened” sort of way, but the events didn’t live up to the hype: a boy throws a pie at a preacher, the preacher shoots himself in the foot, someone sues someone else because of it. They took too long to wind up. For example, the author devoted several chapters to a discussion of water rights.
Also, I found most of the events implausible. I didn’t understand why an astronomer would want to take an electroencephalogram of a hippy as she meditated on Shiva. I didn’t get why, when the teen got angry at the bully, he decided to throw a pie at the preacher’s face instead. I didn’t understand how a man shooting himself in the foot would lead someone to file a pornography charge against a temple. I also disliked when the a rent-a-cop drew a gun to arrest Elissa on her own property, because Elissa seemed so woefully helpless (neither firing back, hiding, or at the very least filing a suit) that I lost respect for her.
The events, instead of leading logically one unto the other in a hilarious snarl, felt trumped-up and bizarre. The stakes felt too low. No one stood to lose her life. No one stood to lose his love, and the characters (because the novella had too many of them, perhaps) weren’t compelling enough for me to care about their property values and legal fees. Worst of all, the situation just sort of resolved itself, without much action by the characters. This felt the weakest novella by far, and even a bias towards novels set in Arizona couldn’t compel me to recommend it.
Delusion’s Song, by Alan Smale, takes the Bronte sisters and sets them in a village that is literally and metaphorically separated from the rest of England by a vast landscape. It deals with grief and longing and the ties between siblings. Emily, the strongest of four children, is described rather delightfully as “a beanpole, at 5’3” the tallest in the family except for Father. Lithe but too mannish to be graceful, her head was often thrown forward with a hint of aggression.”
Emily’s brother Branwell, though as clever as she, drinks far too much and incurs the animosity of the villagers, who burn him in effigy and threaten to burn him as well. He drinks, and fights, and threatens the already-precarious position of the rest of the family. As preacher’s daughters, they, as Anne says “…weave no cloth. I harvest no corn, and shear no sheep. I raise no children of my own.” Anne learns midwifery, while Emily tasks herself with keeping the village safe from the ravages of her mentally ill brother. Charlotte pines for her lost love, and they all pine for their deceased sister Maria, universally agreed a paragon.
This novella manages to both evoke the desolation of the moors with the wonder of alien worlds: in this England, Vikings and “shamblers” occasionally enter the village and threaten to cause trouble. Emily, like the others, fears this landscape, but she suspects that she is part of the reason why their village became so distant from the rest of England. Eventually she undertakes a quest to save them all.
If the writing weren’t so tight, and the characters so strong, the fact that this is a story about the Bronte sisters would have ruined it for me. I find stories written about writers rather onanistic, and I’m no great fan of the Bronte sisters. At first I told myself that the names were just a coincidence, and when the author revealed that the characters were in fact the Bronte sisters, I groaned aloud with disappointment that such a well-crafted novella aspired to be nothing more than a prelude to that dull and dreadful doorstop Wuthering Heights. Despite that, I recommend this novella highly.
Fork You, by Reggie Lutz takes an entire clan of almost piteously un-admirable characters and makes them into the heroes. Gladiola, a wild child with a magic fork and spoon, falls in with and joins a clan of hillbillies called the Johnsons. When some of her adopted brothers go too far in a practical joke, and the dog cage she sleeps in burns down with her in it, she blackmails them into making a tree house for her. The tree, both magical and sentient, gets into a fight with the immortal beings who gave Gladiola her magical flatware.
Fork You has characters galore, twisted ideas, and a plot that zigs and zags in unexpected ways. What it doesn’t have is a likeable main protagonist. In the beginning, Gladiola dominates the story, but with so many minor characters twisting off their own tangents, I felt as though Gladiola lost protagonist rights partway through and never fully regained them. She also never won my heart. She was small and dirty and feral, liked to bite people, knew how to blackmail siblings, and ate squirrels. I kept waiting to find something to like about her, and never did. By the time the story got around to the showdown between the Johnson’s haunted tree and the immortal beings searching for their Oracle (which they never fully explained), I hadn’t decided on who to root for. Without a really likeable main character, the plot and kooky setting became background noise.
Singers of Rhodes, by Jason K. Chapman, is as close to a classic science fiction story as I’ve ever read. It has hard boiled engineering types, even harder military thugs and some misunderstood alien residents of a wheel-shaped space station. Conner Hammond is a pacifist researcher, trying to unravel the secrets of the Rhodes space station. One day he runs into the hostile Union soldiers, “Unis,” with whom he’s had poor experiences in the past. To make matters worse, he runs into an old friend (lover?) named Davey, who’s been physically and psychologically maimed by Union soldiers.
Our hero Hammond, by virtue of his being a sensitive and understanding pacifist, befriends the alien “singers” by realizing the emphasis that the “singers” place upon music. The singers reward him by giving him more information about the space station in two days than Conner on his own had discovered in four years. When Hammond’s friend Davey is captured by the Unis, Conner and his fellow scientist Vic ally with the aliens to rescue Davey.
Chapman used the characters of Hammond and Davey to discuss the ethics of rebellion versus pacifism, but I found the arguments far less compelling than the dynamics between Hammond and Davey, their love for one another, their struggles with forgiveness, and their lessons in not taking too much responsibility for the choices others make. One of the most interesting twists on the classic sf nature of this, I thought, was that Chapman chose to make the main emotional focus between two men. It takes courage to write stories with non-heteronormative elements. However, the main character’s comrade-in-arms, Vic, is female, and the last few pages included an implication that Hammond would “get the girl” after all, which made me doubt my initial reading. Still a good story, but I really wish Hammond and Davey had both been clearly gay.
I also hope that subsequent issues feature at least some female authors. A 100% male author list suggests a bias, which I’m sure is subconscious, but it’s a statistical anomaly that makes me look askance at the impartiality of the editor. I would suggest that Mr. Cirello remove the names from submissions for future anthologies, as is done for the Writers of the Future contest, and shield himself from accusations of sexism. The Panverse anthologies are such a great idea for showcasing novellas that I hope they continue for many issues and inspire others to do the same.
Catherine,
Thanks so much for your review.
With regard to your closing comments,
“I also hope that subsequent issues feature at least some female authors. A 100% male author list suggests a bias, which I’m sure is subconscious, but it’s a statistical anomaly that makes me look askance at the impartiality of the editor”
you should note that Reggie Lutz (author of ‘Fork You’) is female, and Panverse Two features will feature two stories by female authors.
Also please note that this tired canard of editor bias has been addressed before, and recently, by first-rate editors such as Ellen Datlow, Gordon van Gelder et al. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of submissions to Panverse–at least 75%–came from male authors, and this editor is not about to enforce any kind of quota or positive discrimination to ‘shield himself from accusations of sexism’, as you put it. Stories are accepted solely on merit, and nothing else. To suggest otherwise only reflects the accuser’s own bias and slavish belief in the bankrupt ideology of political correctness.
As to your suggestion that I ‘remove the names from submissions for future anthologies, as is done for the Writers of the Future contest’ to shield myself from accusations of sexism, this is really laughable. How dare you?
That last paragraph with the facile, uninformed accusation of sexism made the rest of your review fly right out of my head.
If you had taken the time to look at the very next Panverse Publishing release – “Eight Against Reality” – you will note that of the 8 stories, 6 are written by nonmales: http://www.panversepublishing.com/new_titles.htm
I look forward to your probing commentary on this statistical anomaly.
I note with alarm that 100% of reviewers of Panverse One on your site are male. How can you justify this egregiously sexist statistical anomaly?
You owe Dario an apology.
Don’t bother publishing my comment. I didn’t see that the reviewer was female. I saw “by Shaun Farrel” and didn’t read the 2nd “by”.
You are probably aware by now that 1 of the authors of Panverse One – Reggie Lutz – is a female – which makes the review’s concluding paragraph even sadder.
Correction: I have been informed that Reggie Lutz is female.
However, I still believe that all humans have unconscious bias, and therefore the blind submission process has great merit. Here is a link to an article about Abbie Conant, the first woman selected for a position in a professional orchestra. Her story was made famous in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, which talks about snap decisions and how much weight we place on superficialities. http://www.osborne-conant.org/ladies.htm
FWIW, I’ll let you know that I have a novella scheduled for the next volume of Panverse, so there’s at least one female author coming out from this publication venue. ;o)
You will find a 10,000 word story by me in Panverse 2 – and I’ve always assumed that I am a woman.
Sorry it took me so long to approve the comments, everyone. I’ve been away from the website for a few days. I welcome healthy and vigorous debate, but let’s try to keep it civil. That’s all I ask. We can correct and challenge each other, but let us be wary of tone. After all, we might end up working together on something in the future. I would hate AISFP to ever create sour feelings that live for years to come. Thanks!
– Shaun