Voice, the rolling thunder or whispering precision
of a story's procession of words, the
property that marks a writer as baroque or vanilla or
thudding or lyrical. This issue of
Asimov's is not only rife with writers of distinctive
and powerful voices, but features a Robert
Silverberg editorial that concludes, "It's a marvelously rich
language we have. You might almost
call it supervacaneous in its plenitude of verbal bounty."
Voice is also the answer to
the Jeopardy question, What do you think of when you hear
the name Eliot Fintushel? Fintushel stormed into the field
with a series of fictions carried by his
off-kilter sensibility and his sidling-at-you-sideways
characters, but most of all by a rush of words
that lifted readers bodily and thrilled and chilled them
to the ending like a stand-up, barefoot
plummet down a Splash Mountain water slide. His
"Izzy and the Father of Terror," at least the
third (not second as the intro has it) of the Izzy
stories has these values all, and at novella length.
The story is
unrecapitulatable; take it as granted that the
ever-complaining Izzy once again
saves mankind from a fate no one else can even see,
before being revealed for what he really is.
Izzy's love for and despair over the roving infection
known as humanity is also Fintushel's, who
more and more reveals himself as the long-sought
spiritual heir to R. A. Lafferty.
High praise, as
anyone who remembers the thrill of discovering
Lafferty in the 60s must
know. Younger readers may wonder at the statement,
though, for Lafferty is largely forgotten,
barely even a cult figure. Brilliant as Lafferty's
short fiction could be, his novels betrayed him by
frustrating any reader who wanted characters to
reveal themselves as people, plots to become
more than whimsically linked events, and the rush
of words to crescendo to a glorious peak rather
than buffet monotonically till the end.
If "Izzy"
glories in all of Lafferty's virtues, it does
so only in the process of subjecting us
to all of Lafferty's faults in equal measure,
with a greatly-delayed ending somehow both arbitrary
and abrupt. John Clute said of Lafferty that
"For his career's sake, it was certainly unfortunate
that his response to renown seems to have
been an intensification of the oddness of his product..."
Fintushel now has achieved his measure of deserved
renown; his intensifying oddness remains a concern.
Just as there
will always be a place for head-banging rock 'n'
roll, there will always be an
audience for stories like R. Neube's "The Holy
Stomper Vs. The Alien Barrel of Death," which
brings the WWF into interstellar diplomacy.
What is even odder is that this story is actually a
rogue Analog piece, with its notions that a
down-to-earth wrestler is smarter and more capable
than academics or the military, that humans are
the smartest and toughest beings in the universe,
and that capitalism is the strongest force. As
for voice, let's just say the story shouts at us in three
chords for 2:45 and goes out with a drumstick smashing on a cymbal.
William Sanders
may be best remembered for his novel Journey to
Fusang, alternate
history done absolutely right, with a sting at our
culture hiding on every page. After a stint at
mystery writing, he appears to be returning to the sf
world, and lucky us. Sanders is a Cherokee,
and writes about Cherokees, and that immediately
gives him a voice and an approach not quite
like anyone else's. "Words and Music" is a minor
novelette about a musical showdown with the
devil, essentially a retelling of "The Devil Went
Down to Georgia." But from the moment you
see the shaman hero get persuaded to investigate a
case of witching by being told his rewards will
be Cherokee gospel singing and home-baked pie, you
know you're in good hands with the telling.
John C. Wright's
novelette, "Guest Law," also recalls earlier
Analog days, the era in
which tales of interstellar empires always included
knights and nobility playing at mock courtly
graces in speech fully as baroque as the exteriors
of their spacecraft. Wright has this and more in
this encounter of two such vessels in deepest space.
His answer to his own question of how to
enforce chivalry under such conditions may or
may not be intended to be a moral for our time.
But it provokes more thought than the abstract
rituals of the piece deserve.
Tanith Lee writes
a series of short, pithy, adjectiveless sentences
and makes of them a
style almost as baroque as Wright's convolutions
or Fintushel's concatenations. Here, in the short
story "After I Killed Her," Lee favors us with a
tale of a knight and a dragon. Typically, the
killing of the dragon is not the ending, but more
of a beginning. She leaves no doubt that a moral
flavors her ending, and whether you subscribe to
it or not, her words lend it a seductive beauty.
Tony Daniel's
short story "Black Canoes" is in the first person
and while it's hard to
keep voice out of such a story, voice is not his
dominant tone, although he is a good and graceful
writer. The voice is of a potter, attracted to,
even obsessed with a woman who flits in and out of
his life like the wren she resembles. They meet,
they separate, they meet again: the story never
gets beyond inchoate longings, despite some
foreshadowing, until it veers suddenly into a fantasy
of epic proportions and import. Whatever Daniels
thought he might be saying, we readers never
learn nearly enough about either character to
make the final revelations come close to working,
and we never learn enough about the world they
find to make any of the melodrama believable.
Tony Daniel's story fails for reasons far beyond
voice, and a different voice couldn't have
cured its ills. That proves a point, I suppose.
If that's a victory, it's a small one. Because the real
point of this issue is that in it there lurks the
ghost of a potentially great story whose substance
we'll never see. I'd trade a dozen stories that
give great voice for the chance to read it.
Copyright 1997 by Steve Carper
