Unsettling Futures - Deep Strata: Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology
If you also own this book, we should be friends!
Big names, big stories
Deep Strata is an infrequent series of posts about books that did peculiar things to me, usually when I was young and no one had yet warned me about the dangers of reading science fiction.
If you're a science fiction or fantasy fan of a certain age – say, late thirties to mid-fifties – there are certain authors' names that act as secret codes to find your fellow generational nerd-cohort.
Bruce Sterling, sure, everyone's heard of him if they have more than a passing acquaintance with cyberpunk. But how about Karen Joy Fowler and Nancy Kress? Maureen F. McHugh and Alexander Jablokov, James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel and Richard Butner?
If those names set off a cascade of memories in your brain, of novels and short stories, of awards shortlists and magazine tables of contents, then you are among the readers who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Golden Age authors were shuffling off this mortal coil, when the New Wave had spent itself, but before a certain boy wizard and the explosion of YA would create new popular touchstones in the genre.
The 80s and 90s are not an entirely forgotten age in SFF, but they are less-well-remembered, their controversies given less weight than those of earlier or later decades. We've even forgotten one of the core ideological/sub-genre rivalries of the era, between the cyberpunks and the humanists. (Who even remembers there was a humanist movement in SFF, tenuous as it was?)
Before the great genre re-alignments that would come in the Aughts, way back in 1985, clusters of writers began meeting for the Sycamore Hill Writers Conference.
This was not like Clarion or Odyssey or any of the other newcomer-centric workshops that get the lion's share of attention, critical or otherwise, these days. This was (and still is) an all-pros gathering. A dozen or so writers get together for a little over a week for an intensive critique group – everyone brings one story, every story gets read and chewed over in the traditional Iowa/Milford round table style. Everyone ponders the critiques and goes back to edit their work. That's it.
The product of the 1994 gathering were collected into Intersections, a collection that was published in 1996 and fell into my hands somewhat later, maybe around 1999.
It's possibly my favourite anthology of short SFF.
It's also a fascinating look back into a very, very different publishing ecosystem, driven by different economics and different trends.
Even without having a copy of the collection, you may have heard of one of the stories – Bruce Sterling's Bicycle Repairman, which won the 1996 Hugo for best novelette (a semi-sequel, Taklamakan, won the same award in 1999).
But the collection is packed with stories that could stand up now, some of which are so timeless that they could be published today, with scarcely a word changed.
Karen Joy Fowler's The Marianas Islands concerns the narrator's relationship with her rebellious grandmother, from whom she inherits a secret submarine. Nancy Kress's Sex Education is a very Kressian tale about a girl whose parents allow her to be cloned for profit, without telling her. Jonathan Lethem, pre-Motherless Brooklyn, brought a story about a prison whose bricks are literally convicts sentenced to life, in The Hardened Criminals.* Maureen F. McHugh's Homesick is a low-key character study of a ballerina from a semi-monastic order of dancers who leaves her cloistered society for the first time in years. The Miracle of Ivar Avenue, by John Kessel, is about time travel, redemption, and Preston Sturges. Carol Emshwiller brought part of a western novel.
The stories that really hit me hard on first reading were Sterling's cyberpunk bike repair caper, Alexander Jablokov's startling Greek myth fantasy The Fury at Colonus, and Richard Butner's Horses Blow Up Dog City.**
Jablokov is one of my favourite writers, especially for his short stories. He's also one of those writers whose career took off, then settled gently back to earth, at least partly by choice. Jablokov was a full-time novelist in the 1990s, with books like Deepdrive and River of Dust, but he never quite cracked the same level of success and popular awareness as his peers. It's a damn shame, because he has an incredible talent for complex characters, peculiar societies, and vivid description.
That last talent is on full display in Colonus. A fury, acting in the role of a particularly grim homicide detective, pursues Orestes for the murder of his mother Clytemnestra through a post-modern landscape of trailer parks, gated communities, and media-mogul Olympian gods. It could be seen as a foreshadowing of the Percy Jackson-style strain of contemporary mythic fantasy, but in truth it's sui generis,*** with few descendants if any. Jablokov's story doesn't care about inserting the mythic into a plausible version of the modern world, urban fantasy style; it's one in which the dead body of the Sphinx lies abandoned near a railway embankment behind a strip mall.
The Fury looked at the gently smiling enigma, now disfigured with spray-painted graffiti, and wondered about the true story of her death. For the Sphinx had been, like her, a member of the Old Service.
Butner's Horses Blow Up Dog City, on the other hand, is near-future SF, what a nerd-taxonomist might call post-cyberpunk. A trio of friends reckon with the death of the estranged youngest member of their circle – a genius puppeteer who was destroyed by his own sudden and meteoric rise to fame. They have to do this as the kid's hacker fans are plastering his image all over media feeds, giving them no escape from his presence even as they deal with his sudden absence.
It does something I absolutely love in short SF – using incredibly specific, weird details to draw you in and distract you just a bit so the human and social and technological themes glide in under the radar.
Also, for a 26-year-old story, bits of it seem freakishly relevant, and not just because we have, in fact, developed a media ecosystem that consumes people whole.
The news was on. General Foods execs testifying before Congress, denying that they purposely made their designer fats addictive. The Supreme Court declaring automated facial recognition unconstitutional. The usual wars.
Maybe a little more optimistic than our present reality, actually, but that was the 1990s for you.
Aside from the fascinating end-notes to each story – the authors include snippets of the critiques from their peers, and talk about changes they made, or didn't make, in response – the collection is a near-perfect time capsule of where SFF with serious literary aspirations was circa 25 years ago.
And wow, it's a different place.
As someone who's been an aspiring SF writer since about the time I picked up this volume, the thing I'm most nostalgic for in short SFF isn't any particular theme or subject matter, it's that stories used to be long as hell. Almost every story in here is at least novelette length. The shortest ones are around 10 pages in a trade-paperback sized volume, the longest go on for well over 20 pages.
Of course, the venues everyone was aiming for circa 1994 were Omni, Asimov's, Analog, F&SF, and a rotating cast of pro-paying new startups and old survivors like Amazing that had limped into that era. And all of those had plenty of pages to fill; they were more than happy to take stories that ranged well up to 10,000 words, often well beyond.
Reading Intersections now, you get this startling sense of expansiveness, of stories that are free to add that bit of detail, to take that detour or venture that digression, because they can. An extra thousand words, what's that between friends?
Whereas a quick look at The Submission Grinder these days will tell you that there are loads and loads of outlets, more than there ever were back in the Intersections era. But a lot of them are A) narrowly focused on some tight sub-sub-genre or B) have a hard word limit that might start as low as 4,000-6,000 words.
Personally, this screwed me up for years.
My career**** in short SFF has involved years of retraining myself to write shorter. (Also, marginally better.) I grew up on anthologies like Intersections, like Future on Fire and Night of the Cooters and dozens of Year's Best or Nebula-nominee collections. And by the time I started to sell stories semi-regularly, that era was dead and buried. Yes, the old stalwarts are there, still taking stories up into the novelette range, and there are digital-age magazines like Clarkesworld that don't turn up their noses at 10K, but if you write over 6,000, 7,000 words, fling that sucker out on submission and find out how fast you run out of potential markets.
I don't know whether or not this is a bad trade, on the whole. Is it better to have more markets, more variety, more opportunity to hear more voices? Yes, but I hate that it seems to have come at the expense of wordcount. There are certain types of stories that you can't tell in 3,500 words, after all. I have read some stories in recent years, even widely lauded ones, and felt they had been pared too close to the bone, like their authors had internalized the lessons of the digital era and had denied themselves the opportunity to go big.
It's fascinating to re-read a collection of stories you've owned for more than 20 years, and see what's changed in how you react to them. Both Homesick and The Marianas Islands are a lot more enjoyable to my middle-aged self than to the callow early-20s version of me. If I'm a little less in awe of some of the others, it's only because I've gotten slightly better at spotting the gears and cogs, the plot-supporting buttresses and the places where the painted backdrop is pinned up.
A final note: the appendix of Intersections includes a short version of the famous Turkey City Lexicon, a collection of terms-of-art for SFF writing critique groups, as well as a sort of prototypical version of TV Tropes. When this newsletter returns (in a… couple of weeks?) I'll be talking about the different ways Turkey City Lexicon and TV Tropes anatomize stories, and why I think one of them is a bad influence on the field.
Recent Reading
I've just finished C.L. Clark's The Unbroken, which had a very solid ending, not one I expected, and definitely more satisfying for it. I don't read much fantasy these days, but when I do, I like black powder fantasy with interesting politics, and it certainly fit the bill there!
In the short fiction realm, aside from re-reading anthologies, I really enjoyed Hungry as the Mirror Bright on Lightspeed, a bonkers story about insectile fairies told with exuberant language. Going to have to track down more of Micah Dean Hicks' stuff.
I also enjoyed the delightfully silly Laser Squid Goes House Hunting, over on Escape Pod, which is pretty much what it sounds like.
Currently reading Mickey 7, which has the smooth, goes-down-easy-and-drags-the-reader-along first person voice of books like All Systems Red or The Martian. If you think that's a backhanded compliment at best, it's not. If anyone could do that well, lots more people would; it's hard as hell.
Obligatory Self-Promotion Corner
Nothing much new, since I'm still doing the submission tango for short stories, but Broken Road, the audio drama podcast adapted from my story Patience Lake, is up to episode five. Check it out!
Footnotes
*I literally knew Lethem as "the guy who wrote that basketball story in F&SF that one time" when I picked up this anthology. He's slightly better known now.
**This is the best title of any story in the book. It is possibly one of the ten best titles of any SFF short story, actually.
***Its closest cousins would be books like The Iron Dragon's Daughter, and various iterations of the New Weird.
****Air quotes.