en years ago, it might have been different. A novel as fine as The Mount and a collection as assured as Report to the Men's Club might have been picked up as a matter of course by one of the dinosaur publishers with offices in river-girt Manhattan, where the rents are macho and the restaurants are written about. But 10 years ago, the dinosaurs still thought they were mammals, still thought they could publish mere books on merit without a non-book reason for doing so: like the author's prior fame as a tennis champ: or the near certainty that the book in question was full of whoppers about child abuse. So Carol Emshwiller, in the astonishing high flush of her ninth decade on the planet, did not look to Manhattan. She looked futurewards, found a mammal.
She found Small Beer Press, which had concentrated mostly so far on the works of the superb Kelly Link, but now seems to have joined the cohort of small presses dedicated to the publication of mere books. It is certainly the case that neither new Emshwiller title is anything but merely what it claims to be: an SF novel which plays crystalline riffs on other SF novels, then goes it alone; and a collection of stories put together with absolutely no heed whatsoever to shibboleths about mixing market-genres (which resemble the real genres of our lives about as closely as pornography resembles danger).
The Mount does not, in the first instance, pretend in the slightest to make anything up. We are on the planet Earth, some time after an alien race has landed and, in a fashion now obscure, either created or augmented some decimating illness or malaise of the human species, and enslaved the remnants, breeding them like livestock for "conformation," and then riding them like horses. If we are reminded here of Thomas M. Disch's Mankind Under the Leash (1966; the magazine version was entitled "White Fang Goes Dingo," and in a later release, it was called The Puppies of Terra), it is pretty certain that we were meant to: reading a knowledgeable SF novel is a bit like listening to wind chimes: no wind chime chimes alone.
But The Mount soon complexifies Disch's satirical burden by treating its point-of-view character—a young boy approaching puberty—not only as being eager to continue to benefit from being under the aliens' leash (like Disch's protagonist) but also as being capable of a genuinely convincing love for his young master/rider. Here the wind chimes of generic conversation bring recent horse memoirs (it is a small genre but an intense one) to mind: tales like Richard Adams's Traveller (1988) or John Hawkes' Sweet William: A Memoir of Old Horse (1993).
Surreal bedtime stories from Grandma
Like Adams' Traveller, who is General Lee's horse, Charley is the mount of an owner of importance, the infant Excellent Excellency, Future-Ruler-Of-Us-All. Like adult aliens, Little Master is nearly all head and hands, the latter powerful enough to choke humans, with vestigial lower limbs. The alien cry of alarm, a great "ho" that builds to terrible levels, may have been instrumental in the destruction of human civilization, many, many years ago; but it is clear that human mounts like Charley have adapted to the sound. It is clear that their subservience to the aliens who ride them—Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (1951) should have come to mind already, which will have been part of the plan of the book—misprisions not only humans bridled and bent like horses, but also the aliens, who have clearly degenerated from their mother/fathers who first landed upon Earth, and whose insistence on the inferiority of humans rings bells too obvious to expatiate upon (nor does Emshwiller do so ever).
Charlie is soon freed by his father, whose mouth has been so damaged by the bit that he can hardly talk, but insists on carrying his Little Master with him. Together, alien and boy begins a long mutual rite of passage into adulthood, ending in sex for Charlie and the ability to walk for Little Master, and mutually attentive exogamy riffs for all. Except for the mutuality of the exogamy at the close, The Mount is an absolutely traditional tale, and does seem to ride its premise at a saunter that veers, at times, towards the tireless. But the prose of the Charlie's first-person narrative has a pellucid "naive" depth to it which becomes fathomless before you can blink. There are no stylistic tricks, hardly a moment where the voice is raised, though Little Master's peace-bestowing peroration does lift effortlessly, to powerful effect:
"Oh, but now, how ...," he says. "How, right now, we do go. Step me. Trot me. Sing me along the paths. All things are songs. Smells and all, good songs. Even the air is a song. I see our shadow, yours and mine. I see how my hat covers us both. How we do go along seeing new things and old things, too. As if this flower was unlike any of the others even of its own kind. It's as if you also were not of your type, but of yourself, nor I of my type. Go, go, go, now, do go."
We go.
It is a voice cleansed of everything but what it says. It is, one supposes, a crone voice.
We are lucky to hear it. The stories assembled in Report to the Men's Club share, at times to their individual detriment when read in one rush, that crone voice uttering urgent things the only way to say them. "Acceptance Speech" (1999) reads a bit like a draft of The Mount, though the tortures differ. "The Paganini of Jacob's Gully," new here, riffs Bret Harte, as its title tells us. Venus Rising (1992), a novella, we have seen before and it is welcome back. "Grandma" (2002), perhaps the most brilliant short text in the book, requires its readers—as does any tale of the fantastic wrought to its uttermost—to read every word literally, to leave metaphor for the critics cowering in the Mimesis Kraal, to understand that Grandma is exactly who Emshwiller says she is: Wonder Woman, Gaia queen, human dying, Grandma, girl.
So we are lucky to have a mammal publisher to publish Carol Emshwiller. And we are lucky when she fixes us with her eye, just before bedtime.
