he musician Janis Ian—born 1951, who first burst upon the pop scene at a very young age, circa 1967, with her hit "Society's Child"—has come out of the closet: For decades she's been a fan of fantastic literature. Having recently attended her first SF conventions and actually met some of her literary heroes, she was cajoled by ingenious editor Mike Resnick into allowing her songs to serve as the kernels for 30 original short stories by some of the biggest names in the SF and fantasy fields.
In Terry Bisson's "Come Dance with Me," teens are "kevorking" themselves in pairs to reach a rumored afterlife that might be no more than a cyber-illusion. Orson Scott Card tracks the life of a girl who gets a unique cell-phone buddy in "Inventing Lovers on the Phone." In "Riding Janis," David Gerrold shows how troublesome puberty can be when you're a young comet miner and the next kid is millions of miles away.
Robert Sawyer's "Immortality" shows us a high-school reunion in the year 2023, and what happens when a 60-year-old topical song is thoughtlessly played. In "Murdering Stravinsky," Barry Malzberg employs the famous classical composer and his peers as touchstones for all the woes of "this disgusting sewer of a century." "Play Like a Girl," by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is a ghost story about intergenerational conflicts between a musician daughter and her mother. A roller-coaster tale of suspense—assassins gunning for an innocuous folk singer—is to be found in Spider Robinson's "You Don't Know My Heart." And the afterlife of famous popstars proves to be a hellish hegira in Judith Tarr's "East of the Sun, West of Acousticville."
"The Scent of Trumpets, the Voices of Smoke," by Tad Williams, follows the out-of-body R&R experiences of a future official known as a "Manipulator." Stephen Baxter offers us a Xeelee story, "All in a Blaze," about an immortal woman living on an icy moon and the choices she must make. Nancy Kress' "Ej-Es" concerns a survey ship that lands on a lost human world where a "viral god" awaits. Ian herself renders a Delanyesque story of slavery and lusts in "Second Person Unmasked." A futuristic Healer finds himself conflicted by the arrival of a new patient in "This House," by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. And Robert Sheckley limns a posthuman future in "Hunger."
Joe Haldeman's "Finding My Shadow" wanders the wasteland that is Boston in the wake of a new plague, while—curiously enough, title-wise—Dean Wesley Smith's "Shadow in the City" deals more optimistically with a similar West Coast landscape. Not content with destroying a mere city, John Varley dooms the whole Earth in "In Fading Suns and Dying Moons."
A quartet of tales transpose the literal Romeo-and-Juliet plot of "Society's Child" to various exotic venues: "On the Other Side," by Mercedes Lackey; "Society's Stepchild," by Susan Matthews; "Society's Goy," by Mike Resnick; and "An Indeterminate State," by Kay Kenyon.
Stories of sheer magic crop up with Jane Yolen's mermaid tale, "Ride Me Like a Wave"; Kage Baker's Victorian spiritualist excursion, "Nightmare Mountain"; Tanith Lee's Poe-like diptych, "Two Faces of Love"; Susan Casper's haunted Photoshop narrative, "Old Photographs"; Diane Duane's surreal "Hopper Painting"; and Gregory Benford's Barthelme-like "On the Edge." And Alexis Gilliland's charming "Cartoons" prove to be actual drawings.
Finally, two alternate history tales—Howard Waldrop's "Calling your Name" and Harry Turtledove's "Joe Steele"—examine, respectively, one man's flight across parallel worlds to find his true love, and the political misfortunes of the United States under a displaced dictator.
The music is most definitely in them
Aside from her two hits—"Society's Child" and "At Seventeen"—I confess to an ignorance of the music of Janis Ian. So I cannot say with any certitude how faithfully this volume replicates the kind of sensations one might experience while listening to the Ian catalogue. Yet I can attest that the volume as a whole does do two things. The stories—each of which is prefaced by a snatch of lyrics—do indeed organically arise from the chosen quotes. There's no dreaded sense that the authors are straining to twist and bend their particular visions to uncongenial source material. Quite to the contrary, each author seems to be having genuine fun with the assignment, deriving true inspiration from the Ian oeuvre.
Second, the anthology as a whole does have a certain unifying feel to it, a kind of high-minded social consciousness. For one thing, aside from Mike Resnick's wacky story of a Jewish woman in love with a sentient vegetable and Gilliland's drawings, there's no humor in this volume. Benford gets a little wry, as he follows famous historical figures displaced to a Silicon Valley setting, and Waldrop has some amusing dialogue as his universe-hopping protagonist tries to reassure his children that he's not insane. But even those two stories are basically dark at their hearts. And a piece such as Malzberg's is positively and stunningly despairing. I would venture to say that Ian is not the kind to sit down and write "silly love songs" in the McCartney mode. If she were, then there'd be more lighthearted stories herein.
This is hardly to say that this book is a downer—far from it. I just mean to indicate that all the narratives here are quite serious about their themes and treatments. But a story like Sheckley's, for instance, despite the tribulations undergone by his bioengineered mermaid protagonist, ends on an upbeat note, as does Tarr's Dantean quest and Duane's escape from an oil-painting universe. Certainly the elderly couple in Casper's tale achieve a peaceful transition from this world to the next, while Smith's newly met last man and woman manage to dream big as well.
The mix and interspersion of fantasy, SF and near-horror show editor Resnick exercising his tastes and judgment to produce a well-balanced volume. Moving from story to story, the reader finds a pleasant variety of voice and topic. Ian's introduction is touchingly sincere about the power of fiction to change lives, and one wonders why it always takes someone from outside their realm to remind writers of the real magnitude and importance of their gifts.
