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Gravity Wells: | ||||||||||||||||||
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ravity Wells collects 14 stories by James Alan Gardner, mostly written in the early to mid-1990s, which range widely in genre and style, from pure science fiction to pure fantasy, from conventional to experimental.
"Muffin Explains Teleology to the World at Large" is the story of a precocious young girl who has unique insights into the future of the universe. In "The Children of the Crèche," an art critic visits a planet colonized by a group of artists and uncovers the sordid secret of their childlessness. The title story, "Kent State Descending the Gravity Well: An Analysis of the Observer" involves the killing of four university students protesting the Vietnam War in 1970. "Withered Gold. The Night. The Day." is a fantasy story about an immortal vampire, a girl, a dog and the devil, in a degenerate future.
"The Last Day of the War, With Parrots" is about a crew of humans, filming a music video on a planet that was the site of an ancient alien war, who discover that small apparently harmless alien "parrots" have profound powers, and may be the only surviving weapons from that war. "A Changeable Market in Slaves" deals with a bankrupt alien slave trader. "Reaper" is a contemporary fantasy story about spirits whose job is to reap the souls of the dying. "Shadow Album" involves a far-future human survey team preparing a planet for colonization, where they discover a foglike alien presence that begins to methodically incorporate them spiritually and physically. "Hardware Scenario G-49" is set in a future where humans exist solely in a fantasy virtual reality that can be very mundane or decidedly fantastic. In "The Reckoning of Gifts," an aging gay religious autocrat must choose the one new invention that will be allowed each year.
"The Young Person's Guide to the Organism (Variations and Fugue on a Classical Theme)" is a long series of separate but ultimately related stories of various humans who encounter a huge enigmatic alien organism traveling through our solar system. "Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream" is an alternative history where invention of the microscope finds "serpentine structures" in the blood of some humans and religious interpretation that leads to humanity being split into two separate groups, with profound consequences. "Sense of Wonder" is a dialogue between two adolescent male science-fiction readers speculating on concepts for a story.
Experiments in theme and style
For more than 15 years, James Alan Gardner has largely flown under the radar screen for most SF readers. He has not been a prolific writer—this collection is his first, and it includes virtually all of his short fiction—and his stories have been decidedly experimental in style, themes and narrative technique. About the only thing his stories have in common is a predilection toward the type of literary techniques commonly associated with the New Wave movement of the 1960s—and a tendency toward strange, if often memorable, titles. This has made Gardner somewhat a "writer's writer," whose work may be of greater interest to other authors than to most SF readers.
As with all experiments, some succeed better than others, but the best stories in this collection are very good indeed. Perhaps the best story, one of the most memorable of the 1990s, is "Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream," an alternative history told in three parts: a heresy trial of Leeuenhoek, inventor of the microscope, a hearing between Darwin and Queen Anne, and a closed hearing by Senator McCarthy. "The Last Day of the War, With Parrots" is the best conventional SF story in the collection, the alien parrot being a fascinating concept. "The Young Person's Guide to the Organism" is far less conventional in narrative structure, but equally innovative in its SF concepts. (This story also is the first contact between humans and the alien League of Peoples, which lays the foundation for Gardner's recent novels.) "The Children of the Crèche" is told in a perfect imitation of Harlan Ellison's style and voice, replete with a smart-ass protagonist spouting dismissive in-your-face observations, but also succeeds nicely as a straightforward science-fiction mystery story. "The Reckoning of Gifts" is set in a unique medieval world with fascinatingly and eerily original characters. "Shadow Album" features fascinatingly original future humans (who carry masks that contain spirits that possess them in ritual dances) and a very effective narrative structure, with the protagonist reminiscing on a series of photographs.
Most of the others are minor stories or less successful experiments. "Muffin Explains Teleology" is among the more interesting. "Hardware Scenario G-49" is an amusing if ultimately minor story with somewhat pedestrian speculations about what different humans might do if allowed to live in any virtual reality. The "Kent State" narrative involves a writer trying to write a story about the meaning of the Kent State shootings, with only tangential SF themes and concepts. "Withered Gold" is a vignette with atmosphere but little substance. "A Changeable Market in Slaves" is an experiment in narrative style that largely fails. "Sense of Wonder" is an occasionally amusing SF in-joke, with its dialogue between two sexually awkward adolescents. "Reaper" is a routine supernatural fantasy, and "Lesser Figures of the Greater Trumps" is the kind of work that gets an "A" in college creative writing courses, but seldom gets published.
But even failed experiments can be useful, and while one could wish that his first collection could be of more even quality, James Alan Gardner is clearly an author willing to take chances, and the six best stories alone make this collection well worth reading.
Since writing these stories, Gardner has moved on to writing science-fiction novels in his League of People series. The best stories in this collection provide incentive to look into these more recent novels. —Doug
Also in this issue: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, by Cory Doctorow
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