enry Holt, which has published Karen Joy Fowler's new collection very handsomely indeed except for one bad thing, may think it has done a real good job of the one bad thing it has done, and that it has successfully hidden what it wanted to hide.
Black Glass has no copyright acknowledgments page.
I cannot for a moment believe that Karen Joy Fowler herself wished to conceal all evidence of earlier publication of the stories assembled in Black Glass: Short Fictions. Authors do not normally wish to conceal the fact that they have lives.
I think it was Henry Holt that wished to conceal the origins of most of these stories. Some of them are new to me and may never have been published before; but some of them, which represent the best of Fowler's previous work, were published in various anthologies, collections and magazines.
Almost certainly for market reasons (which is to say, because they were Just Following Orders), Henry Holt obscured the fact that Karen Joy Fowler had published science fiction and fantasy stories in science fiction and fantasy magazines, and that much of Black Glass has already entered the conversation of genre.
This seems far short of courteous.
The conversation of genre--the conversation of story writers influencing each other over the years--has shaped science fiction (in particular) and fantasy for nearly a century now.
So it is not only discourteous to attempt to cut Black Glass off at the roots; it is a small treason.
Brilliant and savvy
Most of the stories assembled in Black Glass are brilliant, though sometimes the savvy, flattened, ironized Alice-in-Wonderland-Between-the-Wars voice in which almost all of them are narrated does obliterate in the memory, through its interchangeable sameness, some of the weaker items. Those which are familiar need to be reread in this new context; those which are not--I had not run across "Shimabara," "Go Back," "The Travails," "The Brew" and "The Black Fairy's Curse"--give great joy.
For readers who care (which should be most of us) here is where the rest of Black Glass comes from:
"Contention" and "The View from Venus: A Case Study" first
appeared in Fowler's first collection, Artificial Things (1986). "The Faithful Companion at Forty" (1987), "Lily Red" (1988) and "Duplicity" (1989) first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction. "Letters from Home" first appeared in Jack and Jeanne Dann's Vietnam anthology, Field of Fire (1987). "Game Night at the Fox and Goose" (1989) first appeared in Interzone. "Lieserl" first appeared in Fowler's second collection, Peripheral Vision (1990). "Black Glass" first appeared in Full Spectrum 3 (1991) edited Lou Aronica, Amy Stout and Betsy Mitchell. And "The Elizabeth Complex" (1996) first appeared in Crank.
There, that didn't hurt so much, did it, Mr. Holt?
Fowler's tone of voice has evolved steadily from her first words in print. She sounds a bit like Donald Barthelme, a bit like Joanna Russ, a bit like Angela Carter, a bit like Kit Reed (reviewed here recently); and Kim Newman sounds a bit like her (the genres of the fantastic are, after all, a conversation). Her voice, like the voice of most genuinely intelligent writers, is an alloy, a chord: she sounds like her compatriots, and she sounds exactly, in the end, like herself. What she sounds exactly like, after all the elements have come together, is a survivor.
Like James Tiptree Jr.
Like the work of James Tiptree Jr., whom Fowler sounds a bit like,
the stories in Black Glass do not very often end happily--and some, like "Go Back" or "The Brew," close with a heartstopping terminal clarity. But unlike Tiptree's work, they do not often end in death. They are stories set at intermissions in the world machine.
They are about the condition of living in an SF world.
"Black Glass," though funny and intricate, is almost the least successful of them, perhaps through overloading: a DEA agent invokes through voodoo an incarnated carnage-causing Carrie Nation, and tracks her through dense whorls of irreality. But this is a plot that needs to be followed, and Fowler's interest in the (beautifully voiced) DEA agent's procedures fails fatally to hold. The last pages of the tale could have appended half a dozen other Fowler stories.
"Shimabara" is set 350 years ago in Japan, where a 15-year-old boy converts thousands to Christianity and hides with them in a fortress, where they are all starved to death by the besieging authorities. The voice of the narrator is that of a 20th century woman whose perceptions intricately merge through time and space with what might be called the eternal anguish of existence in a world where certain things happen:
Within one moment [she concludes], anything is possible. Only the passage of time makes our miraculous lives mundane. For a single moment any boy can walk on water. An arrow can hang in the sky without falling. Martha [the boy's mother] kneels to write a letter. The sun is in her face. Negotiations continue. CNN is filming. The compound will never be taken. There are children inside.
Her stories are not snapshots. They are what happens to snapshots.
Betrayingly intimate
In "Game Night at the Fox and Goose," a woman whose man has just left her--Fowler's exposure of her mind and actions is a betrayingly intimate rendering of how women behave in a men's world--meets a Temporal Adventuress out of Michael Moorcock, and accepts an offer of escape into a world less poisonous to women, or so it seems.
These stories--and the other 13 that make Black Glass into a superb volume of Selected Tales--maintain a constant but almost invariably implicit interaction with all the genres of the fantastic. But Fowler tends only to hint at the multifarious connections between her tales and the larger conversation in which she consciously partakes. It is all the more unfortunate that the publishers of this shapely, solid, seminal book chose to strip Black Glass of that context.
So let us not lose Black Glass.
It tells us how to talk.
It is an arrow that hangs in the sky without falling.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of the Hugo Award winning Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, co-editor of the Hugo winning Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and one of the co-founders of the Hugo winning British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list. His latest book, Encyclopedia of Fantasy--which he co-edited with John Grant--is nominated for the 1998 Hugo Award.
