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TRIGGER WARNING: For extended, detailed talk of racism, sexual harassment, abuse This has not been an easy post for me to write. I'm keeping the...
This is sad to read, and angering. The pants incident in particular is pure WTFery.
space weapons space war (1982 ed.)
“backed up by half the recognized space scientists in the world” is a pretty dodgy formulation…
now i want to hear from the other half
I want to know why that gridded sphere is not flying into flinders.
Here’s my book haul for the last few weeks. It’s large. Folks are dropping off books left and right (an add post-holiday thing that happens every year) and there’s some great stuff. The first photo is, for me, the most delightful. I got some less familiar Russian material and some good snooty Continental writing. The Ficciones is going to replace my battered copy. Manuscripts Don’t Burn is going right onto my TBR pile. That pile also includes a new edition of Lynd Ward’s collected woodcut novels, with a great introduction from Art Spiegelman.
The rest are a very mixed bag, from graphic novels to anarchism. This year I am going to try to read back some more, and read a greater variety of categories and genres. I’ve made a stack of poetry on my night stand for bedtime read; I’m nearly done with Le Guin’s new collection which, as with her last one, I am a bit uncertain about.
There’s not much in the way of rare stuff this time, I got the copy of Conklin’s Onmibus for free off my store’s $1 cart, and grabbed even though it did not have a jacket. About a week later someone sold us a few bins of odds and ends and there was a stack of jackets in one box and what did I find but a jacket for the book! That happens very rarely but it made me smile.
Recent books that have somehow made it into my home. Already tucking in to the Scholz and Le Guin, and the ibn Fadlun and Joe Hill books won’t be far behind. But the pick of this crop is the Tutuola.novel Ajaiyi and His Inherited Poverty, published in 1967 by Faber and Faber. Not the rarest of his work, but in such good condition I couldn’t pass it up. The novel tells the story of siblings trying to gain their freedom and I’m eager to read it.
“Lucilia Illustris” by Leena Krohn, recommended by Jeff Vandermeer
Issue No. 186
AN INTRODUCTION BY JEFF VANDERMEER
Leena Krohn, one of Finland’s most decorated writers, is the kind of storyteller who rewires your brain. She forces you to adapt to her pace, her particular and unique ideas of urgency. The ceaseless roving, testing, and journeying that manifests in Krohn’s fiction originates from a fierce intellect. Krohn is curious about the world, and she has the kind of philosophical mind to make that exploration fascinating to readers. Her fictions aren’t abstractions, however, but alive with details of character and setting and situation that display a keen eye for observation of the world around her.
Krohn’s usual form is a kind of “mosaic” novel, in which short chapters advance the overall story arc but also form complete tales in and of themselves. Her adoption of this structure is wise—the rate of ideas and images conveyed in a typical chapter, even when playful, has a density that might overwhelm in longer increments, but seems layered and useful at the short length. It also creates a puzzle aspect respectful of reader intelligence and imagination.
The story reprinted here, “Lucilia Illustris,” was first published in Mathematical Creatures or Shared Dreams (Matemaattisia olioita tai jaettuja unia), Leena Krohn’s seventh prose work for adults and the winner of the 1992 Finlandia Prize. The book consists of twelve prose pieces that occupy the ground between the essay and the short story, thematically linked by a discussion of the relationship between self and reality.
Some readers of Krohn’s other work in English may be surprised by the tactile, visceral aspect of “Lucilia Illustris,” which could be read as a wide-angle meditation on crime scenes. But, in fact, this quality of the practical and specific occurs throughout Krohn’s fiction. It just isn’t always on evidence in the small selection of her work published in English to date.
A vein of the horrific occurs also in her novel Gold of Ophir, in its description of an airplane disaster and in its ruminations on the explorations of a tuatara reptile. It also can be found in other of her fictions that deal with terrorism and with biotech. To some extent, the grotesque occurs in Krohn’s work because it is an important part of the world, and Krohn’s explorations in fiction tend to interrogate the world from many different angles. The nod to Decadent literature demonstrates, too, that Krohn’s influences are wider than English-language readers may have assumed. But it is also a nod to Decadent-era (pre-vaccination) views of decay and the human body.
What will not surprise readers is Krohn’s focus on the natural world in “Lucilia Illustris.” Nor will readers of her prior, World Fantasy Award-finalist novel Tainaron be surprised by the role of insects in the story. In Tainaron, intelligent insects rule a city named Tainaron and the nameless human narrator comes to understand her hosts and to be transformed by them. In “Lucilia Illustris,” the process is merely more literal.
Krohn has never been “just” a humanist in her fiction and other writings. She generally takes a view of the universe that pulls back from the human to encompass other animals and environments that do not privilege human concerns—even while acknowledging those concerns. She is trying to push past the human gaze, in many cases, to try to get somewhere new and fresh.
In “Lucilia Illustris,” the long view is implicit in the main character’s job as a forensic entomologist. Yet little human moments become amplified by that focus and, in typical Krohn fashion, these small moments in the surface of the text take on more emphasis than they would otherwise. The narrator is always coming up against the human gaze and in needing to explain her own approach we get both a human and post-human view of the world.
Most of Krohn’s fiction, visceral or not, has moments where it challenges the reader, but also enthralls, horrifies, or delights the reader. In creating these effects, Krohn is trying to show the underlying beauty and complexity of the world, this universe, that we inhabit.
Jeff VanderMeer Author, The Southern Reach Trilogy
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Collect them All
Lucilia Illustris
by Leena Khron
Translated by Viivi Hyvönen
Recommended by Jeff VanderMeer
Do you remember, my love, the object we saw, on that temperate summer morn: -Charles Baudelaire
The unused sidetrack led to an overgrown yard of a derelict factory. This was the Ultima Thule of the city, the kind of neighborhood people moved into only if they had no alternative. It had housing projects, a supermarket, a primary school, two kiosks, a bus terminus, some paint factories and National Railways’ storage areas.
The last thing to have been manufactured in the low factory halls were Christmas ornaments, and if you bothered to look in through one of the broken windows you could still see a length of silver tinsel glimmering on the dusty floor.
I know this, because I looked in—because I saw that forgotten glimmer.
Behind the barracks that had served as a canteen, the yard sloped down steeply and soon crumbled into a sandpit.
The neighborhood residents used the sandpit as an unauthorized dump. All the usual junk had been thrown in: fridges, tires and hubcaps, defective office equipment, corroded oil containers, and leaky canisters, the contents of which were best forgotten. There were parts of things so far removed from their original form that it was no longer possible to guess their function. A living room suite in plush was covered in stains not only of mold but also of wine and sperm spilled at some party, decades ago.
In summer, mayweed and willowherb and mugwort seemed to do all they could to hide the things discarded by people, but it was not enough by far.
And it was summer. One of the armchairs of the suite had been placed on the rusty tracks. It looked as if it had been brought there for a performance, a bluff, a cheap jest. As if the onlooker was supposed to think of it as a private vehicle that might, at any moment, speed away southward, to where the old sidetrack met with the main line, and still onward, all the way to the railway station in the city.
Behind the armchair, between a burned Datsun and a Strömberg electrical stove, there was something else. Admittedly it was peculiar that it had lain unobserved for so long. Now it was the center of all our attention.
A cotton blanket, which had once been yellow and flower patterned, was wrapped around it tightly and bound repeatedly with plastic cord. The blanket was already partially decomposed, it had been soaked both in rain and in the fluids secreted by its contents.
Not even the highest of fevers in a living being can rise as high as the heat of decomposition. Its furnace had consumed not only its very source but also the blanket covering it. The colors had faded and merged, the patterns could barely be guessed at, only fuzzy blotches remained. But the havoc was not wreaked by bacterial activity alone. Insects, too, flies and their larvae, beetles and many other species, had participated in the destruction.
Summer was at its peak, the morning so early that the city had not yet woken. A bird I didn’t know chirped on the bank of the sandpit in an elder shrub, its berries already reddening. Some sand slid down as if under someone’s steps. I looked up, but there was no one. The sand shifted by itself.
The shutter of a camera clicked repeatedly. The photographer performed a complicated choreography around his subject, crouching down, shooting a short hand-held series, setting up his pedestal in a new spot, and shooting again.
The rest of us—the inspector and I, and the two patrolmen, who had been alerted to the scene by an anonymous phone call—looked at the bundle in silence, without an objective, until one of the patrolmen retched. At that moment, as if in mutual agreement, all the men moved, almost started, back, away from the source of the stench.
I could not. I was already pulling on rubber gloves. On the contrary, I had to step closer and bend down over the roll. I had to do my due. Despite having felt weary as soon as I saw the bundle. It meant weeks of toil.
– A fucked up job, one of the patrolmen said in a thick voice.
I glanced at him coldly and opened my tool bag to choose the right pincers.
Although I would gladly have sat down in the worn armchair, where someone had read quietly on winter nights long gone by. I would have sought the hidden switch to make it shoot forward, dug my head deep into the headrest, and sped away from the officials and the unknown cadaver, as far as the tracks went.
But soon I forgot the armchair and was captivated by the wrapped up world, which emitted a buzzing tune. I didn’t open the package yet. It wasn’t time to open it yet. The others were already too far, they didn’t hear the tune, and had they heard it, it would have driven them even further. I have never been able to close my ears from it. It was the sound of decomposition, which is the sound of life in death.
Once a man, a poet of sorts himself and my lover at the time, read the poem “A Carcass” by Charles Baudelaire aloud to me while drunk with whisky. I had not heard of it before.
– It’s for you, he said, – remember it always.
I will. I can estimate that the corpse that the narrator of the poem and his lover saw at a bend in the path, on a bed sown with gravel, had lain dead for no more than a few days. It had reached the second stage of putrefaction, was soon to reach the third, for it reeked and the inner gases still distended it, but its skin was already starting to tear: “opened her stench-swollen belly.”
I have also heard the sound Baudelaire writes about, “a curious music,” which resembles the wind, or a stream, or the rustle of grains. Its source is the movement of insects, the overlapping of sheets of insects, their swarming, digging, feeding, breeding, hatching, growing, and preying.
When I first heard its tune, my innards almost overturned. Now it doesn’t have this effect on me anymore.
I’m an entomologist. In my youth my studies took me to many countries. In one small town, the name of which I have forgotten, I had lunch in an untidy café. On the wall of the ladies’ room someone had written in a swift, sketchy hand: Time is nature’s way of preventing everything from happening at once.
To me it seemed odd that graffiti of such consequence was to be found in the restroom of such an inconsequential lunch bar. When I read those words it was as if they had been written just for me. I was unable to imagine the person who had written them. I only saw the hand that wrote.
I have kept both the poem and this sentence in mind all these years.
Timing—that is my task. The wall of the restroom told the truth: If time didn’t exist, everything would happen at once. There would be no separate cause and effect. There would be no infinite chains of causality. But now: things follow each other in a definite order so that the effect never comes before the cause. This applies not only to life but to dying and death, too.
You may want to ask: Why do you state the obvious? I answer you: Because in it lies the real secret.
Keep reading
Fascinating story. I’m finishing Krohn’s COLLECTED FICTION right now and it’s amazing and unsettling. It’s also part of a storybundle of strange fiction: http://storybundle.com/fiction
Due to illness I haven’t posted in a few weeks. . . and the books are stacking up! So here is a month’s worth of additions to me library and my TBR pile. Very happy to get the SF authors’ book to ID first editions. Lots of great fiction and some old favorites that I didn’t have in paper form.
Zakariya al-Qazwini,ʿAjā'ib al-makhlūqāt wa gharā'ib al-mawjūdāt (Marvels of creatures and Strange things existing); 13th century Persian manuscripts, N.d.
I love the birds and the merman.
The next batch of photos for my WFC15 bookhaul. First, two SFBC collected editions (which I love to hunt down and acquire) Ellen Kushner gave me my first autograph of the con in the Riverside collection. I bulked up my Lucius Shepard collection with a number of Special Editions, most of them signed. I will say, however, that I am leery of Aztechs. The paperbacks are not stunning but good additions to my library and a delightful array of covers. Finally, I found some Samuel R. Delany Ace Doubles and a signed issue of his story “Driftglass” in IF.Very pleased; The Jewels of Aptor is in much better shape than the two copies I own right now.
The next batch of acquisitions from World Fantasy Convention 2015. The Blackwoods were impulse buys because they were quite inexpensive; at least one of them may be a first and if not an early printing (the years are the years of first publication). They’re a little worn but clean inside without a lot of discoloration of the pages. Next are a Dunsany and Machen‘s autobiography. The Dunsany has an info card but I’m still researching the Machen. The last is going to be a treasured addition to my library: a 2-volume set of Lady Gregory’s “folk-history” plays, the first American edition, I believe. I left a bookmark I found in Vol. 1 in the photo because I thought it was quite cool.
Starting to photograph the treasure I found at WFC 2015. Here we have three magazines I brought for Kit Reed to personalize, and a first edition of Moorcock’s STORMBRINGER.
Dame Judi Dench 1965
Here’s a delightful treasure I recently acquired: a copy of Tove Jansson’s Who Will Comfort Toffle? I am still researching but it looks like this is the first English language edition published by Ernest Benn Limited in 1960 (published in Finland by Werner Soderstrom Osakeyhtio). The jacket is a little worn but intact and the book itself is in very good condition. The spine is a bit compressed but there is very little discoloration of the paper and the illustrations are colorful and sharp. The artwork is vital and sublime. Janssen was a genius.
Today I went to the second weekend of our semi-annual library booksale. After 2 and a half hours of searching I found some lovely stuff. Also, I got quite a nice stack for my usual weekly haul. The first stack are my weekly received/gifted/acquired books. Stack 2 contains my acquisitions from the sale, and stack 3 are selected magazines from two collections that were being sold at the sale. I’ll take pictures of a few of the cooler covers later. Some of them have first publication of classic stories (such as “The Cold Equations,”“The Man Who Had No Idea,” and Delany’s “Lines of Power), while others have “novelets” by C. L. Moore & Henry Kuttner (Rite of Passage”), Harlan Ellison (”The Deathbird”), Zenna Henderson (”Wilderness”), and Walter M. Miller, Jr. (The Last Canticle”). I found several with stories by Russ, Disch, Leinster, and Kit Reed. Very happy with this load.
Today I decided to post some lovely photos of one of my favorite publisher’s bindings in our Mabbott Poe collection of Edgar Allan Poe materials. Here is our 1857 edition of The Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe, With Original Memoir. This books really stands out of the shelf due to its bright green cloth binding. There are many other wonderful books to be found in this collection, which was donated by Thomas Ollive Mabbott. Mabbott also has a manuscript collection at Iowa, and the finding aid gives a description of his book collection - check it out below:
“Thomas Ollive Mabbott also bequeathed his collection of books by and about Edgar Allan Poe to the University of Iowa Libraries, and they continue to be a seperately shelved sequence in Special Collections. The collection is particularly rich in appearances of Poe’s works in magazines. An endowment accompanied the gift, and the income from this fund has allowed the Libraries to add fine press and other editions of Poe’s work as well as books about Poe. In 2003 the collection was greatly enriched with the gift by Burton Pollin of his collection of illustrated Poe – several hundred books in diverse languages containing illustrated versions of Poe’s works.”
Mabbott Poe PS2605 A1 1857
-Lindsay M.
Excuse me while I drool all over this <3
My personal haul from the Friends of the Library Booksale. After waiting in line for 2 and 1/2 hours and a fine breakfast at the bakery I spent over an hour scouting the shelves for cool books.I got a nice mix of fiction and non-fiction, including a Borges volume and some good critical material. Gender Genocide looks terrible but I couldn’t pass it up. I also found some old SFF magazines in the Collector’ Corner, including the first issue of F&SF and a couple of Avon Fantasy Readers with excellent ToCs. The best one was the F&SF that has Philip K. Dick’s first published story in it. Don’t know how good it is but I couldn’t pass it up for $5.
Books received/acquired/rescued from the last few weeks. Very curious to read Eco’s The Open Work, Japanese Death Poems, and some Sturgeon. Already tucking into the Tiptree volume. The Heart of Darkness has a Mike Mignola cover so I got it to replace my tattered pocket.
The recent bookhaul.The two books on Finland are fabulous, even though I can’t read the words. I found some promising novels this week, and I can’t wait to read the Irène Némirovsky collection. A lot of graphic collections to fill out a couple of runs, upgrading my softcover X-Men volume with this hardcover, and a Le Guin for my SFBC collection.
