Listening to Brahms

Pulphouse Short Story Paperbacks #19

by Suzy McKee Charnas

Nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Novelette in 1986.
Listening to Brahms was originally published in Omni, September 1986.

46 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1986

About the author

Suzy McKee Charnas, a native New Yorker raised and educated in Manhattan, surfaced as an author with WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD (1974), a no-punches-pulled feminist SF novel and Campbell award finalist. The three further books that sprang from WALK (comprising a futurist, feminist epic about how people make history and create myth) closed in 1999 with THE CONQUEROR’S CHILD, a Tiptree winner (as is the series in its entirety).

Meanwhile, she taught for two years in Nigeria with the Peace Corps, married, and moved to New Mexico, where she has lived, taught, and written fiction and non-fiction for forty five years. She teaches SF from time to time, and travels every year to genre conventions around the country and (occasionally) around the world.

Her varied SF and fantasy works have also won the Hugo award, the Nebula award, the Gigamesh Award (Spain), and the Mythopoeic award for Young-Adult fantasy. A play based on her novel THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY has been staged on both coasts. STAGESTRUCK VAMPIRES (Tachyon Books) collects her best short fiction, plus essays on writing feminist SF and on seeing her play script first become a professionally staged drama in San Francisco. Currently, she’s working at getting all of her work out in e-book, audio, and other formats, and moving several decades’ worth of manuscripts, correspondence, etc. out of a slightly leaky garage and sent off to be archived at the University of Oregon Special Collections. She has two cats and a gentleman boarder (also a cat), good friends and colleagues, ideas for new work, and travel plans for the future.

Reviews

[Althea Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

An alien race of lizard-people has become obsessed with human popular culture through listening to our radio (&etc) transmissions… Filled with enthusiasm, they send an interstellar mission to greet humanity – but by the time they arrive, humanity has self-destructed, and the only humans left alive are the crew of a space mission. The lizards bring the survivors back to their own planet, where they are feted as celebrities… but this does not save the survivors from depression and insanity… Meanwhile, the lizards’ culture, taken over my their love of all things human, seems to be going the same way as humanity’s has… Told from the perspective of one of the survivors, a none-too-stable individual who clings to the classical music of Earth as his touchstone.

[Jill Carroll · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this novelette when it was first published in Omni magazine in 1986 and it has stayed with me all these years. Today on twitter I saw the author had died, so I tracked it down online. It doesn’t seem to be currently in print; I’d have bought a best-of short fiction ebook if I’d found one. Anyway, it holds up pretty well, a bit dated but still very powerful. Recommended for fans of Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, Susan Palwick, and Nicola Griffith.

[Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting quick read about alien lizards who are intrigued by human culture to the point of imitation.