Alien Bootlegger: A Novella

by Rebecca Ore

In Franklin County, when times get tough, people often to turn to bootlegging. But that’s a perilous way to make a living, since bootlegging is both illegal and tightly regulated by distributors like Dennis DeSpain. So when the mysterious and scary alien who calls himself "Turk" openly sets up as an independent operator, flouting both the law and the distributors, all hell breaks loose. In it up to their necks and pursuing their own agendas ex-activist Lilly, the alien’s lawyer; Berenice, an aging ’60s radical with a past; Orris, DeSpain’s smart, ambitious wife who believes in doing whatever it takes to achieve the objective; and DeSpain’s ex-lover Marie, a chemical-engineering student who loves working with machines and whose grandmother was a midwife, bootlegger in the Forties, and notorious for having killed a man. "Every writer worth admiring has her place of that locale or perspective from which she does her best and most assured work. For Rebecca Ore, it’s the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwestern Virginia. Though she has lived much of her life elsewhere, the land and its people are in her bones and the rhythm of their speech lodged in her head. It’s not an easy place to love, and she returns to it always with a certain degree of pain and regret. But it’s the forge and wellspring of Alien Bootlegger . "The Blue Ridge area is a region of stunning beauty where guns are common, old wealth holds to traditional values (‘like owning people,’ as Rebecca enjoys explaining), and operating an illegal still is not so much disreputable as a matter of cultural pride." —from the Introduction by Michael Swanwick

Genres: Science Fiction, Collections

140 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Rebecca Ore is the pseudonym of science fiction writer Rebecca B. Brown.

Rebecca Ore was born in Louisville, KY, out of people from Kentucky and Virginia, Irish Catholic and French Protestant turned Southern Baptist on her mother's side and Welsh and Borderer on her father's. She grew up in South Carolina and fell in love with New York City from a distance, moved there in 1968 and lived on the Upper West Side and Lower East Side for seven years. Somehow, she also attended Columbia University School of General Studies while spending most of her energy in the St. Mark Poetry Project. In 1975, she moved to San Francisco for almost a year, then moved to Virginia, back and forth several places for several years, finished a Masters in English, then moved to rural Virginia for ten years, writing s.f. novels and living in her grandparent's house after they died.

Reviews

[Andrew Brooks]

Too strange

The novella that this collection opens with is fairly comprehensible, though with more different kinds of meanings intertwined than is first apparent. The rest of the collection is just... Not.
Responses to statements or situations don't seem to match at all, regardless of whether it is an alien or human responding. Almost as if, in getting her mind successfully into the alien viewpoints, the author then seems unable to switch back to human for the response.?
Part of this is the unfortunately common tendancy for writers to get caught up in too much metaphor, which doesn't necessarily work when your audience has different cultural references. This is especially apparent in that, the author evidently thinks in concepts that are not generally used in the USA, which combined with her goal of presenting alien viewpoints makes for dialogue that just doesn't seem to make sense.

The collection ends with an essay on the writing, that I'll pull from:
"We won’t be just contacting or contacted by alien intelligences. We’ll be getting partial to whole alien biotypes. If we’re lucky, we’ll be Eurasiafrica contacting NorthandSouthAmerica. Something is signifying something about us as a species here that we make a metaphor of this. If life in space exists, we’d better hope we don’t get contacted by a hundred-member federation of tens of thousands of planets exchanging genetic material and competing for ecological niches for a million years."
1. Biotypes is related to biotope, another term she uses just after this; A biotope is an area of uniform environmental conditions providing a living place for a specific assemblage of plants and animals. Biotope is almost synonymous with the term "habitat", which is more commonly used in English-speaking countries. However, in some countries these two terms are distinguished: the subject of a habitat is a population, the subject of a biotope is a biocoenosis or "biological community". [None of the above bio- words even showed in dictionary, had to goto encyclopedia]
2. I don't even know what to say about that vague statement concerning metaphor...
3. None of these stories had anything to do with exchanges of biological material, so I have no idea where that came from or is going
4. The confusion of these concepts shows somewhat in the final line: species don't compete for biologicalniches, they compete for resources; competition for the niche is a higher level abstract that has different considerations.

With this much confusion from one paragraph in the essay's beginning, I think you can imagine the confusing feeling from the less direct stories