Eternity and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

Here are seven stories from a master of the art. Viktor Chemayev is the Philip Marlowe of Russian detectives, a sad-eyed, heavy drinking romantic who refuses to stay beat. In the title novella of this extraordinary collection, he goes head-to-head with an Irish assassin in the depths of a Moscow nightclub in an attempt to win back his true love, who has been sold to the Beelzebub-like king of the Moscow underworld... Lucius Shepard is known for his dark, unpredictable vision, and in this assemblage of some of his best writing he takes us from Moscow to Africa; from the mountains of Iraq, where Specialist Charlie N. Wilson encounters a very different sort of enemy, to Central America, where a bloody-handed colonel meets his doom via lizards. In these seven tales Shepard's imagination spans the globe and, like an American Gabriel Garcia Marquez, refuses to be restricted by mere reality.

Genres: Short Stories, Collections, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy

442 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 2005

About the author

Brief biographies are, like history texts, too organized to be other than orderly misrepresentations of the truth. So when it's written that Lucius Shepard was born in August of 1947 to Lucy and William Shepard in Lynchburg, Virginia, and raised thereafter in Daytona Beach, Florida, it provides a statistical hit and gives you nothing of the difficult childhood from which he frequently attempted to escape, eventually succeeding at the age of fifteen, when he traveled to Ireland aboard a freighter and thereafter spent several years in Europe, North Africa, and Asia, working in a cigarette factory in Germany, in the black market of Cairo's Khan al Khalili bazaar, as a night club bouncer in Spain, and in numerous other countries at numerous other occupations. On returning to the United States, Shepard entered the University of North Carolina, where for one semester he served as the co-editor of the Carolina Quarterly. Either he did not feel challenged by the curriculum, or else he found other pursuits more challenging. Whichever the case, he dropped out several times and traveled to Spain, Southeast Asia (at a time when tourism there was generally discouraged), and South and Central America. He ended his academic career as a tenth-semester sophomore with a heightened political sensibility, a fairly extensive knowledge of Latin American culture and some pleasant memories.

Toward the beginning of his stay at the university, Shepard met Joy Wolf, a fellow student, and they were married, a union that eventually produced one son, Gullivar, now an architect in New York City. While traveling cross-country to California, they had their car break down in Detroit and were forced to take jobs in order to pay for repairs. As fortune would have it, Shepard joined a band, and passed the better part of the 1970s playing rock and roll in the Midwest. When an opportunity presented itself, usually in the form of a band break-up, he would revisit Central America, developing a particular affection for the people of Honduras. He intermittently took odd jobs, working as a janitor, a laborer, a sealer of driveways, and, in a nearly soul-destroying few months, a correspondent for Blue Cross/Blue Shield, a position that compelled him to call the infirm and the terminally ill to inform them they had misfiled certain forms and so were being denied their benefits.

In 1980 Shepard attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop at Michigan State University and thereafter embarked upon a writing career. He sold his first story, "Black Coral," in 1981 to New Dimensions, an anthology edited by Marta Randall. During a prolonged trip to Central America, covering a period from 1981-1982, he worked as a freelance journalist focusing on the civil war in El Salvador. Since that time he has mainly devoted himself to the writing of fiction. His novels and stories have earned numerous awards in both the genre and the mainstream.

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Standing, it looked to Chemayev that the stones beneath his feet were miles away, the surface of a lumpy planet seen from space. A shadowy floater cluttered his vision. The white leaves each had a doubled image, and March's features, rising form the pale seamy ground of his skin, made no sense as a face--like landmarks on a map without referents.

2026 reread:

My memories were pretty firm and I was again delighted by this collection which of course conjures Conrad but also beckons Ballard. I’m reasonably certain I didn’t read the Florida noir piece nor the one involving the artist in prison. I thought they were the weakest of the collection.

Original review:
This collection came into my possession two years at a library sale in Louisville. Soon after I read Only Partly Here the opening piece, a ghost story of Ground Zero which remains the best fiction I've read concerning September 11th. Maybe as divine punishment, I then put down the book and nearly forgot it until the other day. Somewhat stranded in the house with a foot of fresh snow outdoors I picked up the book and read Eternity, a disturbing piece which concludes the tome about Putin's Kleptocracy serving as a bastion of damnation for all of Mother Russia's sins. Reeling from that I flipped back to Shepard's second story about air strike which ruptures the ground in Iraq and opens a passage to Jahannam (Hell in Islam)and read through the collection sequentially. These are philosophically charged stories addressing colonialism, addiction, the War on Terror and the psychology of incarceration. I'm not sure if I am simply over-smitten with the displayed themes to compensate for the enhanced (over-written?) dialogue which predominates. It is debatable whether I care. There was a touch of sadness when I discovered last night Shepard passed away last year. I suspect this won't be my last encounter with such frenetic and New Weird work.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tales of gothic and surreal horror which by being set in places of recent real world tragedy like ground zero of 9-11, the Congo, Iraq, Russia, Central America, and in the American Jail system tackle with these issues and avoids escapism. The tales are great with hints of Ballard, Cortazar, , Borges, and Poe. “Jailwise” and “Eternity” maybe his most extended pieces of nearly pure surrealism. Like Hawthorne he is offering us parables that kaleidoscope any interpretation we try to place on them. Shepard is without a doubt one of our greatest living authors.

[Graham P · Rating 4 out of 5]

As usual, Shepard, master surrealist of crime & fantasy, continues his mastery of the novella with this collection, which shows his usual heavy-handed existentialism touched with magic and violence. Here are more tales of ex-pats and wanderers skirting the edges between a fallen empire and the sorcery hiding within. As duplicitous as his prose is dense, Shepard was perhaps one of the most consistent novella-ists of his time - and never fully branded horror, crime, fantasy or SF, he takes all in with his sorcery ways that evoke classic SF, UK espionage, and hallucinogenic terrors. While some may bristle at his density of prose and inner turmoil of his characters, not many can paint the individual in strife as Shepard had done over two strong decades of fantastical work.

'Only Partly Here' is as modern a ghost story as you can get. Here the rubble of 911 carries more than destruction, but ghosts that permeate the downtrodden barriers of reality. 'Crocodile Rock' has yet another operative seeking a spiritual treasure that may just cut his chord - here, the setting Africa, and yes, a crocodile is the creature to possess. 'Hands Up! Who Wants To Die?' is of the on-the-lamb crime story of Floridian losers on the run from themselves, only to be enmeshed in a great mystery where alien visitations and time splits tweak the narrative. 'The Drive-In Puerto Rico' shows another lost soul in the Caribbean who happens to be a war hero seeking asylum from not only his country but from himself. 'Eternity and Afterward' is more of the usual - tough hitman infiltrates an otherworldly mecca underground only to encounter spiritual side-journeys, godlike Soviet mystics, and Hell painted white, where the vodka flows and the party never ends.

But it is 'Jailwise' that tears the roof off the collection. It is a fine piece of mood, precision, and some far-out blissful fodder as well. Here in a prison of the reformed, there are no guards, no walls, no rules. The inmate/narrator is an artist who is allowed free reign to paint his own cathedral, only to get embroiled with a loving genderless woman and a group of ageless mystics who may be pulling the strings not only from the prison but from another dimension...and mainly from within himself. Utterly beautiful and heartfelt. One of the best prison SF entries ever written, right up on par with Thomas Disch's 'Camp Concentration.'

As always, Shepard is a master.

[Tt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another unbelievably wonderful collection by Shepard. Shepard transforms seemingly everyday incidents into sequences full of sinister forces, unearthly visions and terrifying hallucinations. And in every story there is something infinitely essential about humanity, the beauty and terror of existence.

[Steve Bishop · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is full of mind expanding ideas and well described scenarios, great lines and well evoked weird moments, but the stories themselves left me a little unsatisfied. I felt that the characters, though vivid and believable, lacked qualities that would have made them exceptional in some way. It wouldn't have mattered in what way. I didn't mean just that some added quirk would have added interest, but some deep seated flaw or redeeming facet that would have made them different to the rest of us. On the whole it felt as though these were ordinary people in extraordinary situations, I didn't particularly feel for them as they weren't really striving for anything above or outside themselves or even within themselves. One of the things that made "A Handbook of AmericanPrayer" so fascinating and compelling was that the main character had his life destroyed, but he still kept it together and went on rebuilding no matter what. There's not really anyone like that in the first 4 stories in this and that's as far as I got. Some very decent writing. Close but no cigar.

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seven Lucius Shepard novelettes collected here - and none more intense than the tale I have chosen to make the focus of my review:

A Walk in the Garden
We're in northern Iraq and Charles N. Wilson of Special Forces reflects on the new type of bomb the army used to open up a cave at the base of a mountain. Nobody is clear about what happened. Was his buddy right about a paradigm shift and changes on the quantum level? There's a meadow of yellow flowers at the mouth of the cave extending deep into the interior. Chances are Wilson will do IQ (a futurist drug - more below) but will wait until he's ready to embark on the mission that will take him and his patrol miles inside this mysterious cave.

You'll have to read for yourself to find out what these Special Forces soldiers encounter. Hint: Lucius Shepard injects elements of the fantastic and horrific.

However, what I found especially eerie is all the futuristic technology and drugs that are an integral part of US Special Forces. Each one deserves a special callout, as per:

Super Seeing - Prior to the mission, Wilson zeros in on the cave, "his helmet, the optics of its faceplate magnified, so it seems he's looking at the flowers from a distance of fifty feet and not, as is truly the case, more than a mile." Shepard published his tale during the Iraq War when George W. Bush was president. He envisions the war continuing after Bush with these incredible optics and a host of other science fiction bits to create super soldiers.

Super Helmet - Wilson loves his helmet. "It has a TV mounted above the visor so he can watch his favorite shows. It feeds him, dopes him, keeps him cool, plays his tunes, tells him when to fire, where to hide." Such features could be seen as a soldier's dream come true, but I sense Shepard's skepticism: the author detects the many ways the military can utilize technology for manipulation, control, and (gulp) dehumanization.

Super Smart - On the cusp of entering the cave, Wilson takes a hit of IQ, a futuristic drug that drastically increases his ability to understand and analyze all types of information, from biology to game theory, from mathematics to theoretical physics. Sound appealing? Shepard hints there are long-term consequences of using this brain drug but, hey, when does a soldier have time to think of the long-term when he's in combat?

God 'n Country - Wilson also injects himself with this super patriot drug. "Within seconds he's gripped by a pathologically smooth feeling of competency and confidence, underscored by a stream of outrage and devotion to duty." Wow! Is this the ultimate advantage for Wilson or is this the ultimate in military manipulation? Or perhaps a bizarre combination of both?

The Commander Speaks - Wilson and all the others on the mission hear the voice of Colonel Reese on their intrasuit channel: "The idea for which you are fighting is too large to hold in the mind. If it was visible, it would be too large to see. Like the breadth of the sky or the shape of the universe. Here in this place of terror and iniquity, you are the sole expression of that idea. You represent its burning edges, you carry its flame, you are the bearers of its purifying light." Wilson has taken his God 'n Country drug, but he still can detect a strong dose of bullshit. "The colonel talks about home, God, the country in whose national interest this beautifully tailored, corporate-sponsored message of warrior religion has been created, invoked to inspire in them a zealousness comparable to that of the Enemy." Sounds like a part of Wilson shares the caustic mindset of Lucius Shepard.

Super Screen - "Wilson checks his helmet screen, which shows a digital animation of their progress, little brown figures knee-deep in yellow flowers. He can control the screen to give him whatever angle he wants, even close-ups of the helmets that reveal the expression any soldier is wearing at a particular moment, stamped on features that are individualized but rendered like cartoon superheroes." Seeing oneself and others as cartoon superheroes? Is all this healthy in any way? Sure, it might serve the immediate cause, but what does it say about the depth and breadth of our humanity?

Super Combat Suit - Deep into the cave, Wilson and a fellow warrior encounter a seemingly unending field of fire they must march through. "Then they walk forward into the flames. Wilson watches them on his helmet display, two silhouetted man-shaped robots slipping seamlessly inside the glaring reddish orange wall." No problem with the fire since there's a cooling unit as part of his specially equipped suit covering all parts of his body. And, after an hour or so hoofing it in the flames, a cooling fluid squirts out within the suit, covering his skin. Fantastic future technologies! It seems like being an organic being, being human, is something of a drawback. What's really needed for such a mission are robots. Well, perhaps in the future, the military will develop what's required to really and truly accomplish special missions with optimal efficiency.

I recognize the major themes of the novelette revolve around what discoveries unfold in this Iraqi cave of mystery. But that is for Lucius Shepard to tell. A Walk in the Garden is one unforgettable saga.

[Sal · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is superlative fiction writing whose quality transcends the mediocre perception that sci-fi and fantasy often have among readers who aren't interested in either genre.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lucius Shepard short story collection shows how fantasy weds with criticism of shifty geo-politics and be entertaining. One story has odious leader killed by supernaturally summoned lizard swarm. Shepard's poetic justice takes sharp left turn and no less entertaining.

[gary pollack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great

[Gregor Xane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent collection. And short stories are always a tough sell with me.

[Forest Passage · Rating 2 out of 5]

It had potential, but as the collection went on it became blurry, and rudderless. Lucius shephard could have done better.