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Sarah
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May 30, 2014 06:50PM
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I really liked "The Earth and Everything Under" by K.M. Ferebee at Shimmer. http://www.shimmerzine.com/the-earth-... Has anybody else read it?
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Oh, fantastic story, Laura - thanks for pointing it out! I usually read Shimmer when it comes out but was too crazed this month. So lyrical and such beautiful images - one after another. Loved how Peter described her, loved her growth by the end.
I adored that story (and blogged it too); absolutely heartbreaking and just exquisitely written.
I liked it, though some ornithological problems threw me out of the story and gave me a "fake" vibe. It's very much the kind of story I read Shimmer for, though.
I'm giggling a little bit (in a friendly way) that you don't mind birds coming up out of the ground with letters inside of them, but object to them appearing out of their species' geographic range.
That's always the way it works, isn't it? You can suspend a certain amount of disbelief, but only so much.
Do you know the Marianne Moore poem about imaginary gardens with real toads in them?
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyondall this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make
a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the
result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”--above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.
Marianne Moore, 1911
I love the poem, even though the line ends drive me batty. Wait, especially because the line ends drive me batty!I'm giggling a little bit (in a friendly way) that you don't mind birds coming up out of the ground with letters inside of them, but object to them appearing out of their species' geographic range. Exactly, because the birds coming up from the ground have a purpose. The other just confused me, although perhaps because it had some purpose I don't understand.
Laura, thanks for posting The Earth and Everything Under. I rather enjoyed the lyricism of it.
"Literalists of the imagination above insolence and triviality." Its something for a SF author to aspire to and you know, reach exceed grasp and all that.Also yes about the battiness induced by the line endings probably being a good thing.
Cathy wrote: "Exactly, because the birds coming up from the ground have a purpose. The other just confused me, although perhaps because it had some purpose I don't understand."I agree! If it serves a specific purpose in a story - my disbelief can and easily will be suspended. But if it just simply doesn't make sense, then I have an issue.
(On a separate note, I often have a hard time with poetry. The line ends of that piece don't just drive me batty, they annoy me.)
Well mmm. If it doesn't work for someone it doesn't work for them. But as I read the story the dead husband is constructing the birds from his memory, so why would it make sense that he only remember birds from the place where his wife lives?
It didn't kill the story for me or anything. Overall, I thought it was lovely. It's just that some inner OCD demon of mine can't ignore things like this. Maybe it's this: We've learned to form our ideas about major ideas in stories by observing characters' direct impressions -- the things they report through their senses, and to a lesser degree through their inner dialogs. So for me anyway, if something doesn't ring true, it pings back on me and makes me look for something significant in the larger story reflected in the smaller details.
Here's where I first got stuck:
Elyse heard a burst of song—a lark, she thought—and then another bird singing, and another bird, but none of the songs seemed quite complete. They quit mid-pitch, fell off too soon, as though the birds had not learned the notes yet; as though no one, in the places they had come from, had ever been able to teach them the tune.
“They’re birds,” Elyse said. She crossed her arms: final. “They’re not my creatures. They’ll do what birds do.”
Overall, this is beautiful writing. I'm loving the story. I just can't help thinking, "Hmm, why a lark?"
Sure, maybe her husband came from Europe and is projecting European birds through his memory, and Elyse recognizes their song from some previous experience. That just seems unnecessarily complex to me.
Hmm, picturing Chekov's gun shooting Occam's razor...
My response was a bit different, I think this is why. As I read it, the details of the wife's surroundings ring true and particular to a specific landscape. The worms in the soil, the oak and the cedar, the corn in the autumn fields, moths and fireflies on her porch at night, apples in the co-op. That's a particular landscape at a particular time of year.But the birds aren't right, its not just that they aren't the right birds for the landscape although they aren't. Its that they don't sing right, and the animals wont eat them, and Sometimes the corn had died in patterns close to the holes, like it had been burned.
The birds aren't just badly remembered, they're wrong. The landscape rejects them. In other words they aren't wrong by accident, they are supposed to be wrong.
If I'm right that the birds were supposed to be a jarring, un natural element (and I may not be, it may be that the author didn't intend that at all) I wonder if it would have worked better to make them even MORE exotic? Like if they were peacocks and bower birds and albatross, albatrosses, albatrossii? so they really blatantly didn't belong.
Wow. Just finished ENTANGLED by Ian R. MacLeod, originally in last December's Asimov's, reprinted in Dozois' 31st Year's Best Science Fiction. Set in near future England, the protagonist is an isolated brain-damaged woman surrounded by happy 'entangled' people. Nicely done.
I just read Shaenon K. Garrity's "To Whatever" at Drabblecast (didn't listen to the audio, although it's her usual reader). I laughed a lot. http://www.drabblecast.org/2014/08/17...
Laura wrote: "I just read Shaenon K. Garrity's "To Whatever" at Drabblecast (didn't listen to the audio, although it's her usual reader). I laughed a lot. http://www.drabblecast.org/2014/08/17......"Thanks for the link, Laura. That was fun.
I listened to Sam J. Miller's We Are the Cloud last week, which was the first story covered on Amal El-Mohtar's Rich and Strange review series. Published in Lightspeed and also available in podcast. I thought it was beautifully done. Has anyone else read it?
Mod
Yes! Powerful story. We talked about it at Capclave this weekend too, on a panel about writing realistic teens.
Sounds like a great panel. To add a bit of a teaser: "We Are the Cloud" takes place in a future New York City where the disenfranchised sell their brain processing power in a tech called cloudporting and a boy in a group house falls in love for the first time.
I tried to listen to "We Are the Cloud," got 18 minutes in and had to give up because the narration really was not working for me at all. The story was capturing my attention but I'm going to have to try to find time to read it not listen to it. Accent was all wrong, so wrong! and I wasn't much enjoying the delivery either. Boy is supposed to be Latino, why does he sound like somebody out of a Jimmy Cagney movie?
Finally got a chance to read, rather than listen to "We Are the Cloud," liked it much better in that format.
Finally figured out how to put stories on a reading list on my phone, yeah don't laugh we all have our technological challenges. So that meant I was able to carry with me and find chances to read;Holmes, Sherlock: A Hwarhath Mystery http://www.nightshadebooks.com/2012/1...
which I found gently strange and very enjoyable.
To Whatever Lives in the Walls, which was on Drabblecast, recommended by someone around here, and which made me laugh.
Charlie Jane Anders As Good as New which oddly I have tried to re read twice having already forgotten that I'd read it! Don't know why that is happening, I did like it.
Mod
Glad you liked We Are the Cloud when you read it yourself. I thought that was an excellent story.
As Good as New was the one with the panic room.
Shimmer Issue 22 contains a lovely story, Cantor's Dragon, by Craig DeLancwy. Heaven and hell and all the infinities therein, neatly wrapped in Cantor's Theorem. Recommended.
Read The Water that Falls on You From Nowherehttp://www.tor.com/stories/2013/02/th...
Which won the 2014 Hugo and I think, deserved it, although I found myself a little cranky with the protag, purely personal reaction.
Also Firebugs, which I enjoyed and also wondered if I didn't see a little nod to Kate Wilhelm?
http://www.nightshadebooks.com/2012/1...
Thanks for recommending "The Water That Falls on You From Nowhere," Bunny. Lovely story. I really enjoyed it. On a side note, how wonderful is it that technology lets us freely mix Chinese characters in now? This would have been quite a feat in the days of typesetting.
Mod
Check out Sam J. Miller's "Kenneth: A User's Manual" in Strange Horizons. It includes hypertext links to the fictional documents mentioned in the story and artwork by the author that punctuates the text. And then Anaea Lay had to figure out a way to turn all of that into a podcast!
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2014/2...
I really liked that one too! I put it in last week's roundup:http://www.prezzey.net/2014/diversest...
(it now has a different format!)
It also has two other recent standouts IMO, Tongtong’s Summer by Xia Jia and Wake-Rider by Vandana Singh. (She also had an absolutely amazing novelette reprint in Clarkesworld, Infinities. I'm saving that for next week's posts.)
I'm even more behind on recent stuff than usual, as I've been ill and I'm desperately cramming on 2014 stuff before the Nebula deadline.But I did manage to read Rachael K. Jones' piece "Travelling Mercies" at Strange Horizons this week, and recommend it in particular to anyone who liked the voice and style in her 2014 Crossed Genres story "Makeisha in Time."
http://strangehorizons.com/2015/20150...
..."Power’s down.”“Is it.” She’d never had much use for that kind of power.
...
The doorway was still guarded by gunpowder. She broke the line of it as she passed. Later she could take down the cloves, unmark the lead; redo the witching, to keep out what needed keeping out, and keep in what needed keeping in.
Something lost, something gained, circles closing. This is a great read.
http://www.scigentasy.com/how-to-beco...This is a story I found on a best of the year list somewhere, and absolutely loved. I also discovered a new e-zine in the process!
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This is a story I found on a best of the year list somewhere, and absolutely loved. I also discovered a new e-zine in the process!"
That's a great story. The new podcast Glittership just did an audio version as well: http://www.glittership.com
Scott Lynch's Locus-nominated A Year and a Day in Old Theradane is up for free at Uncanny: http://uncannymagazine.com/article/a-...I believe it's a novelette? I've only just started reading it, I'm intrigued so far.
