davidkm

I did not remember, if I ever knew, that John W. Campbell, that bastion of hard science fiction, published a story* in 1952 by A. Bertram Chandler, that hero of Space Opera, in which human werewolves battle alien bunny-hopping weretigers for mastery of the stars. It's a great story. Well worth re-reading my old magazines for gems like these.

*"Frontier of the Dark," September issue.

Yolen, Jane, 2012, The Last Selchie Child, A Midsummer Night's Press (www.spdbooks.org; orders@spdbooks.org), Cover photograph by M. A. Mathews, ISBN-13:978-0-9794208-9-4, perfect bound, 66 pages, $14.95.

Jane Yolen is one of our venerable masters, both of fiction and poetry. She won the Rhysling award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association in 1993, as well as many other awards, some far more prestigious. Yolen was named SFPA Grand Master in 2010. It is always a pleasure to open one of her books for the first time. The Last Selchie Child is a collection of fairy tales retold as poems, 36 of them, including Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, and Little Red Riding Hood, just to name four.

I lied already. The first part of the book is a group of poems about stories and storytelling. From “Story”:

You shape a tale
To fit your mind.

And so it goes,
In re-creation,
Mouth-to-ear
Resuscitation,

Several poems deal with the legends of people who can be seals or seals who can be people. There is plenty of room for sorrow and betrayal in a situation like this. From “The Selchie's Children's Plaint”:

She leaves us then, without a word
wading into her future.
It hurts like a knife
skinning us as we watch her go.
We were the ones
who were to dive into another life.

Some of these poems look at fairytale stories from new perspectives. Instead of the omniscient narrator, we see things from the point of view of the woman, the child, the prince. This is indeed a fruitful kind of reversal, pointing out the dark underbelly or ludicrousness of the traditional versions of these stories. But sometimes the shift in perspective shows us more. “Knives” reveals more horror in Cinderella than the by-now familiar idea of what happens after the wedding. Cinderella might not have been the naïve young thing most of us thought.

I spoke to the prince in that secret tongue,
the diplomacy of courting.
he using shoes, I using glass,
and all my sisters saw was a slipper,
too long in the heel,
too short at the toe.
What else could they use but a knife?

Fair young things seem to wait so long for something to happen, in fairy tales. How long is too long? From “Tower”:

I have found
the small barred window,
where I sing each morning
to any passing prince.
Be he large or small, handsome or plain,
I will have him.

After a while, you wait your life away, and anything at all becomes enough. How much becomes plain, although unstated, in a clear-eyed reading of fairy tales? The most interesting thing about this book, for me, is that familiar fairy tales are re-imagined in several different ways in different poems. We don't end up with simply two perspectives, but three, four, and perhaps others that we can imagine for ourselves, now that the way has been shown.

The last section of the book consists of a group of poems about “truth,” which is to say that the stories we have been told are wrong, wrong, wrong. Indeed they are! From “Women's Stories”:

Job's wife had her own story.
Lot's pillar of salt cried tears
indistinguishable from her eyes.
Who invented a glass slipper
never had to dance.

It might be needless to say I think you should buy this book. But just in case, I'll say it. You really should buy this book. You won't be sorry.

Rathbone, Wendy, 2013, Unearthly: the collected poetry of Wendy Rathbone, Eye Scry Publications, 170 p., contact wrathbone@juno.com for information. E-book: $2.99 for the kindle from Amazon.com; $2.99 pdf from http://www.fanzinesplus.com/html/unearthly.htm.


Unearthly is an e-book, a reprint of seven out-of-print chapbooks published between 1994 and 2005. Only one poem in this collection is truly new, but unless you have been a dedicated collector of Wendy Rathbone's poetry, you can't have read all of these:

Moon Canoes, published by Dark Regions Press, 1994
(Im)mortal, published by Shadowfire Press, 1996
Scrying The River Styx, published by Anamnesis Press, 1999
Autumn Phantoms, published by Flesh and Blood Press, 2000
Dreams of Decadence Presents, published by DNA Publications 2002
Dancing in the Haunted Woodlands, published by Yellow Bat Review, 2003
Vampyria, published by Eye Scry Publications, 2005


Reading these poems is a sensory experience. They evoke a myriad colors, scents, even pure emotions. Rathbone's work is so rich you have to read a poem again and again to understand what it's about. When you do, you often find the poems are images, or series of images, pictures in words of eerie settings and situations. If these poems were abstract paintings I would hang them in my house. Rathbone's poetry carries the reader through dreamworlds that are intimate, beautiful, ghostly, and sharp-edged. Here there be monsters, though some are the kind to whom one is wont to surrender (whether this is wise is debatable).


From "Vampire Poet"

Fling me the snowflakes
from your eyes
I’ll save them in some
winter land
You’ll never know this is happening
how I watch your naked chest move


Some of Rathbone's monsters are more like old friends, and draw explicitly on tales we've long known.. From "Child’s Letter Found In An Old Toy Box (Written in silver crayon)"

I avoid Neverland’s mirrors, now,
too ancient to look upon, really,
just a ghastly old, old boy.
But don’t be sad, Wendy.

There are themes, common threads running through many of these poems. Seasons and months, especially autumn and winter. Immortality, vampires, creation and destruction. Especially vampires!

I never think of Rathbone as a science fiction writer. Her work is moody; it broods over impossible landscapes like the ghosts of Lovecraft's Elder Things, hovering over their cyclopean Antarctic city. Nevertheless, sfnal themes and settings can be found in her work.

From "Dreaming a Star-Farer to Life"

I watch for his breath
upon the frozen tongue of sky
that arcs my tiny seam of sight.
Within the tundra of galactic
continents, among the sparks
of constellations flickering


These poems take place in unreal worlds: outer space, undefined regions beyond reality, dreams. Sometimes one awakens from the dream. Some of these poems employ tropes from Celtic tales of the fae.


From "The Vampyre Cathedral"

One boy dreamed
of a goblin
who owns time.
He woke aged
and weeping.


There is simply no way to encapsulate Rathbone's oeuvre. And at less than $3 for the whole delightful collection, it's a crime to leave it on the table. So to speak.

Watts, JS, 2012, Songs of Steelyard Sue, Lapwing Publications, lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com
http://www.freewebs.com/lapwingpoetry/, ISBN 978-1-909252-02-8, 24 p. This is a print publication, but I reviewed a PDF file. £10.00 plus shipping, or $22 from Amazon.


Songs of Steelyard Sue is a small book of 12 poems about Steelyard Sue, a metal inheritor of our world. Two of the poems were previously published elsewhere. I gotta tell ya, as I was reading this book I kept silently saying to myself, “that couldn't happen,” or “that violates the laws of physics” and so on. I fully intended to not write a review. But somehow I couldn't do that. I couldn't dislike these poems. J. S. Watts didn't write a science fiction book, in which robots are supposed to do only those things robots plausibly could do. Even though it is about a robot. This is, at its most scientific, perhaps a science fantasy book. Of course it is really about a lonely woman, the last person on earth, if a robot who admits that she has no heart and no human soul is a person. Whatever she isn't, she is, at least, a gardener, even in the absence of plant life.


_I bent the wire
in pretty shapes
and made flower faces
from black rubber scraps.
I saw a bird there, once,
perching on a sonic shell._

(From “Steelyard Sue Plants a Garden”)


Sue is alone, the Earth is nearly a lifeless place, but she isn't completely alone. Metaphorically speaking, there are a few knocks on the door:


_It sat there for two days,
stone-like, good as dead,
until, on the third day,
I found the stone moved,
the toad gone,_

(from “Toad”)


And isn't that a hell of a thing? Did Jesus come back in the form of a toad? And Steelyard Sue, a seeker, but not human and not having a soul, didn't recognize him? Or is this allusion really just a cheap joke? I suspect the latter. The thing is, I like Sue. I like her voice. She doesn't know much about our world, but she's trying. She doesn't know how things are supposed to work, but she has a very strong sense of right and wrong, and wants to do right. The writing is lyrical and the story is a real human one, about an amateur self-taught archaeologist marooned all alone on a desert island 26,000 miles in circumference.


_Sometimes I go to church
three or four times a day. There are so many abandoned here,
churches, that is,_

[and]

_I once found a place,
multi-layered, open to the sky,
where rows and rows of cars
waited their turn in silence_

(From “Steelyard Sue Goes to Church”)


Sue doesn't really know what a church was, and she can't tell a church from a parking garage, but she knows they were important to us in a non-tangible way. She tries to experience them the way we did. She is doomed to failure, and she knows that, but she isn't anything by herself. She exists in relationship to our vanished species.


_A woman of many parts, all man-made
and without a human soul,
not even the soft-skin touch of polished chrome.
I make no concession to organic,
the full moon has no pull upon me.
All I am is corners, sharps and rust:_

(From “The Last Lament of Steelyard Sue”)


Sue is a post-human commentator, solitary, strangely knowledgeable about some of our affairs, yet profoundly ignorant of others. She isn't independent of us. She was not made by us, but she was assembled out of what we left behind. The funny thing about Sue, is that she is also a sort of bridge. A bridge between the human world and a robot world about which she knew nothing, because it came to be when she was already gone. Exactly how this happened is not explained either, but it does provide an explanation for the book. The poems are what the robot world knows about Sue. We don't learn much about the robot world, but we do get the sense that there is a real society, developed at some future time with no direct reference to us. Instead, the robots refer back to a legendary past in which Sue was the only inhabitant.

Vinge, Vernor, 1992, a fire upon the deep: Tom Doherty Associates, 613 pages.

I haven't read everything by Vinge, but I would be surprised if he's written another book better than this one. It is a thriller, in which an extremely powerful and implacable foe pursues relatively helpless and inoffensive people who, paradoxically, are the only ones who can protect the galaxy from it. But what does a plot summary tell you about a good book. This book is full of edge-of-the-seat drama, delightful aliens, futuristic technology, and the equivalent of e-mail messages from a galaxy spanning information network that add realism and allow the author to tell us things the characters can't know. It is sort of a perfect storm of the book, as far as I am concerned, and I can't believe no one's yet tried to make a movie or series of movies out of it.

Here is how it begins. 5 billion years before the story opens an evil computer program that was intelligent and self-aware tried to take over the galaxy. This conquest would have included its extinguishing all independent thought in the galaxy. But something, we never meet in, destroyed the evil thing and all recorded history in the galaxy's civilizations begins 5 billion years ago. That is so long that nobody really thinks about how odd it is to have a clean slate then that's as wide as the galaxy. A chunk of memory, as in RAM or the futuristic equivalent, exists just outside the main civilized part of the galaxy and it is in active. But a human civilization, not a very important one, finds it and tries to mine it for the valuable information it contains. We all know where this is going and soon enough the investigators are destroyed. But that's just the prologue. The entity immediately embarks again on its original plan, interrupted by a mere 5 billion years in suspended animation, and it creates what soon becomes known as "the blight." But I have to tell you another thing. The author hypothesizes that for some unknown reason the interiors of galaxies contain a field that suppresses intelligence of both natural organisms and artificial organisms like computers. So the interior of the galaxy is the unthinking depths, old earth is in what's called the slowness, were faster than light travel is impossible, above the slowness is the beyond, divided into three syllable airs and above the beyond is the transcend, which is really outside the galaxy entirely. If you move up into the transcend and are not soon destroyed, you become a power and may ultimately evolve into something like a god, although those are not usually interested in mundane things like galaxies. Some of these powers or even greater entities are perverted and instead of doing what ever they are supposed to do they decide to control and destroy a helpless little creatures inside galaxies. Like us. It's one of these that is creating the blight. So while the blight is systematically subverting and destroying the vastly powerful civilizations of the high beyond, subsisting on computers more intelligent than Einstein, faster than light travel, and technology based mainly on force fields and things even weirder, when human spaceship escaped the initial attack and headed for the bottom of the beyond where something mysterious might be able to defeat the blight. I'm not going to spoil the story by telling you what happens with that plot line. But the world where much of the rest of the story plays out is inhabited by arrays of intelligent doglike creatures. Each individual member of that race consists of three to six doglike beings, which are individually about as intelligent as dogs. But a pack communicates within itself telepathically. Keith Laumer explored something a little bit like this in one of his amusing Retief stories. Retief was stationed on a planet where the natives consisted of isolated organs, like spleens, eyes, feet, and so on. A bunch of organs got together to make a more powerful being. Just like with Vinge's story, in Laumer's older story the intelligence rose with the complexity of the organism. That book was written with firmly in cheek, but "a fire upon the deep" makes a serious attempt to portray the colonial doglike organisms realistically I think the attempt is pretty successful. This is just one example of the care that Vinge used in putting this story together. You need to read it.

Tentchoff, Marcie Lynn, 2007, Sometimes While Dreaming: Cedar Rapids, IA, Sam's Dot Publishing, 83 p.

Sometimes While Dreaming is a chapbook of poetry written by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff. Thirty-seven of the 48 poems in this collection are new. Eight ethereal illustrations by Marge B. Simon accompany them. At her best, Tentchoff is able to put the reader in touch with the souls of some pretty strange people and other beings. There is plenty of her best in this chapbook.

One of my favorites is "Fallen," in which a case of mistaken identity has more than casual significance.

Some other girl found him there,
And drew him down to her,
Gently freeing each limb from the thorns.
It wasn't me.

What I like best about this poem is that I was led to empathize with the protagonist (someone I could be, aside from the gender difference), but put in a situation I could never be in, and, while reading the poem, I felt that I was there.

I also enjoyed "Crow counting," with its mounting sense of impending doom for the naïve narrator.

The road grew long, I asked his name,
but he would only smile at me,
and stroke my cheek with feathers gleaned
from one of our last seven birds.

This poem has roots in the old ballads of betrayal and death that were so popular with folksingers of the 1960s and earlier.

From "Displaced":

Sometimes she remembers
coming from some other place
where song and dance
were food and drink

This poem is a short poignant view into the heart of someone lost who is forgetting that she is lost. Subtle stories, sketched in allusion, hints, and sly clues, these are Tentchoff''s hallmarks. One is sometimes left knowing the feel of what has happened, or why, when the specifics are uncertain.

"Other hungers" is another take on the Persephone myth, supposing, as others have done, that she's content or happy underground.

Do you miss the dim,
bone-filled freedoms
of the underworld

And what if she does? Would anything change? Tentchoff asks a lot of questions here and she hints at the answers, we are not sure perhaps if we interpret those hints correctly.

In other poems we explore the lives of werewolves, Cinderella, dryads, and others. In "Rootbound" (Clever title, by the way) a dryad shows us what her life is really like:

Away from this, the prison of my bark,
My anguish flows and rages through my sap,
And burns the brightest sun to bitter dark,
That they stride free while I rot in this trap.

Tentchoff reminds us that we are all prisoners, and I don't think she says this anywhere in Sometimes while dreaming, but it's implicit. Some prisons we cannot escape, but for many of us the bars are inside our heads.

When Tentchoff is dreaming, strange and wonderful things result. Myths are retold in enchanting and unexpected ways and new myths are created with their own history stretching out from them into the imagined past. Sometimes while dreaming contains many more poems I am tempted to excerpt for you, but come on. Just buy the book. I'm very sure you won't regret it.

Sneyd, Steve, 2008, Mistaking the Nature of the Posthuman, perfect-bound trade pb, Hilltop Press, 4 Nowell Place, Almondbury, Huddersfield, HD5 8PB, England, ISBN 978-0-905262-42-0, 107 p, ￡6.99/$14.

Historian of SF poetry, chronicler of global SF poetry news, prolific English SF poet whose work is well-known everywhere among genre poetry readers. That is Steve Sneyd, and any new collection from him is eagerly anticipated. Here it is, with an intriguing and disturbing cover by Gunter Wessalowski. If I counted right, there are 96 poems in this book. According to the introduction, these poems were all first published in the 21st century, not many years on, yet the book reads like a best-of high-graded compilation. There is not a dud in the lot.

The introduction, written by the author, appears to claim that the book is published as a guide to surviving the future. Works for me. Although if you use this book as a guide to survival it might just convince you to give up right now. But don't do that! At least read the book first.

The first poem is "If the doors of perception were cleansed." Here's an excerpt.

... just like today only nicer and
futuristic how it ought to be the
best of home only better smoother
cosier somehow if we didn't have
to get back jobs to go to and
Elaine's mum and the kids and anyway

Well, you get the idea. Sneyd doesn't believe in punctuation and has heard rumors of pronouns and prepositions, but does not believe they have been sighted in the wild. Somehow it's all quite understandable (albeit occasionally with a little work).

From "We are also keys to the experiment"

snakes bred russet-red for survival camouflage
in case just in case with monster multifiltered
lungs to breathe
in hindsight the russet we suspect aesthetic
and fangs megafangs manipulated into drills
to search subsurface water out that too late we learn
In this low gravity will also grow

In Sneyd's future nothing ever works like we expect or plan. And when does it ever? Maybe these cautionary tales are spot on accurate. Let me just give you a further taste of the content of this remarkable book. Open it to any page.

From "As is written in the emergency manual,"

Airless Extraterrestrial Enterprises tests our faith
will at very last possible instant as we hallucinate
flake into non-sentience save us reward such loyalty

From "Included out,"

sure beyond doubt more than half at least
the others at these dos are same as me are
not the humans they appear to be at all and
all the towers of the world I am so sure
full night on night of humans hiding from
each other...

What if, all unknowing, you take one of these androids home? Androids who can't be sure of each others' humanity. At least, with clothes on.

From "The sanctity of his mission,"

and
before
sending the virgin to her doom
who otherwise would have anyhow within
a cycle gone into ground

a crop-source-placator she
at least now will not have to
burrow down alone: a hybrid in
her belly, a tasty

extra bonus for the god or gods.

One gets the impression that what is being said is so very important the words tumble over one another in a hopeless attempt to get out before it's too late. I guess if this is a handbook of the "break glass in emergency" kind that might be true. After all, aren't we waist deep in the future already? If this book is instead a metaphor about how hopelessly stranger and more desolate we ourselves will become than most of us can imagine, nevermind what our tools or aliens will be like, then there's no hurry. Cherish your illusions. Don't read this book. Trust me, you don't want to knw what can happen to us, out there, or even right here at home. What you do want to know is, if you buy only one SF poetry book this month, or this season, Mistaking the Nature of the Posthuman should be it.

I know I'm giving what some will misconstrue as contradictory advice, but I maintain that's the best way to deal with the future. In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit I was the first publisher of one or two poems in this collection.

David C. Kopaska-Merkel
1300 Kicker Rd
Tuscaloosa, AL 35404
205-246-9346
jopnquog@Gmail.com


Book review


Schimel, Lawrence, 2007, Fairy Tales for Writers: a Midsummer Night's Press, New York, ISBN-13 978-0-9794208-0-1, $6.50 (US), a small perfect bound book with glossy card-stock two-color cover, 30 pages.

13 poems, 12 original. The theme of this book is, perhaps, obvious from the title. These poems all relate in some way to well-known fairy tales and to the writing life.

This is the first book published by Schimel's new press and it looks nice. It's very small; it might get lost on a bookshelf, even one full of chapbooks. I didn't measure it, but it looks like it's about 5 ½ inches tall by 4 inches wide or thereabouts. Also, it isn't for everybody. I think it will really only appeal to writers and perhaps also to fans of modern treatments of fairy tales. Still, the poems are excellent. Schimel is a very good writer and he knows what people are about, whether or not they are writers. His points about humanity are reinforced by his choices of fairy tales. I don't generally like to read about writing or writers; it seems too intellectually incestuous, but this book is different. The poems are music, and I have to recommend "Fairy Tales for Writers."

Here are a couple of examples. It's hard to know which to choose. How about "The Little Mermaid"?

She gave up her voice for him,
learning to mimic the minimalist style
he advocated in his workshops.

Or maybe "Cinderella"

He couldn't find her anywhere.
He asked everyone, tried to track her down:
Who was her agent?
Where had she published?

"The Ugly Duckling"

the uncertainty, the constantly having to tell
the kid to get his nose out of a book and go out
and play like normal children should.

By turns chilling, melancholy, and even uplifting, these poems pack a punch. Don't miss out.

Clark, G. O., 2011, Shroud of Night, Dark Regions Press, 60 p., www.darkregions.com, perfectbound pb, ISBN 978-1-937128-02-9, $7.95.

G. O. Clark has been a fixture in the fantastic poetry community since before I joined it. His work has been published in many places, including Asimov's Science Fiction and Strange Horizons. This is his 10th book. We have never met, but I have read and enjoyed his work for decades. Shroud of Night, his latest collection, comprises a diverse assemblage of his darkest poetry. Most of these 39 poems are very short, driving their nails in with just a few lines. Few are longer than a page, but they don't need to be. Original images are hard to come by in horror poetry, but Clark delivers, again and again.

From "Cemetery Angel"

She's just trying to
get the kinks out, a little
break time stretching, stiff from
having to hold a solemn pose
all night and day.

Some of these poems can be reminiscent of the old Rolling Stones song "Sympathy for the Devil." Others have a sharper edge. Still other poems are serious and silly at the same time.

From "A Few Words About The Angels"

They can adapt to every atmosphere,
be it air, water, or the vacuous lack thereof,
the speed of light a minor inconvenience.

From "Curses and Salutations"

May your gravestone be made of cardboard,
your casket balsa wood, and your obituary
written by a dyslexic drunk.

It's not easy to encompass in a brief review the breadth of style and tone displayed in this book. I hope these three excerpts give you something of the flavor of the whole that they represent.

Who would've thought a poem about screams could send chills up my spine? Did you know that Hell hath a sailboat? Pray you are never conscripted for the crew! You'll meet some peculiar monsters in this book. Zombies, sure, but garden gnomes? What is their horrifying secret? There is humor here, but who said humor and horror don't go together? I think they do, and if you read this book, I believe you'll see I am right. Shroud of Night brings a lot of darkness together in a handy package. You should read it.

Cox, Cardinal, 2014, From Space, Starburker Publications, c/o 58 Pennington, Orton Goldhay, Peterborough PE2 5RB United Kingdom, unpaginated saddle stitched chapbook. Available from the publisher for a C5 self-addressed envelope, or email cardinalcox1@yahoo.co.uk. This collection states that it was inspired by the exhibition "Space Fact and Fiction" held at Peterborough Museum June to October 2013, and by the National Space Centre in Lericester.


This chapbook has the same format as the numerous Cthulhu Mythos themed booklets that Cardinal Cox has written recently. In contrast to those books, most of the poems here owe their genesis to golden age science-fiction books and movies, with some real life space science and politics thrown in. The usual bottom-of-the-page notes explain where some poems came from, and dedicate others to notable SF fans. The poems vary from rhymed and metered to other forms and even free verse. This works, I think, as the chapbook's space theme ties them together.

I particularly like the (to me) new insight of “Orbital Observatory”

And as we look into the past
Because the Universe has grown
Those distant vistas are smaller
Than the space we inhabit

If we could look far enough, would we see a tiny post-Bang blaze? Another science poem, “Space Suit,” also appeals to me. An excerpt:

We can't imagine what drove
The fish first onto land
Had a pool dried?
Did it chase an arthropod?

These by no means represent the range of this pamphlet, but do, I hope, indicate its quality. Get it before it's too late!