My cousin loved me, and he thought I didn’t know it, but I did. So I pretended to like him back as well. When I saw him falling over himself to follow me or hold hands with me to cross the street, I held back my laughter so hard that I felt like I was about to pop.
His mom sat us both down and explained that it was wrong, and we were cousins, which meant we could not hold hands anymore. So of course I grabbed his hand right then and there as she watched.
He turned red. My aunt turned red, too.
After that, we had to run away, otherwise we would have been in serious trouble. We called ourselves brother and sister and sat up late at night in motel rooms or on the roofs of unlocked apartments, laughing and laughing at the pure insanity of it. Brother and sister, that was even worse. If anyone realized what sort of sibling love we’d shared, we would have been put on death row at once.
Eventually, we settled down in Santa Monica. Then we called each other boyfriend and girlfriend, and no one cared what we did to each other in public.
After a while, that grew old, so we called each other husband and wife.
After a while, that grew old, too.
Then we realized we could call each other cousins again. We went home our separate ways. I took a plane, and he wandered around for a few more weeks until the Greyhound bus dropped him into the neighborhood again.
My aunt sent me to pick him up. A lesson, she called it. When he stepped off the bus he smiled at me, a little shy, a little embarrassed. I smiled back. Well, we were cousins again. We could start over.
As we got in the car, he reached out, hesitant and blushing furiously, and held my hand.
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With nothing to do all summer except sleep, game, and generally while away the indolent hours of blistering Texas heat, I decided I might as well knuckle down and knock a few books off my to-read list. And here are the results. The hours I spent reading were probably some of the happiest hours I spent during those three months out of school. At the very least, it meant I could curl up indoors with the air-conditioning on and have a legitimate excuse to not move a single muscle.
So, tada! My reading list.
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Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
The Hunch-back of Notre Dame, by Victor Hugo
David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Door Into Summer, by Robert A. Heinlein
Requiem for the East, by Andrei Makine
Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
Melting Stones, by Tamora Pierce
The Hunger Games, by Suzanna Collins
Dancing With Bears, by Michael Swanwick
Foundation, by Isaac Asimov
Catching Fire, by Suzanna Collins
Mockingjay, by Suzanna Collins
The Rules of Attraction, by Bret Easton Ellis
Playing for Pizza, by John Grisham
The Tales of Beedle the Bard, by J.K. Rowling
The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
Foundation and Empire, by Isaac Asimov
The Second Foundation, by Isaac Asimov
The Silent Girl, by Tess Gerritsen
Ghost Story, by Jim Butcher
Black Order, by James Collins
Queen of Angels, by Greg Bear
Undertow, by Elizabeth Bear
Ink and Steel, by Elizabeth Bear
1984, by George Orwell
Hell and Earth, by Elizabeth Bear
Total count: 31
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I figure that’s an average of about one book every three days. And some of these weren’t short, either. Gone with the wind? 500+ pages. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell? It was a door stopper. I went on an Elizabeth Bear kick as well, mostly because I’d finally gotten my hands on copies of her novels. Amaaaazing. She is number one or two on my list of favorite sci-fi authors who are still alive.
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When I was young, my mother used to tuck my hair behind my ear and tell me fairy tales. She always ended with, “There is magic in the world. You just have to open your eyes wide enough to see it.”
She disappeared on my seventh birthday. They never found her body.
As I grew up, her words stayed with me. I taught myself to watch, and the more I opened my eyes to drink in other people’s faces, the more I began to see: they were not human faces. Beetle eyes. Purple smiles. Cheekbones sharp as knives. The mask of human flesh stretched thin over their real faces, and I widened my eyes to see.
One day, a woman with spider mandibles stopped me in the street and asked, “What am I?”
I told her, “You’re an insect.”
Word of me spread. Soon I was being hailed down by everyone, perfect strangers, acquaintances, and asked the same question each time: “What am I?”
I always answered. “You’re a tiger. You’re a banshee. You’re a cyclops.”
In a whole world where no one knew what they were, I was the only one who could tell them. Some wept when they learned the truth. Others laughed. One girl, a jewel-haired harpy, pulled a gun out of her purse and shot herself in the head. Her blood splattered me blue-green. Afterwards, I curled up on my bed and cried for days.
When I came out again, the same question besieged me on all sides. “What am I?”
I told them, “You’re human. What else would you be?”
A look I had never seen before crossed their faces: happiness. And then, the more I looked, the more their bizzare faces dissolved, the more solid their skin grew, and before I knew it, they were beaming at me with two eyes and one nose and one mouth each, and they had never looked happier.
So. Ask anyone, and you’ll get the same answer.
It’s true enough if you want.
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Tonight, I caught a basilisk.
Gaelhwyhn took me hunting. She was a hunter. I met her first in the blue depths of the club, hunting for victims. Now we were in the wilderness together, hunting for prey.
There was only one rule, she told me: never trust anything. What may seem like an old car engine could actually be a swamp dragon disguising itself as the local surroundings. A pride of basilisks cawing in the distance might be a jaguar mimicking their cries to lure you in. Even the smell of orchids could be nothing but stealth technology, mutated to snare the unwary travelers. Nothing could be believed.
The technology of the Ancients had been powerful beyond magic, once upon a time.
Side by side we swept through the jungle, all senses alert. Twice I was almost lured away by what turned out to be an old aeroplane, and once Gaelhwyhn killed a dragon just as it was about to pouce. It never stood a chance.
Like I said, she was a hunter.
Until at last we found them: a whole nest of basilisk, powered down for the night and plugged in to a cluster of sockets to recharge. I burst in on them before they could power up again and snatched one up in my hands.
It hissed, flaring and sparking, but I was strong and I bent the old technology to my will. Its struggles grew weaker and weaker, and at last it lay rigid in my hands, humming with resentment but tamed.
The magic of the Ancients, slaved to my will.
Congratulations, Gaelhwyhn said. You are truly a shaman now.
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Last night Jessica had taken too much wonderflonium, and today she wanted to sing.
Bright-eyed and vibrating with energy, she bounded up the steps to her classroom and stood in the doorway, poised with eagerness. “Amazing!” a classmate said. “Are you on drugs?”
But to her vitamin-fueled mind, even that sounded like a compliment. Beaming, she kissed the amazed boy once on each cheek before sliding into her seat, all attention.
After school ended, she threw herself into work with such verve that her coworkers all stared in amazement. No way, they whispered behind their hands. It was unnatural.
That night she couldn’t sleep. The effects of the wonderflonium were finally beginning to wear off, and she tossed and turned restlessly. At last, after two hours of staring at her ceiling, she got up and went to the bathroom.
By her sink stood a little brown bottle, half full of pills. Jessica poured two out into her hand. They looked like pale blue buttons. “Just for tonight,” she promised herself. “I’ll quit tomorrow, I swear.” Tilting her head back, she swallowed.
Immediately, a sense of calm spread through her. She went back to bed and slept deeply.
The next morning, she awoke so full of energy she wanted to sing.
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It looks like Christmas on drugs.
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I recently went through a fit of fervor where I burned through about a dozen of Philip K. Dick’s books in the spate of two months, plus numerous of his short stories. It is a little overwhelming to read all at once. While Dick’s writing itself sometimes stutters, and the storyline meanders around confusedly, the ideas behind the novels are intriguing, such as the idea of people forced to live in subsurface ant-like colonies following a nuclear war that obliterates the earth (The Penultimate Truth) or a drug that causes shared hallucinations, which people escape into to leave behind reality (The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch).
He has a tendency to borrow elements of a story from one another. Apartments are called conapts, money is referred to as poscreds, and people ride around in flying machines called flapples. A number of his stories also mention, to varying degrees of importance, precogs and psis. It’s as if all his separate fictional world are really one, the edges blurred and melted together.
I like to think of his as a disorganized genius because while his ideas are always intriguing, oftentimes they ramble about in such muddy writing that they fail to come across. I borrowed the term “disorganized genius” from the use of it in criminal profiling as “disorganized killers”. While not strictly accurate, disorganized killers tend to be erratic and unplanned in their killings.
In the same way, Dick is erratic and unplanned in his writing. He did not have a set schedule of writing. Sometimes he went years without picking up a pen, only to suddenly churn out a sudden torrent of novels. The quality of his writing also fluctuated wildly. For example, he wrote the novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch in 1964, which is one of his best works. In the same year, he also turned out The Zap Gun, The Penultimate Truth, and Lies, Inc., all of which fall short of what is generally considered good writing. Dick had an impressive bibliography of 36 novels and over 100 short stories, but out of all that only a handful are really considered excellent.
I wouldn’t suggest trying to read all of his novels. He repeats ideas, especially about alternate realities and the nature of what reality is. A number of his books circle around Cold War paranoia where two massive entities of the democratic West and the communist East lock horns. Only a few are really good though, and trying to plow through all his books left me feeling burned out. If you want to read something by Philip K. Dick, I would suggest the following:
- The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
- The Man in the High Castle
- Time Out of Joint
- Ubik
- Galactic Pot Healer
- Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Many of his short stories are really good too, including “Second Variety”, “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”, and “War Games”. He wrote a few non-science fiction novels as well, although I haven’t read any of them yet. I might pick one up later, although it seems to me as though his style of writing and the force of his ideas flows strongly from the twisted, brilliant ideas of science fiction. It’s the compelling ideas behind his stories that I love, and I’m not sure how good he will be writing without those ideas behind his words.
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In winter, the boardwalk died. The lights still spun every night in the same carnival patterns as summer, but the people were gone. Empty stores and silent rides swallowed up the chill off the Gulf and returned nothing.
At times like these she walked along the boardwalk by herself, feeling the salt breeze gather the hair from her neck, and the tears tracked down her face in silence. Whenever there were people around, she bawled. It was embarrassing. The silence, the loneliness of now–preferable.
It helped her remember. Memories were all she had now, and she clung to them with the fervor of the ocean clinging to the beach.
And yet, they trickled.
They fell.
They washed away
. And after they had been bleached white as driftwood, what next? She did not want to imagine such a thing.
So she remembered for as much as she dared, and tried not to imagine the day when she would spread her arms out and float to sea. Under the carnival of empty colors she remembered alone.
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The other day, I finally discovered where my university library was hiding the vast majority of their Philip K. Dick books. Those sly librarians had stuffed them in right between C and E, can you believe it? I mean, who would have thought to look there?
Anyways, what do I do of course, but check out every single volume I could lay my hands on, and bam! I’ve got all my winter vacation reading right there.
These, along with the infamously long Les Miserables and Elizabeth Kostova’s Swan Thieves, will make for a very pleasantly idle winter vacation.
And in case you can’t read the titles, they are, from the bottom up:
- Lies, Inc.
- The Penultimate Truth
- The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
- Deus Irae
- I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon
- The Zap Gun
- Radio Free Albemuth
Say what you will about Texas A&M and it’s libraries, but they have one pretty amazing science fiction/fantasy collection. Its collection includes letters from J.R.R. Tolkein, first editions, signed copies, a monograph collection, and manuscripts from Isaac Asimov. I think their collection includes a copy of every sci-fi/fantasy book ever published, although I may be wrong on that point.
Here is a link to their Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Collection. The books don’t check out, but you can sit in the library and read them for however long you want. I haven’t actually done that yet. One of these days. They have every book Michael Swanwick ever wrote, and I’m just dying to get my hands on them.
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The wife’s husband died one day. Unable to bear the grief, she determined not to let him go. Instead of letting a funeral home have his body, she sewed him up in an apple and buried the apple in the far corner of the garden.
Not long after a tree grew where she had buried the apple. It grew taller than the fence, taller than the house, tall enough to touch the sky.
Strangely enough, the tree did not sprout leaves. It only grew small white flowers shaded with pink in the center. The flowers gave off the most delicious scent. Everyone who passed by stopped dead in their tracks to smell. Some of them even stood there for ten minutes before at last going on their way.
Time passed, and the flowers fell. The tree grew heavy with ripe, pink apples that smelled even better than the flowers. No one was able to resist, but all who passed by stopped to pluck one and eat it. The ground around it was constantly littered with apple cores.
Only the wife never ate from her own apple tree. She did not like the smell of the apples: it made her sleepy and sad. But everyone urged her to at least try, so finally she plucked an apple off the lowest branch and took a bite.
Instantly she fell down as if dead. But she ewas only asleep, so deeply asleep that nothing anyone did could wake her up. And even though she was asleep, tears flowed from her eyes in an unending stream.
They watered the roots of the tree where she had fallen. And the tree grew even more.
Then the apples turned black and bitter, and the scent made people want to vomit. All who passed by turned sick and faint at once.
People began to avoid the wife’s house, and with the lack of care it soon fell into decay.
But under the apple tree the wife remained, and long after her body decayed into the earth her tears continued to flow, and flow, and flow.
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