16) ‘Invisible Planets’ by Hao Jingfang
A nameless narrator tells a nameless listener stories of distant planets and the strangeness and wonder that can be encountered thereon. Marco Polo is referenced, and indeed this magical-realist story carries an echo of the sound created by Italo Calvino’s imaginary voyage in Invisible Cities:
Can you tell which stories are real and which are not? I travel through these planets like Marco Polo wandering through the cities of the Orient, like Kubla Khan riding through his endless realm. Everything happens in the blink of an eye. You can say that I really have been to these places, or that I have never left.
‘Invisible Planets’ is a story about storytelling, about the changes that are impacted upon us by hearing another person’s tale, by walking for a while among the shadows and silences and musics of a different world. We are the aliens, and the aliens are us. I found some lovely echoes here of some of the themes Vandana Singh explored in her story, about how when two sentient beings encounter one another, they create a third, entirely different being between them:
But they don’t realise that this sense of ‘self’ is an illusion. At the moment when two of them merge, the two original selves cease to exist. They become a combined person and, when separated, two new persons. The new persons do not know all that transpired before their encounter and each believes that the self is the self, never having changed at all.
A gently provocative story, luminous in its language and landscapes.
17) ‘On the Leitmotif of the Trickster Constellation in Northern Hemispheric Star Charts, Post Apocalypse’ by Nicole Kornher-Stace
There’s a part of me that says the current micro-fashion for story titles that spill over into a second line of text is a fashion for bigging up something not so great as the sum of that title’s parts. There’s an equal part of me that revels in the poetry and boldness of such a titular statement, throwing down the gauntlet to a reader right from the off, and that my own tendency to err on the side of understatement where titles are concerned might in fact be rather boring.
An interesting discussion to have, but in the case of OTLOTTCINHSCPA, it’s beside the point. Nicole Kornher-Stace’s story is deliriously fine, as boldly poetic in its use of language as it is terrifying and unsparing in its vision. I don’t think I’ve fully grasped all of it yet – what are the ghosts, for example, how are they ‘captured’? – but as I’ve said before, not fully getting a story has never been a deterrent to my enjoyment of it.
Wasp is an Archivist in a post-apocalypse world. Her task – her birthright – is to gather knowledge about the world before the apocalypse, and her main way of doing this is to entrap ‘ghosts’ of people who were alive during that period. Her day-to-day life is brutal, defined by physical combat and material hardship. The end of the story hints that she may have given her life for the sake of those ghosts she pursued.
The imagic ‘furniture’ of post-apocalypse has become rather well-worn in recent years. What a thrill then to find in Kornher-Stace’s post-apocalyptic world a place of genuine terror, genuine mystery:
The slow burn of autumn congealed into winter, the edges of the map grew sticky with apple juice and the dirt from underneath Wasp’s bitten nails, and the ghost was getting restless. ‘This is not a map to walk by, idiot,’ it told her, standing by in silence as she lay out the saltlick and the apples and the little dish of blood. As she crammed ghosts into jars and took them back to the hut where she paced the tiny room of it nightlong, four paces by four, and questioned them. Each with its story of a long drop on a short rope, or a fall down the stairs, or a half-dozen bullets sinking themselves, wet as kisses, in its erstwhile flesh. Or of a strange deep sick-smelling sleep, stalked by the dreams of dreams.
The amalgam of myth, science-as-magic and the ruthless imagining of a depleted world is potent and strange. The dense, allusive prose rewards multiple readings. Eager to find out more, I was delighted to learn that Wasp’s full-length story is forthcoming in 2015 from Small Beer Press.