Greatest Uncommon Denominator Magazine—Reviews

Like Mayflies In A Stream by Shauna Roberts

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 13:42:12 PDT

Like Mayflies In A Stream

by Shauna Roberts

Hadley Rille Books, 2009

Paperback, 196 pages

ISBN: 098251400X

$11.95

Buy from Amazon.com

Buy from Book Depository

While I found the cover off-putting for a handful of reasons, once inside I was caught in the flow of the narrative. Roberts realizes her players well, showing multiple sides to mythic characters, and the details she puts into this historical re-imagining of "The Epic of Gilgamesh" really bring the story to life.

I was not familiar with the myth prior to reading Roberts' interpretation, and I think that it stands well on its own. We are quickly, and rather brutally, introduced to the deprivations of the King, Gilgamesh, and the cloud that hangs over the citizens of his city. He is both their protector and their destroyer. Also in play are Shamhat, a priestess of Inanna, who has personal connections to both the King and the newly-forming rebellion; Zaidu, a trapper who sets the story in motion; and Enkidu, beast-man raised by gazelles, who becomes the fulcrum of change.

The King is a bull of a man: muscular, quick-tempered, and driven by powerful lusts. He cripples the men he wrestles, races others beyond exhaustion, and now has claimed first "rights" to any bride. Gilgamesh answers to no one but the gods—and while the temple grows rich from offerings left by those begging the goddess Inanna for protection, the clergy are simply one more voice that the King ignores.

When Zaidu comes to Gilgamesh with his tale of a beast-man destroying his traps, the King sees that perhaps he has found an equal to try. Gilgamesh sends Shamhat into the desert with Zaidu to tame the beast-man and bring him back to the city.

The emotional and political twists and turns are best experienced firsthand. I recommend this novel for both its fast pacing and insightfulness, as well as for its historical grounding, and I look forward to more from Hadley Rille Books' Archaeology Series.

Eggs of American Songbirds by Kenneth L. Clark

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 08:10:05 PST

Eggs of American Songbirds

by Kenneth L. Clark

Redneck Press, 2010

Chapbook, 34 pages

Buy direct from the publishers

$8

"This book is © 2010 by Kenneth L. Clark. It has no ISBN or other official presence in the world. Like all of us and every thing, it will disappear someday with the rest of what we love and remember with fondness."

The cover design for 'Eggs of American Songbirds' is by GUD's layout editor, poetry maven, and Issues #1 and #7 Instigator, Sue Miller. Redneck Press is owned and operated by friend-of-GUD and Night Train editor Rusty Barnes. A free .pdf of the chapbook was provided by the publishers and will be kept by the reviewer. Poet and short-fiction writer Kenneth L. Clark was published in Issue 1 of GUD Magazine.

Now we've got the disclaimers out of the way, on to the poetry.

'Eggs of American Songbirds' is a handsome chapbook of poems drawn from life. In them, Clark clearly enjoys playing with the slipperiness of language and the exploitation of the way we read poems, in order, linearly. If you read this line from 'Still Time' in isolation it tells you one thing:

we make time to forget the laundry

When you move on to the line that follows, what it tells you changes:

list of things to do and ignore today

Similarly:

who fills out an incident report. It’s a crime
to be quiet as a puddle after chrome violence

('Roadside Crosses')

and

At the spillway the red
winged blackbird crouches down

('At the Spillway')

There's fun with and love of language in this chapbook, but at the same time, the poems feel deeply personal. They are about love and loss, grief and intimacy. Clark writes himself and his preoccupations onto the page.

"Don’t say anything else tonight,
put your head in my lap and sleep, forget 25 hours
of news and information, relapse to when sleep came
by the cadence of rain, hard rain. Rain, hard rain."

('Ethics for the New Gulf')

Anything and everything is grist for the poet's mill--anything seen, overheard, everything felt, experienced. It's all here: little slices of life pinned to the page.

...She pulled
photographs from an album while her husband went to walk the dog
and find the cat. "This one is Steven and this one’s an old barn."

('The Body Paused')

Clark's poems can convince you that there is beauty in the mundane, but that it takes a poet to see it and bring it to our attention.

There should be an easier way to speak
about crazy women—it’s not enough to just
change the names or distort the facts,
you have to make the stories believable

even though they aren’t.

('On Returning Home To Find My Things Destroyed')

This self-assumed task permeates the pages.

Some of the poems, of course, are more successful than others. I particularly liked 'The Body Paused' and 'Home and Garden', perhaps because they spoke to me more than the others. That's the secret of literature; everyone brings their own experience to it, and takes it away changed, re-interpreted, perhaps--we hope--better understood. You could do worse than start that process here.

Kenneth L. Clark's work appears in GUD Issue 1: Catholic Girls, A Doorbell, and In Defense of the Boll-Weevil

Cloud Permutations by Lavie Tidhar

Tue, 08 Feb 2011 06:04:58 PST

Cloud Permutations

by Lavie Tidhar

PS Publishing, 2010

Hardcover, 120 pages

Buy direct from the publishers

ISBN: 9781848630437 (Book Depository)

£12.00 (if bought direct from PSP)

I stumbled into a #hashchat on Twitter, where World SF blog creator, GUD contributor, and prolific writer @LavieTidhar was answering questions from the audience. If the Library of Congress was on the ball with their Twitter archive, or I had a better memory, I could amaze you with the brilliance of my question. As it is, I will try to impress you with the brilliance of the book that I won with that lost-to-posterity question.

'Cloud Permutations' is part myth, part science fiction adventure. Its roots are both broad and deep; they nurture a story that is personal, well-defined, and brilliantly textured and contextualized, yet still archetypal.

Tidhar draws from his experience in the remote islands of Melanesia to paint for us one possible permutation of the clouds. Heven is a world populated, centuries ago, by Melanesian settlers from distant Earth. They have been cut off, due to unknown circumstances (a trope Tidhar has pulled off beautifully before), and their day-to-day life has grown to fill those circumstances as /kastom/. There is one rule above all others, core to keeping the peace: you will not fly.

Kalbaben and his best friend, Vira, go against the /kastom/ of Heven and pay a heavy price, Kal's first step towards a prophecy he ill understands. He is banished to the merchant-island Tanna, given to remote relatives. There, he is befriended by an ostentatious and crafty albino, Bani, who takes him under his wing.

The adventure they embark on is not easy, nor just, nor kind, nor innocent, but it is told with a rich brush, in language, in interaction, and in scope. The world of Heven has many histories, touched on lightly in parts, and heavily in others. Tidhar borrows from many standard sfnal tropes, and makes something unique of them: in blend, tone, and setting.

The story that is told most directly, the life of Kalbaben, is sweet or bitter-sweet depending on how you choose to read it. It ends perhaps a touch too simply, except 'Cloud Permutations' has many more stories besides, and Tidhar weaves them in a tapestry worth reading for its many ragged layers.

Lavie Tidhar's work appears in GUD Issue 0 (The Infinite Monkeys Protocol), GUD Issue 1 (Hello Goodbye), and GUD Issue 6 (The Last Butterfly).

Classics Revisited: Some thoughts on 'The War of the Worlds' by H.G. Wells

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 11:19:02 PST

The War of the Worlds

by H.G. Wells

It's often debated whether a classic novel would be published today. I think I can state categorically that 'The War of the Worlds' as written would not.

Yes, this nineteenth-century novel is a classic of Science Fiction, perhaps the one SF novel that everyone, in the West at least, has heard of; it's been filmed, it's got its very own album, it's been endlessly reprinted, and you can download it for your Kindle for 94 pence. What can I possibly have against it?

Simply this: the protagonist does not protag.

The what now?

It's striking when rereading 'The War of the Worlds' after so many modern SF novels to observe that neither the narrator nor his brother feels it incumbent upon them to do anything about the Martian invasion. Indeed, the narrator's ambition is to leave England until such time as it's safe to return, and his brother actually succeeds in doing so.

True, the brother does help out a couple of damsels in distress, but it's notable that he saves them from other people, not the Martians. The narrator has some qualms about his (unnamed) wife, although not enough, perhaps, to give the scene that ends the novel much emotional impact.

By and large, however, they are both primarily concerned with their personal safety.

It's hard to see that going down well in the modern SF market, where the emphasis is very much on protagonists who are in the vanguard of the action, however reluctant they might be to act initially.

In the 1953 film directed by Byron Haskin, the story was substantially changed overall, and, significantly for the purposes of this discussion, protagonist Dr Clayton Forrester was given a much more active role in trying to defeat the Martians. Like the original narrator, he observes the invasion, but, unlike him, he doesn't run off to whatever the equivalent of France would be in order to wait the conflict out. He tries to fight back with the weapon at his command--science.

You can see a trailer for this movie on IMBD

In Steven Spielberg's 2005 effort, protagonist Ray Ferrier is more in the vein of Wells' run-for-your-life narrator, but he has an excuse--he's encumbered by his two children. Throughout the film, everything he does is focused on keeping them, and particularly his daughter, played charmingly by Dakota Fanning, from harm. He may not defeat the Martians, but he does save his child.

Wells' novel gives, perhaps, a glimpse of a Britain stratified by class and class roles that was weakened, if not entirely destroyed, by two world wars. I don't believe it's a novel that would have been written as it stands after the First World War; I don't believe it's a novel that then could have been written.

The gentleman narrator is secure in his speciality of "speculative philosophy"; he's as much a soldier as he is a farmhand or a lord. It's simply not his role to get involved in fighting. This was obviously so well understood by Wells' readership that at no point does he need to explain why he doesn't volunteer for the nearest regiment. It just wasn't done.

There's less excuse perhaps for the narrator's brother, who, as a medical student, might be thought to have skills that would be both necessary and useful in the conflict. Again, however, Wells doesn't defend his actions; indeed there is no recognition in the novel that they might need defending.

Yet there are actions in the novel that the narrator feels require some defence, or at least justification--such as after he has stunned the raving curate and left him to be gathered up by the Martians.

Such class security must have been destroyed in the First World War that so horrified Wells and undermined his belief in human progress towards a higher society that would have no use for war.

In general, the novel seems structurally sound. At the beginning, Wells introduces the idea of the "transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water", thereby foreshadowing the agents of the Martians' ultimate defeat.

Interestingly, when used, slightly adapted, in the introduction of Spielberg's film, the "[n]o one would have believed...that this world was being wached keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's..." line was laughable. This, from the man who brought us Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Please. It's bearable in the context of the novel, just.

'The War of the Worlds' is an interesting title, especially given that all the novel's action takes place in the home counties and London. It's more like Mars versus the south-east of England. There's no suggestion that France will only be safe temporarily; this is very much an English war. Perhaps Wells also had two other worlds in mind: the macro world of the visible, and the micro world of the very small. In this particular conflict, of course, small succeeds where even the mighty Thunder Child, pride of the novel's navy, fails.

"For, surging out beyond the white tumult, drove something long and black, the flames streaming from its middle parts, its ventilators and funnels spouting fire."

A magnificent--and heroic--ending for at least one character in the tale.

Chimeric Machines by Lucy Snyder

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 01:04:45 PST

Chimeric Machines

by Lucy A. Snyder

Creative Guy Publishing, 2009

Paperback, 92 pages

Buy direct from the publishers

ISBN: 189495355X (Amazon)

£6.95 / $10.95 ($3 ebook)

Lucy A. Snyder was winner of the 2009 Bram Stoker Award: Superior Achievement in Poetry.

Chimeric Machines is, simply, a delight. Fifteen of the thirty-eight included poems had been previously published, over nine years, in various pro and semi-pro markets, including Strange Horizons, Chiaroscuro, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and Greatest Uncommon Denominator Magazine. I should say up front that Lucy is one of a handful of my favorite poets—her creations tend to tweak me just so: elegant, grounded, visceral, playful, knowledgeable, erudite, educated...she knows a lot about a lot, including the feel of language, and puts it all to good use.

Tom Piccirilli's introduction is short, quirky, and a great way to set the mood before you dive in. Consider it a palate cleanser for the ever-fresh sashimi Lucy slices the world into. The book is broken into seven courses: Technica, Quiet Places, Dark Dreams, Crete Kentucky, Daughters of Typhon, Strange Corners, and Unshelled Evolution. Some sections are more coherent than others, but, for me, the first was the strongest punch. I made notes on each poem as I went, and so many of them, first time through, were just, "Yes. Oh Yes.", or "Delightful", or "*hee*". That's where she hits me.

The leading piece, "Modernism", is simple, but oh-so-elegant, beautifully wry, and hits on several levels. It's two brief stanzas, both relating the same scene, speaking on classical art and modern art, life, perspective, and it is...delightfully wrong, which is a mode I think Lucy aims for frequently.

"And There in the Machine, Virginia Finally Stood Up" is a prose poem, and not what you might expect from the collection's title, but perhaps all the more powerful for that. Three pages long, a lifetime, but I wouldn't do the themes justice by explaining them. The poem does them justice, in spades. My only qualm is that the end is perhaps a bit simple, and glib, in comparison. But there is a lot of glib, throughout, and it's something she does very well.

"Subtlety", which GUD originally published in Issue 2, gets a special call-out in the introduction, and it's well-deserved. From my slush notes, "I was hooked from the first stanza. The third one had me laugh out loud, for real." It still makes me giggle with glee, the punnery, and imagery, and sheer playful twisting of language, which is both subtle and so-very-not.

"Sympathy" had me at "the soylent flesh of every blessed enemy", which, admittedly, was the last line, but I then wrapped around and enjoyed it anew--not because of any particular twist that reshaped the poem as a whole, but because I knew what was coming.

And so on. Some other favorites, in order of presentation, were "glowfish", "Mute Birth", "Home for the Holidays", "Internal Combustion", "Infinite Loop: Girl with Black Eye", "Uncanny Valley Girl", "Book Smarts", "Dumb", "Permian Basin Blues", and "Photograph of a Lady, Circa 1890". I could probably list most of the book.

Not everything worked so perfectly for me; in particular, I didn't enjoy the story-in-five-poems section, "Crete, Kentucky", but I expect folks other than me would enjoy it more. These poems were less playful, more focused on telling the story; there's still some poetry there, but I don't think it's up to the rest of the collection.

And, overall, where I have a complaint, I think it's rooted largely the same—most of her poetry is so strong, that when it's not doing it's thing 110%, it falls a little flat, for me. Sometimes the poem is just too on-the-nose, or saying something I've read too many times without her characteristic energy; in one case she uses a gimmick twice ("Infinite Loop: Girl with Black Eye" and "Looped"; and "Infinite Loop: Girl with Black Eye" just does it much better than the other, I think); and another she hits a theme twice, and again, not so much as extends it, but does it better in one than in the other ("Ocean" vs. "Photograph of a Lady, Circa 1890").

My complaints are few and far between, and I mostly mention them so as to not over-sell you on some mythical collection that no one would ever find fault with. This is a brilliant collection. If you enjoy poetry, speculative fiction, language, life, or any combination thereof, you should really check it out.

GUD has previously reviewed Lucy Snyder's "Sparks and Shadows" and "Installing Linux on a Dead Badger". You can read teasers of "Subtlety" from GUD Issue 2 and "Internal Combustion" from GUD Issue 5.

Storm Warning: Echoes of Conflict by Vanessa Gebbie

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 11:22:06 PST

Storm Warning: Echoes of Conflict

by Vanessa Gebbie

Salt Publishing, 2010

Paperback, 118 pages

Buy direct from the publishers

ISBN: 9781844718122 (Book Depository)

£8.99 / $14.95

This collection of short stories by Vanessa Gebbie is not cozy bed-time reading. Even the most apparently innocent openings--"I'm on a train going to the sea"--only mask for a short time the brutal truth that's about to be revealed. Liesl is on a train, and she's been told she's going to the sea, but the train in 'Red Sandals' has a very different destination.

Gebbie gives us little slices of insights into people's lives that are often so harsh that you want to look away, but also so honest and intimate that you feel looking away would be a betrayal. From the baker returned from WWI who goes down a tin mine instead of returning to his trade, but finds that even underground he can't hide from what happened to his neighbour and fellow-soldier to the bedridden ex-soldier whose self-conceit never quite catches up with the change in his circumstances, Gebbie shines a spotlight into those places we'd rather not look.

The writing is clean and to the point with few words wasted. "The sky was the deepest blue, over there above the hill. No stars. Security lights at the factories." Thus, the scene is set in 'Background Noise', where Maidie learns there is more to her grandfather's story of a daring escape from a submarine than she previously suspected. "My lips moved against the rubber. Every breath I took filled my chest with bad air. I pulled at it, tugging it back down, trying to keep it. It was mine. I was Bambrick." Like so many of Gebbie's characters, Grampa has something to hide. Out it comes, though, eventually, choking and gasping its way out into the night, as if it simply can't be held back any longer. Then we have it, the raw truth of the character's secret, exposed on the page.

The characters in these stories are ordinary people. They could be us, or our close relatives, our friends, people we meet in the streets. The stories put us into their lives, and make them more real by only offering these slices, by eschewing backstory and long explanations. Characterisation is deftly achieved in a few strokes. "Before the lockers were broken, Takundwa laughed from behind the schoolhouse. Before the tables were burned in the open, the last time he was a naughty little brother and ducked under Hondo's fist and ran away." ('Maiba's Ribbon') "He stands a full head above me and I am considered not short. It is said he has the strength to lift a full barrel and carry it to the slow count of an hundred. His hair it is thick and long, and of reddish colour, and his gaze most impassioned when he speaks of two things: his God and his ale." ('The Ale-Heretic')

With this volume, small but perfectly-formed, both Gebbie and Salt Publishing cement their reputations for producing quality short fiction that demands to be read.

Read GUD's review of Vanessa Gebbie's Words From a Glass Bubble.

Vanessa Gebbie's short story 'Jamie Hawkins' Muse' appeared in GUD Issue 2. Read a preview.