Plenty of science fiction and fantasy authors do
“thought experiments” — but few of them disregard experimental
safety protocols with quite as much gleeful abandon as Eileen Gunn. And now, at
long last, Gunn is publishing a second book of demented tales.
Gunn’s
new book Questionable Practices
comes out in March from Small Beer Press,
but we got hold of an early copy and were excited to delve into the strange
imagination of Gunn. For those who’ve missed out on her writing, this former
Microsoft exec published a
book of jarring stories, Stable
Strategies and Others, ten years ago, and also published the webzine
Infinite Matrix.
True to form, Gunn’s new book, Questionable Practices, contains a number of sardonically weird
looks at the future and the strangeness of corporate culture. But her
insatiable eye for weirdness branches out this time around, featuring a number
of different takes on the fantastical.
There is also a good deal of silliness in Questionable Practices, which should be
welcomed by anyone who’s gotten tired of the pervasive stiff upper lip in SF
and fantasy of late. From outright spoofs to metafictional pranks to sarcastic
mischief, Gunn is constantly winking at the reader, while also packing tons of
clever ideas. And just when you least expect it, she drops a serious truth
bomb.
In terms of theme and subject matter, the stories in this
book are all over the map. You can read her four-part steampunk
pastiche online,and her bizarre metafictional piece of
Kirk/Spock slash fiction is also online. But you
can also read her strange Christmas fairytale, a collaboration with Michael
Swanwick, which starts out goofy and slowly becomes sadder and sadder. Also
online: “Zeppelin
City,” another collaboration with Swanwick that includes both
derring-do and abundant strangeness.
My favorite pieces in this book, in fact, are generally the
ones in which there’s a surprising weight behind Gunn’s flights of fancy.
Including the Christmas story, “The Trains That Climb the Winter
Tree,” which turns into a coming-of-age tale with kind of a heavy message.
Similarly, another collaboration with Swanwick, “The Armies of
Elfland,” involves a young girl learning some harsh lessons and facing
some serious heartbreak in the midst of all the weirdness. Both of these
stories feel like the kind of dark fables that a lot of young-adult book
authors have aimed for of late, but Gunn (and Swanwick) take themto darker places and bring an amazing
inventiveness to them that add to the feeling of going on a real journey.
And on the “dark fabulist” tip, probably my
favorite story in the book is the previously unpublished “Chop Wood, Carry
Water,” which is told from the point of view of a Golem who is mystified
by his own soulless existence and just wants to return to being inanimate clay.
The Golem tries to understand what it is to be alive, and the meaning of
Jewishness, even as terrible things are threatened for the small Jewish
settlement he lives in.
But Gunn also turns her satirical eye on several characters
whose self-delusions get them into trouble. In “Up the Fire Road,”
she tells the story from both the contradictory POVs of a man and a woman, who
are both kind of awful people, and both of whom end up having a romantic/sexual
relationship with a sasquatch that winds up turning them into television stars.
In “Hive Mind Man,” a collaboration with Rudy Rucker, she follows
another dreadful romance, involving a man who takes our obsession with smart
gadgets and social media to a horrendous extreme.
In between these strange satires and the bizarre fairy
tales, there are also straight-up spoofs, such as the Star Trek and steampunk things linked above, plus a metafictional
tale about Michael Swanwick and Samuel R. Delany eating hamburgers.
The overwhelming feeling you get after you finish reading Questionable Practices is one of
oppression — Gunn is not using fanciful writing and silly spoofs to liberate
you, as a lot of other writers would, but to show how you’re being crushed by systems
that make no sense. There are a lot of stories about enslavement and
imprisonment here, and in none of them does liberation turn out to be as simple
as people imagine.
Her first book was described as “Kafkaesque,” but
here she’s moved beyond the Kafka riff into something harder to pin down —
there are plenty of surreal touches, but also a lot of hints that our own
subjectivity, our ways of constructing ourselves, are at the root of how we
become enslaved.
If you’ve been wishing your science fiction and fantasy
short stories had a bit more mischief lately, then Eileen Gunn’s Questionable
Practices is guaranteed to shake things up.
