Aqueduct Press has just released several more titles--all of them in the Conversation Pieces series-- in e-book formats. The latest titles are:
Aliens of the Heart by Carolyn Ives Gilman
Candle in a Bottle by Carolyn Ives Gilman
A Brood of Foxes by Kristin Livdahl
Of Love and Other Monsters by Vandana Singh
De Secretis Mulierum by L. Timmel Duchamp
Shotgun Lullabies by Sheree Renée Thomas
Each can be purchased for $5.95. You can find them all here.
Showing posts with label Carolyn Ives Gilman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carolyn Ives Gilman. Show all posts
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
2010 Galyactic Spectrum Awards
Brit Mandelo has posted the 2010 Gaylactic Spectrum Awards over at Tor.com:
Best Novel Winner: The Steel Remains - Richard Morgan (Del Rey)
Best Novel Short-List:
Best Short Fiction Winner(s):
“The Behold of the Eye” by Hal Duncan, from Lone Star Stories. Reprinted in Wilde Stories 2009 (edited by Steve Berman).
“The Rocky Side of the Sky” by Melissa Scott, from Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures (edited by Lynne Jamneck).
Best Short Fiction Short-List:
Best Other Works:
I see a couple of Aqueductistas on the short lists.
Best Novel Winner: The Steel Remains - Richard Morgan (Del Rey)
Best Novel Short-List:
- Ash - Malinda Lo (Little, Brown)
- By the Mountain Bound - Elizabeth Bear (Tor)
- Centuries Ago and Very Fast - Rebecca Ore (Aqueduct Press)
- The Enchantment Emporium - Tanya Huff (DAW)
- Naamah’s Kiss - Jacqueline Carey (Grand Central)
- Palimpsest - Catherynne Valente (Bantam Spectra)
- The Red Tree - Caitlin Kiernan (Roc)
- Seven for a Secret - Elizabeth Bear (Subterranean Press)
- Strange Fortune - Josh Lanyon (Blind Eye)
Best Short Fiction Winner(s):
“The Behold of the Eye” by Hal Duncan, from Lone Star Stories. Reprinted in Wilde Stories 2009 (edited by Steve Berman).
“The Rocky Side of the Sky” by Melissa Scott, from Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures (edited by Lynne Jamneck).
Best Short Fiction Short-List:
- “Angels Alone” by Carolyn Ives Gilman in Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures
- “Behind the Curtain” by Joel Lane in Dark Horizons, Issue 22, reprinted in Wilde Stories 2009
- “The Bloomsbury Nudes” by Jameson Currier in Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet (edited by Vince Liaguno and Chad Helder), reprinted in Wilde Stories 2009
- “City of the Dead” by Kate Welsh in Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades: Lesbian Ghost Stories (edited by Catherine Lundoff)
- “Firooz and his Brother” by Alex Jeffers in the May 2008 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, reprinted in Wilde Stories 2009
- “Here Lies the Last Lesbian Rental in East Vancouver” by Amber Dawn in Fist of the Spider Woman: Tales of Fear and Queer Desire (edited by Amber Dawn)
- “I’m Your Violence” by Lee Thomas in Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet
- “In Circles” by Aurelia T. Evans in Fist of the Spider Woman: Tales of Fear and Queer Desire
- “In the Night Street Baths” by Chaz Brenchley in Lace and Blade (edited by Deborah J. Ross)
- “One Horse Town” by Melissa Scott in Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades: Lesbian Ghost Stories
- “Parts” by Kal Cobalt in Wired Hard 4 (Edited by Lauren Burka and Cecilia Tan)
- “Remember” by Astrid Amara in Tangle (edited by Nicole Kimberling)
- “The Succession Knoorikios Khnum” by Zachary Jernigan in Wired Hard 4
- “Waiting Tables and Time” by Lyn McConchie in Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades: Lesbian Ghost Stories
Best Other Works:
- Were the World Mine, a film by Tom Gustafson.
- Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades: Lesbian Ghost Stories (edited by Catherine Lundoff)
- Periphery: Erotic Lesbian Futures (edited by Lynne Jamneck)
- Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet (edited by Vince Liaguno and Chad Helder)
- Wilde Stories 2009 (edited by Steve Berman)
I see a couple of Aqueductistas on the short lists.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Carolyn Ives Gilman has a new novel out in August!
Is it slavery, or is it love?I'm intrigued-- can hardly wait, in fact. I can use me a good novel of revolution, yeah.
Dhota is the life-giving ritual that binds the people of the Forsaken Isles. From the poorest fisherman to the greatest leader, it gives them health and peace of mind. But for the person who conducts the healing, it is a perpetual bond. A dhotamar can never break free of the people she has cured.Publish Post
Spaeth Dobrin is destined to life as the dhotamar of the tiny, isolated island of Yora. But then the outside world crashes into her life in the form of two men—Harg, the troubled and rebellious veteran, and Nathaway, the privileged outsider come to teach her people civilization. They propel her into a vortex of war, temptation, and—just possibly—freedom.
The Forsaken Isles are on the brink of revolution. Spaeth, Harg, and Nathaway are about to push it over.
PS Carolyn will be attending WisCon this year.
Friday, December 10, 2010
The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2010, pt.2: Carolyn Ives Gilman
Thoughts about American Gods
by Carolyn Ives Gilman
The most interesting books to write about aren’t the ones you admire the most; they are the ones you want to argue with. When Timmi asked me to write about the best books I’d read in 2010, I thought about recommending that everyone read David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, a book I admired fawningly. But hearing me gush about the way Mitchell’s descriptions replicate the random way we actually perceive the world, and other such connoisseurship, would be tedious. So I want to talk about a book that made me say, hey, wait a minute: Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.
American Gods is not a new book; it’s been sitting on my to-read pile for years. I took it with me to the hospital when I was incarcerated for pneumonia, and it kept my attention through days and nights of IVs and X rays. This is high praise. Not many books could do this.
Despite my long delay, I really anticipated reading this book, because I’m quite interested in American gods. To me, this seems like one of the most god-ridden, god-bedeviled countries on earth. Here is a country that could invent Mormonism and Scientology; a country that once was practically papered over with the Utopian communities of Zoarites, Harmonists, Hutterites, and Swedenborgians; a country that has been hospitable to imports like Theosophy and Transcendental Meditation. Surely it has an aptitude for this god thing.
Imagine my surprise, then, to find that American Gods was not about American gods at all; it was about gods from everywhere but America. In fact, Gaiman advances the remarkable argument that America is hostile to gods, that they can’t survive on American soil. The premise of the book is that immigrants from all over the world brought gods with them to North America, but they have not thriven here, and now are forced to eke out an existence as grifters and deadbeats, taxi drivers and small-town businessmen. It makes for a pretty interesting story, although it requires you to swallow the idea that practicing believers in Odin and Anubis somehow made it through Ellis Island.
The idea of America being hostile to gods seemed preposterous to me until it struck me that if all you knew about America came from its writers of fantastic literature, you would surely have to draw the same conclusion. American fantasy is remarkably Eurocentric, and where it is not, it turns to Japan or Africa or India for mythology, almost never to America. If you believe our fantasists, American cities are populated with imported Romanian vampires, Russian werewolves, Celtic faeries, and Germanic witches, but nary a homegrown magical being. True, there are some fantasies based on a European environmentalist notion of what Native Americans might have believed, scrubbed clean of all the actual gods and mythology. But as a rule, we plagiarize northern Europe when it comes to the supernatural.
Why is it so easy for us to imagine an Old World teeming with supernatural beings, and so difficult to imagine a North America enchanted with indigenous gods? Why can’t we believe we live in a naturally magical place? I can’t answer that, but I have some ideas.
Gods tend to spring from the land. When you go back to the original myths, the events are usually tied to a geographic spot—not just “the forest,” but a specific glade in a particular forest. People with an intimate knowledge of their local landscape know the spots where other-than-normal events tend to happen, where the boundaries between here and there are thin, and oddness leaks through. North America is just as peppered with these places as anywhere else on earth. What it lacks are people with the intimate, generations-long knowledge of place that reveals the location of enchanted spots. We are too mobile for such sensitivity. It takes quiet, slowness, and listening, for which we are in too much of a hurry. But this may be changing. We could, of course, make it change.
Gods also tend to spring from the past, and we persist in seeing North America as a place without a past. It is somehow necessary to the American character to believe that history started here with the arrival of Europeans, and as a result we are in a state of willful denial about deep time on this continent. For example, in St. Louis I live in a place that was the site of a city bigger than London or Paris in 1200 A.D. Half an hour’s drive from my home there is a flat-topped pyramid larger in volume than the great pyramid of Cheops. From the crest of this towering, geometric structure you can see a panoramic view of the valley that was once the urban center of North America. A recent archaeological theory holds that the valley was laid out much like the Nile Valley at Thebes. On the east side was a complex of temples dedicated to gods of the sun and sky; on the west side was a cluster of pyramids that marked the entry into the underworld—a maze of limestone caverns that now lie under a rusty wasteland of abandoned railroads and factories. The city on the east side is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but Americans trivialize it by calling the pyramids “Indian mounds” as if they were primitive heaps of dirt.
Another example: when the Roman empire was in its heyday in Europe, the Scioto Valley in Ohio was one of the holiest places on earth. Here, inhabitants created hundreds of enigmatic landscape artworks of massive berms and ditches in geometric shapes—perfect circles, octagons, precisely measured squares, ellipses, and linear causeways that linked sites 50 or 100 miles apart. Archaeologists now think that these people had a grasp of geometric theory we never suspected—for example, some of the square-circle combinations (which look like Euclidian diagrams in aerial view) may be linked to the classic problem of “squaring the circle” that also fascinated Greek mathematicians. Others are astronomically aligned—not to the sun, which would have been obvious, but to the moon cycles, which requires precise observations over at least an 18-year period. And yet Americans think they have to go to Europe to tour neolithic observatories.
I mentioned how modern books trivialize Native American religion by denying that it involved mythology or gods. Gaiman explicitly states this in American Gods, but can hardly be blamed for it, since to find information on Indian gods one must resort to such sources as the forbidding green volumes of the Bureau of American Ethnology (which, contrary to popular belief, are mostly written by Indians themselves, too often uncredited). Here one finds grand mythic cycles such as the one underlying the Mandan Okipa ceremony, which re-enacted the creation and early history of the world. The Mandan knew gods aplenty—Charred Body, Old Woman Who Never Dies, Long Arm, and demons like Shoulder Mouth, Tail with a Knife, and Flame around the Ankle. Among the most compelling gods are the cosmic twins Mahash and Atutish. They represent principles of wild chaos and civilized order. Through a set of linked stories they collaborate to rid the world of primordial dangers. The climax comes when Mahash is crucified for three days on a forked tree, then is resurrected by the daring intercession of his brother, demonstrating the necessity of both principles.
With material like this at hand, why do American writers feel they have to import supernatural beings and ancient civilizations from Europe?
Of course, the granddaddy of American gods is the Christian one, who has absorbed entire pantheons. I was puzzled by Gaiman’s exclusion of Christianity, as if it had nothing to do with the question of American gods. (Actually, till the end of the book I kept expecting Jehovah to show up and smack down all of Gaiman’s has-been pagan gods with his pinky. It never happened.) Now, I can understand writers’ hesitation to take on living gods who walk around today interceding in peoples’ lives and messing with our politics. But you cannot argue that the Christian god lacks enchantment. And authors do not earn points by only taking on the easy questions.
I wish I could challenge American authors of fantastic literature to do some hard work seeking inspiration in the American landscape and the American past, instead of looking in the pages of already-written books and already-used myths. This is a magical and mysterious country full of pristine material. For gods’ sake, we should use it.
Carolyn Ives Gilman lives a double life. In her writing life, she has published dozens of stories and the very fine novel Halfway Human. In her professional life, she is a historian specializing in 18th and early 19th-century North American history, particularly frontier and Native history. Her most recent nonfiction book, Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide, was published in 2003 by Smithsonian Books. She has been a guest lecturer at the Library of Congress, Harvard University, and Monticello, and has been interviewed on All Things Considered (NPR), Talk of the Nation (NPR), History Detectives (PBS), and the History Channel. As for her "day job," Carolyn works for the Missouri Historical Society as a historian and museum curator.
by Carolyn Ives Gilman
American Gods is not a new book; it’s been sitting on my to-read pile for years. I took it with me to the hospital when I was incarcerated for pneumonia, and it kept my attention through days and nights of IVs and X rays. This is high praise. Not many books could do this.
Imagine my surprise, then, to find that American Gods was not about American gods at all; it was about gods from everywhere but America. In fact, Gaiman advances the remarkable argument that America is hostile to gods, that they can’t survive on American soil. The premise of the book is that immigrants from all over the world brought gods with them to North America, but they have not thriven here, and now are forced to eke out an existence as grifters and deadbeats, taxi drivers and small-town businessmen. It makes for a pretty interesting story, although it requires you to swallow the idea that practicing believers in Odin and Anubis somehow made it through Ellis Island.
The idea of America being hostile to gods seemed preposterous to me until it struck me that if all you knew about America came from its writers of fantastic literature, you would surely have to draw the same conclusion. American fantasy is remarkably Eurocentric, and where it is not, it turns to Japan or Africa or India for mythology, almost never to America. If you believe our fantasists, American cities are populated with imported Romanian vampires, Russian werewolves, Celtic faeries, and Germanic witches, but nary a homegrown magical being. True, there are some fantasies based on a European environmentalist notion of what Native Americans might have believed, scrubbed clean of all the actual gods and mythology. But as a rule, we plagiarize northern Europe when it comes to the supernatural.
Why is it so easy for us to imagine an Old World teeming with supernatural beings, and so difficult to imagine a North America enchanted with indigenous gods? Why can’t we believe we live in a naturally magical place? I can’t answer that, but I have some ideas.
Gods tend to spring from the land. When you go back to the original myths, the events are usually tied to a geographic spot—not just “the forest,” but a specific glade in a particular forest. People with an intimate knowledge of their local landscape know the spots where other-than-normal events tend to happen, where the boundaries between here and there are thin, and oddness leaks through. North America is just as peppered with these places as anywhere else on earth. What it lacks are people with the intimate, generations-long knowledge of place that reveals the location of enchanted spots. We are too mobile for such sensitivity. It takes quiet, slowness, and listening, for which we are in too much of a hurry. But this may be changing. We could, of course, make it change.
Gods also tend to spring from the past, and we persist in seeing North America as a place without a past. It is somehow necessary to the American character to believe that history started here with the arrival of Europeans, and as a result we are in a state of willful denial about deep time on this continent. For example, in St. Louis I live in a place that was the site of a city bigger than London or Paris in 1200 A.D. Half an hour’s drive from my home there is a flat-topped pyramid larger in volume than the great pyramid of Cheops. From the crest of this towering, geometric structure you can see a panoramic view of the valley that was once the urban center of North America. A recent archaeological theory holds that the valley was laid out much like the Nile Valley at Thebes. On the east side was a complex of temples dedicated to gods of the sun and sky; on the west side was a cluster of pyramids that marked the entry into the underworld—a maze of limestone caverns that now lie under a rusty wasteland of abandoned railroads and factories. The city on the east side is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, but Americans trivialize it by calling the pyramids “Indian mounds” as if they were primitive heaps of dirt.
Another example: when the Roman empire was in its heyday in Europe, the Scioto Valley in Ohio was one of the holiest places on earth. Here, inhabitants created hundreds of enigmatic landscape artworks of massive berms and ditches in geometric shapes—perfect circles, octagons, precisely measured squares, ellipses, and linear causeways that linked sites 50 or 100 miles apart. Archaeologists now think that these people had a grasp of geometric theory we never suspected—for example, some of the square-circle combinations (which look like Euclidian diagrams in aerial view) may be linked to the classic problem of “squaring the circle” that also fascinated Greek mathematicians. Others are astronomically aligned—not to the sun, which would have been obvious, but to the moon cycles, which requires precise observations over at least an 18-year period. And yet Americans think they have to go to Europe to tour neolithic observatories.
I mentioned how modern books trivialize Native American religion by denying that it involved mythology or gods. Gaiman explicitly states this in American Gods, but can hardly be blamed for it, since to find information on Indian gods one must resort to such sources as the forbidding green volumes of the Bureau of American Ethnology (which, contrary to popular belief, are mostly written by Indians themselves, too often uncredited). Here one finds grand mythic cycles such as the one underlying the Mandan Okipa ceremony, which re-enacted the creation and early history of the world. The Mandan knew gods aplenty—Charred Body, Old Woman Who Never Dies, Long Arm, and demons like Shoulder Mouth, Tail with a Knife, and Flame around the Ankle. Among the most compelling gods are the cosmic twins Mahash and Atutish. They represent principles of wild chaos and civilized order. Through a set of linked stories they collaborate to rid the world of primordial dangers. The climax comes when Mahash is crucified for three days on a forked tree, then is resurrected by the daring intercession of his brother, demonstrating the necessity of both principles.
With material like this at hand, why do American writers feel they have to import supernatural beings and ancient civilizations from Europe?
Of course, the granddaddy of American gods is the Christian one, who has absorbed entire pantheons. I was puzzled by Gaiman’s exclusion of Christianity, as if it had nothing to do with the question of American gods. (Actually, till the end of the book I kept expecting Jehovah to show up and smack down all of Gaiman’s has-been pagan gods with his pinky. It never happened.) Now, I can understand writers’ hesitation to take on living gods who walk around today interceding in peoples’ lives and messing with our politics. But you cannot argue that the Christian god lacks enchantment. And authors do not earn points by only taking on the easy questions.
I wish I could challenge American authors of fantastic literature to do some hard work seeking inspiration in the American landscape and the American past, instead of looking in the pages of already-written books and already-used myths. This is a magical and mysterious country full of pristine material. For gods’ sake, we should use it.
Carolyn Ives Gilman lives a double life. In her writing life, she has published dozens of stories and the very fine novel Halfway Human. In her professional life, she is a historian specializing in 18th and early 19th-century North American history, particularly frontier and Native history. Her most recent nonfiction book, Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide, was published in 2003 by Smithsonian Books. She has been a guest lecturer at the Library of Congress, Harvard University, and Monticello, and has been interviewed on All Things Considered (NPR), Talk of the Nation (NPR), History Detectives (PBS), and the History Channel. As for her "day job," Carolyn works for the Missouri Historical Society as a historian and museum curator.
Friday, February 19, 2010
2009 Nebula Award Nominations
The 2009 Nebula ballot is out-- and has two Aqueductistas on it. Congratulations, Carolyn and Rachel!
Short Story
Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela, Saladin Ahmed (Clockwork Phoenix 2, Norilana Press, Jul09)
I Remember the Future, Michael A. Burstein (I Remember the Future, Apex Press, Nov08)
Non-Zero Probabilities, N. K. Jemisin (Clarkesworld, Nov09)
Spar, Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld, Oct09)
Going Deep, James Patrick Kelly (Asimov’s Science Fiction, Jun09)
Bridesicle, Will McIntosh (Asimov’s Science Fiction, Jan09)
Novelette
The Gambler, Paolo Bacigalupi (Fast Forward 2, Pyr Books, Oct08)
Vinegar Peace, or the Wrong-Way Used-Adult Orphanage, Michael Bishop (Asimov’s Science Fiction, Jul08)
I Needs Must Part, The Policeman Said, Richard Bowes (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Dec09)
Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast, Eugie Foster (Interzone, Jan/Feb09)
Divining Light, Ted Kosmatka (Asimov’s Science Fiction, Aug08)
A Memory of Wind, Rachel Swirsky (Tor.com, Nov09)
Novella
The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, Kage Baker (Subterranean Press, Jun09)
Arkfall, Carolyn Ives Gilman (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Sep09)
Act One, Nancy Kress (Asimov’s Science Fiction, Mar09)
Shambling Towards Hiroshima, James Morrow (Tachyon, Feb09)
Sublimation Angels, Jason Sanford (Interzone, Sep/Oct09)
The God Engines, John Scalzi (The God Engines, Subterranean Press, Dec09)
Novel
The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Nightshade, Sep09)
The Love We Share Without Knowing, Christopher Barzak (Bantam, Nov08)
Flesh and Fire, Laura Anne Gilman (Pocket, Oct09)
The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey, May09)
Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor, Sep09)
Finch, Jeff VanderMeer (Underland Press, Oct09)
Bradbury Award
Star Trek, JJ Abrams (Paramount, May09)
District 9, Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell (Tri-Star, Aug09)
Avatar, James Cameron (Fox, Dec 09)
Moon, Duncan Jones and Nathan Parker (Sony, Jun09)
Up, Bob Peterson and Pete Docter (Disney/Pixar, May09)
Coraline, Henry Selick (Laika/Focus Feb09)
Andre Norton Award
Hotel Under the Sand, Kage Baker (Tachyon, Jul09)
Ice, Sarah Beth Durst (Simon and Schuster, Oct09)
Ash, by Malinda Lo (Little, Brown & Company, Sep09)
Eyes Like Stars, Lisa Mantchev (Feiwel and Friends, Jul09)
Zoe’s Tale, John Scalzi (Tor Aug08)
When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead (Wendy Lamb Books, 2009)
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making, Catherynne M. Valente (Catherynne M. Valente, Jun09)
Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld (Simon, Oct09)
For more information, visit http://www.nebulaawards.com or http://www.sfwa.org
Monday, December 15, 2008
The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2008, Part Two: Carolyn Ives Gilman
Carolyn Ives Gilman:The Enchanted Frontier
Sometimes, insights come from the juxtapositions that happen when you read books in the context of a crowded life.
I must have been one of the last five people on earth to read Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I’d put it off because the book was such a doorstop. But last spring a friend gave me a loaner copy just as I was leaving on a research trip, so I took it along. I no longer had an excuse not to read it.
I should explain that my day job as a museum curator takes me around North America and Europe tracking down dispersed collections of books, manuscripts, maps, artworks, curios, antiquities, and downright bizarre and enigmatic stuff. I get paid to talk my way into the closets where museums keep the things they’re a little embarrassed by, like the shrunken heads and witches in bottles. For the last two years, I’ve been scouring the world for material relating to the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys between about 1750 and 1800, in order to produce an exhibition and book on the American Revolution on the Frontier. This was an era when the American Midwest was a contested zone, a place that would have seemed very alien to all of us who live in it today. It was inhabited by a complex blend of peoples—multilingual, multiethnic, multinational. Native Americans, French habitants, British soldiers, American settlers, African slaves, all struggled to define and control one another and the land where they wanted to live.
On this particular trip, I was investigating something fairly normal: the manuscript collection of an eccentric 19th-century scholar named Lyman Draper. He was obsessed with the subject I am working on, and devoted his life to acquiring every relevant scrap of paper he could lay his hands on. He was willing to go beyond the ends of the earth for a good interview; when he ran out of manuscripts to collect, he employed a medium to raise the spirits of the historical figures he studied.
So there I was, spending the day immersed in the collection of an obsessive dead scholar, then going to my hotel room at night to read a novel that actually made obsessive scholars sound interesting. This was an extraordinary feat in itself. But even more extraordinary to me was the way that Clarke managed to bring to life a set of European folk traditions about the supernatural. She managed to put me in a world where other-than-human beings present a real and present danger, where cozy normality is a mere lacquer over a perilous mystery that obeys rules we can only distantly sense.
And suddenly I understood the minds of the American frontiersmen I was reading about.
This is not so far-fetched a leap as it might seem. To begin with, I think Clarke’s book is based on some serious research into traditional beliefs about the nonhuman world. Whether she has invented or distorted details for fictional purposes is not important, because she has remained true to the overall picture. By that I mean the sense that magical power emanates from the land itself; that a vast hidden reality exists beneath the everyday world; that the worlds intersect at particular geographical points; that animals act as messengers or conduits between the worlds.
Moreover, the other world is inhabited by beings we cannot understand. They are simultaneously childlike and immensely powerful. They meticulously obey rules we cannot fathom, and trap us when we violate them. They can be physically beautiful and even grand. In negotiation they are deceptive, and in war treacherous. They are cowardly, but also formidable enemies. They are ruthless and have no regard for human life. They are lazy and feckless, incapable of becoming productive members of society, but glory in wealth and finery when they can get it. They love to cast spells over human beings and carry them off to their own realm, where the captives live in an entranced state, forgetting their homes and families.
This last paragraph, written to describe fairies as portrayed by Clarke, matches point by point Euro-American beliefs about American Indians in the late 18th century.
The existence of American Indians seriously staggered European intellectuals, and in the 18th century debate raged over how to account for them. Were they different in nature from Europeans (the French philosophes’ view), or were they simply at a different stage of cultural development (the argument of Scottish intellectuals)? Did they constitute a separate sub-species (as Carolus Linnaeus believed), or did they have the capacity to become “civilized” (as Thomas Jefferson argued)? On this debate hung questions about human origins and social evolution—questions with urgency for an impending colonial age.
So intellectuals wrote a lot about their reactions to Indians, but we know much less about the reactions of ordinary people who based their beliefs about the world on tradition and tale, not theory. Most of the people who actually came into contact with Indians on the frontier at this time were of Celtic extraction, often straight from Highland crofts or rural Ireland. They brought to America their clannish allegiances, their martial traditions, their fondness for ecstatic religion—and their folk traditions. They had certain expectations about the way other-worldly beings behaved and acted. When they were pushed or moved onto the frontier, they found themselves sharing space with incomprehensible and unpredictable beings. It only stands to reason that their pre-formed expectations about the Other were projected onto the Indians.
*
When we enter the world of the frontier through the gateway of Celtic traditional belief, and try to see what the settlers saw, America looks like a very different place.
People moving west before the Revolution had to cross a line that separated the predictable world of Europe from the wilderness. It was called the Proclamation Line, after the Proclamation of 1763, in which George III had forbidden settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains in order to preserve the West as “a Desert for the Indians to hunt and to inhabit.” Once beyond the line, settlers were beyond protection.
When people entered the West, what they encountered first was the forest. Not the little patches of woodland we have set aside to cherish in a paved-over world—this forest was endless, impenetrable, unmapped. It stretched uninterrupted from the foothills of the Appalachians to the rumored shores of the Mississippi 800 miles away—a forest four times larger than all of Britain and Ireland combined. To newcomers, it seemed primeval, unchanged since the dawn of time, mile upon endless mile of dank moss and tangled vine under the uninterrupted shadow of ancient trees. “Who can tell how far it extends?” wrote one American in 1782. “For no European foot has as yet travelled half the extent of this mighty continent!”
Things grew to immense sizes in the West. American chestnuts (a species now almost extinct) had trunks that rose fifty feet before branching, and a surveyor in 1774 measured a sycamore thirty-seven feet in circumference. Boatmen hauled hundred-pound catfish from the river. There were flocks of neon-colored Carolina parakeets flashing through the trees (yes, even in Ohio). Watching from the overhead branches were the huge tawny cats most people called panthers. Rumor told of “the ivory-bill wood-cock” whose beak was pure ivory—“a circumstance very singular in the plumy tribe.” More amazing to them than to us were the buffaloes that ranged as far east as the border of West Virginia. One astonished traveler described them as a sort of mythic beast assembled chimera-like from the parts of other animals: the body of a cow, the eye of a goat, the grunt of a hog.
But these living behemoths were dwarfed by the mysterious bones found at a salt spring just past the Kentucky River. Here, wrote one eyewitness,
very large bones are found, far surpassing the size of any species of animals now in America. The head appears to have been about three feet long, the ribs seven, and the thigh bones about four; one of which is reposited in the library in Philadelphia, and said to weigh seventy-eight pounds….These bones have equally excited the amazement of the ignorant, and attracted the attention of the philosopher….Whence is it that the whole species has disappeared from America?…These are difficulties sufficient to stagger credulity itself….Can then so great a link have perished from the chain of nature?
The mystery posed by the great bones was coupled with another one, even more troubling to accepted wisdom. As soon as they started to cross the mountains, Americans came upon evidence that this land had been inhabited by an advanced civilization at some ancient time in history. The discovery of a mysterious race of builders and engineers, unmentioned in the Bible or any history, posed such a dilemma that American intellectuals quickly entered into a state of denial about their existence, an attitude that persists today. But the ancient landmarks must have evoked a different response from Celtic immigrants—one of familiarity. Here were huge barrows marking the graves of neolithic chieftains. When broken open, they revealed coffins assembled from stone slabs, holding gigantic skeletons arrayed in shell beads and copper weapons. Hauntingly beautiful sculptures had been left as grave goods.
Undiscovered species, extinct monsters, a fallen civilization—who could doubt that the West was a land of mystery and magic? But we would be wrong to imagine that 18th-century Americans reacted to it with the same confidence and curiosity we would. Our positive view of wilderness was thoroughly alien to them. To them, the silent forest was an ominous realm. We think of external dangers, but to them the greatest threat was an internal one. For they believed that living in such a forest would change them. First would come a type of disorientation they called “bewilderment.” Then, by a slow and subtle process, the wilderness would rob them of the morals and manners of the civilized world. They would forget European ways and degenerate, step by inevitable step, into savages.
This belief was based on a legitimate scientific theory of the day; but then as now, science became distorted and exaggerated when it entered the popular culture. The theorists held that the differences in culture and lifestyle being discovered all around the globe were not racial—or as we would say, genetic—but the result of adaptation to different environments. Ordinary Americans heard this and reasoned: if character was formed by environment, would not a European transplanted to a new environment take on a different character? Would not a person who went to live in the forests that produced the Indians become like the Indians?
In fact, that was exactly what they believed. Pseudo-scientific “proofs” showed that the character traits of savagery were produced by the darkness and damp of the forest, by sleeping on the moist ground, or by eating wild game. Indian maize was disdained as a starvation food for this reason. Journalist Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur described what happened to people who went to live in forests: “Their actions are regulated by the wildness of the neighbourhood…. The chase renders them ferocious, gloomy, and unsocial…. Their wives and children live in sloth and inactivity;…they grow up a mongrel breed, half civilized, half savage.” Hunting was “a licentious idle life” that would “pervert good dispositions” and lead to “rapacity and injustice.”
The most terrifying proof of the susceptibility of civilization was the phenomenon of captivity. Gallons of ink were expended on this subject in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and the captivity narrative became one of the first indigenous genres of American popular literature. Scores of these homespun tales gorged the market, filling roughly the same slot as horror does today. The central mystery that confronted Americans was, why did so many people captured by Indians adapt so quickly to their new lives, forget their own cultures, families, languages, and religions, and blend seamlessly into Indian society?
It was a well documented phenomenon. In 1764, at the end of Pontiac’s War, Col. Henry Bouquet “liberated” hundreds of European captives in Ohio, only to have a large proportion of them decline to be rescued. When the redcoats forced them to march back east, sure that they would soon recover their senses, dozens escaped to return to their Indian villages. Those who stayed behind eventually became known as “white Indians,” feared and vilified for combining the enterprize and discipline of Englishmen with the treachery and ruthlessness of Indians. One of them, Simon Girty, achieved such a legendary reputation fighting for the Indians that Stephen Vincent Benet made him a prominent member of the Devil’s jury in The Devil and Daniel Webster. Nineteenth-century engravings portrayed him as a shriveled, twisted creature with a maddened expression.
Today we notice with suspicion that women, African Americans, and other marginalized groups were particularly likely to “succumb” to Indian life. Girty himself was an abused child. But these are our explanations, not theirs. At the time, it was such a baffling phenomenon that they struggled to account for it as a universal human tendency to degenerate into a savage state from a hard-won pinnacle of civilization. Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1753,
when an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.
The settlers on the frontier had a less detached attitude than Franklin. They believed that the Indians were exercizing a mysterious power over their captives. Significantly, they did not call it captivity; they called it “captivation.” They regarded it with terror and mistrust. The most famous frontiersman of all, Daniel Boone, succumbed to captivation during a six-month sojourn as Sheltowee, adoptive son of the Shawnee chief Blackfish, in 1777-78. When he returned to Boonesborough, the town he had founded, the residents put him on trial for collaboration with the enemy. He was tainted with suspicion ever after, because he had shown the moral weakness of failing to resist.
All of this is far more understandable when one minds the beliefs underlying the settlers’ reactions. They had long experience with captivity, after all; fairies had been ensnaring Britons for centuries, almost always with tragic results. With Tam Lin echoing in their minds, is it any wonder that they reacted to Indian captivity the way they did?
*
All of this leaves an interesting dilemma for historians like me. If we acknowledge the role mythology played in the surviving first-hand accounts of Native Americans, how are we ever going to learn the truth about the people themselves? What I want to know is, what were the Indians really like?
People like the wily but nearly illiterate George Croghan, who lived with the Shawnee and Delaware for years and achieved enormous power representing the Crown at their tribal councils, swore they had cultural and character traits that we find eerily similar to the traditions of the Sidhe he had doubtless learned growing up in Ireland. Should we discount his testimony, or could there have been some reality underlying his claim?
The truly interesting question here is the chicken or the egg. That is, did Celtic frontiersmen see only what they expected to see, so that their perceptions (and the historical record they produced) were irretrievably tainted with an overlay of myth? If so, then we will never know what the Indians were actually like in the 1770s. Since they left no written record of their own, no plausible evidence survives. I, who study American Indian history, might as well be studying fairies.
Or could it be the other way around— that Europeans’ earliest experiences of non-European peoples actually gave rise to stories about the nature of supernatural beings, perhaps overlaid on earlier and less detailed traditions? Could the folk tales reflect a literary means of coping with real-world experiences of the Other?
Or could the tales reflect something universal about the reality of human nature when it is unrestrained by society and custom? I’m not sure I even want to go there, since it smells of determinism, but in the interest of objectivity we have to ask the question.
The fact is, these were and are still dangerous ideas. This made the reading of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell an uncomfortable and double-visiony thing for me. It was impossible for me not to think of the fairies as the indigenous, colonized peoples of the British Isles, and I actually suspect this was Clarke’s intent. At the same time, she does make you really long to smack those fairies down, or exile them to fairy reservations. Maybe this is the cleverest thing the book does—it makes you realize that, presented with a different balance of power, even you and I, enlightened liberals though we are, might react much as our ancestors did to Indians.
Carolyn Ives Gilman is the author of Halfway Human, a novel, a great deal of short 
fiction, and a body of work of 18th- and 19th-century American history, particularly Native and frontier history. She has published two volumes in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces Series, Candle in a Bottle: A Novella and Aliens of the Heart: Short Fiction.Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Readings at WisCon 32
WisCon offers a wide variety of programming across eighteen (gasp!) tracks. Although there are two single-author readers by the year's Guests of Honor, all the rest of the readings are group presentations by four or five authors (or, in the case of the unique Broad Universe Rapid-Fire Reading, by numerous authors offering brief tantalizing bursts of their work). Most of these readings take place in a conference room equipped with several armchairs rather than straight chairs and a table with microphones facing the audience, which gives the room a slightly more comfortable and informal feel. This year, though, a few of the readings were held in other venues-- viz., Madison coffee shops. I wish I'd been able to get out to those, 'cause I love cafe readings. (Maybe next year?) I typically attend several readings in the course of the con, but this year I was able to attend only one, the second of the two groups of Aqueduct authors reading.
Kath and Tom attended the first one (which was held at the same time as one of my panels), though, and got some photos of Aqueduct's authors.
Here is Carolyn Ives Gilman, reading from Aliens of the Heart.
Nisi Shawl read from Filter House.
Anne Sheldon read from Adventures of the Faithful Counselor.
Wendy Walker also read.
And Sue Lange read, too.
I was able to attend the second group of Aqueduct authors reading, though. Eleanor Arnason has a few things to say about it in her posts on WisCon, which you can find on her blog. As she notes, she read a very short piece-- and she also announced that she was working on a rewrite of her sequel to A Woman of the Iron People, "Hearth World," for Aqueduct, which evoked a great, roaring cheer from the audience.
Vandana Singh read the opening of her novella, Of Love and Other Monsters (which resulted in Aqueduct's selling out all the copies of it that we brought to the con by late Sunday afternoon). I know that text well; it was a pleasure hearing the author's own voice speaking it.
Nancy Jane Moore read the dramatic conclusion, rather than the opening, of one of her stories in her new collection from PS Publishing, Conscientious Inconsistencies.
Eileen Gunn read a tantalizing fragment of a story set on Christmas Day, involving elves, that was bizarre, frightening, and heartbreaking and literally had me sitting forward on the edge of my seat, waiting to see what would happen next. And later, after everyone had finished reading, she read her short, stunning poem "To the Moon Alice," which can be found in LCRW #22.
And finally, Andrea Hairston, who is hands-down the best reader I've ever had the pleasure to hear read, offered us the vivid, harrowing first chapter of her new, as yet unpublished novel, which opens in the late-19th-century American South.
I could fairly feel the audience around me shivering (and not just from the room's freezing air, which necessitated Andrea's wearing the jacket that an audience member kindly loaned her).
I loved the reading, I loved the thought that these authors and their fine work are what Aqueduct is all about. What a joy to be in such company!
The format and setting of WisCon's GoH readings are quite different from that of the group readings, for they feature a single author in a 75-minute time slot. I wanted to attend Maureen's, but alas, it was not to be. I can, though, tell you about my own. First, I should probably mention that it was held in one of the larger rooms, where a long table with microphones is placed on a dais in front of many rows of chairs with an aisle between them. This is not a good setup for a reading. For one thing, I prefer to stand when I read. For another, I had no wish to be elevated and distant from the audience. My solution was to detach a microphone from one of its holders and stand on the floor, holding the mike in one hand an the book I was reading from in the other. This was a bit awkward, but it worked as long as I was holding a conversations pieces volume in my hand. (See the photo, which Kath took.) It couldn't work, though, for one of the books of the Marq'ssan Cycle (even the smallest of which are too heavy to hold open in one hand). So then I tried just projecting my voice, without a mike, and found that it worked.
I began by reading "Dear Alice Sheldon" from Talking Back: Epistolary Fantasies. (I have Lena de Tar to thank for having suggested that I read both nonfiction and fiction.) I then read a couple of nonspoilery scenes from Stretto, the last book of the Marq'ssan Cycle. I had prepared other things to read, but I thought, given the excellent composition of the audience attending, that a Q&A might be better. In fact, the Q&A turned into a lively, interesting conversation to which numerous audience members contributed. I'm still thinking about some of it.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2007, Part 2: Eleanor Arnason, Carolyn Ives Gilman, and Rebecca Ore
The lists continue!
Eleanor Arnason:
What movies have I seen this year that I liked? Flushed Away by the Aardman Studio, famous for the Wallace and Grommet shorts. This is a full length movie, done by computer imaging rather than claymation: the story of an upper class rat, who discovers the world of working class rats in the sewers of
Carolyn Ives Gilman:
I have very little time to read for pleasure; the only times in my life absolutely staked out for fun reading are in airports and hotel rooms, which puts a high premium on easy to pick up and distracting. Nevertheless, my definition of a good read is something that makes me grab my notebook (the one I always carry in my purse, along with the driver's license and credit card) and start scribbling. This year, the top three scribble sources in my life have been: 1. The New York Times. Anyone who can read the news these days without getting steamed up to write something is immune to outrage.
3. Science News. The world sure is a weird place. This little newsletter, which I have read religiously for thirty years, brings a new dose of boggling revelations to my door every week. Did you know that the bracts on pine cones are arranged in spirals that conform to the "golden ratio" of ancient Greek geometers? (Did you know that pine cone petals are called bracts?)
Rebecca Ore:
Books and Things Read in 2007
I think this is going to have to be favorite stuff, since I can remember things I read on line with more pleasure than most of the books I’ve read.The three most intriguing books I’ve read in the last year or so were 1491: New Revelations of the
Of the three, Guthrie’s book cuts through the sentimentalizing of the past so common in most discussions of the Ice Age. He’s a biologist and a hunter and knows his mammoths from the carcasses that thaw out of Alaskan tundra permafrost. As a bowhunter, he immediately knew the catalogues that sold the contemporary equivalents of arrow straighteners which many scholars who’d never shot anything assumed were symbolic objects. Guthrie says the art was adolescent play. He points out that the later variants of exploring adolescents who he believes made the art in the first place discovered most of the caves. He doesn’t destroy the poetry. It’s a different poetry, the poetry of thinking about skills visually, of rehearsing in art what scares, what the artist is trying to master. Adolescents in our culture do a different art, but I’ve seen photographs of graffiti that were as elaborate as anything painted in the caves. Guthrie also looks at the whole of the activity and points out that for every art book masterpiece, there were hundreds of sketches, botched work, and even vandalism of earlier works. Way cool -- a wonderful corrective for the accounts of Paleolithic art by non-hunters and non-biologists.
1491 covers the
Mithen’s book would have been helped if he hadn’t framed it with a time-travelling point of view character. The archeological research is sound; the framing device made me grit my teeth. Use it as a guide to current work in various parts of the world.
The rest of my reading this year has been on-line communities. One that’s currently holding my interest is the International Falconry Forum. What’s intriguing about this one is the range of people who train and fly birds of prey, and the arguments the British traditionalists get into with the
The whole phenomenon of Internet communities has eaten a lot of time, gotten me a new job and share in a house in the Northern Virginia suburbs of
I think we’re just beginning to explore the Paleoelectric.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Aliens of the Heart by Carolyn Ives Gilman
The second book of the two I picked up on Friday from our
To Betty Lindstrom it seemed like her whole world was drying up and blowing away. She and Wayne had had to lease out the last 40 acres that spring to a man from the next county who was farming nearly all the land in their township. He’d taken out the fences and cut down the beech-tree windbreaks Betty’s father had planted in the ’30s, and now plowed fields came right up to the edge of the farmhouse yard on every side.
Betty Lindstrom leaves Wayne at the gas station in the derelict town of “
As she started the car, Betty had a strange, reckless idea. What if she just turned east instead of west and drove off out of town? What if she just left
They left town about
Betty drives west, but alone with the prairie and the wind, though everything looks familiar, she can’t seem to find the way home through a landscape that memories and visions have saturated with the strangeness of history.
In “Frost Painting,” art critic Galena Pittman falls in love with Thea, an artist attracted to working in ephemeral media, such as frost. When Thea leaves, drawn to the colony of humans seeking mysterious aliens who might or might not exist,
The vegetation on north slopes, south slopes, and valley floor was a pattern of green, teal, and umber. It was as if someone had taken a giant brush and painted the land to form an abstract of overlapping tints. “Isn’t that natural?”
“Of course not. This was one of the first landscape paintings the colony did. Here, let me drive so you can watch.”
A little reluctantly,
At first
The car stopped.
“I don’t know,” Thea said. “It looks different at every time of day, and every type of weather.”
“I don’t know,” Thea said again.
As they continued on,
They arrived at the Flens down a rocky path. At first, it looked like a range of rampart cliffs, formed into organ‑pipe pillars of a thousand dimensions. A swarm of people was at work on the cliff face, some on scaffolding anchored into the rock, some swinging on ropes. Though she tried from several angles,
When she asked, Thea laughed. “The sculpture is not in the rock,” she said. “The medium we are working in is wind. At sunset, the mountain above us cools faster than the valley, and a wind rushes down the slope. The Flens will catch it in a thousand fissures, and part it, till it forms a shape. We will know we have gotten it right when the rock pipes sing. It’s almost done; we are tuning it now.”
“You are making an organ from the mountain,”
“An organ only the wind can play,” Thea answered.
In “Okanoggan Falls” (which Carolyn wrote about in a post here last summer), Susan Abernathy undertakes to humanize Captain Groton, the alien occupation officer charged with removing the residents of Okanoggan Falls, Wisconsin, so that the aliens can mine its silica.
“Never mind the glass,” Susan said, taking it and handing the pieces to Tom. “Did you cut yourself?”
“No, of course—” he stopped in mid-denial, staring at his hand. A thin line of blood bisected the palm.
"Here, I’ll take care of that,” she said. Taking him by the arm, she led him to the bathroom. It was not until she had dabbed the blood off with a tissue that she realized he was not recoiling at her touch as he had before. Inwardly, she smiled at small victories. But when she brought out a bottle of spray disinfectant, he did recoil, demanding suspiciously, “What is it?”
“Disinfectant,” she said. “To prevent infection. It’s alcohol-based.”
“Oh,” he said. “I thought it might be water.”
She spritzed his hand lightly, then applied a bandage. He was looking curiously around. “What is this place?”
It’s a bathroom,” she said. “We use it to—well, clean ourselves, and groom, and so forth. This is the toilet.” She raised the lid, and he drew back, obviously repulsed. She had to laugh. “It’s really very clean. I swear.”
“It has water in it,” he said with disgust.
"But the water’s not dirty, not now.”
“Water is always dirty,” he said. “It teems with bacteria. It transmits a thousand diseases, yet you humans touch it without any caution. You allow your children to play in it. You drink it, even. I suppose you have gotten used to it, living on this world where it contaminates everything. It even falls from the sky. It is impossible to get away from it. You have no choice but to soak in it.”
Struck by the startling image of water as filth, Susan said, “Occupying our world must be very unpleasant for you. What is your planet like?”
"It is very dry,” he said. “Miles and miles of hot, clean sand, like your
“You must drink water sometimes. Your metabolisms are not that different from ours, or you would not be able to eat our food.”
“The trace amounts in foods are enough for us. We do not excrete it like you do.”
“So that’s why you don’t have bathrooms,” she said.
He paused, clearly puzzled. Then it dawned on him what she had left out of her explanation. “You use this room for excretory functions?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s supposed to be private.”
“But you excrete fluids in public all the time,” he said. “From your noses, your mouths, your skin. How can you keep it private?”
For a moment the vision of humans as oozing bags of bacteria left her unable to answer. Then she said, “That’s why we come here, to clean it all off.”
He looked around. “But there is no facility for cleaning.”
“Sure there is.” She turned on the shower. “See?”
he reacted with horror, so she quickly shut it off. She explained, “You see, we think of water as clean. We bathe in it. How do you bathe?”
“Sand,” he said. “Tubs of dry, heated sand. It is heavenly.”
“It must be.” She could picture it: soft, white sand. Like what lay under the Okanoggan limestone. She looked at him in dawning realization. “Is that why you want…?”
“I cannot say anything about that,” he said. “Please do not ask me.”
Which was all the answer she needed.
In the final story, “The Conservator,” the Conservator attends to a very special document and discovers that the relationship between map and landscape is more complicated than she had thought.
The lights came on, creating a cocoon of artificial brightness under the darkened dome. The two assistant archivists held open the double doors, and the maintenance men maneuvered through with an enormous muslin-wrapped roll on their shoulders. Obeying the Archivist’s precise instructions, they brought it to the center of the room and laid it on the dropcloth. The assistants knelt down to untie the fabric laces that secured the covering.
The Conservator drew close as they began to unroll the document. It had been described to her, but it was more compelling in reality. Her mind sharpened with a cold rush of vitality. She was in the presence of the thing to which she was most devoted: the authentic artifact, the tangible object on whose surface the past was written in cypher.
It was a map of the great river, source to mouth, drawn in uncanny detail. And yet, as it unrolled before her, the Conservator could see it was no ordinary map. Six feet wide and thirty long, it was a layered creation, many-leaved as fillo dough. She drew on latex gloves and knelt to finger its edge. Not only were there layers, but they were of different materials, bonded securely together. The bottom layer was a milky-white cured hide, soft and supple. Then there was a sheet of thin, pliable birchbark taken from the inner layer of the tree, once colored a pinkish beige but now browned with time. Then a layer of parchment followed by one of laid paper—the hand-crafted kind that still showed the ladderlike pattern of the screen on which it was made. Next was a layer of higher-quality wove paper, and one of the sized linen once used for architectural drawings. The topmost layer was a brittle, yellowed paper, disintegrating in snowflake bits that already littered the dropcloth.
“It’s ironic that the most recent layer is in the worst shape,” the Archivist said. She sounded tragic, not ironic.
“Not unusual, though,” the Conservator said. It was wood-pulp paper, a mass manufacturing process introduced in the 1880s that resulted in such a high acid content that the material literally self-destructed. In all the archives of the country, the recent paper was eating itself away even when stored in perfect conditions. Inherent vice, conservators called it. Most of the printed history of the twentieth century would be gone before another hundred years passed. It was inscribed on an evanescent surface.
Copies of Aliens of the Heart can be purchased for $9 from Aqueduct Press. Subscribers to the Conversation Pieces series will be happy to know that their copies of Aliens of the Heart and Of Love and Other Monsters went out in this morning’s mail.
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Aliens of the Heart by Carolyn Ives Gilman
I'm pleased to announce that Aqueduct Press will be publishing Aliens of the Heart, a collection of short fiction by Carolyn Ives Gilman, as a volume in our Conversation Pieces series; we'll be releasing it in October. The collection will comprise one original story and three reprints, including "Okanoggan Falls," which the author discussed in her post Some Thoughts About Women and War.
This will be Carolyn’s second volume in the Conversation Pieces series. Her novella Candle in A Bottle was published as Volume 13 and is, of course, still available from Aqueduct Press.
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