The Mumpsimus

  I reviewed Mary Rickert's novel The Memory Garden for the Los Angeles Review of Books . I loved the book, but it was a difficult review to write because it's just about impossible to say anything about this novel without ruining a significant effect of the last quarter of it. I'm not a fan of spoiler warnings, and generally think such things give way too much emphasis to plot, but in this case I think it is a book that needs some sort of warning before you read anything about it, because the effect of the last quarter is just so powerful and so much more than merely about the plot. So I said that in the review. Which in and of itself is almost saying too much. Here's a better review of The Memory Garden : Go read this book!

This is the ninth in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found  here . 2004 was the first full year of The Mumpsimus. It was also the year with the largest number of posts: 319. (These days, I'm able to get out about 100 or so in a year.) And it was the year when a relatively large number of people began to notice what was going on here. That initial attention is what made me think this was not, perhaps, just a useless lark. A lark, yes, and largely useless, yes, but maybe not completely so... The year began with a post about returning : I hadn't paid a lot of attention to the site at the end of 2003, having written one post in December and none in November. The first paragraph of that post indicates that I was still thinking of this as a site about, primarily if not exclusively, science fiction. The reason for my absence...

M. Rickert's "Cold Fires", published last year, was a story that astounded me with its complex structure, its imagery, and its enigmas. It's dangerous, though, to hope for a writer to repeat their previous success, because repetition usually leads to dilution; and yet it's difficult not to compare other work to the touchstone and find it lacking. Thus, when I read the two Rickert stories Fantasy & Science Fiction published this year, "The Harrowing" and "A Very Little Madness Goes a Long Way" (in the April and August issues, respectively), I knew they were well written, intelligent, strange, and even lovely ... but no matter how I thought about them, no matter how much I tried to appreciate them for what they were on their own, with their own purposes and pleasures, they just weren't "Cold Fires". Now comes the third Rickert story of the year, this one published at SciFiction, "Anyway" , and I'm beginning ...

There are many reasons to subscribe to F&SF , but my own has become a simple, single one: because Mary Rickert publishes most of her work there. Yes, plenty of other good writers appear in those pages, but Rickert is my favorite for the moment, because her stories are enigmatic gems, sometimes sharp and disturbing, sometimes gentle and funny, and often a mix of quotidian details with tropes from traditional fantasy and myth (or, occasionally, science fiction). In her stories, dream logic creates understructures of metaphor -- subtexts and echoes play off the other elements of the story to create a rich imaginative landscape. The latest issue of F&SF (the October/November double issue) contains "Cold Fires", a complex new tale from Rickert that manages to be three stories in one and much more than that. It starts off like a tall tale of a brutally cold winter: It was so cold dogs barked to go outside, and immediately barked to come back in, and then barked to go...

A couple months ago I said that Lucius Shepard's story "Only Partly Here" is likely to be read differently because it was published in a genre magazine ( Asimov's ) than it would have been were it published in a non-genre magazine. The story's fantastic elements are ambiguous, but since it appeared in Asimov's , most readers are probably more likely than they would be otherwise to assume that the "proper" reading of the story is to give full weight to the supernatural suggestions. M. Rickert's "Many Voices", from the March issue of F&SF , poses similar problems of interpretation, although to a lesser extent. Part of the story is narrated by a woman who has murdered someone because angels told her to. She claims to be able to read people's "auras", to predict the future, and to heal the sick through a sort of psychokinesis. Standard New Age woo-woo. The one thing we know is that the character fully believes hers...