Lewis Powell

I'm always saying "why isn't this sci fi short story mostly descriptions of a game of baseball?"

One book I’ve been slowly reading is “Seven Taoist Masters: A Folk Novel of China”.

Kate got it for me a couple holidays ago as a gift, knowing my interest in Taoism.

I am 8 chapters in (out of 28) and it is sort of a fascinating book in that, if this hadn’t been presented as “a novel about these seven people achieving self-mastery by Taoist sages”, it would 1000% read, so far, like a story about a charlatan establishing a cult.

The main master, and instructor of the other seven, Wang Ch’ung Yang, commences his journey to enlightenment because he had a vision at/of a nearby mountain. In order to cultivate himself he deceives his spouse and family and pretends to be ill so that he can have solitude. He then goes out in search of students (abandoning his family), and encounters a couple, Ma Yü and Sun Yüan-Chen, who are worthy of being his disciples. But only if they sign over all their wealth and family property to him.

It is one thing to have a spiritual leader say “you need to divest yourself of material possessions to pursue this course”; it is another thing to have them say “actually you need to formally sign all your wealth and property over to me, so I can use it to build a spiritual retreat/school, and to require them to formally and legally arrange the transfer rather than, as they initially offer, letting him use the funds without transferring them.

The couple then creates an elaborate lie to get the transfer done with the approval of the couple’s other relatives, claiming the transfer is temporary and related to the husband’s ill health. Immediately upon getting the transfer done, the Master then creates some charitable activity to create the impression that he is just a custodian of the couple’s wealth, and then the couple decide that instead of husband and wife, they will be brother and sister in the Tao.

If you’ve watched literally any documentaries about cults and how they operate, it is impossible not to parse virtually every part of this as red flags!

Anyway, I am curious to see where the narrative goes but it doesn’t seem like a manual for cultivating one’s virtues, on the face of it.

In this post, a follow on to this recent one, I'm going to reflect on the middle three anthologies we read:

• Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora
• Dark Matter v. 2: Reading the Bones
• Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction

Dark Matter Volume 1
separation anxiety, Evie Shockley (2000) — This is a story set in a dystopian world where people (particularly ethnic minorities, who are the characters in the story) live in highly segregated and controlled communities that are walled in and allow for some in- and out- migration, but only with permission of the white government.  The main characters are siblings who have a strong attachment to each other, but the primary protagonist wishes to pursue life beyond the walls of this controlled community, and her sister does not. Several times that we would come across sibling dynamics in other stories or later volumes, I would be reminded of this story, and how it managed to portray affection, closeness, and conflicting perspectives, all along with the story's nuanced treatment of the societal/racial issues shaping their conflict.  This may be the story I've referred back to most in relation to other stories we've read in later volumes.  Shockley is principally a poet (something that was true of a number of contributors to the Dark Matter volumes, iirc), and, unfortunately, has not written any other short stories.

Greedy Choke Puppy, Nalo Hopkinson (2000) — This is a story about a soucouyant (a creature from caribbean folklore), and as I was reading it, I had the distinct feeling I had read it before. I am not sure when or where I would have, but I don't think I was just predicting how the story would turn out, it really felt like I was remembering the ending. Maybe we read it in an English class in college?  At any rate, Hopkinson's prose is excellent, and she manages to create very effective tone/atmosphere, as well as a compelling story. "Hopkinson can write a good story" is probably not news to people, but it was definitely one of the stories that stuck with me.

The Evening and the Morning and the Night, Octavia Butler (1987) — Again, "Octavia Butler is good at writing" is not something to stop the presses over, and I had definitely read this story before, because I had read virtually everything she had written over the year or so prior to the book club getting to this volume (I started with Mind of my Mind, and then just kept going).  The primary threads in the story that connect with other of Butler's work (in my view) is a) her interest in situations where one has internal conflict between what you might call biological or other subconscious compulsion to behave one way, and one's conscious identity (in this case, there is a genetic disorder that manifests a number of behavioral compulsions for those who have it, and which have traditionally uniformly led to serious self-harm, but we also learn that it is responsible for other behavioral tendencies in our protagonist, some of which she is unhappy to accede to and does not initially want to embrace), and b) groups that don't naturally fit into existing social structures successfully, and the social structures that they would adopt if given the reigns.

Gimmile's Songs, Charles Saunders (1984) — The rare instance of one I am including that stuck with me because of how much I wound up disliking it. This is a story that had a ton of potential.  It's a sword and sorcery story, we have an awesome protagonist—Dossouye—who is riding some sort of cool animal companion, and dispatching enemies with ease (you can tell from my affinity for that CL Moore story, and Russ's Alyx story, that I am totally a sucker for this genre), but the story is basically about her running into a guy with roofie magic (via music), and then when the roofie music wears off, she is like "oh that's totally cool, because I would have been down for that anyway." And like, what I would give to be an editor who could go back and make this be a better story/series, because ugh, why squander such a cool protagonist on such misogynist garbage?

Dark Matter Volume 2
The Glass Bottle Trick, Nalo Hopkinson (2000) — I don't want to flood with Nalo Hopkinson, but I definitely remember our discussion of this piece. It's a retelling of a bluebeard and it has a lot of nice subtle things going on with the presentation and the prose.

Jesus Christ in Texas, WEB Du Bois (1920) — Some of the stories we read are doing subtle things, but this one is not being subtle.  A very effective piece and also a piece with a fairly clear and loud message ("confront your prejudice, and live up to your own professed tenets").  As we read these books, we often wondered why certain pieces were included and then we also wondered about why pieces were arranged in the order they were.  With The Future is Female volumes, the answer was clear for the latter, the pieces were in chronological order of publication.  Sometimes we had interesting thematic juxtapositions and maybe that reflected something about the time period those pieces came out in, but it might also have just been noise emerging from the random sample of two pieces chosen by the editor. As you can see from this sequence of stories, Dark Matter was not organized chronologically.  So, why were the pieces put in the order they were? Your guess is as good as mine. Sometimes adjacent stories would have thematic similarity, but often not. This is another place where editorial apparatus is helpful. If we had notes from the editor saying "I chose to include  this story because" it would give the reader a way to place the stories into that kind of context instead of just grasping for it. (Not this particular story, but I mention it here, because it's sort of an odd one out in terms of the stories that stuck with me).

Maggies, Nisi Shawl (2004) — Having looked over the rest of the stories, this is the only other ones that really stuck with me at all.  It was a story about a child's relationship with the genetically engineered (iirc) nanny that lived with the family in a terraforming colony situation. The story does a good job with the relationship dynamics but leaves a lot of the worldbuilding underdeveloped. 

Overall, I think the second Dark Matter volume was not as strong of a collection as the first (though both had several good stories including some I didn't mention here). One notable feature is that both had entries that either were poems, or were short fiction/flash fiction that bordered on being poems, which, while interesting to read, were definitely less plot oriented than I tend to prefer.

Wandering Stars
Trouble with Water, Horace Gold (1939) — A second entry in the "stuck with me for bad reasons": this story was just so goofy. The Wandering Stars volume had a lot of unfortunate stereotypes crop up throughout the stories (nagging wives? you betcha!), but this story really felt like a silver age Jimmy Olsen Comic (the era when he routinely turned into, e.g., a giant turtle, or similar), the premise is a guy who offends a water imp and gets cursed to not be able to touch water, and so the water moves away from his body whenever he would come into contact with it. This is played for...shenanigans mainly? Like, his concession stand is going to go out of business because it won't rain near him (maybe? I have trouble remembering the actual details). So it's not horror like "oh no, how will he drink? Will he die of thirst?", it's more slapstick, like "but how can he take a shower without making a mess". It's not a good story, but it is the one I am most likely to think of and giggle about, I guess.

Paradise Last, George Alec Effinger (1974) — In a future where people are strongly discouraged from being openly Jewish, the protagonist's relationship to his grandfather leads him to retain his Jewish identity, at the cost of being shipped off to a super remote planet. He winds up being assigned a more activist jewish wife (who is unhappy about this diaspora-based approach to undermining Jewish identity), and coming to to resist the authoritarianism somewhat.  I think this is the piece in the volume that I spent the most time thinking about, and probably the character that I identified the most with.

Jachid and Jechidah, Isaac Bashevis Singer (1964) — I have probably read some Singer before this, but I don't know specifically what. I liked this piece a lot. It has a folkloric quality to it, and a somber beauty to the prose and the story. 

Overall, this volume was not my favorite of the things we read (though, not my least favorite, either), and I wonder if that's because I didn't have enough distance from the subject matter, or if it's just that the anthology is somewhat dated, and a more recent, more comprehensive anthology would have landed better for me?  I am still glad we read it, but I think partially, if I had just read this one on my own, I would have gotten a lot of the same things from it that I got from reading it with the group, whereas, reading the other books with the group has generally been more eye-opening and informative about the stories, other stories that are doing similar things, reasons why the stories might not be working for me, that aren't just "the story isn't good" (or the situations in which we all sort of agree "nope, that story just isn't very good").

Okay, in a couple of days, I'll retrospect the other three volumes that we read, and maybe decide whether these stories have been about man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. self, or man vs. Donatello

my current list of upcoming reads (indeterminate order) include: