Alien Contact Anthology -- Story #3

The introduction to my Alien Contact anthology, which I posted on April 25, would be a good place to start, if you haven't already done so....

"Face Value" by Karen Joy Fowler

This story originally appeared in the November 1986 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited then by Edward L. Ferman, and is approximately 5,000 words in length.

I first read "Face Value" in Karen Joy Fowler's short story collection Artificial Things (Bantam Spectra, 1986), which is, sadly, out of print, but can easily be purchased from the secondary market. I believe that Artificial Things was also Karen's first book -- a rarity in publishing, to have a genre collection as a first book, particularly from a New York publisher. Genre collections as first books are quite common among small/independent publishers -- e.g authors Paul Di Filippo, Andy Duncan, M. Rickert, to name but three -- but, again, not so with NY publishers. This obviously speaks to the quality of Karen's short fiction.

I recall my writing class in college... The instructor was discussing humor in fiction, and how difficult it was to write a truly serious humorous story, if that makes sense -- i.e. not slapstick, not zany, not "doh!" humor, but serious humor. And, of course, our assignment was to write such a story ourselves. At the next class session I brought in a copy of Karen Joy Fowler's story "The Faithful Companion at Forty" (a finalist for both the Hugo and Nebula awards), handed it to the instructor at the end of class, asked her to please take it home and read it, and then let me know next week what she thought of the story. The instructor was so impressed with the story that the following week she read it out loud to the entire class. You have to understand, too, that the instructor was not a fan of science fiction/fantasy, and was rather vexed to learn that that was my interest when I introduced myself during the first day of class. Again, the instructor reading this SF story to the class is simply a testament to the quality of Karen's writing. I felt absolved in the class from that point, through to the end of the semester. [Thanks, Karen!]

Though I had been a reader and fan of Karen's work for many (many) years, my first professional encounter with her occurred in 1999: she wrote the introduction to the very first book I acquired and edited -- Richard Paul Russo's collection Terminal Visions (Golden Gryphon Press, 2000). Richard and Karen went way back in their writing careers, and he had requested that she write the introduction to his first collection.

Given all that, I was determined to include a Karen Joy Fowler story in this anthology. I chose this particular story because of the intersection of art and communication, a theme you will find in at least one other story in the anthology. With regards to art and communication, Karen has this to share about the story:

"Face Value" is a story I wrote shortly after my stories began to sell and I began to imagine that I might actually have a career as a writer. It's probably no coincidence then that it deals so directly with issues of art and of privacy and of the difficulties of trying to communicate anything with mere words. I have written a lot about how hard it is for men and women to talk to one another. My current novel-under-construction is about that childhood dream, never achieved, of talking to (non-human) animals. With that as context, to think we might someday understand and be understood by anyone with whom we share no DNA and no history is as great a leap as any a science fiction writer could take. My story is about what happens when we meet members of an alien species who share every thought perfectly and effortlessly. As we try to talk with them, which will matter more -- will it be their abilities or will it be our limitations?