"Residue" by Michael Arsenault

The following story -- "Residue" -- will be the sixth, and final, story to be posted here from my co-edited anthology (with Nick Gevers) Is Anybody Out There? recently published by Daw Books. I hope these stories have intrigued you enough to purchase a copy of the book -- either the mass market paperback edition or the Kindle ebook edition, or both! The anthology contains an additional 9 original stories, by (in order of appearance) Alex Irvine, Yves Meynard, Mike Resnick and Lezli Robyn, Paul Di Filippo, Ray Vukcevich, Matthew Hughes, Ian Watson, Felicity Shoulders and Leslie What, and James Morrow (a nearly 9,000-word story), plus an introduction by Paul McAuley. So there is a lot more reading to be had in the book, and I believe you'll find the quality of these stories easily warrant multiple readings. But enough of the promotion....

In 2002, while working on the Witpunk anthology, co-editor Claude Lalumière sent me a story entitled "A Halloween Like Any Other," written by Michael Arsenault, an author with whom I had no familiarity, or even knowledge of, at the time. Claude asked that I consider the story for our anthology, which I did, and the story was accepted. I learned much later that Claude had attended a party at which Michael had "performed" (Michael's word) the story; that's how Claude came by the story initially.

So, if not for Claude, Michael and I would never have met -- virtually speaking, that is -- and I wouldn't have invited him to contribute a story to the anthology Is Anybody Out There? and Nick and I would not have seen this wonderful little gem of a story -- "Residue."¹

About "Residue," Michael writes: "While on a camping trip, I decided to take a late-night canoe ride. I paddled out to the middle of the lake and then looked up at the sky. It was hard not to notice the difference between this view and the one I had back in the city. Out here I could actually see the stars. Back at home, even on a cloudless night, I'd be hard pressed to spot more than a dozen, but that night, on that lake, I could see thousands twinkling up there. In order to take it all in, I lay down on the bottom of the boat and looked up. Positioned like that I had an unobstructed view, and this, coupled with the gentle rocking of the canoe in the water, began to make me feel weightless. As if gravity had let go of its hold on me and I might start floating up at any moment -- an entirely new sensation for me. One I didn't care for even a little. My stomach churned and my sense of balance abandoned me completely. Frankly, it was a miracle I managed to hang on to my dinner. In the end, at least one good thing came of that experience: it inspired the mood and setting of my story 'Residue.' Not the lake part, nor so much the feeling ill part, but the general sense of wonder and awe that comes with proper stargazing. So maybe, hopefully, all that queasiness was worth it in the end."

Residue

by Michael Arsenault

      They went outside, lay down on the grass, and looked up at the stars.

      Everything was quiet for about a minute, and then:

      "So…"

      "So?"

      "So what are we doing out here?"

      "We're… Nothing. We're just out here."

      "Why?"

      "I don't know. If you really need a reason I guess we could say we're communing with nature. Or something."

      "Since when do we do that?"

      "Since…tonight. Since right now."

      "This doesn't sound like you. Why are you being weird?"

      "I just want to be outside for a little while, okay? Out of the house and away from distractions."

      "What distractions?"

      "Lots of things. Television, for instance."

      "What's wrong with TV?"

      "Nothing, just God forbid it should ever be turned off while we're conscious."

      "You're touchy all of a sudden."

      "Look, I just want to lie here, have a moment of peace, and see if I can connect with something. Stare up into the sky, and, I don't know…ponder the meaning of the universe. What's so weird about that?"

      "It's not like you."

      "Fine. It's not like me. I'm different now."

      "I think I feel bugs crawling up my legs."

      "Maybe you should just go back inside."

      "Don't be so --"

      "No one's forcing you to stay out here."

      "I'm not…"

      "You're not what?"

      "I'm doing my best, okay? I'm trying."

      "I guess."

      "…Do you…?"

      "Do I what?"

      "Don't bite my head off. I was just going to ask if you know any of their names."

      "Whose names?"

      "The stars. The planets. The…whatever those patterns are called."

      "The constellations?"

      "Yeah."

      "No. Don't really know their names. I mean, of course I know some of them, but I don't know which is which."

      "Me neither. I never really thought much about it before, but now that we're here looking up I feel kind of ignorant."

      "You're not ignorant."

      "I feel that way. Ignorant. Not to mention insignificant."

      "Looking up at the sky can do that to a person."

"Graffiti in the Library of Babel" by David Langford (Part 1 of 2)

To continue my celebration -- and promotion -- of Is Anybody Out There? (Daw Books, June 1), my co-edited anthology with Nick Gevers, another story from the book follows.

But first...

The second review of IAOT? has appeared -- from John Ottinger (@johnottinger) on his Grasping for the Wind blog. Typically a review of an anthology will specifically mention maybe 5 or 6 stories and/or authors at most, along with a critique of the anthology as a whole. But John's review contains details on all 15 stories, as well as the introduction, providing readers with a comprehensive look at the entire anthology. John writes: "In Gevers and Halpern’s collection of fifteen original stories, [the Fermi] paradox gets the fictional treatment, explored and examined as only speculators can do....the anthology is an enjoyable read, one that is fairly entertaining with flashes of storytelling flair. Recommended if you have ever asked yourself the very question which provides the title."

And if you decide to click on over to John's review, please do make your way back here for David Langford's story, "Graffiti in the Library of Babel," the third story to be posted in its entirety from Is Anybody Out There?

I've never met David Langford, but I've been a long-time fan of his sardonic fiction, and I've been reading his zine Ansible¹ for what seems like decades. (Wait! It has been decades!) In 2002, Claude Lalumière and I selected David's story "Encounter of Another Kind" (Interzone, December 1991) for inclusion in our co-edited anthology Witpunk (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003) -- a collection of sardonic fiction, with about half the stories original to the collection and the other half reprints. So, it was only natural for me to invite David to contribute to this anthology as well, and I'm so glad that I did.²

To quote from David's Wikipedia entry: "As of 2008 he has received, in total, 28 Hugo Awards, his 19-year winning streak coming to an end in 2008. A 31-year streak of nominations (1979-2009) for Best Fan Writer came to an end in 2010." Now that's a lot of Hugo Awards -- and nominations!

About his story "Graffiti in the Library of Babel" David writes: "Too many nonfiction commitments, not enough stories written. 'Graffiti in the Library of Babel' is my only fiction of 2009, inspired by our editors' kindly invitation, my inability to resist a Borges allusion, and some random thoughts about unperceived signals. Suppose the aliens out there made the traditional study of our Earthly communications, analysed the most popular forms of email, and offered us the boundless wealth of Contact in terms which we automatically filter out owing to the strong Nigerian accent? No, no, Charlie Stross must already have written that one.³ Some further supposing eventually led to 'Graffiti.'"

Graffiti in the Library of Babel

by David Langford

"There seems to be no difference at all between the message of maximum content (or maximum ambiguity) and the message of zero content (noise)."

-- John Sladek, "The Communicants"

As it turned out, they had no sense of drama. They failed to descend in shiny flying discs, or even to fill some little-used frequency with a tantalizing stutter of sequenced primes. No: they came with spray cans and spirit pens, scrawling their grubby little tags across our heritage.

Or as an apologetic TotLib intern first broke the news: "Sir, someone's done something nasty all over Jane Austen."

# # #

The Total Library project is named in homage to Kurd Lasswitz's thought experiment "Die Universal Bibliothek," which inspired a famous story by Jorge Luis Borges. Another influence is the "World Brain" concept proposed by H. G. Wells. Assembling the totality of world literature and knowledge should allow a rich degree of cross-referencing and interdisciplinary…

Ceri Evans looked up from the brochure. Even in this white office that smelt of top management, she could never resist a straight line: "Why, congratulations, Professor. I think you may have invented the Internet!"

"Doctor, not Professor, and I do not use the title," said Ngombi with well-simulated patience. "Call me Joseph. The essential point of TotLib is that we are isolated from the net. No trolls, no hackers, none of what that Manson book called sleazo inputs. Controlled rather than chaotic cross-referencing."

"But still you seem to have these taggers?"

"Congratulations, Doctor Evans! I think you may have just deduced the contents of my original email to you."

"All right. All square." Ceri held up one thin hand in mock surrender. "We'll leave the posh titles for the medics. Now tell me: Why is this a problem in what I do, which is a far-out region of information theory, rather than plain data security?"

"Believe me, data security we know about. Hackers and student pranksters have been rather exhaustively ruled out. As it has been said, 'Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.'"

"'Holmes, this is marvellous,'" said Ceri dutifully.

"'Meretricious,' said he." Joseph grinned. "We are a literary team here."

Ceri felt a sudden contrarian urge not to be literary. "Maybe we should cut to the chase. There's only one logical reason to call me in. You suspect the Library is under attack through the kind of acausal channel I've discussed in my more speculative papers? A concept, I should remind you, that got me an IgNobel Prize and a long denunciation in The Skeptic because everyone knows it's utter lunacy. Every Einstein-worshipping physicist, at least."

A shrug. "'Once you eliminate the impossible…' And I'm not a physicist. Come and see." He was so very large and very black. Ceri found herself wondering whether his white-on-white decor was deliberate contrast.

# # #

George Alec Effinger - Part Two

My apologies for such a long delay since my previous blog post. I enjoy this enough that I would love to do it full time, but it doesn't pay the bills, unfortunately. I've had two very big projects that I've been working on that have occupied these past two weeks. I've just completed copyediting The Best of Joe R. Lansdale (approximately 152,000 words) for Tachyon Publications, scheduled to be published in 2010. I also completed my copyediting review of novel Pennterra (approximately 135,000 words) by Judith Moffett; this is the first reprint title I acquired for Fantastic Books (an imprint of Warren Lapine's Wilder Publications). The book had to be scanned from the original hardcover, and there was a huge amount of copyediting work, plus the author has made some text changes to update the book from the mid-'80s to 2009. I'm now waiting on Judy to finish her review of the last portion of the book. My next project will be copyediting vampire anthology By Blood We Live (this one's a monster 245,000 words!) edited by John Joseph Adams for Night Shade Books. Now, on to the purpose of this blog post...

This is the second of three essays on author George Alec Effinger -- one for each of the three collections of his work that I acquired and edited for Golden Gryphon Press, between 2001 and 2007. Part One of this series focused on Budayeen Nights.

Once Budayeen Nights was complete and in the hands of the typesetter, I began thinking about the next collection of Effinger's work. But now that George had passed away, I didn't have his input on this second book as I did for BN. All I had was my commitment to him to help bring his work back into print, and his email of August 30, 2001, in which he suggested a collection featuring "a hefty selection of my 200 stories, with introductions to each one, and calling it GAE: The White Album or GAE Live! At the Village Gate or . . . GAE: The Prairie Years." When George and I were communicating by email (albeit sporadically, due to his health and domicile issues) between 2001 and 2002, I had asked him to put together a list of the stories he would like to include in a "best of" collection, but time just wasn't on his side. And George wasn't kidding when he referred to his "200 stories" -- I know, as I've tried to track down a goodly portion of them! In fact, I probably have the largest "collection" of George Alec Effinger short fiction, only second to Barbara Hambly, who now has all of George's files and books in her possession.

The Concept
I'm a bit fuzzy on the details, considering it was six years ago, but if ye olde memory still serves me, I came up with the basic idea for the second collection during a telephone conversation with author George Zebrowski. Unlike archived email, I'm not able to replay and quote six-year-old telephone conversations, so memory will have to do. (Maybe AT&T has the conversation archived in some illegal-wiretapping file? GeorgeZ and I may have mentioned the words "Budayeen" or "Islamic" or "Arab" in the course of our conversations about GAE!)

I had worked with GeorgeZ on his short story collection entitled Swift Thoughts (Golden Gryphon Press, 2002). During that project, and for some time afterward, we spoke quite often on the telephone. George had unlimited long distance at the time and enjoyed calling and chatting with his many author friends and editors. It was the "author friends and editors" that gave me the idea. Since GAE was no longer with us, to select the stories for his next collection, I decided that I would ask his peers -- friends and fellow authors, and editors -- to select their favorite GAE story. And then, once they told me their favorite story, I would ask them -- as a tribute to GAE -- to write a mini introduction to the story. I wanted to first hook them on the story suggestion, and then seek their cooperation to write an intro. GeorgeZ wholeheartedly agreed to contribute, as did many others.