Book Received...David Mitchell

Back in the summer of 2012, when I learned that the Wachowski Brothers' directed Cloud Atlas, starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry, was to be released in October, I decided it was about time that I read the novel, considering that David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas had been published eight years earlier.

Cloud Atlas was even one of the few books I added to my Goodreads shelf -- that's how intrigued I was with the prospect of finally reading this book. The story is divided into seemingly unrelated sections: The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing, Letters from Zedelghem, Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery, and The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish -- all well-written and as intriguing as I had hoped: great stuff. Then I got to the section An Orison of Sonmi-451 -- an interview with a genetically engineered fabricant. And the interview seemed to go on and on and... and I became bored and set the book down. Never to pick it up again. In fact, just the other day I realized the title was still listed as being read on my Goodreads shelf, about two years later! (P.S. I haven't seen the movie yet either; I'll wait now for it to be available on cable.)

But, I'm not giving up on David Mitchell, and, in fact, courtesy of Suvudu.com, I now have an Advance Reader's Edition of The Bone Clocks to read at my leisure.

Here's an excerpt from the publisher's PR sheet that was inside the book:

Following a scalding row with her mother, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: A sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as "the radio people," Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena, and she has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics—and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly's life, affecting all the people Holly loves—even the ones who are not yet born. A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence; a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting from occupied Iraq; a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list—all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world.

Mitchell's writing has that underlying element of the "fantastic" -- science fiction in Cloud Atlas, and evidently the supernatural in The Bone Clocks -- and yet, his fiction is considered "mainstream," as is the fiction of W. P. Kinsella, whom I wrote about here, and Kazuo Ishiguro, whom I wrote about here, to name only two others. And gawd help us if we should ever refer to these individuals as science fiction writers.

Alien Contact Anthology -- Story #6

Blogger and Internet Explorer 8 (my browser of choice) were not playing together nicely for nearly all of Friday, so this blog post is a day later than I had anticipated. However, I'm still on target to complete 26 blog posts, at one post per week, to introduce the 26 stories to be included in my Alien Contact anthology, forthcoming from Night Shade Books in November. My rather loose introduction to this anthology was posted on April 25 and would be a good place to start, if you are new to this blog.

"I Am the Doorway" by Stephen King

Night Shift, I believe, was Stephen King's first short story collection. I had to obtain permission for the use of "I Am the Doorway" through Random House, who owns the publishing rights to Night Shift, which includes this story. So that's why you're seeing the first edition of the book pictured to the left. And also because this story was originally published in the March 1971 issue of Cavalier, a so-called "men's magazine," and the cover is a bit too risqué to reprint here.¹ But that was the magazine Stephen King was selling his stories to at the time.

"I Am the Doorway" is the oldest story included in Alien Contact, and is approximately 5,000 words in length. I had not intended to include in this anthology any stories that were published prior to about 1980 or so. But during my second meeting with Jeremy Lassen, Editor in Chief at Night Shade Books, in which we discussed the contents of the anthology, he suggested King's "I Am the Doorway." And, when the editor in chief recommends a story to this editor -- considering that the anthology had not as yet been accepted for publication by said editor in chief -- well, this editor in particular listens!

In my own library I have King's Dark Tower series as well as the Green Mile series; and I have also read the "complete and uncut" edition of The Stand (which endowed me with a near-divine appreciation for the art and skill of editing). And I am also eagerly awaiting King's forthcoming novel 11/22/63. But I haven't read much of King's short fiction, so for this reason alone I appreciated Jeremy's suggestion.

I then asked Jeremy for some thoughts on this particular story; I had assumed he had read it many, many years ago and yet the story remained fully in mind, enough so that he was easily able to state the title, and some basic content, during our meeting. Here's what Jeremy had to say:

A couple of years ago, I went through a Stephen King short fiction re-read...reading through Night Shift and Skeleton Crew back to back.

What struck me at the time was how incredibly political, and grounded in the politics of the Vietnam war, much of Stephen King's early short fiction was. "I Am the Doorway" is, to my mind, no exception to this. It reads now as alternate history, with an extrapolated space program...but at the time, I think it was a great metaphor for the failure of American Imperialism. Despite our technology, we were defeated...infiltrated even, by an alien enemy we didn't really understand. Science Fiction. It's not about the future, it's about the time it was written. And to me, "I am the Doorway" is a perfect expression of the era in which it was written. And it is a lesson...a metaphor that is even more horribly appropriate now than it was then.