Fantastic Metropolis

March 15, 2002

The Shadow Cabinet

Jeff VanderMeer

One aspect of fantastical literature that concerns me deeply and which has universal implications is the relative paucity of unique, interesting imaginations within fiction today. Too many writers and readers prefer their literature spoon-fed to them, in portions similar to the last, with the same smells and colors, served to them on the same worn dishes, and accompanied by the same polite conversation. It seems to me that reading — reading well, with an appreciation for more than just the basics of narrative, plot, or story — is a heroic act these days, especially considering the distractions of other media. Comic books, movies, and television shows can all be quite profound, but even the best examples provide us with ready-made immutable images. Reading a book that not only entertains but is also deeply felt — deeply realized, created from a highly personal vision, strikes me as a kind of rebellion.

Reading fully engages and strengthens that long dormant muscle called the imagination, which is the most visible manifestation of the soul. Books define who we are but, more importantly, they allow us to dream well. History has shown us all too often the consequences of dreaming poorly or not at all.

The ultimate effect of the inability to reach beyond a certain set of constraints is to create a Shadow Cabinet — an anti-canon that exists in the minds of those readers who have not been colonized by the all-too-familiar. Some of these books remain in print and although not widely known still find an audience. However, certain members of the Shadow Cabinet cannot be easily found outside of used bookstores or dusty warehouses, where they wait to be discovered sometime in the future. These are the books that good readers hoard in order to send copies out to new converts. Such books, which have so enhanced our own imaginations, can only be rescued by holding them in our memories and by spreading the word.

One book that recently joined the ranks of the Shadow Cabinet, The Troika (excerpt), by Stepan Chapman, began its “public life” as even less than a published novel. For 10 years, it existed only as excerpts in various literary journals, no publisher willing to bring it out into the light. The reader could intuit the existence of a larger vision through the jagged fragments in those journals, but nothing more. That it has once again receded into the world of shadow is perhaps no surprise.

The Troika is that rarest of birds, a truly visionary novel of the surreal that never loses sight of its main characters’ lives. In this case, those characters happen to be a robotic jeep (Alex), a brontosaurus (Naomi), and an old Mexican woman (Eva). If that sounds strange, consider this: the troika is trudging across an endless desert lit by three purple suns. Not only has their journey lasted hundreds of years, but they have no memory of their past lives, and therefore no clue as to how they came to walk the desert. Only at night, in dreams, do they recall fragments of their past identities. To further complicate matters, sandstorms jolt them out of one body and into another (a game of metaphysical musical chairs): Eva falls asleep a Mexican woman only to wake up a jeep.

The novel alternates between dream-tales about the troika’s former lives and their present-day attempts to discover where they are and how they can get out. From this quest form, Chapman has fashioned a poignant and powerful story of redemption in which pathos is leavened by humor and pain is softened by comfort. It is the story of Alex who wanted to be a machine. It is also the story of deranged angels, deadly music boxes, and of the love and desperation that can bind people together.

As importantly, The Troika is a stylistic tour-de-force — it abounds with magnificent prose passages, some of which delight and some of which horrify. One of the cleverest passages describes an alternate theory for why the dinosaurs died out:

The dinosaurs called them The Spoilers. They evolved from the man-of-war and grew huge on the surface of the oceans. They killed by stinging. They were hollow animals, beasts of living origami, with radial skeletons of cuttlebone and opalescent white skins. They rolled up onto the beaches like moving cities, folding into and over themselves. Lifting their minarets against the purple skies, they scoured the continents, consumed the fern forests, slow and hideous and inevitable as doom… In a matter of decades, the Spoilers chewed the Earth down to its rind. They all starved, leaving behind not a single fossil to mark their passing.

This little story is irrelevant to the plot and yet indicative of the novel’s many tangential pleasures, none of which harm the main thrust of the narrative. Chapman is a master of creating backdrops that have real depth and life — the images and ideas he tosses out would be the foreground material in a novel by a less inspired writer.

A good example of Chapman’s stylistic genius can be found in his account of Naomi joining the army. On Chapman’s Earth, the nations with the strongest military might don’t hoard nuclear weapons — they hoard frozen soldiers. The description of Naomi’s initial emersion in a suspended animation tank is worth quoting at length:

Cheated of shivering and cramps. Cheated of pleas and tears. Nothing outside of me, just my brain winding up my spinal cord like a rubber band in a toy airplane. Struggling to squirm out of the rotten, frozen core of that dark, that dark, that dark so cold, you could cut it with knife, a knife, a knife so sharp, it could cut off your thumb, and your thumb so numb, it wouldn’t cut butter, butter, butter so small that it sings in the eye of an icicle, slips through the needle so thin, it would slide off a spoon, and the spoon so hot, it burns a hole in your tongue, and your tongue so wet that it sticks to a frosty parking meter, and there you are, there you are, there you are, stuck. On a city street, in the dirty sleet, stuck by your tongue. And it’s no consolation that you’re one of a series, just one little girl in a row of foolish little girls in blue jackets, all standing on the sidewalk, all spit-glued to parking meters. Because they were all so foolish and also because someone, someone they never see, keeps coming around and putting cold silver quarters in the meters, to avoid little red violation flags and to keep the current running through the meters, so the tongues stay stuck, all those raw, purple tongues of all those little girls, for twenty years. Oh children misled! Said the voice in my head. Beware! Beware! For thou art dead. Beware entrapment by refrigerator. Beware the lid that slams on suffocation. Beware the stinging freezer mites that swarm in the ice cubes that float in the desolate gutters of freezer burn, where no hipboots can call you an ambulance. This is the place of itching, buzzing battery acid, where balloons break like eggshells, and eggshells bend like balloons.

The ability displayed above to simulate a mind shutting down, to mix almost-stream-of-consciousness with dead-on metaphors to describe the process of encroaching deep freeze — this ability is what separates a major writer from a lesser writer, a stylist from a technician. This ability, contrary to what they tell you in writing workshops, cannot be taught. It’s a gift to be treasured by readers fortunate enough to stumble upon it. (It’s also, unfortunately, not a quality much prized by commercial publishers.)

Following several break-neck narratives that provide textbook examples of how to create suspense and tension, the denouement of The Troika has a tremendous cathartic effect on the reader, who has shared a harrowing journey with fascinating characters. Portions of the novel remind me of Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, early Harlan Ellison, and Philip K. Dick, but, in truth, these are nearly silent echoes, for Chapman possesses the type of originality that places him more exactly among the ranks of those writers not connected to any school or movement — namely, writers like Mervyn Peake, Angela Carter, and Alasdair Gray.

In 1997, I managed to find the financial backing to publish the novel through my own Ministry of Whimsy Press. When the dust settled, the book had won the Philip K. Dick Award and received rave reviews in over 100 publications worldwide. However, as of this month, the book resides in the purgatory between out-of-print and in print. (A few copies are still available through Amazon. A warehouse somewhere in the western United States has some copies as well.) Thus, it is perhaps appropriate to remind readers of its existence as it once again recedes into a kind of limbo. It is certainly possible that it may return to a shadowy half-life through print-on-demand in the next year. But for now, it has become the newest member of the Shadow Cabinet, a junior officer in a world of miracles and marvels beyond the ken of anyone who did not luck out and buy a copy while it was widely available.

— Jeff VanderMeer

Thanks to Mike Simanoff for his invaluable research and assistance.

(Compiled by the Editorial Board and Mike Simanoff.)

Untranslated Books

Readers who read in English only have another Shadow Cabinet to consider: foreign-language books not yet translated into English. What follows is a partial list of titles that merit translation into English.

Serbian Authors

(Provided by Zoran Zivkovic.)

Portuguese and Brazilian Authors

(Provided by Luís Rodrigues.)

Hungarian Authors

(Provided by Péter Michaleczky.)

See also: “A Brief History of Hungarian SF”.

Korean Authors

(Provided by Minsoo Kang.)

Copyright © 1996 by Jeff VanderMeer