Danilo

Short Story by Carol Emshwiller

I'm never quite sure why I love Emshwiller stories as much as I do. This one left me with a big goofy grin, but it's hard to explain exactly why. I'm confident most people will enjoy reading the story though, so go do that.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled rambling:

Lewella is an older, single woman. Her head is in the clouds most of the time, and she's more than a bit crazy. The story is narrated by her friend Mary Ellen, who describes Lewella like so:

"She sits and hums to herself. Bees and hummingbirds fly aroundher as if she's a flower and even when she's not wearing red or yellow. There's a jay that comes and hops around her feet and she feeds him crumbs. ... Once a streak of sunlight shined down sideways through the trees on to her tangled white hair and made it glow in a magical way. Not for long, though."

One day, Lewella invents an imaginary fiance, and decides they are to be married in the spring. She gets a painting of him somewhere and eventually decides to set out into the world to find him. Mary Ellen tags along on this grand quest to make sure her batty old friend doesn't get hurt.

One big effect impresses me about Emshwiller's writing in this story, her descriptions and choice of details. The two old women, picking vegetables in their village seem to inhabit an idyllic fantasy land. As they wander further from home, the modern world breaks in. Hummingbirds and lace collars give way to bus fares and dollar amounts, and eventually Wal-Mart and park benches. This effect climaxes along with the climax of the story itself, with vines, trees, and other naturalistic descriptions intruding on a modern bar room. I also particularly enjoyed the odd symmetry of the last lines.

The story has fantastical descriptions, and perhaps Lewella is supremely lucky or implied to innocently cause things to work out for her, but this is magical realism with only the faintest tinge of fantasy. I think Emshwiller may write fantasy in the same way Neal Stephenson always writes science fiction: "it's an attitude."

I don't think I'd have enjoyed a story with this plot written by any writer besides Emshwiller, but she makes it sing.

4 lace collars out of 5.

All the News That's Fit

Short Story by Carol Emshwiller

Darta and her mountain village get all their news when Flimm, a sort of traveling reporter, hikes several days from the nearest town to bring it to them. But it's been a month since Flimm showed up, and they worry that he's dead, so Darta sets out to find him.

Much of the story's length is spent on Darta realizing how isolated and backwards her village is. She marvels over the size of draft horses, and strange clothing and whatnot. This is the sort of thing, and I find myself writing this weirdly often, that would be boring from most writers, but Emshwiller makes it charming and fun.

Anyway, besides Darta's big adventure, this is really a story about what happened to the newsman, and about who has the right to decide what other people are told or not told. Is it better to preserve innocence, or let people make up their own minds how much they want their own innocence preserved? The world is really much different than Darta, and thus the reader, are lead to believe.

I tend to agree with Darta, and I'm absolutely thrilled the story averted the ending I expected. It says much more, and is much more interesting that way. Not that I should expect any less from Emshwiller, but I'm just too used to authors who aren't quite so good.

3.5 tinniest dogs in the world out of 5.

The Lovely Ugly

Short Story by Carol Emshwiller

This doesn't feel quite like anything I've read before, and that makes it interesting. But it doesn't do as much for me as I'd hoped.

A group of human explorers touch down on an alien planet and set up camp. Told through the eyes of an alien linguist who doesn't quite get humanity, we see them play with and love their dogs and fall too easily for the alien's ruse of being tame and not much smarter than animals themselves.

These are aliens who achieved spaceflight, by the way, pretending to be friendly and only semi-intelligent while at the same time disabling the lander so as to have more time to study us. They even make up a low-vocabulary pidgin language to teach us as if it were their own, lest we learn too much about them from language.

The bat-like aliens are legitimately friendly and joking and have a great love of humor, which adds some humor to the story itself, but their deception eventually goes too far, and while the humans underestimate them, they also overestimate their own understanding of humans. Relations head south when our viewpoint alien crosses a line he doesn't realize can't be uncrossed.

An extremely interesting take on first contact, although the aliens themselves are (necessarily) implausibly mammalian. But that, along with the inclusion of dogs on the space expedition, makes the story work in terms of what insights the two species can have about each other, and how similar-yet-different they can be. The story wouldn't have worked with less mammalian aliens.

The climax is emotional and well-written, and things wrap up with no twists or turns, surprisingly neatly. We aren't cheated of emotional payoff, but neither are we rewarded with any dazzling insights. The reader is left to think about how far ignorance of wrongdoing can be accepted as a defense, and how hard it is to keep working with someone when you can't forgive them.

A very good story, but it didn't move me to calling it great. 3.5 out of 5.

Uncle E

Short Story by Carol Emshwiller

Four orphans have to figure out how to survive in our modern world without their mother. They're able to make it with a little help from their Uncle E.

The twist here is telegraphed well in advance and goes completely unexplained. Which isn't so much a problem for this story, but it does help illustrate that without the twist, it is still pretty much the same story. It's basically a 6-page sentimental expansion on the 2 sentence summary above. The ending is cute, but there isn't much more to it than that.

3 frozen dinners out of 5.

The Bird Painter in Time of War

Short Story by Carol Emshwiller

A burned-out, stuttering war photographer wanders enemy territory painting flowers and birds. Fast paced, heartwarming, and devastatingly tragic all at once, with thoughts on collateral damage and the unthinking, pointless violence of a certain type of soldier (on both sides). The final line could either be the one fantasy element of the story, or a metaphor implying a much sadder ending. I choose the sad, but it is open to interpretation. 5 out of 5.