People of the Book (Am ha-Sefer): A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy

Edited by Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace

“From Sholom Aleichem to Avram Davidson, Isaac Bashevis Singer to Tony Kushner,
the Jewish literary tradition has always been one rich in the supernatural and the fantastic.
In these pages, gathered from the best short fiction of the last ten years,
twenty authors prove that their heritage is alive and well —
in the spaces between stars that an alphabet can bridge,
folklore come to life and histories become stories,
and all the places where old worlds and new collide and change.

These are the people of the book. Open, read; the universe is made of words.”

Table of Contents
Introduction, by Ann VanderMeer
“Burning Beard” by Rachel Pollack
“How the Little Rabbi Grew” by Eliot Fintushel
“Geddarien” by Rose Lemberg
“The Wings of Meister Wilhelm” by Theodora Goss
“The Dybbuk in Love” by Sonya Taaffe
“Fidelity: a Primer” by Michael Blumlein
“Niels Bohr and the Sleeping Dane” by Jonathon Sullivan
“The Tsar’s Dragons” by Jane Yolen
“Going East” by Elana Gomel
“Dark Coffee, Bright Light, and the Paradox of Omnipotence” by Ben Burgis
“Biographical Notes to “A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-planes” by Benjamin Rosenbaum
“Alienation and Love in the Hebrew Alphabet” by Lavie Tidhar
“The Problem of Susan” by Neil Gaiman
“Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke” by Peter S. Beagle
“Eliyahu ha-Navi” by Max Sparber
“Reuben” by Tamar Yellin
“The Muldoon” by Glen Hirshberg
“Semaphore” by Alex Irvine
“Golems I Have Known” by Michael Chabon
“The History Within Us” by Matthew Kressel

Forthcoming: December 2010.

Readercon 21 started off somewhat humbly.  Several of my friends who have accompanied me before couldn’t make it, and this time around I knew a larger portion of the attendees than ever before.  My first thought upon arriving was that the convention didn’t feel real.  I tried to explain this to a few folks, and they kept reminding me that it was still Friday and it takes some time for things to warm up.  And warm up they did.

The first panel I attended, one of the annual short-fiction summaries, name-checked two friends of mine as talented up-and-comers: Genevieve Valentine and Alaya Dawn Johnson.  It was nice to hear their work getting recognized.  Later, Scott H. Andrews hosted a Beneath Ceaseless Skies reading, where I read a section from “The Suffering Gallery,” a short story appearing in BCS this fall.  I also heard Michael J. DeLuca, Margaret Ronald, Tom Croshill (which I later found out was his first reading), and several other talented fantasists.  People seemed to like my excerpt.  In fact, people seemed to like all the stories, which is a credit to Scott’s editorial eye.

Later, I participated on a panel about the bright future of SF magazines, which had as a launching point the question of how to make SF magazines more culturally inclusive.  Liz Gorinsky did a great job keeping us on topic, and we heard well-thought-out comments by panelists Neil Clarke, K. Tempest Bradford, and pinch-hitter Michal J. DeLuca, who was there for Gavin Grant.  Compared to last year’s somewhat sullen first panel on the future of SF magazines, this one felt much more positive, and we all agreed the short fiction market is in a renaissance.  These things go in cycles, and we are presently on an upswing.

Kate Baker (known for her podcasts at Clarkesworld Magazine, writing under Kathryn E. Baker) was in the audience, and she was shyly waving at me until I suddenly realized who she was.  She did a wonderful podcast of my story “The History Within Us” and also has her first published story in Sybil’s Garage No. 7.  I ran over and hugged her, which I realized immediately following might have been a little too forward considering we had only met for the first time.  I hope she forgives my exuberance.

At the Meet the Prose party I chatted with a lot of lovely people, including Mary Rodgers, whom I met in New York a few weeks back, and I got to taste a Brooklyn Stout from Scott H. Andrews, who had smuggled in a growler into the hall.

I had a nice conversation with Jacob Weisman and Bernie Goodman from Tachyon Publications about Jewish-themed fiction (I’m writing a novel partly based on Jewish myths).  And they also gave me excellent publishing advice.  By the time everyone moved toward the bar, it was 1 a.m., and they were closing.  Exhausted, I ducked off to my bedroom.

Saturday, I was free of panels, and so attended things sparsely.  But I did attend Alaya Dawn Johnson’s reading from her novel Moonshine.  I also attended Part II of the future of SF magazines and also found the panelists to be forward-thinking and positive.  The general consensus was that the short fiction future is a good one.

I attended the Rhysling Awards (two poems from Sybil’s Garage No. 6 were nominated in the short-form category).  We didn’t win, but I heard several fabulous poems, especially a sung one from Amal El-Mohtar.  I offered to record a classical guitar accompaniment to it, which she seemed excited about.

All of this felt like a prelude to Saturday night.  We had been planning to throw a room party for a while, and the intention was to tell a few people, but not the entire con.  After all, it was a small room, and we didn’t reserve a suite or a room on the party floor.  Well, the word got out.  We knew this when a gentleman showed up first to the party whom no one knew.  “Where did you hear of this party?” we asked him.  He named another person no one in the room had told.  That’s when we knew things might get…crowded.

The lovely Kristin Janz bartended, making specialty cocktails such as Aviations and Margaritas.  The room quickly got hot and loud and sometimes raucous, but I punctuated the noise with readings from the new issue of Sybil’s Garage No. 7.  Kathryn E. Baker, Tom Croshill, E.C. Myers, and Amal El-Mohtar all got up on the bed and read at various points in the night.  And all were grand.  More than one person told me these readings were the best they’d heard at the con.  At one point even Peter Straub showed up to our party, but when I somewhat awkwardly re-introduced myself to him and praised his latest novel, he told me he was going to “mingle on” and left the party.  Oh, well.

I popped in to a party Mike Allen threw upstairs, and there was treated to a fabulous performance of theatrical poetry (I unfortunately don’t recall the name of the woman he read with, but she [edit, thanks Amal!] Claire Cooney was great too.)  It is so wonderful to be surrounded by creative people.  At times like these, there are no other places I’d rather be.

At around 4:30 a.m. the last stragglers left the party.  But I could not sleep, and so wandered down into the lobby to hang with Liz Gorinsky and Benjamin Rosenbaum.  At one point the hotel called security on her because Ben had stacked pillow cushions upon her.  I kid you not.

The sun was coming up.  I had another day and another panel to attend.  And so at some point I wandered off to bed.  I think it was 6 a.m.

Three hours later, miraculously, I was up.  The shower, which the night before was full of beer, had one remaining.  Not bad, I thought.  I made it in time to see the metaphysical hard SF panel, which was highly entertaining if not a bit over my head a times.  Mr. Ben Rosenbaum, you are super smart, but can you slow down sometimes to let us non PhDs grasp an inkling of what you are saying?  I’m tongue in cheek of course.  I thought Ben and the other panelists were fabulous.  I can sometimes forget how many smart people come to ReaderCon.  It’s staggering.

I hosted a Sybil’s Garage kaffeeklatsch, of which the lovely JoSelle Vanderhooft attended, and we spoke in depth about where to take Sybil’s Garage and Senses Five Press.  Mercurio D. Rivera and Devin Poore, editors of Sybil’s Garage, sat in on the conversation.

There was also more mingling.  And carnivorous plants.  Oh, and I sold nineteen copies of Sybil’s Garage No. 7.  A good omen, or I should say is a sibylline signal of future sales.

Some other highlights, not necessarily in any order:

• Talking with Sean Wallace of Prime Books about anthologies
• Finding out I share a TOC with Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon and Peter Beagle (The People of the Book, Prime Books, Dec 2010)
• Finding out Gordon Van Gelder and I are distant cousins
• Seeing Kelly Link for literally ten seconds
• Swimming in the pool in the rain
• Going out for Korean BBQ and finding out all of the NY people were already dining there
• Hanging out with Brett Savory and Sandra Kasturi of Chi Zine Press
• Talking e-books with Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld Magazine
• Seeing Blake Charlton transformed into The Last Cakebender (see photos)
• Jeremy Lassen suggesting dirigibles are the new vampires

The surreality of the opening hours evaporated away by the end of the weekend.  The conference had most definitely become real.  The wave function collapsed.  Now I’m left with the typical post-con blues, missing the conversations and the stimulation.  But I’m also rejuvenated by the weekend, brimming with creative energy, and I’m looking forward to starting several new projects soon.

Thanks to all who attended for a great weekend.  And thanks to the organizers for putting this convention together.  You can see some of my photos here.

Yesterday I spent the afternoon at Jones Beach with my cousin.  We arrived at 3pm, and the temperature was still well in the 90s.  We stayed until the sun set.  It was quite beautiful. I took a photo.  Then I stopped by my folks’ house for a bit, and they promptly fed us.  Then my dad showed us his giant tomato garden (organic varieties, them all.)

So after a day in the sun and a few nights of little sleep I was somewhat cranky today.  And then Mercurio D. Rivera delighted me with news that my story “Saving Diego” has received an honorable mention in Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection. My story originally appeared in Interzone #221.

Mercurio was also name-checked in the opening comments, specifically about his whimsical SF story “Dear Annabehls.”  Alaya Dawn Johnson also received an honorable mention for her story “The Yeast of Eire.”  Congrats to fellow Altered Fluidians for the mentions.

* I’ve had nightmares about the production of Sybil’s Garage.  In the latest, I received the proofs, and they were horribly wrong.  The cover was pitch dark and the images were duplicated all across the pages kaleidoscopically.  While I was looking at the mistakes, a bottle of Listerine on the stove caught fire, and I inhaled toxic fumes, which made me cough up blood.  “Never mind!” my dream self said, “There’s no time for doctors.  I’ll just open the windows, get some air, and then get back to working on Sybil’s.  I only have three days to go!”  Or some such.  Can you tell I’m stressed? 

Beneath Ceaseless Skies Reading – Friday, 6pm
Reading with several BCS authors.  I’ll be reading an excerpt from “The Suffering Gallery.”

The New and Improved Future of Magazines – Friday, 8:30pm, Salon G
Bradford, Clarke, Gorinsky, Ga. Grant, Kressel

Sybil’s Garage Kaffeeklatsch – Sunday, 1pm, Vineyard
Kressel & editors from Sybil’s Garage

“Edited by Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace
Introduction by Ann VanderMeer

From Sholom Aleichem to Avram Davidson, Isaac Bashevis Singer to Tony Kushner, the Jewish literary tradition has always been one rich in the supernatural and the fantastic.

In these pages, gathered from the best short fiction of the last ten years, thirty authors prove that their heritage is alive and well — in the spaces between stars that an alphabet can bridge, folklore come to life and histories become stories, and all the places where old worlds and new collide and change.

These are the people of the book. Open, read; the universe is made of words.”

I’m very excited to be included in this anthology.  This story was/is a very personal one for me, one that I think has deep-rooted Jewish themes of tradition and the fear of breaking them that pervades, at least in my small experience, a Jewish life.  I can’t wait to see the table of contents.

“So the other day I listened to Kate Baker reading Matthew Kressel’s ‘The History Within Us’, which was published in March 2010. Obviously the sensible thing for you to do is to leave Best SF (what, a website encouraging you to leave it??) and either listen to the podcast here or read the story here. You’ll be reading it one of the Year’s Best Anthologies next year.”

The reviewer especially praises Kate’s reading of the story, which I agree is quite fabulous.  Kate Baker (writing at Kathryn E. Baker) has a story in the forthcoming Sybil’s Garage No. 7, her first publication, and I’m sure not her last.

Needless to say I’m very flattered by the review.

I spoke with a luthier and he suggested it might cost as much as $130 to fix, which is pretty much in the range of a new, low-end classical guitar.  I decided that I’d try to fix the bridge myself.  Last weekend while out at my folks I attempted to glue the broken piece back on using high-bond wood glue.  But as soon as I tried to string it up again, it snapped.

The entire bridge needed to be replaced.  So I spent several hours using various implements like razor blades and letter openers to pry off the bridge without cracking the guitar’s soundboard.  Success came late last night.  And while high on 85% cocoa chocolate I decided to try and make my own bridge out of a piece of pine from an unused bookshelf.  Well, ninety minutes and quarter-of-an-inch of cutting later I decided I would need more tools than I had to make the bridge properly.  And besides, the pine I was using was too soft a wood and I feared it might crack under tension.  So I broke down this morning and bought a classical rosewood bridge from Stewart-MacDonald for about $15.

I’m hoping that the new bridge will turn my lame guitar (lame in the traditional sense) into a working instrument again.  Eventually, I hope to do a more detailed blog post about it, as I’ve been taking pictures along the way.  For example, here’s me with a hacksaw:

“Throughout the period of [issues] 220-225 there has been much to enjoy.  My top three stories are, as they say, in no particular order, ‘Bone Island’ (225), ‘Saving Diego’ (221), and ‘Lady of the White-Spired City’ (222), with ‘Microcosmos’ (222) demanding to know why it’s not been included.  The most memorable issue was the outstanding 221.”

That was very nice to hear, especially since #221 also contained stories by Paul Berger and Alaya Dawn Johnson, my Altered Fluid mates (and ranked #6 and #10 respectively in the poll).

If a giant hand came out of the sky, grabbing a burning plane on its way to disaster, and gently set it on the ground, saving all aboard — that I could hail as a miracle.  But one person or house or family surviving a disaster?  That’s just life.  That’s just the way life is.  To hail every survivor as a miracle is to silently suggest that all those who died were not worthy of being saved, and I think that’s an even bigger tragedy.  All of this stems, I think, from the fact that, at least in most of the West, we haven’t learned how to handle death.  It’s still something that we eschew at every opportunity.  It’s much easier to hail the survivors as a miracle then to mourn the senseless, random deaths of those we love.

Speaking of Fluidians, last night we attended Alaya’s book release party for her forthcoming novel Moonshine.  We decked ourselves out in 20s attire and danced to live jazz.  We even saw a dance performance by the banana-belted and talented Kristen Mangione.  I expect today to see lots of pictures from the night.

Wikipedia defines “hipster” as “young, recently-settled urban middle class adults and older teenagers with interests in non-mainstream fashion and culture, particularly alternative music, indie rock, independent film, [and] magazines…”  I find that definition a little too vague.  To me, a hipster is someone who tries much too hard to be hip and/or ironic.  You can readily tell hipsters by their ostentatious glasses, either of the 1950s NASA nerd variety (i.e. Ray Ban Wayfarers), or of the 1960s Carroll Burnett over-sized spectacles.  That or their too-tight jeans, Converse All Stars, Adidas or some other brightly colored shoes.  Pocahontas headbands for the women.  And for the men, beards.  Long Riker’s or Woodsman’s or Grisly Adams.  (Seriously, wtf is with so many beards?)  And a sense of entitlement.  An enormous sense of entitlement.  They deserve this world that their parents fucked up for them.  (And they’re going to make it right by smoking roll-your-own cigarettes and looking superciliously down at you as you pass them by.)  Most of them possess a holier-than-thou attitude which emanates, I think, from that immature place we all go through where we think we know everything there is to know about the world but really know nothing at all.  I think hipsters have mastered this affectation and turned it into an art form.  (It’s kind of like the self-delusion of Sarah Palin.)

I don’t hate hipsters entirely (though I do get a perverse joy reading Look At This Fucking Hipster.)  I like living in a neighborhood not completely gentrified, that doesn’t have corporate-owned stores on every corner, that still has a record shop that sells real records and values the local coffee shop over lifeless Starbucks.  I like the vibrancy of living in a town with lots of young people who don’t believe working at Goldman Sachs is the epitome of success, unlike my former home of Hoboken.  But lately, maybe because I’ve been going out more, I’ve found myself looking more closely at this strange class of youth culture that arrived just after my time, or passed me by simply because I’m just not that hip.

I was at a party recently at a local bar where there was live music.  The first performer, a banjo player, was talented but seemed to be playing the same song over and over again.  None of the hundreds of hipsters crowing the bar’s large backyard batted an eye, it seemed.  Hipster test: passed. Then came a Ska band.  Fun and energetic.  The hipsters were happy.  Pass number two.  Then the party moved inside, and a group of older men (maybe in their late 40s or early 50s) began playing classic rock standards.  Creedence and Allman Brothers and the Kinks.  And during one Allman Brothers song, while waiting in line to go to the bathroom I overheard a 20-something hipster decry the band.  “What is this crap?  This is my grandpa’s music!” he shouted.  Crap? I thought.  I was pretty drunk at this point, but the music was stirring me, and I said, “If you can’t appreciate this music, than you can’t appreciate rock and roll!”  A man next to me nodded (in his 30s, possibly), but the objectionable hipster punched me in the shoulder (it was meant to be “buddy-like” but I thought it was a bit too hard; I wanted to hit him back), and then he went on bemoaning the band.   Somebody had sinned and would pay for it.  As he wailed on and the line slowly moved forward I noticed people fleeing the bar.  In no time at all, the crowd had vanished.

Hipster test: failed.

I guess rocking out to live music covering some of the best guitar solos of all time is not as cool as, say, a banjo.  With the latter, one is perceived to be avant-garde, edgy, different.  But as soon as one resorts to something heard and known — well, that’s cause for abandonment, rejection.  It’s too mainstream.  And I think at this moment I finally understood then the motivating force behind hipsterdom.  It’s a constant search to be perceived as just that: avant-garde, edgy, different.  But it’s a moving target because trends move through hipsterdom at the speed of Twitter.   What it ends up being is a culture devoid of substance, one that chases its tail in ever shrinking dervishes that at the end one is so dizzy and so lacking in meaning that all one can do is buy a MacBook and grow a beard.

I suppose people said this about the 90s grunge generation, and I have to admit I owned a few flannels and had my hair long for a time.  They called us Generation X and told us we were good for nothing, pot-smoking slackers, that our music was too angry and our heroes suicidal nihilists.  Perhaps they were right.  I’ve considered that I’m just getting older, curmudgeonly, and saying the same damn thing everyone says about the successor generation.  But man, you can’t honestly tell me that you can look at this without cringing*:

*Notice the lack of lenses.  Soooo ironic.

I’m not perfectly happy with the Democratic bill that passed.  I’m not sure how I feel about forcing people to get health insurance, especially since I know nothing in the bill which is going to lower costs.  I do laud the significant changes in policy: people with pre-existing conditions have to be covered.  Insurance companies cannot drop individuals who get ill.  It is said a society is judged by how it treats its most infirm.  By that standard, we’re pretty low on the totem pole.  But I believe this legislation, however flawed it is, moved us up just a bit.

Monsters of Modernity panel. What is Gary Frank doing?

Yesterday I spent most of the day at the Lunacon convention in Rye Brook, New York.  I traveled up with Mercurio and Alaya Dawn Johnson; it’s not very far from New York City where we all live.  The con is held at the Rye Brook Hilton, a modest hotel much like the one for Readercon.  Last year, I remember seeing more familiar faces, but this year it felt like the usual New York crew was conspicuously absent.  I did have a nice conversation by the bar with Neil Clarke, however, the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine.

The panels went well, although twice the moderators didn’t show up so the panelists and I had to make due.  My first panel, “Monsters of Modernity,” talked about the monster as metaphor for our fears.  While I thought the premise of the panel was pretty basic (I believe most people understand this connection intuitively) we ended up having some very interesting discussions on the origins of vampires, werewolves and what the monsters of the future might be like.  Bram Stoker brought vampires to the mainstream, George Romero did the same for zombies, James Cameron and William Gibson for monster AIs.  What will be the next beast that haunts our dreams?  Golems?  Tax men?

The second panel (which I almost missed because I was ditzy after donating blood) was on the year’s discoveries in computing.  We had our geek moments, and I was afraid of losing the audience as Robert Rosenberg and I went off on a technical discussion of IPv4 vs. IPv6.  But the discussion turned interesting in the end as we talked about some of the privacy and civil liberty concerns that some of the new technologies will bring.  The salient discoveries that I mentioned during the panel: Microsoft’s Pivot Application, HashCache, the iPad, Google Maps street view with “view user pictures,” depositing checks by photograph, and the BioNanomatrix’s Nanofluidic Chip.  I’m too lazy to link them, so you’ll have to Google.  My favorite, though, seems to be MS’s Pivot App, which I hope to use soon.

The last panel discussed print versus E-books.  We talked about the benefits and limitations of each technology, how the multiple formats of e-books and the lack of standards is a headache for publishers, and how the technology can be expected to morph over time.  I found this discussion the most interesting for many reasons, but mostly because I felt the audience had a direct interest in the outcome of the book industry (what else would we expect at a con?).  About two-thirds of the audience members said they had bought an e-book and most people seemed very open to the idea of reading books on a pad-like device.  But one woman came up to me in the end and told me how she prefers the visceral feel of a book in her hands.  I know what she means.  For me, it’s the smell, especially with old books, as many of the seminal books I read as a kid were second hand.

Overall, my experience was fun, but I felt something was missing at the con.  Perhaps I was just missing my usual circle of friends, who as I said were conspicuously absent.  And, sadly, I didn’t buy any books.  Though Alaya did buy some smoked salt which smelled fantastic.  Yes, they had a spice trader in the dealers’ room.  The spice must flow.

Monsters of Modernity, Grand North, 1:00 – 2:00 PM
What if a vampire bite isn’t just a vampire bite? From vampires and sexuality to Frankenstein and the Enlightenment, to The Thing and the AIDS epidemic, monsters have often stood in as allegory for modern issues.
Gary Frank, Matthew Kressel, Jonathan Maberry, Kim Paffenroth [M]

Year in Computing, Odelle, 4:00 – 5:00 PM
What were this year’s awesome breakthroughs in computers?
Seth Breidbart [M], Matthew Kressel, Robert Rosenberg

From Ebooks to Print and Back Again, Maple, 5:00 – 6:00 PM
Ebooks, e-readers and the marketplace. Dead trees versus electricity and wires. Will this really revolutionize the way we read books, or is that all just hype and glamor to get you to buy an e-reader? Are people who cling to paperbacks Luddites who refuse to move on with the times or are they clinging to something real?
Joseph Bellofatto, Ty Drago [M], Glenn Hauman, Matthew Kressel, Michael Walsh

I hope you can join me there.

Clarkesworld Magazine

Also today in podcasting, Vylar Kaftan’s story “Fulgurite,” which was originally published in Sybil’s Garage No. 6, is now up at Escape Pod PodCastle (Thanks Rachel!) for your listening pleasure.

There’s also a large thread of dualism throughout Judaism, which at first blush seems odd for a religion that prides itself on its strict monotheism.  The Shekinah, or the Divine Presence, is sometimes referred to as the Sabbath Bride.  Supposedly, when the second Temple was destroyed, the Shekinah, the feminine aspect of God, came down to dwell on earth among humanity, separating from God in heaven, to be reunited with God when the Messiah comes.  Some sects of Judaism go outside to greet the Sabbath Bride on Friday nights, and they consider it imparting them, for the duration of the sabbath, with a second, holy soul.

There are also virgin births (in one story, God is the father of Isaac, not Abraham), and angels coming down to earth to fornicate with women and create a race of humans known as the Nephilim.

I’m reading this book for many reasons.  I’ve found that I have a lot of fun writing stories about desert people, and I think this has a lot to do with my traditional Jewish upbringing, the Passover celebration where one says, “We were slaves in Egypt” and not “They were slaves…,” the many stories of a desert-roaming people, and my overactive imagination.  Today I am less inclined to take anything literally in the bible, but the stories to me are still powerful, as all good literature can be.  The midrashic interpretation of the Torah, the filling in the blanks between verses seems a whole lot to me like what I do when I’m writing and building a world.  Sometimes, by context or intuition, the gaps are automatically filled by my subconscious.  It’s almost as if — and I know I might offend the sensitive — the rabbinical scholars were writing Torah fan fiction.  They took characters and settings and interpolated how and why they did the things they do, how they came to be.

I hope to write some Judaic fan fiction too.  That is, after I navigate my way through this tome, I plan to write some stories using the mythology I uncover.  I don’t plan to create a new Narnia.  I’m not interested in converting people or convincing them of the uprightness of one faith over another.  I just plan to have fun exploring these ancient stories and revealing them in new ways.  I hope to write about some of what I find here.