George Alec Effinger Live! From Planet Earth
George Alec Effinger had a rare gift for writing, and that over a dozen of his peers have contributed introductions to the new collection of his short stories, "George Alec Effinger Live! From Planet Earth," is a more poignant tribute to his talent than any collection of plaudits from a reviewer. Tenderly and with palpable affectionate, each of the15 writers who introduces Effinger’s tales shares personal memories and expresses admiration -- even envy -- for his accomplishments.
The commentaries illuminate the stories and give them something of a new spin, but Effinger’s fiction speaks for itself -- even when, as in his Springfield Stories (written under the punning pen-name O. Niemand), Effinger was adopting the voices and styles of other writers, from O. Henry to Ernest Hemingway to, most delightful of all, Mark Twain. Even writing under his own name, Effinger had a flair for lending his nib to the voices of others, as in the story "Two Sadnesses," where Effinger effortlessly merges the worlds of "Winnie the Pooh" and "The Wind in the Willows," complete with the vocabulary and styles of A. A. Milne and Kenneth Grahame.
Often, if lovingly, described by colleagues as "fey," Effinger would appear to have had a way of seeing things from a vantage all his own, and that unusual point of view may explain his inclination as a natural satirist. Effinger knew how to poke fun at human frailties even as he expressed compassion by writing from a deep-seated understanding. Several times in this collection his narrator is none other than the President of the United States, invariably depicted as a well-meaning man suddenly out of his depth. In "The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, -Everything-," the crisis involves a friendly invasion by a race of self-appointed arbiters of good taste -- beings with everyone’s best interests at heart, if only they could stop dictating, in their lethally benign manner, exactly how everyone really -ought- to dress, decorate, and live. (In another story, "Put Your Hands Together," Effinger examines the impulse to help others onto the True Path with an intimate -- almost painfully so -- look through the eyes of a Christian fundamentalist confronted with an alien preacher.) In the hilarious "Solo In the Spotlight," the President discovers -- during a moment of international crisis -- that his staff is equipped with a Tarot Card reader, and when the only Tarot deck available turns out to be a Barbie Tarot belonging to the "First Daughter," the solemn mysteries of the major and minor arcane collide with history in the making for truly side-splitting results.
More often than not, however, Effinger’s humor -- and humors -- took on darker, cooler shades. In "All the Last Wars At Once," he envisions a month-long Mother of All Battles that pits everyone (I mean, -everyone-) against each other; the last one standing can only be the irrational need to fight wars itself. You have to read the story fully to understand and appreciate how Effinger punctures the idea that war is glorious, romantic, or even rooted in a genuine need to repulse an "other." Warfare is the theme again in "Target: Berlin!", a fabulously absurd tale in which the great air battles of World War II are fought on European highways with fleets of classic cars. And for those who prefer their wars fought against a secret internal enemy there’s "At the Bran Foundry," a chilling revelation of exactly where raisin bran comes from -- not just the bran (the end product of an exacting ore refinement) but the raisins, too. Two scoops were never so much insidious fun.
No writer spins out his dreams and fables with as much flair and prolific industry as Effinger and comes away completely unglimpsed to his readers. Thus, we see a shade of the author’s inner self in a raw, but wise-cracking, chess battle royale between man and machine ("My Old Man") and gain an ever so slight, but moving, insight in the agoraphobia-centered "Housebound." But if Effinger, who struggled with ill health throughout his life and career, had his melancholy moments, so too did he have his flights of rapture. In "One," a husband and wife spend their lives searching fruitlessly for life on other worlds, only to find the universe is a sterile place; with a deft twist, though, Effinger moves past the scientific question (summed up nicely enough by the famous quote, "If aliens exist, where are they?") to a larger and more mysterious enlightenment. In his Mark Twain homage, "The Wisdom of Having Money," Effinger tackles the need to explore Out There from a different angle and arrives at a very similar conclusion, beautifully phrased by a starship pilot who has decided to stay put on an asteroid for love: "We’re -always- in space, dear." And a few lines later: "The thing is that you must shed the pretty kickshaws of life so you can live the real article." Twain himself, that great American philosopher, could hardly have put it any better.
Still, truth can hurt; and in a pair of unforgettable stories, Effinger took the issue of race and racism head-on in a manner that splinters cliché and shatters expectation. In "Everything But Honor," a black physicist tries to undo the sad history of American racism, and unravels much more than he expected -- including his own sanity. Then, in "From Downtown at the Buzzer," the author takes a commonplace game like basketball -- simple, but complex with many hues of force and influence -- and turns it into the ultimate contest between humans and aliens.
If you’ve read Effinger, you know what to expect from this hefty, rewarding collection. And if you don’t -- why, you’ve got a hell of a treat in store!
by George Alec Effinger
Publisher: Golden Gryphon Press. Publication Date: May 2005. Pages: 363. Price: $25.95. ISBN 1-930846-32-0
