A Thousand Deaths
There are few truly visionary science fiction writers (or, in more modern parlance, speculative fiction writers). There are many good writers who deal in exotic settings: the far future, dystopian societies, other planets. That’s not quite the same thing. Michael Crichton may spin yarns about dinosaurs being re-created using biotechnology, and it’s speculative stuff for sure - but not necessarily anything more than a barely plausible "What if?" scenario, a type of technology fiction.
Science fiction, as George Zebrowski once put it, is a way of rehearsing possible futures. But it’s more than that, too; it’s a way of examining the totallioty of the human experience: our past as well as our future, our souls as well as our clever capacity to invent new ways to kill and terrorize ourselves. For the puret distillation of fore-thinking and meaningful modes of imagination, you have to look to literary innovators like Jules Verne, or H.G. Wells; you have to come to grips with the challenging, sometimes disheartening, always vivid portraits of humanity offered by Zebrowski, by Pamela Sargent, by Jack M. Dann, by Michael Bishop, by Kathryn Kristine Rusch. Golden Gryphon has put out books by all of these writers, and with the publication of A Thousand Deaths, Golden Gryphon’s third collection of stories by George Alec Effinger--a man admired by the best among his peers--this press demonstrates once more its dedication to preserving the best of the genre’s voices.
Effinger was a genius and something of a trickster. Perhaps he had to be; his life and his career were cut greivously short after a life of ill health, much of which was spent enduring pain and medical bills (and the Kafka-esque legal tangles those bills sometimes inflicted upon him). Perhaps the cruelest part of his story is how little mainstream attention his work received: fully as deserving of the kind of widespread familiarity that other visionaries, like Arthur C. Clark or Isaac Asimov, earned, Effinger never quite gained that level of recognition, or of financial reward. He was a master stylist and a deep thinker; he was also a playful sort, and not always in a nice way--at least, not to his creations, and particularly not to the fictional stand-ins in which he invested a kind of alter-ego identification. Effinger’s most creative (and arguably most abusive) relationship with an alter-go was the one he enjoyed with Sandor Courane.
Courane features in the novel The Wolves of Memory, which is reprinted in it entirety as part of the new collection. He also appears in about a dozen short stories, seven of which appear here after The Wolves of Memory: Fatal Disk Error, In the Wings, From the Desk Of, The Wicked Old Witch, Mango Red Goes to War, The Thing from the Slush, and Posterity.
The thing you need to know about Courane is that he’s killed off in a variety of ways in almost all of these stories. He’s sort of like Kenny on South Park, the kid who--as pal Eric Cartman once put it--"dies all the time." Like Kenny, Courane’s deaths are practically a given, and like Kenny, they don’t stop him from springing back healthy and whole for the next story, where he sets about getting killed off all over again. Inevitably, as with Kenny, Courane’s deaths start to become a source of humor, even for Courane himself, who is described in one tale as having "grown wary over the decades."
That’s all fine and well for the short stories, where Courane is usually (though not always) so similar to his creator that he shares the profession of science fiction writer and / or editor. The Wolves of Memory is a different sort of beast, even though Courane does try his hand at writing sci-fi novels in the course of his several careers. In this novel, Courane, like everyone else, pretty much lives and dies at the behest of a worldwide computer system called TECT. Once the onmipresent tool of human representatives, TECT has now become the sole, autonomous governing force for all affairs of Earth and its far-flung colonies, and the machine issues its haphazard orders with no sense at all of human reality. Courane fails in his assignments not because he is the criminal that TECT categorizes him to be, but simply because TECT is unable (or sadistically unwilling) to give him assignments for which he is suited--and that includes his TECT-santioned career, mercifully short, as a science fiction writer.
Exiled to a colony world in the Epsilon Eridani system, Courane makes a new life (not to do so would be "contempt of TECTwish," after all), and new friends, but he keeps seeing his friends waste away with a memory-destroying disease. Convinced that his run of bad luck on Earth was merely a runup to his exile because TECT knew all along that he, like the others, would develop the debililating symptoms of the incurable disease, Courane determines to do something about his fate, something that will strike at the heart of TECT’s hold over humanity. But is Courane’s rebellious plan a truly revolutionary response? Or is he still serving "TECTwish" in mounting his betrayal? The story is a clever construct in many ways, unveiling Courane’s story as he himself, stranded in the desert without food or water for days on end, haltingly recalls it. The Christ analogy only begins in the desert, though: there’s a full-on sacrifice myth, complete with a half-mocking reference to the Catholic mass, that follows. But this is no less a work of reverence, in its way, for all its barely disguised anger, because it revisits one of the thorniest questions in theology: are certain sins necessary to allow God’s plan to unfold?
The other stories follow a kind of arc, growing ever more punchy in their order of appearance, as Courane encounters various supernatural horrors: a witch, a genie, a vengeful writer with two deadly, other-dimensional sidekicks, a ruthless, life-stealing computer program, and a visitor from the future who just might be the most harrowing editor a sci-fi writer ever had to contend with. Effinger lets his creative powers run rampant, and he has his laughs, but he’s also in earnest, and he gets a lock on your head: once he’s rattling around in your skull, he won’t budge. Effinger may have deaparted this world, but his voice is here for the long haul.
by George Alec Effinger
Hardcover: 343 pages
Publisher: Golden Gryphon Press. Publication Date: June 1, 2007. Pages: 343. Price: $24.95. Format: Hardcover Original. ISBN-13: 978-1-930-846-470
