Short SF Marathon Day 6: Cortázar, Crosshill, Davis

Julio Cortázar, “Headache.” Tor.com, September 3, 2014 (first English translation).

Now this is interesting. This is a short story originally written in 1951 and never translated before, by an Argentine writer who was one of the major players in the boom in literature in South America in the 1960s and 1970s, published at what may be the site the closest to the heart of genre science fiction. There’s always been whole worlds of science fiction and fantasy cut off from genre, written in different traditions or by writers who don’t think of themselves as genre writers; sometimes the dreaded words “magic realism” might also be uttered, as you may be tempted to in this case. A Spanish language writer telling a story of imaginary animals raised by people who suffer from various just as imaginary diseases and afflictions brought on — perhaps — by those animals? That’s the textbook example of magic realism, isn’t it?

It certainly is an intriguing story, one you know you can’t suck the meaning out off in just one read. It actually made me slightly nauseous reading it, evoking as it does through its language the feeling of migraine onset. I can’t compare the translation (by Michael Cisco) to the original, but on its own it’s got a brilliant hallucinary quality.

Tom Crosshill, “The Magician and Laplace’s Demon.” Clarkesworld, December 2014.

This on the other hand is a much more traditional mixture of fantasy and science fiction, in which the world’s first self aware AI becomes aware of the existence of magic and magicians and sets out to hunt them down to be able to understand and use the last thing in the universe outside his ken. A decent story, well told.

Amanda C. Davis, “Loving Armageddon.” Crossed Genres, July 2, 2014.

Compared to “Headache”, this is a much more self conscious attempt at a magic realist story, or sketch rather, of the man with a hand grenade for a heart and the woman who loves him. It almost seems as if this is meant as a metaphor. Almost.