Introduction—Hal Duncan
For me, this collection has a peculiar meaning, a personal meaning others won't see in it—can't see in it. In many ways, it's a cabinet of ephemera that tells a story as a whole for me. Having encountered so many of these tales first through the Glasgow SF Writers' Circle, they mark moments in my own development, stand as souvenirs of earlier times, in place of memories that have long-since drifted off into the haze of kinda sorta remembering back in the day. I've no idea what night we might have workshopped this story, what pub we were in when Neil told us that one had sold—nothing so crystal—but in reading them, they click together for me to a model of changes—then, now, the points between.
When I first met Neil Williamson through the Glasgow SF Writers' Circle, you see, I was still caught up in an obsolete notion of fantasy, shaped by the commercial category's genesis in the 1970s post-Tolkien boom, I guess. SF was my taste—in its widest, wildest sense, for sure, abbreviating the "Science" to "S" to evade the question of its absence, but still insisting it was SF—as opposed to, you know, that stuff about elves and magic swords. The idea of slipstream was... pulling at loose threads in that tapestry of preconceptions. Gary Gibson, another GSFWC member, was working on his slipstream magazine Territories... when? Fucked if I can remember. What I do recall is Neil bringing in these weird little stories, how copies of The Third Alternative or Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet would be handed out for show of a sale here or there.
In our little anarchist syndicate of scribblers, stories such as these marked out an aesthetic terrain that wasn't beholden to any boundaries. We've never really set limits on what "belonged"—there was never anyone to set limits. And I'm not sure any of us fussed over what side of what fence they fell on theoretically. Call this one SF. Call that one horror. Call them slipstream or interstitial. Or don't. Fuck it, over the years, it seems to me, that old closed definition of fantasy has just been shrugged off in favour of... an admission of just how varied fantasy can be, of a diversity that's typified, manifested, in a collection such as this.
Within the category itself, as evidenced here, there's a return of fantasy to roots that go back long before that Tolkien boom—and I don't just mean to Howard and Lieber. No. Flick through the pages of this book to a story such as "Well Tempered," view it from a different angle, through lenses tinted rose or sepia, and this might be a Bradbury tale, a type of fantasy with zero interest in sword-wielding shenanigans. "A Horse in Drifting Light" has a similar quality to it, I think, sparks thoughts of Bradbury's "The Pedestrian" in my mind, conjuring a wholly SF scenario but no less a fantasy story for that. Does the why and how of the horse really matter? I don't think so.
Here such category distinctions as SF and Fantasy are irrelevant, are most blatantly eschewed in Weird Engineering tales like "The Apparatus" or "The Gubbins." I'm not sure if Neil counts "The Bennie and the Bonobo" in that category, but I see something of the same sensibility there, in engineering that's certainly wonderful if it isn't weird—George Bennie's railplane. But that wonder... there's a twist on SF's love of gadgetry, I think, a spirit I'm tempted to suggest is very Scottish, romantic and reverent, for sure, but more pragmatic than the technocrat's dream, less about the potential for an awesome frontier future, more about... the stuff. It's a footerer's love of bits and bobs, the materials of mechanisms—the gubbins, indeed. But we'll get to that.
Fantasy or SF? Inhabiting that Bradburyesque twilight zone where fantastic and horrorific also shrug off distinction, many of the stories here might be classed as "dark fantasy" if one were desperate to taxonomise. There are aspects of the uncanny, as in "The Happy Gang" where a medical adjutant in WW1 stumbles upon a dugout with a far eerier wrongness than the carnage going on around, or in a classic Jamesian ghost story such as "Harrowfield," or in something like "Sins of the Father," which verges on good old Lovecraftian horror. They're all "Neil stories" to me though, more than anything. And seeing them as such... this is where they become benchmarks of change for me, points upon the path to where I am now, endlessly wittering on about it all being, at the end of the day, strange fiction. Fiction of the wondrous or the monstrous, the marvellous or the mysterious.
And the mundane too, most interestingly, most wonderfully of all.
The strangeness here is often subtle, you see, not a sensational spectacle of the unreal but rather a skewing of our perspective on the real. We might find, say, a steely alien nettle sprouting in a Scottish family's back garden, a whole interstellar civilisation part of the picture but utterly backgrounded in a story where the fantastic is really a weird weed sneakily springing up in the domestic, a resilient intruder—right scunner—but not the monstrous interloper of horror. No, the strange here is too damn thrawn to be locked into that role.
Often the fantastic is a reconstruction of the domestic, in fact, a mosaic of crockery and other such seeming banalities, mundane materials—"clay, porcelain, metal, glass"—not smashed, unless in the accident of a dropped tumbler, but rather clipped carefully with pliers, to be recombined, with utmost precision. A mosaic through which one might walk into another existence—it's a fitting image of the collection itself, echoed in the series of paintings in "Softly Under Glass," the flashes of imagery in "Postcards," all speaking of individual glimpses into... what? A deeper reality, perhaps? Or just a deeper experience of this one? Somewhere in all those little visions, or between them maybe.
Finding the fantastic in the domestic is a recurrent theme, to the point one might outline an associated imagery of birds—a canary in a council flat, a talking crow on a rooftop, the key image of "The Codsman and His Willing Shag." That last example strikes me as where this theme's articulated most explicitly, in a story speaking of disenchantment with the mundane, the parochial, speaking of the wonders that lie beyond, wonders it's only natural to yearn for... but refusing to deny what is and will always be our home. It's a story of re-enchantment, rediscovery.
The fantastic need not be a foreign force, you see, something we only encounter via its incursion into our realm or our incursion into its. It is already here, could be in anything. In a child's doll carved from bone, fragile, all too easily crushed to dust. In a photographer shooting his ex under the shadow of an alien not-quite-invasion, focusing in on a swallow tattoo. There are epiphanies to be found as much in the everyday aspects of these images as in the exotic—ambiguous epiphanies perhaps, but profound, exquisite. One need not always go looking elsewhere for the fantastic. The perils of fantasies of escape into exotica, indeed, are at the heart of "The Last Note of the Song," a pirate story and, in a stroke of pure inspiration, a musical to boot. What could be more awesome than to be swept out of a drudge's life into The Crimson Pirate as an MGM Musical? Ah, but that music can be a siren song, the story tells us. Don't be so quick to get caught up in it.
If you can help yourself, that is. I know I read them and I find myself doubly struck because they are in a way, for me, exactly the sort of thing they speak of—sculptures of bone left after the past is gone, a mosaic that makes an image of elsewhen. But even without that personal connection, I have no doubt you'll find them equally as captivating. Where that music comes to us not from beyond but from within, where it is this fleeting, fragile, precious melody of materials and moments—articulated here most subtly, most simply, perhaps, in the lynchpin story of the collection, "Hard To Do"—it's hard not to surrender to that equipoise of joy and sorrow over what is so precious because it is so fleeting, so fragile...
Those little things, the bits and bobs, the gubbins of lives.
The ephemera.