Introduction | Tim Powers
The term “Absurdist fiction” sounds forbiddingly academic, calling to mind Ionesco and Pinter and even Kafka, but science fiction has produced some lively examples of it, from the ironic but relatively shallow stories of Robert Sheckley to such genuinely affecting novels as Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan and Philip K. Dick’s Galactic Pot Healer.
The best absurdist fiction doesn’t just baffle and amuse—if it’s convincingly absurd, it gets past the reader’s surface attention and delivers an unexpected punch.
It seems oxymoronic, but one of the painful things about the characters in Emily C. Skaftun’s stories is that they never lose hope! Even when crushed by overwhelming disasters, they see, or imagine they see, a chance. You admire their unbowed determination, even as you cringe for them.
Another thing her characters don’t lose, amid their spectacular travails, is love and loyalty. Reincarnation is a reality in many of these stories, so even death isn’t an insurmountable separation. And they do try with all their strength to surmount it, and then keep on trying. These are not fatalistic antiheroes.
Skaftun deals in the stuff of nightmares. As in real nightmares, the situations in her stories are often preposterous—animate toys and lawn decorations, jocular talking fish, invading aliens with wheels for feet who are captivated by the phenomenon of roller derby—but the earnestly striving humanity of her characters, even the non-human ones, forbids you to dismiss them with a laugh or an impatient shake of the head. Skaftun knows no more science than Ray Bradbury did, but, as with Bradbury, the sheer unrelenting force of her imagination makes that irrelevant, and reminds the reader that the strength of science fiction is to give characters problems—often literally shattering problems!—that comparatively merciful reality spares us.
In spite of all that, I don’t mean to give the impression that her stories are gloomy! As with Vonnegut and Dick, there’s generally a bright vein of deadpan wit sustaining her characters. And it’s earned wit, not gratuitous quips and wisecracks—it’s gallows humor in the shadow of the gallows.
The one trick any story has to do is convince the reader that the events are really happening, in real places, to real people—or to real sentient creatures, anyway. This is difficult enough even in mainstream fiction, but in science fiction and fantasy it’s especially challenging. And in stories like “Diary of a Pod Person,” “Frozen Head #2,390,” and “Oneirotoxicity”—to choose three examples almost at random—Skaftun takes one impossibility and then mercilessly extrapolates the consequences of it, with the sort of logical peripheral details that let a reader vicariously experience the events of the story, rather than just note them. You wind up believing, for the duration of the story, at least, some awfully outlandish things, and caring about the characters enmeshed in them.
You’ll come away from these stories with some odd new furniture in your subconscious—and you’ll find that it definitely livens up the décor.