His name is Lester Ballard. A social outcast since childhood, Lester grows up in rural Tennessee, in and among small towns and forests where his growing degeneracy has few barriers or checks. His violence toward certain people escalating as the story moves on, Ballard finds himself penned in with seemingly no way to escape.
The Memory Police tells the story of a year in the life of an unnamed woman. Living in a society ruled by the titular Memory Police, she must regularly burn items that have been decreed as forbidden—calendars, fruit, books, etc. are all made to disappear. The result is these items slowly fade from people's memories. But there are certain people whose memories do not die. Conveniently most are involved in art ((literary readers' radars perk up!). Such people are naturally anathema to the Memory Police, and are hunted by them. Thus it is that the main character comes to hide one such person in a secret room in her house. But can she hide him forever while she herself remains compliant with the seemingly unending list of forbidden things? Can she retain her sense of identity in a world in such enforced flux?
Unlike any other game I've ever played, The Unfinished Swan is essentially 'graffiti the puzzle' game. Based on a fairy tale, players begin in a white, colorless world in the first-person perspective. There is no up down, left, or right. But there is a dot on screen, and when pushing the 'shoot' button, a blob of black paint is launched into the world, splashing against the closest surface. By spamming the 'shoot' button, players slowly paint their world, and in the process discover where walls, floors, doors, and windows are. Getting to the next point in the game/story, players perform this type of exploration.
I ordinarily do not comment on anthology introductions, but Shippey does an excellent job positioning sf in literature, culture, and society. There is no hyperbole, nor is there a condescending view—something quite easy given the baby steps sf once needed taking. He also offers a few nice tidbits for thought, something that this jaded sf reader still found interesting after a decade+ of ingesting innumerable such tidbits. (For example, Shippey avers that short fiction is the most natural form of science fiction.) And perhaps most importantly, he goes about positioning each of the stories—indirectly explaining why each was selected for the anthology.
Kicking off the anthology is Fritz Leiber's “The Cat Hotel”—a catty story with a catty mystery. Matching witches with felines in the modern world, the main character is a cat who needs to get to the bottom of some strange, veterinary behavior. Building its own, unique setting, “Slow Birds” by Ian Watson tells of a family feud in a future/fantasy world in which sailing races on glass are a prominent social feature. Needing fleshing out (novella-length would have been better), Watson nevertheless puts in place the skeleton of the idea regarding humanity's blindness in the moment vs. ideology.
An asymmetrical two-player game, Raptor sees one player taking control of a mama raptor and her five babies, and the other player a team of ten scientists. There are a couple win conditions, but generally the scientists want to either kidnap three babies or tranquilize mama, and the mama raptor wants to get three of her babies to safety or eat all the scientists. Gameplay takes places on a small, six-piece modular board with rocks obscuring sight in various directions. Action is driven by a simple card mechanism. Each player has a deck of nine cards, each card numbered one through nine. At the beginning of a round, each player draws up to three cards, chooses one, then players simultaneously reveal. The player with the lowest number gets to take the action depicted on the card, for example the mama raptor can scare a scientist, remove a tranquilizer dart, leave the board and re-appear elsewhere, etc. The scientists can shoot a tranquilizer dart, create a fire barrier, kidnap a baby, etc. The highest number gets to take as many actions as the number difference with the opponent's cards. If the raptor player played a 3 and the scientists played a 7, the scientists would have four actions, of which there is another selection per side. The game playing quickly (+/- 30 min), the last man (or dinosaur!) standing, wins.
There are stories, regardless of genre or taxonomy, which seem to derive from such a uniquely imaginative place that nothing could ever explain their source or inspiration. The story kicking off this collection, “Master Blaster and Whammer Jammer Meet the Groove Thang”, is that. About two laid back guys in a van who come in contact with a pleasure alien, adventure, to say the very very least, ensues. The title story “Fractal Paisleys” starts in the Lil' Bear Inn, but ends up in a place more picaresque. About a trailer park man and his bartender girlfriend having the night of their lives after discovering a piece if fantastical technology, it asks: want to re-write your environment with a remote control?
The Mosquito Coast is told through the eyes of fourteen year-old Charlie Fox. But it’s his father, the wildly eccentric Allie Fox, who is the center of the show. Cantankerous, self-righteous, nominally racist, deeply intelligent, and innovative, Allie rants and raves about the shortcomings of American culture—Chinese-made this, and inflation that—while putting his money where his mouth is by inventing his own gadgets and technology. Keeping Charlie, his three siblings, and their mother off the grid, the children are home-schooled in luddite conditions, raising their own crops for sustenance. One day, after yet another of his gadgets fails on the market, Allie has enough and decides to move the family to Honduras to start again. The mosquito-thick jungles of the Central American country offering Allie what he’s looking for, the family goes on to set up a homestead in the countryside. And much more. Unable to escape his ideological conflicts, Charlie soon finds his father ranting and raving about the local situation as well. Eventually, something has to give.
Boiled down to a single thing, Chabyrinthe is a logic game. A 4x4 grid of cards is laid out on the table. Each card has a water drain of some type. Some are intersections, some are curved, some go over/under, etc. At points around the perimeter are laid two homes and two cats, and it is the players’ job to align the labyrinth of drains and canals such that a cat has a path to a home. Each player having two moves on their turn, they can twist or shift the cards to realign the labyrinth, trying to create a path. Each cat has a number of points printed on it (3 through 5), and the player who collects the most points by getting cats to homes is the winner. The whole game takes anywhere from 15-30 minutes, depending on the age of the people playing—the older, the shorter.
