Into the Abyss

Objectivity's Paradox, by Robert J. Santa

originally published 12/23/2007

Paradox: The Magazine of Historical and Speculative Fiction has been both entertaining and intellectually stimulating since its inception in the Spring of 2003. As a market devoted almost exclusively to historical fiction and alternate history, it is one of only a few that focuses on this genre. What that says to me, as a reader, is that the caliber of stories within its pages will be the creme de la creme, if only due to the limited availability of output for such stories.

Full disclosure: One of my speculative twists on a mythological tale appeared in the first issue of Paradox, and I've spent the last four years trying to get another publishing credit. I regard editor Christopher M. Cevasco as one of an elite minority who maintain the level of professionalism all good publications should strive for, as I've had nothing but outstanding exchanges with him and heard nothing but similar remarks from writers at the SFReader forum (of which, full disclosure continuing, Chris is also a frequent visitor). Lastly, as an editor myself, I have purchased one of Chris' stories for an upcoming anthology.

Okay, I lied. This is the last remark: Paradox is my favorite fiction magazine, and I devour every copy I get.

Which brings me to one of those reviewing quandaries. Much like coaching little league and watching your own child blow the big game, will I be able to distance myself from my prejudices enough to make critical commentary?

There's only one way to find out: write a review of Paradox, issue 11 and see what happens.

The opening piece is "Love, Blood and Octli" by T. L. Morganfield (more disclosure: she is also a frequenter of the SFReader forum). Even without the magnificent Mesoamerican art covering the first page, I knew this would be a subject matter dear to my heart: the Aztec Empire. My favorite novel is Aztec by Gary Jennings, an historical fiction epic I've read twenty times at least, where I was first introduced to octli (a tequila-like spirit, though that is an inferior description). It is unfair to compare Morganfield's short story with Jennings' masterpiece, and I won't. "Love, Blood and Octli" stands on its own as a fable about the rise of the Aztecs as a people. Ayomichi is given her name by the wind god Ehecatl and told of her future role as dispenser of wisdom. Ehecatl visits her rarely throughout her life, always changing its course and the course of her people (and not always for the better). The pacing of this piece is deliberate (which should not be interpreted as "slow"), as the story of a civilization's infant steps unfolds. I found Morganfield's storytelling outstanding, and her piece deserves the spotlight of first on the table of contents.

"In a Byzantine Garden" is one of three contributions by Darrell Schweitzer (the other two being poetry, of which I am woefully underskilled to critique and will refrain from doing so). This one-page short story about a meeting of lifelong enemies engaged in a discussion of peace could truthfully take place in any time, in any setting. Schweitzer elegantly brings the two characters to life with such simple brevity, all writers who strive for that skill should be jealous (this one included). What could be called the story's twist, upon which everything before pivots, is a single sentence of three words. I couldn't have done it with fifty. This is a curiously haunting, extremely short story that hung with me for far longer than it took me to read it.

Michael Livingston does in his Civil War story "The Angel of Marye's Heights" exactly what I feel Chris Cevasco is looking for in Paradox: taking a documented historical event and examining it from a different perspective. This is not a "What If?" tale, as many Civil War speculations tend to be. The "Angel," from history, is a Southern soldier at the battle of Fredricksburg who risked his life to bring water to the dying strewn about after the massacre. The "Angel" in Livingston's story isn't the water bearer; he's an actual angel masquerading as a Northern soldier, one who knows what's about to happen. This is an interesting story about destiny, though I felt it took a bit too long to set up. Don't get me wrong, the opening is very well written, just a bit more than I would have done given the opportunity to tell the same tale.

"Historical drift" is a great phrase to come out of "I Read the News Today, Oh Boy..." from Richard Mueller. The term refers to a psychosis afflicting the protagonist's friend and many other people around the world. They believe they have traveled to another time period, and from their perspective the modern world does not exist. The narrator meets Jeannie in a coffee house in a thoroughly-modern world plagued by terrorism. Historical drift is at first treated as escapism until Jeannie begins to feel she is affected by it. I liked this story, in spite of its predictable ending.

I can't same the same for "Fort Bliss," a Vietnam-era piece by J. Kenneth Sargeant. American soldiers are not fighting in Vietnam for Democracy; they are there to fight a whole host of mythological creatures such as dragons, harpies and trolls. The truth is being covered up by the U.S. Government, which sends Specialist Dennis Grace to investigate. His conversations with a captured harpy skew his opinions in a way no combat ever had before. I never connected with Grace as a protagonist, and I was never drawn into the environment of the story. One of the reasons for this, surprisingly, is the use of profanity. I'm a prude when I write my own stories and almost never use profanity. There's plenty of it in "Fort Bliss," but I found it in curiously short supply. When one considers a thoroughly profanity-laced story probably wouldn't make it into this kind of market, I still felt the soldiers in this story didn't sound like soldiers would in the Vietnam jungle. As a writer of primarily fantasy, it was not the fantastic elements in this piece that turned me away from it. I simply couldn't empathize with Specialist Grace or his situation, which could just have easily been told with the harpy being replaced by a captured VC woman.

"Letters on Natural Magic" by Matthew Kirby is something of a surprise. Were it not for the illustration of the famous robotic, Turkish chess-machine accompanying the title, I would have thought the narrator a protoge studying chess at the feet of his master. Instead, the narrator is actually a robotic, chess-playing machine engaged in a game against Benjamin Franklin, who it has previously beaten twice before. Alone, Franklin tells the machine a long story about his own role as a spy and dealings years before that would have altered the world on a scale no less grand than the formation of the United States was. As I read the opening pages, Kirby's deliberate - there's that word again - structuring of the story seemed, well, slow. Only after finishing this piece did I understand he was emulating a chess game. Before a vital move can be made, several steps must precede it. The vital move in the story is Franklin's revelation of his "big secret," one that cannot be revealed without an understanding of the events that preceded it. Kirby's writing is engaging during the opening pages, enough so that a typical reader's attention shouldn't wander. Where many times I have written a "whammy" into a story, something to give the reader an aha! moment, it is the writing of the story itself that provided the whammy for me. I applaud Kirby's technique. While this may not be the best story in this issue, the technique clearly is.

The premise behind Tom Doyle's "The Wizard of Macatawa" is that the Land of Oz is less fiction than documentary, observed through a time- and dimension-traveling device by both Frank Baum and the story's young narrator many years later. This piece also holds a whammy, one so well done I wouldn't dare spoil it here, one that made this writer laugh out loud with envy. It seems the residents of Oz didn't take too kindly to Baum telling about their lives and came to this world to do some not-so-nice things. As a great fan of the musical Wicked for its ability to tell a well-known story from a view-point that is both contrary to the accepted norm and highly-entertaining, I also enjoyed Doyle's concept as much as his prose.

So, I've gotten through the whole magazine and shared my opinions of it. Was this a glowing review filled with fawning praise? Hardly. Did I enjoy it? No doubt. Would I recommend Paradox, issue 11 to a friend or family member? Absolutely. This issue contained more speculative elements than I was accustomed to seeing in previous issues, but it is still a solid home for historical fiction. As I've said dozens of times, any collection of stories is going to be hit or miss. That this one was almost exclusively hits is not surprising to a subscription holder; Paradox always hits. If you do not have a subscription to magazine, I can't imagine why. Paradox: The Magazine of Historical and Speculative Fiction is a twice-yearly reason to run to the mailbox.