Excerpt
Introduction: Do Not Remove This Tag
Eileen Gunn
Carol Emshwiller stories should come with warning labels: Do not operate heavy machinery while reading these stories. Avoid psychedelics when reading an Emshwiller story. Do not stay up all night, reading story after story by flashlight, under the covers. Because you could find yourself with an inexplicable desire to drive your heavy machine off-road into the mountains, flashing all your turn signals, defying gravity, and violating the social contract. You could permanently alter your brain chemistry, so that you are incapable of ignoring your perfectly reasonable impulse to move into a stranger's house and break him or her to your will. Deprived of sleep, myopic, and running on two D batteries, you could become convinced that subverting the natural order is not only an option, but a mandate.
Have Carol's stories always been this subversive? If asked, she says no, but why should we believe her? All those unreliable narrators—how can we trust this woman? I did a spot-check on a few stories. Well, maybe more than a few: they're pretty much irresistible, and a spot-check quickly turns into a couple of lost hours, sometimes days.
Carol Emshwiller has been producing brilliant stories for more than half a century, and she is more prolific now than ever: all of the stories in this book were written in the past several years. They are different from her earlier stories: more intent, less playful; sparer, more essential. Without sacrificing subtlety, they are more direct. Although Carol has not completely left behind the battle of the sexes, these new stories detail defections and private truces in a larger war: men and women engaged in hand-to-hand combat with life itself.
I sometimes visit Carol at her summer home in the Owens Valley of California, and she shows me around that spectacular high-desert terrain, where the rain evaporates before it hits the ground. Not too far from where she lives is the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, home to the earth's oldest living inhabitants, trees that have survived for thousands of years in a climate so inhospitable that they have no predators or competition, growing so slowly that they become their own impermeable armor. She admires these trees, she says, because they live in a land of little water and bitter cold, and they thrive on it—not unlike some of the characters in this collection. Both the men and the women in these stories are stubborn, crafty, and courageous. They are tenacious, and they do seem to thrive under adverse conditions. Sometimes they are delusional, but aren't we all, sometimes?
When I visit, Carol leads me places I would never have gone alone: up onto an obsidian dome, across a river on a fallen tree, and over the John Muir Trail in a hailstorm. She has taken me into the High Sierra in search of a pie shop, and has made me an object of interest to the Inyo County sheriff's office. I can't say that she will subvert you in exactly the same way, but she will take you somewhere that expands your expectations, confronts your fears, and amuses you no end.
