I asked each of my
fellow short-listed authors for the 2013 Sunburst Award if they would be kind
enough to write a piece for my blog. Here’s this week’s piece by Derryl Murphy.
Bio:
 |
| Derryl Murphy |
His novel Napier's Bones, which he describes as “a peripatetic math-as-magic urban fantasy/hard science fiction story,” was nominated last year for the Aurora Award for Best Novel. The short story collection Over the Darkened Landscape (Fairwood Press) is Derryl's fourth book and is nominated for a 2013 Sunburst Award.
The Sunburst Award jury says: "In this wonderful collection, Derryl Murphy ranges over the whole territory of speculative fiction, from hard SF to magical realism and back again. He is particularly adept at mining history in stories that twist and tweak reality, turning it into the thought-provoking “what if?” of great speculative fiction. Whether he is writing of a society where government cutbacks have created an interesting way for private citizens to make money, a legendary artist’s battle with an equally legendary creature of myth, a town where growing old is the exception rather than the rule, or a poignant phone call between a husband and wife separated by a distance that can never be crossed, Murphy’s stories mix fantasy and horror, the extraordinary and the everyday, to stunning effect."
Find Derryl on Twitter: @derrylm
Buy Over the Darkened Landscape at Kobo: http://store.kobobooks.com/en-CA/ebook/over-the-darkened-landscape
To
Make a Long Story Short
by Derryl Murphy
It’s an odd feeling to have a book of short stories on the
same Sunburst Award short list as four novels. It’s not like they’re apples and
oranges, of course, but there are plenty of people out there - my wife among
them - who feel that short fiction generally doesn’t do the trick for them,
that it doesn’t tell a complete enough story. (Although let me note as an aside
that my wife does read my short fiction, and sometimes she even gets it. “Last
Call” made her cry, as it did its original editor and the artist who supplied
the illustration for the magazine in which it appeared.)
Like it or not, though, short fiction is by its very design
not set to do the same thing a novel does. The character development is, by
necessity, presented in a different fashion, for one thing. It’s no less
effective if done right, of course, but there is a shorthand readers and
writers of short fiction come to recognize.
Now, not all short fiction is created equal. The shortest
story in Over the Darkened Landscape
is fewer than a thousand words, and the longest is over eleven thousand. The
snippet that is “Clink Clank” obviously doesn’t give me the room to stretch
that the novella of “More Painful Than the Dreams of Other Boys” does. But
that’s part of the fun for me. I don’t write much short fiction anymore, but I
do still find it enjoyable, and an interesting challenge.
2
But mostly it’s because I like to imagine that these little
snippets - or longer snips, to coin a term - have a life beyond what you read.
And that is precisely what drives my wife so crazy. It’s not so easy, nor so
important, to wrap up the narrative of a short story so that it finishes in one
neat and tidy package. Questions often remain, and I for one am fond of those
questions.
Yes, sometimes you can make everything neat and tidy. I
won’t give much away, but to refer again to “Last Call,” I think by the end
there is no doubt that this is the same happy place to end the story no matter
if it’s 2400 or 120,000 words long.
I also find it’s easier to be relentlessly depressing in
shorter bites. In my previous collection, Wasps
at the Speed of Sound (11 stories of ecological SF - if you squint just
right - that is about to be reprinted by Five Rivers here in Canada), I was
accused of being just a little down. To quote from one review: “The effect of
such savagely pessimistic stories in one concentrated dose is depressing as all
hell, and by half way through a reader might be excused for wondering: if
that's Murphy's view of the future, why does he have kids? Why isn't he hanging
from a rafter some place?”
3
But wait! There’s good news! The stuff I write isn’t always
so down and depressing, and there are indeed stories in Over the Darkened Landscape that may even make you feel good about
yourself. Not always, of course, as I do have a reputation to keep, but they
are there. Some laughs along the way, even.
Unlike Wasps,
this new collection is not thematic in any way. It’s a mixture of science
fiction and fantasy and (kinda) horror and what I suppose you could call
slipstream, or weird fiction. I’ll readily admit that the state of the world
has me feeling somewhat cynical about things, which when one is writing science
fiction stories with an eco/enviro bent can make it easy to misplace the
rose-coloured glasses.
But the stories of Over
the Darkened Landscape often came from someplace different; the world can’t
always be on the verge of ending in my fiction, and while, as has been noted by
one of my editors in the past, loss seems to play a large role in my stories, I
don’t think that makes me much different than a whole passel of other authors.
Loss is a factor in every life, it’s a conflict, internal or external, that can
give a story meaning, give it play, give it emotion.
So can joy or love, of course. But I don’t play as well
with those.
4
But Derryl! I hear you cry. You’re babbling on and on and
telling us practically nothing about the stories in the book.
Yes, well, sorry about that. I do tend to wander off on
tangents. Exploratory conversation can be great fun if you’re willing to go
along for the ride, or it can be brain-blisteringly numbing. I can only hope
you’re with me, not agin me.
So here, as a favour to you, are elevator pitches for each
and every story, guaranteed to be as spoiler-free as possible (the last four,
incidentally, all involve real or possibly apocryphal moments in Canadian
history, or with historical personages. With a minor sprinkling of the
fantastic of some sort. So there is that to consider. I call them my “Magic
Canada” stories).
Body Solar:
Rich European
Goes on a tour out in space
Problems occur
Canadaland:
Satirical look
At the culture of our land
Yes, some things have changed
Frail Orbits:
Tired old astronauts
Landlocked and suffering
Given a last chance
Voyage to the Moon:
Climbing the beanstalk
A fairytale astronaut
Giant on the Moon
Last Call:
What do you say at the end
When they’re your last words?
The Cats of Bethlem:
A true story of
HG Wells and Louis Wain
Antiques Roadshow told me so
More Painful Than the Dreams of Other Boys:
A former child cop
An adult now, feeling lost
Back to solve a crime
The Day Michael Visited Happy Lake:
In rummage sale books
A boy finds old memories
Not his, come to life
Clink Clank:
Mom and Dad need some money
Hey kid. Come down here.
Northwest Passage:
When my grandpa was up north
Ghosts might be made up
Cold Ground:
Had some magical powers
Some things might have changed
Over the Darkened Landscape:
A Prime Minister
In our time but not in his
Solves crimes with his dog
Ancients of the Earth:
Cave men and mammoths
Amidst the Yukon Gold Rush
That was some meal
Truth be told, I think you’ll find the stories in the book
more entertaining, more thoughtful, more full of adventure and whimsy and
despair and joy than you do my feeble and flailing attempts at haiku. I feel
very privileged that the judges thought so, not only so much that they were
willing to honour this book alongside four other fine books, but that they even
used the pejoratives “wonderful” and “stunning.”
Which, if it had been a collection of poetry, I think you
can guess how that would have turned out.
For more information on
The Sunburst Awards: http://www.sunburstaward.org/2013-sunburst-shortlists
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