The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1, charts the expansive career of an experimental science fiction writer.
Existential monsters, disaffected aliens and lonely robots—all of these creatures belong to the imaginative fictions of Carol Emshwiller, but so too do more mundane characters. In The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1, housewives, spinsters, and Emshwiller herself also make appearances, as the stories leap from genre to genre, from traditional to experimental. These tales chart a career that spans half a century, and with Emshwiller recently turning 90, it’s remarkable that she keeps writing at such a high artistic level.
While the earliest of these stories stumble in their obvious plot machinations, the talent is there, bubbling, as in “Love Me Again” (1956). By the 1960s, Emshwiller perfected an avant-garde approach to science fiction that placed her on the crest of the burgeoning New Wave (a loose association of highly ambitious writers coalescing around the magazine New Worlds in England). First-person narrators make sharp, often disconnected, observations, while leaving plot alone for another day. “But Soft What Light…” (1966) encapsulates the aesthetic explosion in terms of both form and content: “Uniq-o-fax, a sensitive machine for combining words so fast that, like an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters, he not only COULD write by random selection, all of Shakespeare’s plays, but almost DID at 1012 bits per second (also of Mallarmé and Gide). […] I was his (sort of) vestal virgin.” Here the machine and human become entwined not by circuitry but by poetry in a way that is equal parts sweet and melancholic.
One of Emshwiller’s New Worlds stories, “Methapyrilene Heydrochloride Sometimes Helps” (1968), further elaborates the artistic transformation. The narrator is kept alive by the modern techniques of a one Dr. Ostrander and is caught up so fully in her medical problems that the doctor’s operations become her whole life. Her concerns seem as much her own as they are Emshillwer’s: “I am, by the way, only interested in impossibilities. People make their livings every day from the possible, while I, even in my psychological being, am not so particularly possible anymore.” While the narrator is obviously not a stand-in for Emshillwer, the focus on the weirdness of modern day living and gender relations is very much Emshwiller’s.
The audacious “Autobiography” chronicles every nook of her sprawling life with such vivid, naked detail that it’s surprising that it avoids the affectedness that taints confessional work. “Most of my life is spent not working,” she admits. Simple joys are, as they are everywhere in her work, the most profound: “If there’s a sunset over Brooklyn, we must take beauty where we find it. Mother wants me to write something nice she can show her friends.” Of course, it’s hard to ignore the ironical tone this story, and many others, take on. The Emshwiller of “Autobiography” is no visionary genius; the Emshwiller of this story is as self-conscious about her age as she is about her writing.
The detached, observational style would only deepen in the coming decades before Emshwiller slowly came back to plot and science fiction. The exploration of form becomes almost essayistic in pieces like “Queen Kong” (1982), which meditates on the role of women in art and public spaces through a feminine Kong raging across New York City. Yet she reduces the scale, which allows her to peel back the layers to reveal the contradictions in conventions of all sizes: “Always, after rage and tears, comes sadness and regrets. Things lapse into their opposites: hate to love, love to hate. And in the same sense, the large always have their smallnesses; the fat their thin; the meek their ferocities; the foolish, their profundity, and vice versa. Therefore she must be feeling awfully small and insignificant by now, being so large.” She loves to riff, however diaphanously, on societal woes, to consider deeply the problems the women’s movement made clear. There should be room for all shapes, all forms, all preferences, the narrative concludes—unlike this particular world, which places women in a box that is one-size-fits-all.
Perspective is paramount in this collection—worlds that would be explored with the intensity of a hibernating cicada by most genre writers are, in Emshwiller’s hands, dug into with the precision of a grizzled prospector. Language becomes a knife to cut through the excesses of pattern, like in the buzzing “Slowly Bumbling in the Void” (1981):
There is a need in all of us to build a little house, log by log or stone by stone. There is a need to sew up a little mattress for the floor, to stash away dried food in leather pouches (rice and figs); a need to make a little set of shelves and to put up a hook for our coat and another hook for our pan. There is a need to make soup out of old bones, to gather dandelion greens and prepare them according to a grandmother’s recipe. There is a need that a storm should rage outside and that we should sleep through it. Afterwards—after, that is the need to make a map of the territory—there is a need in all of us to move (decorated and with hat) to tunes or to play a game with small stones, and all the while, to be on the lookout for something mysterious.
Glimpses are all that we’re allowed in this dreamscape where penises and maps are our primary concerns. Emshwiller picks up the rubble that other writers discard and creates moving accounts of marginal lives.
It’s unfortunate that this lovely work is marred by so many typos. One hopes that the publisher, Nonstop Press, can fix the problems in successive editions. The only other thing that could have made this any better would have been to include some reproductions of the cover illustrations that Emshwiller’s husband, the noted artist and filmmaker Ed “Emsh” Emshwiller, produced for a number of her stories. Thankfully Nonstop has already put out the beautiful Emshwiller: Infinity x Two: The Art & Life of Ed & Carol Emshwiller, which includes numerous pieces of his work.
Despite the occasional failure, the collection is an immense success of artistic autobiography. The later stories are no less fascinating and entertaining than her more boundary pushing studies. Many of them take on the form of fables and exist as a kind of late, reconfigured wisdom literature. “Mrs. Jones” (1993), in particular, treats the treacheries of familial solitude with such feeling that the sisters are allowed to step out of the mist of words and live their sad lives bare. Emshwiller, again and again, makes the quotidian strange and the strange quotidian.
