Book Report: Near+Far by Cat Rambo (Part II): Far

Part I is here.

Part II is here:

Whoa. This collection, Far, brings the guns just like Near did. This time around, though, we are in the future. And if anything, things seem to have gotten worse, even if they are brighter and better lit by to the overhead halogen lights of your cubicle-home.

Cat Rambo's exploration of advertising, products, commercialism, and consumerism are only exacerbated in stories like "Surrogates", "Seeking Nothing", "Amid the Words of War", and "Zeppelin Follies", the last of which Rambo claims was her attempt at slapstick comedy. It's not that it wasn't funny, it's just that standing back, looking at the world of commercialism she created, where writers write by managing software that spits out endless variations of the same story for every conceivable market niche and everyone wears malleable Bodies that keep the actual world at arms length, well, it's pretty frightening from my standpoint because it's a dystopia where the depicted society isn't all that unhappy, like in Brave New World. Often cited as the model dystopia, Brave New World is really a social satire or even utopian satire (Huxley called it a "negative utopia": the drugged out disconnected world is, by and large, "happy"). It is implied in "Surrogates" and "Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain" that the rich are happy because they've built a world of consumerism based on picking the fruits of lower caste's labors, which implies that the rest of the world could indeed be a dystopia. How is this different from our current world? Blood diamonds and oil shales anyone? In Rambo's "Zeppelin Follies" everyone seems pretty content with their hyperconsumerism, which to me is just an extrapolation of where we are headed. Both "Surrogates" and "Zeppelin Follies" reminded me of David Mitchell's Nea So Corpocracy in the "An Orison of Sonmi~451" chapter of Cloud Atlas, a fantastic book.

If the last collection touched from time to time on the themes of relationships and intimacy, then this collection   is the inverse. We're still talking about relationships, but Far is about the inability to find connections and how far we will go to connect. I mean, the protag of "Angry Rose's Lament", a drug addict trying to find some kind of connection to replace his drug craving, contemplates letting an intelligent wasp eat his brain so he can join an immortal group-mind. Yeah, that's what it's about.

After that we have "Seeking Nothing" which is a fucking HAUNTING tale about a young man who is desperate to connect with anyone, absolutely anyone. He's a social outcast managing clones working on a distant planet, who cannot seem to connect with the few non-clone coworkers or his past. It is a frightening tale of utter loneliness. This was by far one of my favorite stories in this collection. The protag's loneliness still lingers in my mind.

"A Querulous Flute of Bone" was also about seeking out a relationship: romantic love. I could see the plot coming a mile away, which was fine, because the story was really an exercise in beautiful world-building. What I loved so much from the first story in the Near collection, "Mermaids Singing Each to Each", and about the near-future exploration of commercialism of "RealFur", "Vocobox(TM)", and "Therapy Buddha", was the effortless world-building Cat dropped into those stories. And here we see even more of that. "A Querulous Flute of Bone" is like world-building idea after another, though never overwhelming. It left me hungry for more. In the afternotes, Cat says that this story is part of a shared world project started by Philip Athans, so perhaps there's more.

"Surrogates" seemed a bit like the Far version of "Not Waving, but Drowning", 'cept in a far future society. The protag has an Insanity Chip in her head, which allows her to edit the world she senses. It's a touch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but from a great angle. And her descriptions of the edits the protag sees are immersive.

I'd say that, for me, hands down, the best story in both collections was "Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain". Most stories about falling in love turn me off immediately. It's been done so much. But this story was intimate, beautiful, tragic, and told as smoothly as the character's porcelain skin. I'm pretty shocked it was original to this collection. Original stories tend to be stinkers or just perfectly fine stories, never having gone through the vetting processes of editor crits (I'm sure Hydra House had the story edited, but I mean in the marketplace). Whatever the case, this is my favorite story of the collection. 

There are afternotes for the stories in both collections, which is one of my favorite parts to read. It's like the context of the context.

On its own, Far is a strong collection of stories. Together in one book, both collections, Near+Far, represent a selection of Cat Rambo's work over the last five years and show that she is a writer able to capture the human perspective on life and relationships in the most imaginative environments.

Book Report: Near+Far, Cat Rambo (Part I)

I don't actually remember the first time I heard or read about Cat Rambo or one of her stories. I do remember the first time I saw her name and I was like: "Cat Rambo? Who the hell goes by 'Cat Rambo'?" Well, Cat does. 

Cat Rambo's name has floated across books and anthologies and zines I've read for the last five years or so. Editor of Fantasy Magazine, fiction in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Hyperpulp, Asimov's, and a shitload of anthologies. Her name is synonymous with speculative short fiction over the past decade and seems to have exploded in the last couple of years. She had nineteen short stories come out in 2011. NINETEEN! 

I got to meet her up at Clarion West in 2011. She lectured on online presence and industry stuffs, giving her time in and out of the classroom. She's a great supporter and resource, one of the many writers up in Seattle who make moving up there a temptation. 

A few months back she asked me to review her upcoming short story collection Near+Far (2012, Hydra House), which is what you're reading now. There're so many stories in this collection I'm going to break this review into two parts, the Near and Far collections, which follows the book's layout. Both collections have their own table of contents and restart the page numbering. I read my version as a PDF, but apparently the printed copy is bound in a style called tête-bêche, like how the old Ace Doubles used to do it. But you know, done classy. I think it not only works, but it's just the sort of thing print publishers need to do if they want people to go out and buy the print copies of their books. It worked on me and I've already read the book. The covers were done by Sean Counley and the interior artwork was done by Mark Tripp.

Cat also did a line of jewelry based on the book's artwork:

Near+Far jewelry

Nancy Kress sporting snazzy Near+Far jewelry 

This book is great opportunity to examine Rambo's work in detail. It's a retrospective with stories that go back to 2007, so you can see what she's been doing over the years. As I said before, I was familiar with her and her fiction, but I'd never read her stories back to back and wasn't able to see just what she was doing with her work. 

She starts off the Near collection with a strong story, "The Mermaids Singing, Each to Each". It's a beautiful, lyrical story of a formerly female protagonist who's gone and had its gender removed after years of sexual abuse by its now deceased uncle. But that's all back story. The real story is of it and two others navigating waters filled with man-eating mermaids (done with a nice bit of worldbuilding) while the trio prowl the seas looking for garbage, the modern booty. But the real-real story is whether or not the protag can forgive the semi-autonomous boat it inherited from its uncle which it holds partially responsible for its abuse. "Mermaids" encapsulates what Cat Rambo is really writing about: relationships.

Her stories are quiet meditations on relationships. Now, "quiet" in a review is usually code for boring or nothing happens. This is not the case. There's murderous mermaids, superheroes, asphyxiations, dark shamans, quasi-animal burnings. There's plenty of action and things ahappenin'. No, what I mean by quiet is that many of her stories are about, at their core, relationships, usually between two people, they just don't say so up front. 

This is not an easy thing to do, to have these subtle but effective explorations of relationships (brother-sister, victim-perpetrator, husband-wife, rival friends, boyfriend-girlfriend) all while the world is ending, cybernetic cats are prowling, supervillians are attacking, and immortality is at your fingertips in some crazy fruit. Usually there's some new element that's introduced which causes the relationships to stress and/or react. In many of her stories the element is a new-fangled product with spec-like qualities, such as with "Vocobox(TM)" (a voicebox for cats) and "RealFur" (living clothing) and "Therapy Buddha" (a talking buddhist psychology doll; actually the product isn't very spec-ish, it's the worldbuidling in this one.). The new element doesn't cause discord in the relationships, it just pulls the lid back, exposing them. For example, "Close Your Eyes" is a haunting tale of a sister who cares for her dying brother. She drives him around, supports him financially, lives with him. She's put her entire life on hold while he withers away. And for all her sacrifice she is rewarded with bitter resentment and passive-aggressive sarcasm on page one, a relationship that I think is all too real and common. The new element is the brother's interest in shamanism, which he explores in classes at the hospital he goes to for treatments of his undisclosed illness, but the discord was there years before the story started.

The emphasis on relationships lends the Near collection an intimacy and immediacy that feels contemporaneous. For the most part, these are people who are living modern lives right around the corner from us. Besides the cybernetic superheroes. 

One of the things that I wasn't so thrilled about at first were the stories' endings. That's because many of them end on natural notes, meaning that while plots are not resolved the character's arcs were. Such is the case with "Memories of Moments, Bright as Falling Stars", where the story just ends. What about the bad guys? Will the protag survive? You can't just end a story right there like that!?!? But she did. And once I reread it I found that it ended there because the protag's story had concluded. This is a strong collection because even if there are pieces that don't work for you (wasn't a big fan of "10 New Metaphors for Cyberspace", a borderline poetry piece that went over my head) there're many others that will. It's a collection filled with a variety of stories that are able to get at and portray the human experience in wondrous environments.

(That was Part I of the review. Part II is here.)