REVIEW - GUD Issue 1 (Autumn 2007)

A while ago, I argued that the genre short fiction scene had become a little bit too cozy and that what was needed was a bit more risk taking and a bit more energy and a willingness to pick a fight with genre conventions.  In short, as Bob Hoskins once said in the Long Good Friday “a bit of the old Dunkirk Spirit, know what I mean?”.  Well the editors of GUD (Greatest Uncommon Denominator) must have known exactly what I meant as this magazine is a template and a master-plan for the reinvigoration of SF.

The question is, what are GUD’s authors and editors doing messing around in genre?

Issue One of GUD is 200 pages long, has a very pretty cover by Oisin Mac Suibhne and contains stories of varying length, some interesting black and white artwork and a number of poems.  At $13 for a hardcopy sent to Europe, it’s a little on the expensive side (approaching as it does the cost of a paperback novel) but at 200 challenging pages, it’s worth the money if you enjoy your short fiction.  GUD is very slickly put together from the off-white paper to the very impressive website.  Simply put, everything about GUD screams sophistication and professionalism in a way that most other genre magazines do not.

Upon reading GUD, I can’t help but wonder why they’re bothering to identify with the SF scene at all.  The back of the magazine is festooned with recommendations from genre websites and one of the editors even took the time to directly approach me to review a copy of the magazine but from the way the magazine looks to the actual content of the stories, GUD is much closer to an upscale mainstream literary magazine than it is to the dragons and spaceships of the “Big Three Plus Interzone”.

Enough foreplay, I’ll move on to the content now but at 200 pages, there’s really too much for me to look at in detail so I’ll talk about the stories that particularly impressed me, and any I didn’t like, and then gloss over the rest.  There are other reviews of the magazine here, here and here if you’re looking for additional input.

The first story is “Electroencephalography” by Darby Larson.  This story took me completely by surprise.  I sat down to read the magazine expecting genre stories of the kind you find in most genre short fiction magazines but this story is completely different.  It may feature robots and people being re-animated after their deaths but the story structure and the emotional weighting of the plot and characters is genuinely weird.  At one point a character is left to look after his infant niece and he leaves her in the bath and goes to sleep.  Upon waking up several hours later he finds her dead but rather than panic he just calmly uses bits of robot to bring her back to life.  This happens a few times but then the robots start ripping open people’s chests and it all goes strange.  There’s also a robot that may or may not exist and which may or may not have been built and may or may not be figurative.  Borrowing elements from SF, horror and psychological thillers, “Electroencephalography” really sets the tone for the rest of the magazine as it is sharp, challenging, ambitious and rather difficult to completely get ahold of.  Like a lot of the stories in GUD, it is clearly reaching for a number of big ideas and themes and is trying to be quite technically innovative and while it might not be entirely successful (I’m still not sure what the story is about) it is unsuccessful because it is hugely ambitious and unaffraid to be different.  It’s a load of fun.

“Arrow” by Nadine Darling, by contrast, is a warm, cynical and honestly funny fable about people who fall in love.  In the story, being the kind of person who falls in love is represented by having a massive arrow buried in your chest and the bulk of the story features the character dealing with the day-to-day irritants of having a sodding great arrow in your chest.  Darling writes with a perfect blend of vulnerability and cynicism, like someone for whom the world is just a little too much.  She then shifts gear and has her protagonist visit a shady doctor in the hope of having the arrow removed and we go from warm and accessible to slightly disturbing and difficult to interpret but I think this duality nicely captures the complexity of the subject matter, even if I think it ends rather suddenly.

Jordan E. Rosenfeld’s “Aliens” is deceptively titled as it’s easily the least genre-friendly piece in the magazine.  Maybe this is one of the reasons why I enjoyed it as much as I did.  The aliens in question are the two main characters, both waitressing in a New Age wholefood diner and neither of them is quite right.  They are both adrift from the world around them but they both adopt different strategies for dealing with it as one is withdrawn and cynical and the other throws herself fully into the world but only through the medium of playing a character.Like “Arrow”, “Aliens” is warm and funny and yet appropriately cynical.  No trace of any dragons or spaceships though.

Steven J. Dines’ “Unzipped” is a terrifying story.  It is about a veteran of the war in Yugoslavia who is clearly consumed by psychological problems but is constantly attempting to keep his head above water.  The story begins with his visiting a hooker for a bit of S&M, continues with his beating up his wife and ends with his thinking about flashing a bunch of teenaged boys in the hope that the police would drag him off and then beat the shit out of him in prison.  It would be easy to write a story such as this and make it seem crass or sensationalist but Dines does an excellent job of getting across how conflicted and desperate for some kind of relief his protagonist is.  This is memorable, powerful stuff.

“In the Dark” by Sean Melican is easily the most traditionally genre short story in the magazine.  It’s a series of letters between a reporter, his friend and his agent upon the decision by an alien species to allow him to visit their planet.  However, the price he has to pay for this is that he must be blinded.  In many ways this is a traditional story of Humanity vs. The Other but what is great about the story is that it focuses on sex and how the aliens see in the human a different and interesting new sexual plaything but this sets him on a path that becomes increasingly unpleasant in the process.  Though not fully developed, there are some neat ideas in here about the shift from fear to tolerance to attraction to the other and while I think it’s one of the less ambitious pieces that travels a path that many other writers have been down, Melican treads the path with style nonetheless.

“Item 27” by Mike Procter is one of several very short stories that are included in GUD, rarely more than a couple of pages long these general present thoughts or exercises in style or ideas that either wouldn’t fit into a longer piece or which wouldn’t support a longer exposition.  Procter’s piece is about a man crossing off items on the list of things he wants to do in life and number 27 is to look into having someone killed.  It’s neatly written and funny in a dark and slightly disconnected way and a good example of what can be done with really very few words indeed.

Reading GUD came as a revelation to me.  It highlighted how safe and unambitious a lot of genre short fiction is and how people have become so locked into a very cerebral mode of writing whereby tropes are wheeled out, played with and then neatly put back into the box for next time.  GUD’s pieces are far more ambitious and while a lot of the pieces left me cold or bored me, all of them offered me something that you really don’t see that often in genre short fiction.  GUD’s pieces aren’t always conceptually clear and a lot of them start and then stop leaving you unclear as to what exactly was going on in the reader’s head but this is undeniably a good thing.  GUD’s pieces are bold, challenging and completely unafraid to fail.  If the short fiction scene is, as many have suggested, all about aspiring authors learning their trade then I’d much rather see writers who aren’t afraid to take genre in new directions, even if these directions turn out to be dead ends or take them out of the genre ghetto and into the mainstream.  GUD is undeniably doing good, important work and long may it continue doing so.

Comments

[A.R.Yngve]

Great! I'll have to check out GUD (which, by the way, means "God" in Swedish).
:)

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I'm sure the editors will be gratified to hear that millions of swedish people cry out the name of their magazine during sex.

[Jacob Martin]

I liked GUD Issue 1 as well. It was my first encounter with Science Fiction short fiction in magazine form, and I was relieved that somewhere out there, was still accepting short stories and poetry and assorted stuff (I have not been around in the SF Magazine culture long, it is the only SF magazine I have ever read). I submitted some stuff to them, but it got rejected, however I was given helpful pointers about the general feel of the magazine and why my Fantasy (modern Fantasy at that) was rejected. For that I admire this magazine even more, and I will not stop reading it because they rejected my submissions. I also got a reply about my query about the future of rejection slips via email depersonalising the creative writer's ritual of pinning such slips to a wall, and was pleasantly surprised at Kaolin Fire's personable response.

Certainly a magazine to watch.