More modern Promethei
Sep. 23rd, 2014 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileOne of the very cool things about attending nerdy literary conventions like Readercon is that you can pick up unusual little hard-to-find books. This past Readercon, in honor of the awesome Memorial Guest of Honor, Mary Shelley, I picked up a little limited-run paperback--scarcely more than a pamphlet--called The Mortal Immortal: The Complete Supernatural Short Fiction. While Mary Shelley wrote a lot of things besides Frankenstein, it looks like she only wrote five pieces of supernatural short fiction. But now I have all of them!
First off, the cover is gorgeous, a textured gray with the the text made to look like a gravestone rubbing. The text is a nice atmospheric sort of tiny cramped round serif font, which is very old-timey, but it gets a little wearing to read, and also it's not right-justified and suffers from random line breaks. Overall, though, it is a very pretty book.
Before getting to the five stories, there is a meandering and somewhat self-indulgent introduction, framed as a short story wherein a middle-aged Mary Shelley returns from the dead and snarks at the book's editor. But only a little--I think it would have improved with some additional snarking, honestly. The reanimation conceit fits very well with Mary Shelley's works, as it is a theme she returned to time and time again; it works slightly less well in that the narrator manages to not narrate himself enough to establish himself as a character I care about, but enough that I feel like I'm sitting through him talking about himself. Also, he seems to be mimicking the highly detailed, overwritten prose style of the period, which, dude, there's a reason we stopped writing like that when we invented proper editing software. It does provide some solid background information on what Mary Shelley did with her life and her writing after all the fun exciting bits with Frankenstein and Percy Shelley getting his fool self drowned that you always hear about, at any rate.
The first story is The Mortal Immortal: A Tale, which brings us into the fun madcap world of Agrippa and alchemy, and reminded me that I still need to read that third Deb Harkness book. Our narrator is a hapless former apprentice of the famed alchemist, who has a haughy, demanding girlfriend, and is also an idiot who doesn't know the first thing about lab safety (literally the first thing you learn in a modern school, which is don't put anything in your fucking mouth). Idiot narrator eats a science experiment that causes him to age imperceptibly slowly, which causes issues in his marriage with Haughty Demanding Lady. (Her name is actually Bertha, as in the apropos Grateful Dead lyric, "Bertha, don't you come around here anymore.") Overall, it is an endearing story about two idiots, which eventually turns into a meditation on how age affects our relationships.
The second story is entitled Transformation, about a reckless young Italian lad who is, quite frankly, an asshole. He is in love with his guardian's daughter, but then he goes off to Paris and makes reckless party boy friends and spends all his money and becomes even more of an asshole, which results in a big family drama wherein he tries to kidnap the girl he wants to marry--twice. All this changes when, wandering around in a penniless rage, he meets a magical dwarf. No, he seriously does meet a magical dwarf, who offers to switch their bodies for three days in exchange for all sorts of riches, so that he can attempt to woo his girlfriend again (don't ask me how this was supposed to work) but then there are plot twists and he almost dies and becomes less of an asshole, the end. This story was really quite a lot of fun, what with all the kidnappings and fight scenes and almost dying.
The third story, Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman, is not only the weirdest story in the book, but possibly the weirdest use of epistolary form I have ever seen. It's in the form of a newspaper article, that basically apologizes for not being able to get an interview with Mr. Dodsworth, and then goes on about the science of how he reanimated (cryogenics, basically), and the circumstances under which he was found, and then proceeds to speculate about what it must have been like for him. I'm not used to "speculative fiction" meaning "fiction in which people sit around speculating about stuff," but that seems to be what this is. Anyone who complains about Roger Walton should very definitely not read this story.
The Dream gets us back to more conventional storytelling form, with a regular third-person narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. This is also my favorite piece in the book, possibly because it's the only one with a female protagonist. Our heroine, Constance, is planning on getting herself to a nunnery, because her whole family is dead after a brutal fight with her boyfriend's family, as they have been enemies for years yadda yadda medieval stuff. The King of France visits her to try and talk her into not going to the nunnery, and her boyfriend, also the only surviving member of his family, comes to convince her to take him back or else he will go off to die heroically in Palestine. Constance decides to let St. Catherine decide for her by spending the night on a religiously significant ledge over a river. I must wonder how often this is actually how people made major life decisions back in olden times.
The last story, Valerius: The Reanimated Romani, at least has the good grace to feature actual transcriptions of our reanimated dude talking and thinking about things, although there's not much of a story arc to this one. To be quite honest, it is like 90% bitching about how terrible and degraded 19th century Italy was and how the Roman Republic was so much better. (It's a bit funny if you know about how much Mary Shelley hated Italy.) Also the friendship he strikes up with a young married English lady sounds . . . not solely friendlike.
I'm super excited that I read this, but honestly, Frankenstein is clearly still the masterpiece.
First off, the cover is gorgeous, a textured gray with the the text made to look like a gravestone rubbing. The text is a nice atmospheric sort of tiny cramped round serif font, which is very old-timey, but it gets a little wearing to read, and also it's not right-justified and suffers from random line breaks. Overall, though, it is a very pretty book.
Before getting to the five stories, there is a meandering and somewhat self-indulgent introduction, framed as a short story wherein a middle-aged Mary Shelley returns from the dead and snarks at the book's editor. But only a little--I think it would have improved with some additional snarking, honestly. The reanimation conceit fits very well with Mary Shelley's works, as it is a theme she returned to time and time again; it works slightly less well in that the narrator manages to not narrate himself enough to establish himself as a character I care about, but enough that I feel like I'm sitting through him talking about himself. Also, he seems to be mimicking the highly detailed, overwritten prose style of the period, which, dude, there's a reason we stopped writing like that when we invented proper editing software. It does provide some solid background information on what Mary Shelley did with her life and her writing after all the fun exciting bits with Frankenstein and Percy Shelley getting his fool self drowned that you always hear about, at any rate.
The first story is The Mortal Immortal: A Tale, which brings us into the fun madcap world of Agrippa and alchemy, and reminded me that I still need to read that third Deb Harkness book. Our narrator is a hapless former apprentice of the famed alchemist, who has a haughy, demanding girlfriend, and is also an idiot who doesn't know the first thing about lab safety (literally the first thing you learn in a modern school, which is don't put anything in your fucking mouth). Idiot narrator eats a science experiment that causes him to age imperceptibly slowly, which causes issues in his marriage with Haughty Demanding Lady. (Her name is actually Bertha, as in the apropos Grateful Dead lyric, "Bertha, don't you come around here anymore.") Overall, it is an endearing story about two idiots, which eventually turns into a meditation on how age affects our relationships.
The second story is entitled Transformation, about a reckless young Italian lad who is, quite frankly, an asshole. He is in love with his guardian's daughter, but then he goes off to Paris and makes reckless party boy friends and spends all his money and becomes even more of an asshole, which results in a big family drama wherein he tries to kidnap the girl he wants to marry--twice. All this changes when, wandering around in a penniless rage, he meets a magical dwarf. No, he seriously does meet a magical dwarf, who offers to switch their bodies for three days in exchange for all sorts of riches, so that he can attempt to woo his girlfriend again (don't ask me how this was supposed to work) but then there are plot twists and he almost dies and becomes less of an asshole, the end. This story was really quite a lot of fun, what with all the kidnappings and fight scenes and almost dying.
The third story, Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman, is not only the weirdest story in the book, but possibly the weirdest use of epistolary form I have ever seen. It's in the form of a newspaper article, that basically apologizes for not being able to get an interview with Mr. Dodsworth, and then goes on about the science of how he reanimated (cryogenics, basically), and the circumstances under which he was found, and then proceeds to speculate about what it must have been like for him. I'm not used to "speculative fiction" meaning "fiction in which people sit around speculating about stuff," but that seems to be what this is. Anyone who complains about Roger Walton should very definitely not read this story.
The Dream gets us back to more conventional storytelling form, with a regular third-person narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. This is also my favorite piece in the book, possibly because it's the only one with a female protagonist. Our heroine, Constance, is planning on getting herself to a nunnery, because her whole family is dead after a brutal fight with her boyfriend's family, as they have been enemies for years yadda yadda medieval stuff. The King of France visits her to try and talk her into not going to the nunnery, and her boyfriend, also the only surviving member of his family, comes to convince her to take him back or else he will go off to die heroically in Palestine. Constance decides to let St. Catherine decide for her by spending the night on a religiously significant ledge over a river. I must wonder how often this is actually how people made major life decisions back in olden times.
The last story, Valerius: The Reanimated Romani, at least has the good grace to feature actual transcriptions of our reanimated dude talking and thinking about things, although there's not much of a story arc to this one. To be quite honest, it is like 90% bitching about how terrible and degraded 19th century Italy was and how the Roman Republic was so much better. (It's a bit funny if you know about how much Mary Shelley hated Italy.) Also the friendship he strikes up with a young married English lady sounds . . . not solely friendlike.
I'm super excited that I read this, but honestly, Frankenstein is clearly still the masterpiece.