A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories Read Free

fictionally what instantaneous travel, transilience, might feel like, finding out in the process that
     what it feels like is the only explanation of how it works, and that where words in themselves are inadequate, syntax can
     take you straight to another world and home again in no time.
    All three of the churten stories are also metafictions, stories about story. In “The Shobies’ Story,” transilience acts as
     a metaphor for narration, and narration as the chancy and unreliable but most effective means of constructing a shared reality.
     “Dancing to Ganam” continues with the theme of unreliable narration or differing witness, with a hi-tech hubristic hero at
     its eccentric center, and adds the lovely theory of entrainment to the churten stew. And finally, “Another Story”—one of my
     very few experiments with time travel—explores the possibility of two stories about the same person in the same time being
     completely different and completely true.
    In this story I found churten theory apparently failing to find its technology, unable to get us reliably from X to Y without
     time lapse; but I expect they’ll go on trying. We as a species do love to go very, very fast. My own attention in “Another
     Story” was lured by the marriage and sexual arrangements of the planet O, an intricate set of relationships and behaviors
     laden with infinite emotional possibilities. We as a species do love to make life very, very complicated.
    I don’t want to talk about “The First Contact with the Gorgonids,” or “The Ascent of the North Face”—is anything deadlier
     than somebody explaining a joke? I am, however, fond of both. Funny stories, silly stories, are such a gift. You can’t sit
     down to write one, you can’t intend one; they’re presents from the dark side of your soul.
    “The Kerastion” is a workshop story. My assignment was for each of us to invent an artifact or a prescribed behavior or folkway;
     we made a list of all these items, and then each wrote a story using as many of them as we liked. Several oddments, such as
     necklaces of vautituber, come from the list, as do the concepts of sculpting in sand and making flutes of human leather. My
     friend Roussel described her artifact thus: “The kerastion is a musical instrument that cannot be heard.” A Borges story in
     ten words. I made a few hundred words out of it and enjoyed doing so, but did not really improve on it.
    Of the stories in this volume, “Newton’s Sleep” and “The Rock That Changed Things” are the ones I’ve had the most grief with.
     “The Rock” is a parable, and I don’t really much like parables. Its anger makes it heavy. Yet I like its key image very much.
     I wish I could have given my blue-green stone a lighter setting.
    As for “Newton’s Sleep,” the title is from Blake, who prays that we be kept from “single vision and Newton’s sleep.” In the
     story it is further linked to Goya’s extraordinary “The Sleep of Reason Engenders Monsters.” “Newton’s Sleep” can be, and
     has been, read as an anti-technological diatribe, a piece of Luddite ranting. It was not intended as such, but rather as a
     cautionary tale, a response to many stories and novels I had read over the years which (consciously or not—here is the problem
     of elitism again) depict people in spaceships and space stations as superior to those on earth. Masses of dummies stay down
     in the dirt and breed and die in squalor, and serve ‘em right, while a few people who know how to program their VCRs live
     up in these superclean military worldlets provided with all mod con plus virtual-reality sex, and are the Future of Man. It
     struck me as one of the drearier futures.
    The story, however, didn’t stay with that, but with the character, Ike, who wandered into my mind with problems on his; a
     worried, troubled man: a trulyrational man who denies the existence of the irrational, which is to say, a true believer who