TITLE: Anthems Outside Time and Other Strange Voices
AUTHOR: Kenneth Schneyer
367 pages, Fairwood Press, ISBN 9781933846927 (paperback)
DESCRIPTION: (from the back cover): Curator’s notes from an art exhibition. Exam questions. A children’s social studies book. An end-user license agreement from God. From Nebula-nominated author Kenneth Schneyer comes this collection spanning the range from fantasy to science fiction to horror to political speculative fiction. Representing more than a decade of work, these 26 weird, disorienting stories will accost your expectations while relocating your heart. This volume includes such celebrated works as “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer,” as well as two stories never before published.
MY RATING: Five out of five stars
MY THOUGHTS: Kenneth Schneyer’s new short story collection Anthems Outside Time and Other Strange Voices finds him at the top of the game when it comes to telling stories in non-traditional narrative forms. Schneyer is not afraid to jump genres, meld styles, subvert tropes or upend storytelling technique. I would not be surprised to find out his next story is told in the form of an interactive jigsaw puzzle, or that he’s tossed pages into an fireplace to char and pieced together a story out of the ashes and unburned remains.
Schneyer loves to force readers to “fill in the blanks,” sometimes quite literally (see “Levels of Observation,” a story told via a series of blank performance assessment forms for people with an unspecified special talent that sounds a lot like telepathy), and sometimes through the eyes of a character ("Tenure Track,” another series of evaluations and applications but with the responses filled in). He gives his readers an extra level of personal investment that might not have been achieved if these tales has been written in more traditional forms. Likewise “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer,” in which we are left to figure out exactly the titular artist was experiencing that influenced her portraiture in sublime ways, and in “You in the United States!” which gives us excerpts from a near-future social studies textbook without telling us exactly how the United States got where it is at the point the textbook was written. “Some Pebbles in the Palm” plays with the reincarnation trope by having the author directly address the reader multiple times to let us know the story isn’t as neat and tidy as we’d perhaps like it to be (and yet, the story itself is still more than satisfying). And “I Have Read the Terms of Use” might be the best example of legal language trapping us (in this case in our own failing bodies) while holding the writer of the contract (in this case, God) harmless. “Life of the Author Plus Seventy” is a clever look at copyright law and how far corporations will go to close loopholes in the legal language.
Schneyer’s legal experience comes to the fore in several of the aforementioned entries, and also in two of the longer, and best, stories in the collection. Both “Keepsakes” (one of my all-time favorite stories, by Schneyer or anyone else) and “The Whole Truth Witness” focus on lawyers’ use of supposedly infallible witnesses to intimidate the opposition or sway the jury. In “Keepsakes,” they are essentially living, interactive, recordings of specific moments in a person’s life; in “Witness,” they are people who have been injected with something that enables them to recall everything they’ve experienced with perfect clarity but takes away their ability to speak untruths. “Witness” takes a comedic turn that makes the point of the story all the stronger and highlights how easy it is to find flaws in the infallible. “Keepsakes” is about more than just the legal battle: it’s about how we often fail to let go of our pasts sufficiently enough to live our present, how we fail to learn from our mistakes, and how holding grudges may hurt ourselves more than the people we have the grudge against. It has a bittersweet tone throughout, and my heart broke for not just the leads but also the secondary characters.
Perception is another key facet of Schneyer’s storytelling: how we perceive others, and how we are perceived. Who exactly is “the other”? The protagonist of “Hear the Enemy, My Daughter” thinks she knows all there is to know about an alien enemy and about her own daughter – until she digs a little deeper and realizes how little she understands both. “The Plausibility of Dragons” (another favorite story of mine) gives the “othering” of women and Muslims a supernatural explanation but doesn’t shy away from tackling the issue head-on (and beats down the argument that there were no female knights or black people in Europe in medieval times along the way). “Calibration” also hinges on a mother thinking she knows what her daughter is doing while she’s at work, while “Keeping Tabs” takes on the toxic nature of Fandom and Celebrity by literally enabling a fan to see through a favorite actress’ eyes. “Who Embodies What We Are” may be the most straight-forward examination of how perception alters as we learn more facts, being the story of a Great Hero and the downtrodden culture he died to defend. And “A Lack of Congenial Solutions” centers us – humans – as the “other,” taking on colonization and the human propensity for control.
Schneyer also loves to subvert tropes. Another favorite in the collection is “Serkers and Sleep,” which looks at “berserker rages” in peace and wartime through a magical lens (and gives us a twist on the “sleeping beauty” and “cursed book” tropes for a nice three-fer). “The Age of Three Stars” plays with the nature of prophecy and how words don’t always mean what we think they mean. “I Wrung it in a Weary Land” is another heartbreaker, taking the “alcohol is magic” and “mystical storekeeper” tropes and doing a triple twist before sticking the landing. “Living in the Niche” gives a very physical presence to the feeling that everything we love disappears.
The final story in the collection is also a heartbreaker (and is one of two stories original to this collection, along with “Who Embodies What We Are”). “Dispersion” is about the slow discovery by a daughter that her mother is losing words and memory. The reader realizes what is going on long before the main characters do, and anyone who has watched a loved one descend into Alzheimer’s will recognize the main character’s pain and confusion and determination to do anything to help her mother. What I loved about the story is how Schneyer illustrates the mother’s fleeing thoughts, and how he brings about the resolution.
There are several other stories in the collection that I haven’t had a chance to mention. “The Mannequin’s Itch” and “The Last Bombardment” are studies of wartime tactics with sf-nal touches. “The Sisters’ Line” (co-written with Liz Argall) is a surrealist’s dream. “Six Drabbles of Separation” is exactly what the title advertises. “Lineage” is a beautiful ghost story focused on how small selfless moments can change history.
There is something for everyone in Anthems Outside Time and Other Strange Voices: science fiction, fantasy, surrealism, social commentary, comedy, even a little horror.