Deal Me In Short Story Challenge 2020: My List

This challenge is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis For this challenge, you select 52 stories to read in 2019 and then assign each of them to a card in a deck of cards, drawing one card each week and then reading the story that matches the card. I read most of last year's list, but I didn't finish it. This time, like Jay, I have included a wild card in each suit, so I can pick whatever I want for that card when I draw it. 

This year, I think I will try to have a post every month about what I've read.
5/7/20: 12 read, I'm trying to catch up to 16 and then I will be back on track for 4 per month

◇Diamonds: 19th century-ish poems◇ (a few are 18th century)
A Arthur Hugh Clough: Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth  5/7/20 
1 Alfred Lord Tennyson: Ulysses (reread)
2 William Shakespeare: Venus & Adonis
3 Swinburne: Garden of Proserpina (reread)
4 John Keats: Ode on Melancholy (reread) 6/21/2020
5 Percy Shelley: Ode to the West Wind (reread)
6 John Keats: Ode to a Nightingale (reread)
7 John Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn (reread)
8 Percy Shelley: Adonais
9 Robert Burns: To a Mouse (reread)
10 Percy Shelley: Mont Blanc
J Percy Shelley: Ozymandias (reread)
Q Percy Shelley: To a Skylark (reread) 1/25/2020

K Wild Card

♤Spades: Science Fiction & Fantasy♤ (from old issues of Asimov's)
A Nancy Kress: Night Win (September 1983)  4/26/2020
1 Octavia Butler: Speech Sounds (December 1983)
2 Connie Willis: And Who Would Pity a Swan? (January 1985)
3 Richard Purtill: Gorgonissa (January 1985)
4 Frederick Pohl: Fermi & Frost (January 1985)
5 Bruce Sterling: Dinner in Audoghast (May 1985)
6 Lisa Goldstein: Preliminary Notes on the Jang (May 1985) 1/30/2020
7 Pat Cadigan: After the Days of Dead-Eye Dee (May 1985)
8 Michael Swanwick: Anyone Here From Utah? (May 1985) April 26 2020
9 Kate Wilhelm: The Gorgon Field (August 1985)
10 James Blaylock: Lord Kelvin's Machine (December 1985) 
J Robert Silverberg: An Outpost of the Empire (November 1991) 4/25/2020
Q Kim Stanley Robinson: Vinland the Dream (November 1991)
K Wild Card: Charles de Lint: Uncle Dobbins Parrot Fair 4/24/20

♧Clubs: More Stories from Asimov's♧

A Rudy Rucker & Bruce Sterling: Storming the Cosmos (December 1985)  4/20/20

1 James Tiptree: All This & Heaven Too (December 1985)  

2 Susan Palwick: The Woman Who Saved the World (May 1985)

3 James Patrick Kelly: Solstice (June 1985) 

4 Ian McDonald: Empire Dreams (December 1985) 

5 Norman Spinrad: World War Last (August 1985) 6/20/20

6 Kim Stanley Robinson: A History of the 20th Century, With Illustrations (April 1991)  4/28/20

7 Greg Egan: In Numbers (April 1991) 1/31/2020

8 Lucius Shepard: Shades (December 1987) 

9 Karen Joy Fowler: The War of the Roses (December 1985)

10 Gene Wolfe: The Nebraskan and the Nereid (December 1985)  April 27 2020

J  Robert Charles Wilson: Boulevard Life (December 1985) April 25 2020

Q Keith Roberts: Mrs. Byres and the Dragon (August 1990) 6/22/2020

K Wild Card

♡Hearts: 20th Century Poems♡

A Pablo Neruda: Oda a la Critica (Ode to Criticism) (reread)

1 W.H. Auden: In Memory of W.B. Yeats (reread)

2 Pablo Neruda: Oda a la Sal (Ode to Salt) (reread)

3 Robert Hayden: Perseus (reread)

4 Pablo Neruda: Oda a la Alchofa (Ode to the Artichoke) (reread)

5 W.H. Auden: The Unknown Citizen (reread)

6 Robinson Jeffers: Hurt Hawks

7 T.S. Eliot:  Little Gidding

8 Marianne Moore: Poetry  5/31/2020

9 W.H. Auden: The Shield of Achilles (reread)

10 Neruda: Deber del Poeta (The Poet's Obligation) (reread) 6/18/2020

J Robert Frost: Birches 

Q Neruda: Migracion (Migration) (reread)

K Wild Card 

Deal Me In: The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains

This is one of my cards for the Deal Me In Challenge: the 7 of Hearts, which is the suit I dedicated to stories on audio. I was keeping up with my list until I fell behind in May. I will try to catch up this month by reading two at a time for a while.

I have read this short story before and listened to the audiobook twice now.

The audio version is read by the author with musical accompaniment by the FourPlay String Quartet. It is an hour and 23 minutes. I loved the audio reading. I would like to listen to more of Gaiman's audio books. (I listened to Norse Mythology earlier this year.) Apparently there is an illustrated version as well. 

I think this is one of Gaiman's best short stories. It is set in Scotland.

“You ask me if I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many things. For where I left him. For what I did. But I will not forgive myself for the year that I hated my daughter, when I believed her to have run away, perhaps to the city. During that year I forbade her name to be mentioned, and if her name entered my prayers when I prayed, it was to ask that she would one day learn the meaning of what she had done, of the dishonour that she had brought to my family, of the red that ringed her mother’s eyes.”

The narrator describes himself as a "wee man" (and later, as a dwarf). His mother was human, and so is his wife. He can run faster than ordinary men, and he can communicate with spirits. He  hires a man named Calum McInnes to be his guide to a cave in the black mountains. The cave is known for its gold, but the locals avoid it. They say that taking the gold corrupts you. The narrator is not concerned about this because the gold is not what he wants from this trip, anyway.

The story is delightfully creepy, and apparently there is also an illustrated version. I would like to read it sometime. 

“I am old now, or at least, I am no longer young, and everything I see reminds me of something else I’ve seen, such that I see nothing for the first time. A bonny girl, her hair fiery red, reminds me only of another hundred such lasses, and their mothers, and what they were as they grew, and what they looked like when they died. It is the curse of age, that all things are reflections of other things.

I say that, but my time on the Misty Isle, that is also called, by the wise, the Winged Isle, reminds me of nothing but itself.

It is a day from that jetty until you reach the black mountains.” 

Deal Me In Update: April

Here are the stories I read in April!

Hearts: Stories on Audio

"Snow" by John Crowley -- Lightspeed podcast. The link goes to the magazine where you can either read it or listen or both. The author discussed the story with Lightspeed here, and I had a hard time figuring out what else to say about it, but I thought it was really interesting.

Clubs: Classic SF

"Occam's Scalpel" -- my first Theodore Sturgeon story. The introduction says:  
Although his stories made clever use of science, he was never known as an hard sf writer, but rather as the finest literary craftsman of his day in the genre… “Occam’s Scalpel” is on the edge of being not sf at all.

Which makes me wonder why this is included in an anthology of hard sf. Anyway, I didn't like this one & didn't feel like writing about it. If Sturgeon is as good as his reputation has it,  I'm sure he's written better than this!

"Atomic Power" by Don A Stuart -- Another disappointing story.

Spades: Contemporary SF

"All the Hues of Hell" Gene Wolfe -- I have previously read Latro in the Mist by this author, and I have The Fifth Head of Cerberus on my TBR list. Wolfe passed away earlier this month, and this is the first short story I have read by him. The editors' introduction says: Gene Wolfe’s body of work in the science fiction field, along with that Delany, Dick, and Le Guin, is perhaps the most influential of any writer f the past two decades. Of them all, Wolfe is perhaps the least interested in the use of pure science in his fiction... Wolfe’s fiction is so rich and evocative, his style s precise and complex, that much f his influence has been stylistic. "All the Hues of Hell" is a story in which theoretical physics and metaphysics combine. It has, initially, the ring of a hard sf situation: three characters on a ship in space approaching an alien planet, one of them mad, or dead. Quickly the story becomes mysterious,  ambiguous, and disturbing... 

I liked this one, but it was weird.

Deal Me In: March Stories Read (4)

Here are the stories I read in March!

Spades: Contemporary Science Fiction

John M. Ford, "Heat of Fusion"

This is a new author for me. The story is told through diary entries of a man with terminal radiation poisoning. This is a hard one to describe... it's intense, and very internally focused, with very little setting description. This one is captivating. 

Robert L Forward: "The Singing Diamond"

A search for valuable ores in the Asteroid Belt leads to the discovery of a diamond disk with life in it. 

This probably the most boring story I have read for this challenge, and that's all I'm going to say about that. The SF Encyclopedia notes that this is Robert Forward's first published story, so maybe he wrote better ones later on, but I'm not sure why the editors were so impressed with it. Its just missing something, I'm afraid. 

Bruce Sterling: "The Beautiful & the Sublime" 

I have heard of Bruce Sterling before, but I don't think I have read anything by him. This is a far-future story that looks at how AI might transform society. The central plot, though, is about the building of an aircraft that mimics the flight of a dragonfly. The really revolutionary thing about it, from the point of view of the characters, is that the craft is designed to fly without a computer:

"Why?" I said. "What happened to its controls?"
Somps grinned for the first time, exposing long, narrow teeth. "They haven't been invented yet. I mean, there aren't algorithms for its wing kinematics. Four wings flapping -- it generates lift through vortex-dominated flow fields. You've seen dragonflies..."

I liked this bit where the narrator reflects on the history of science:

"... I confess that I felt the loss of those glory days, which we now see, in hindsight, as the last sunset glow of the Western analytic method. Those lost battalions of scientists, technicians, engineers!
Of course, to the modern temperament, this lopsided emphasis on rational thought seems stifling. Admittedly machine intelligence has its limits; it's not capable of those human bursts of insight that once advanced scientific knowledge by leaps and bounds. The march of science is not the methodical crawling of robots.

But who misses it?"

I will not spoil it, but I definitely recommend this one if you can find it. 

Hearts: Stories on Audio

HG Wells: "The Crystal Egg"

The main character, Mr. Cave,  owns an antique shop. One antique item that comes into his possession is a crystal egg. One night he observes a light coming from the egg and examines it. For a moment, he has a glimpse of  "a view of a wide and spacious and strange country" but soon the view vanishes. After a while, he starts to suspect that the crystal egg is showing the planet Mars. After that... well, there are some mysterious happenings, but I guess I was expecting something more dramatic. I have read The Time Machine,  The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The War of the Worlds, and those books had a similar feel to the classic horror of the same era (Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, ect). This is the first short story I have read by him, and it is very low-key in comparison to those novels. I liked it, but it did not blow me away. 

Deal Me In: January-Febuary stories read (7)

This is what I have read so far for the short stories/poetry selections I planned for the Deal Me In challenge, except for  the poem "The Eve of St Agnes." I already wrote a separate post about that one. 

Clubs: Classic Science Fiction

Raymond Z. Gallun: "Davy Jones's Ambassador" 1935 1/15/2019

I really liked this one! This is an early first contact story (about first contact with aliens, that is) set at the bottom of the ocean, rather than in space. It is clever, imaginative and a bit sad. Probably my favorite of those I have read so far. 

James Blish: "Surface Tension" 1952 1/28/2019 

Discovering that the sun will soon explode, scientists create microhumans who can live in a drop of water. This was ok, but not quite as good as the previous story, I thought.

Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore: "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" 1943 2/19/2019

This story is about children who discover another dimension. The editors' introduction says: "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" is one of his [Kuttner's] genre masterpieces, in which he alludes to Lewis Carroll (and invokes Carrolls play with mathematical logic) as he parodies the advanced theories of child psychologists and the educational toy industry. If geometric sense really is learned by children at an early age by interacting with the world, most especially with their toys, what if they got toys from the fourth dimension? 

Kate Wilhelm "The Planners" 1968 2/23/2019 
Winner of the Nebula Award for Best Short Story
This is basically a mad scientist story. I didn't think this was anything special, I'm afraid, but I will wait and see if it has any interesting parallels or connection with the other stories I haven't read yet. 

Spades: Contemporary Science Fiction 

Gregory Benford "Exposures" 1982 2/5/2019

Kind of a slice of life story, except that the characters are astronomers. This wasn't a bad story, but it was a bit dry.  

Hearts: Stories on Audio

Peter Beagle: We Never Talk About My Brother Podcastle podcast 
2/17/2019

This is probably not my favorite Peter Beagle story; that's probably either "Come Lady Death" or "Salt Wine" (which I read years ago in The Line Between). This is a story about someone who can make stories come true. It is a little bit eerie, but not quite a horror story. As in "Salt Wine," there's a great narrator, but for some reason, the other aspects of the story weren't quite as compelling to me. I have 3 more Podcastle stories on my Deal Me In list, and I might listen to more of them next year. 

Natalia Theodoridou: The Birding: A Fairy Tale
World Fantasy Award Winner for Short Fiction: 2018 
Strange Horizons podcast (click through to listen or read the story)
2/28/2019

The premise of this story is a plague that is turning people into birds. The narrator, Maria, lives in contemporary Greece. She tries to avoid the plague and tells a story about birds to her unborn child, which will eventually dovetail (ha!) with the frame story. This was weird, maybe a bit too surreal for my taste. 

Deal Me In: The Eve of St Agnes by John Keats (1820)

Manuscript of the poem (British Library)

This is the first poem I have read for the Deal Me In challenge. I have read some of the short stories and I will write about them later, but I think I will do individual posts for all the poems (if I read all of them). I read the poem a couple of times, and then read the commentary on the poem at the website of Brooklyn College (found via Wikipedia). The "overview" at that link quotes some comments (from a reviewer of the time) calling it "one long sensuous utterance," but lacking in substance. The commentary, I think, shows that there actually is a great deal to think about in this poem, but it goes through the whole thing in much more detail than I have in this post!

The Eve of St Agnes was written in 1819 and published in 1820. The poem is named for the evening before the feast of Saint Agnes, which falls on January 21st. Legend had it that a girl could see her husband in a dream if she performed certain rituals, going to bed without supper and lie down naked, looking upward to the heavens rather than behind or sideways.

The British Library website (at the link above) says: "The poem is richly detailed with full of intimate descriptions, although Keats’ publishers forced him to tone down some of the sexual description for fear of provoking an adverse reaction from readers." 

I.

ST. AGNES' Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!

The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;

The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,

And silent was the flock in woolly fold:

Numb were the Beadsman's fingers, while he told 

His rosary, and while his frosted breath,

Like pious incense from a censer old,

Seem'd taking flight for heaven, without a death,

Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.

The poem begins outside a medieval chapel, where a beadsman enters to say his prayers. (A beadsman is a poor man paid to pray for a wealthy patron; the word refers to the beads of a rosary.) He overhears the music from the revels in the castle nearby. The narrator shifts to describing the revels, where Madeline is anticipating the vision she hopes to receive from St. Agnes that night. 

VII.

Full of this whim was thoughtful Madeline:

The music, yearning like a God in pain, 

She scarcely heard: her maiden eyes divine,

Fixed on the floor, saw many a sweeping train

Pass by -- she heeded not at all: in vain

Came many a tiptoe, amorous cavalier,

And back retired; not cooled by high disdain,

But she saw not: her heart was otherwhere:

She sighed for Agnes' dreams, the sweetest of the year.

Porphyro is introduced in stanza IX. He is hiding nearby in the shadows, seeking Madeline. 

Apparently, he has seen her in a vision. He sneaks into the castle, and we are told (in stanza X) that he would be killed if discovered, because the castle's inhabitants are hostile to "his lineage." (I am guessing this refers to a family feud). The only one who is friendly to him is the old woman Angela. She recognizes him and urges him to leave. I don't think there is any explanation of how she knows who he is. Porphyro convinces her to help him find Madeline. He finds her in her room, where he watches her. At the end of stanza XXIII, she is compared to a nightingale:

XXIII

... As though a tongueless nightingale should swell 

Her throat in vain, heart-stifled, in her dell. 

This looks like an allusion to Philomela, the woman who was raped by Tereus, who also cut out her tongue; ultimately she was transformed into a nightingale. The most famous version of the story comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses. (I wrote a post about Metamorphoses last week which covered this story.) I will come back to this, as its relevant later.

XXIV

A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,

All garlanded with carven imag'ries

Of fruits and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,

And diamonded with panes of quaint device,

Innumberable of stains and splendid dyes,

As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings;

And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,

And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,

A shielded scutcheon blushed with blood of queens and kings.

XXX
And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep, 
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavendered,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrups, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferred
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon.

Porphyro continues to watch Madeline sleep, and starts to play her lute. In stanza XXXIV, she opens her eyes and sees Porphyro. At this point she is "wide awake," but she still sees "the vision of her sleep" indicating that she still thinks that she is dreaming. She speaks for the first time in the next stanza (XXXVI), revealing that Porphyro was in her dream. Now that she sees him in the waking world, she is startled by the difference between the dream Porphyro and the real one; the latter, she says, is "pallid, chill and drear." Almost as soon as she says this, he becomes invigorated again and... melts into her dream: "Into her dream he melted, as the rose/Blendeth its odour with violet,—"

So this looks like a poetic way of saying that they're having sex, and consent is ... dubious under the circumstances. This is why the mention of Philomela jumped out at me... without that allusion, I might say that any disturbing element in the relationship is probably unintentional. As it is, that angle sort of looks deliberate. 

There is a storm outside, and the moon sets. Porphyro declares that this is not a dream. Madeline is not pleased to hear this; she fears that he's going to leave her, even though she says a few lines later that she has been deceived (and it seems plausible that if she had known the whole thing was real, she would have refused to have premarital sex with him). He tells her that the storm outside is an elfin-storm from faery land, and that it will help them slip away to his home in the southern moors before everyone else in the castle wakes up. This is partly because they drank a lot the previous night (so they are sleeping in) but also possibly a magical effect of the storm.

And they are gone: ay, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm.
That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe,
And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form 
Of witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm,
Were long be-nightmar'd. Angela the old
Died palsy-twitch'd, with meager face deform;
The Beadsman, after thousand aves told,

For aye unsought for slept among his ashes cold.


So maybe they never arrived at that house on the moors; it sounds as if they were blown away to faery land. 

Whew! That was weirder than I was expecting. The danger and the attraction of being lost in dreams is a prominent theme here, and one that comes up in some of his other poems (e.g. La Belle Dame Sans Merci, which was written later). I have read some of Keats's other poems, but not since before I started blogging, and this one was new to me. 

The Eve of St Agnes by Arthur Hughes, 1856 (Wikimedia)

Deal Me In Challenge list for 2019

This challenge is hosted by Jay at Bibliophilopolis. For this challenge, you select 52 stories to read in 2019 and then assign each of them to a card in a deck of cards, drawing one card each week and then reading the story that matches the card.

The stories for the first 2 suits are from The Ascent of Wonder: the Evolution of Hard SF, edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. I selected these using the Wikipedia page, which makes it easy to see the year of publication for each story. The table of contents in the book itself is not in chronological order, for some strange reason. I'll probably read the whole book by the end of the year, but I will use this challenge to decide which stories to read first.

I am not sure if I can read all of these, but if I have to change something I will probably cut back on another challenge. After all, this one is probably one of the easier challenges to fit into the year, especially since I have designated one of my suits for stories on audio. 

I probably won't review all of these, but I will do a few round-up posts.

Clubs: Classic SF Short Stories

A - H.G. Wells: "The Land Ironclads" 1903
2 - Rudyard Kipling: "With the Night Mail" 1909
3 - Don A Stuart: "Atomic Power" 1934 4/15/2019

4 - Raymond Z. Gallun: "Davy Jones's Ambassador" 1935 1/15/2019
5 - Hal Clement:  "Proof” 1942 8/6/2019
6 - Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore: "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" 1943 2/19/2019
7 - Raymond F. Jones: "The Person from Porlock" 1947

8 - Philip Latham: "The Xi Effect" 1950 6/23/2019

9 - Arthur C. Clarke: "The Star" 1955 7/28/2019

10 - James Blish: "Surface Tension" 1952   1/28/2019
J - Katherine Maclean: "The Snowball Effect" 1952
Q - Philip K. Dick: "The Indefatigable Frog" 1953
K  - J.G. Ballard: "Cage of Sand" 1963 8/31/2019

Spades: Contemporary SF Short Stories 

(using a broad definition of "contemporary": 1968-present)

A - Kate Wilhelm "The Planners" 1968  2/23/2019
2 - Poul Anderson "Kyrie" 1969 8/7/2019
3 - Gregory Benford "Exposures" 1982 2/5/2019
4 - Theodore Sturgeon "Occam's Scalpel" 1971  4/15/2019

5 - J.G. Ballard "Prima Belladonna" 1971

6 - Ursula K. Le Guin "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" 1974 (reread)
7 - Ian Watson "The Very Slow Time Machine" 1978 8/15/2019
8 - Robert L. Forward "The Singing Diamond" 1979  3/14/2019
9 - William Gibson "Johnny Mnemonic" 1981
10 - Bruce Sterling "The Beautiful & the Sublime" 1986 4/1/2019
J  - Gene Wolfe "Procreation" 1984
Q  - John M. Ford "Heat of Fusion" 1984 3/9/2019
K - Gene Wolfe "All the Hues of Hell" 1987 4/29/2019

Diamonds: Poetry

A - John Keats: The Eve of St. Agnes     2/13/2019 
2 - Percy Shelley: Ode to the West Wind (reread) 
3 - Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (reread) 
4 - John Greenleaf Whittier: Snowbound 
5 - Tennyson: Ulysses (reread) 7/31/2019
6 - Tennyson: The Lotus-Eaters 5/19/2019
7 - Arthur Hugh Clough: Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth 
8 - W.B. Yeats: The Song of Wandering Aengus (reread)
9 - Yeats: Easter 1916 (reread) 

10 - Pablo Neruda: Explicar Algunas Cosas (I Explain a Few Things) (reread) 7/25/2019

J - Neruda: Canto a la madres de los milicianos muertos (Songs for the Mothers of Slain Militiamen)

Q - Neruda: Oda a la critica (Ode to Criticism) 

K - Neruda: Oda a la sal (Ode to Salt)

Hearts: Stories on audio 

A - Edgar Allen Poe: A Descent into the Maelstrom LibriVox
2 - Nathaniel Hawthorne: Rappaccinis Daughter LibriVox 8/2/2019
3 - Jules Verne: In the Year 2889 LibriVox
4 - HG Wells:  The Star LibriVox 6/28/2019
5 - HG Wells: The Crystal Egg LibriVox 3/23/2019
6 - Algernon Blackwood: A Victim of Higher Space LibriVox 
7 - Neil Gaiman: The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains - library audio (downloadable ebook) (reread) 6/1/2019
8 - Natalia Theodoridou: The Birding: A Fairy Tale: Strange Horizons podcast (World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction 2018) 2/28/2019
9 - Peter Beagle: Come Lady Death Podcastle podcast (reread)
10 - John Crowley: Snow 
Lightspeed podcast (http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/snow/) 4/14/2019
J - Peter Beagle: We Never Talk About My Brother Podcastle podcast 2/17/2019
Q  - NK Jemisin: Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Under the Still Waters Podcastle podcast [found on this page: http://podcastle.org/new-to-podcastle]
K -  Ken Liu: The Paper Menagerie Podcastle podcast