Intersections: The Sycamore Anthology

by John Kessel

Each year, the invitation-only Sycamore Hill Writers' Conference brings together some of science fiction's greatest authors in a workshop focused on short SF/fantasy. In 1994, all stories submitted to the workshop were collected for Intersections. These 13 stories and one novel chapter, some rewritten by the authors to incorporate workshop critiques, are accompanied by authors' afterwords and by comments that were made about each story. Unsurprisingly, Intersections is a superior anthology and an excellent resource for new and intermediate SF/F writers. The fiction is so strong that anyone uninterested in the art of crafting prose may skip the commentary without being shortchanged. (Just don't skip Appendix I, the incisive and hilarious "Turkey City A Primer for SF Workshops.")The 1994 participants were Richard Butner, Carol Emshwiller, Karen Joy Fowler, Robert Frazier, Gregory Frost, Alexander Jablokov, James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel, Nancy Kress, Jonathan Lethem, Maureen F. McHugh, Michaela Roessner, Bruce Sterling, and Mark L. Van Name. With a lineup that strong, choosing the best stories has more to do with reader taste than writer ability; the works described here were selected to suggest the anthology's range and diversity. Bruce Sterling's Hugo Award-winning "Bicycle Repairman" displays his trademark brilliant high-tech extrapolation in the clash between an obsessed treadhead and a federal agent. "The Marianas Islands" is prose goddess Karen Joy Fowler's subtle, stunning portrait of a WWII widow and '60s activist grandmother whose father-in-law may have invented the submarine. Alexander Jablokov's "The Fury at Colonus" rewrites Greek myth as a modern, hard-boiled, satirical, and very strange sort of police procedural. In "The Miracle of Ivar Avenue," John Kessel pays tribute to a classic Hollywood director in a painfully sharp time-travel tale. In short, this is one of the best original literary-SF/F anthologies of the '90s. --Cynthia Ward

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fiction, Anthologies

Paperback

First published December 1, 1995

About the author

John (Joseph Vincent) Kessel co-directs the creative writing program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. A winner of the Nebula, Locus, Sturgeon, and Tiptree Awards, his books include Good News From Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, The Pure Product, and The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories. His story collection Meeting in Infinity was a New York Times Notable Book. Most recently, with James Patrick Kelly he has edited the anthologies Feeling Very Strange, Rewired, The Secret History of Science Fiction and Kafkaesque. Born in Buffalo, NY, Kessel has a PhD in American Literature, has been an NEA Fellow, and for twenty years has been one of the organizers of the Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop.

Reviews

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got turned on to this collection by a truly glowing review by Matthew Claxton in his Unsettling Futures newsletter, and I can confirm this book delivers. Sycamore Hill is an invite-only science fiction writer's workshop, the post-graduate version of Clarion and its ilk. Given that Bruce Sterling is my favorite living science-fiction author and I recognized a handful of names on the cover as heavy writers with big ideas and serious chops, I figured I'd give it a look.

I was really too young to experience 90s science-fiction when it happened, but this was actually a golden moment for the genre. Serious futurism was out from under the mushroom cloud binary of the Cold War, and the writers were GenX and Boomers at the peak of their abilities. It was slightly more possible to make a living writing fiction, before a certain Everything Store that owns this website and the maw of Digital Content consumed everything. Science-fiction was still a ghetto, before every Iowa Writer's Workshop literary fic head decided that straight realism wasn't enough and they could write about clones and diseases and digitally altered selves, but it was a ghetto with ambition!

What elevates this collection is that it brings the reader into the magic circle of artistic creation, with short notes of the authors reacting to each other's stories in the Milford Method style (and as S.L. Huang among others have pushed back, Milford is not the only method), and you can see where pros think a story is weak, and how it was improved.

Sterling's "Bicycle Repairman" leads the collection, and is a favorite. I also enjoyed Jonathan Lethem's "The Hardened Criminals" as a prison drama of absent fathers, Maureen F. McHugh’s "Homesick" in it's study of a dedicated dancer, and Alexander Jablokov "The Fury at Colonus", a retelling of the myth of Orestes from the point of view of the Fury as a cop facing down retirement in a setting half mythic Greece and half suburbia.

As Claxton points out, they don't make them like this any more. Even as we've been liberated from the burdens of physical text, we're bound by ever shorter attention spans. Intersections is a fine vintage, and well worth reading!

[Gregory Frost · Rating 5 out of 5]

An anthology of stories collected from one particular year of fiction workshopped at The Sycamore Hill Writing Workshop. Includes great work by Karen Joy Fowler, Carol Emshwiller, Robert Frazier, Jonathan Lethem, Maureen McHugh, and yours truly. And MORE! Each story includes something of a gloss about its shaping and how the workshop process affected its revision.

[Sururi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bruce Sterling | Bicycle Repairman
("Mr. Rhapsodist"in incelemesini okuduktan sonra notu 1.5*tan 2.5*a cikti)