What do you think?
Rate this book
This Time, While We're Awake
Fowler's new collection, This Time, While We're Awake, welcomes you to the worlds of egregious dystopias—environments where tornadoes come one after another as neighbors spar, drugged breeders make babies in the near-future for the sterile rich, and humans are sacrificed by contract to aliens who protect them. In this collection, Fowler examines what it means to be fair and humane in the surreal landscapes where the ruling factions are neither of these things. Come and get your Practice Baby, if you'd like to try parenting. Take an injection to experience love without a partner. This collection showcases not only Fowler's trademark heart and humor, but also a darker dimension of commentary similar to Bradbury or The Twilight Zone. Selected stories in this volume have been published internationally and online.
- GenresShort Stories
328 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 28, 2013
160 people want to read
About the author
Heather Fowler
44 books124 followersHeather Fowler is a poet, a fiction writer, a playwright, and a novelist. She is the author of the novel Beautiful Ape Girl Baby (2016) and the story collections Suspended Heart (2010, 2nd edition 2019), People with Holes (2012), This Time, While We're Awake (2013), and Elegantly Naked In My Sexy Mental Illness (2014). Fowler’s People with Holes was named a 2012 finalist for Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award in Short Fiction. Her fictive work has been made into fine art in several instances and her collaborative poetry collection, Bare Bulbs Swinging, written with Meg Tuite and Michelle Reale, is the winner of the 2013 TWIN ANTLERS PRIZE FOR COLLABORATIVE POETRY released in December of 2014. Fowler has published stories and poems online and in print in the U.S., England, Australia, and India, and had work appear in such venues as PANK, Night Train, storyglossia, Surreal South, Feminist Studies, and more, as well as having been nominated for the storySouth Million Writers Award, Sundress Publications Best of the Net, and Pushcart Prizes. She is Poetry Editor at Corium Magazine.
Please visit her website here: www.heatherfowler.com
Please visit her website here: www.heatherfowler.com
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 6, 2013
Read 8/8/13 - 8/22/13
4 Stars - Strongly Recommended, 'specially to those who like a little WTF fiction
328 Pages (Ebook)
Heather Fowler has taken literature to places I hadn't known it could go. A practice baby for expecting parents, that looks and acts just like your own baby would (so creepy); drugged breeders who are awakened for one day of copulation and impregnation, then put back to sleep while the baby gestates (so freaky); a town that allows an alien species to harvest one of them per visit in return for their continued protection against the assumed horrors that exist on the other side of the walls that seal them off from the rest of the world (so scary).
A wickedly dark and haunting collection that shows its readers an alternative look at the future of humanity; a deep, devastating spiral into strange and frightening circumstances.
4 Stars - Strongly Recommended, 'specially to those who like a little WTF fiction
328 Pages (Ebook)
Heather Fowler has taken literature to places I hadn't known it could go. A practice baby for expecting parents, that looks and acts just like your own baby would (so creepy); drugged breeders who are awakened for one day of copulation and impregnation, then put back to sleep while the baby gestates (so freaky); a town that allows an alien species to harvest one of them per visit in return for their continued protection against the assumed horrors that exist on the other side of the walls that seal them off from the rest of the world (so scary).
A wickedly dark and haunting collection that shows its readers an alternative look at the future of humanity; a deep, devastating spiral into strange and frightening circumstances.
September 25, 2013
To put it plainly, this collection is freaking amazing! Fowler is an artist that defies the constraints set by the artists before her. She writes observant characters, she utilizes fantasy and fable, and she weaves everything together with the keen attention of any good literature. She engages the reader with social and societal critique, questioning and redefining roles. Fowler finds beauty in the hidden and breaks apart the glamor of what is not really real, but what we often adopt as our reality. In other words, she blurs the line between reality and the reality of our fantasies.
April 20, 2014
I reviewed this in the April 2014 issue of the journal Stirring:
It may seem incongruous to apply the word "pleasurable" to the dystopian visions conjured by Heather Fowler in This Time, While We're Awake. The sixteen stories in the collection feature technology run amok, ecological devastation, a smattering of horrible deaths. There's no doubt that the subject matter is disturbing.
But after my initial read-through, one of the first notes I jotted down was "breath of fresh air." The stories, interwoven with subtle critiques of rampant consumerism, class inequality, and violence against women, do what good literature should do: make you step back and look at your world with a more critical eye. So let's call them "refreshingly disturbing."
A couple of stories do express guarded optimism. "Eugenically, Dear" portrays a society structured around a new form of eugenics, but a dissident doctor may actually succeed in subverting the practice of rating the "quality" of newborns. In "Please Be Careful with the Children," a school administrator takes a stand against the soul-crushing skills tests that derail students' futures. She genuinely sympathizes with children, including the small girl who punches a playground bully, and the boy who plays hooky every day by disappearing through a hole in the fence.
Men guilty of anti-women violence get their comeuppance in "A Big Girl Has a Good Time with Small Men." Hardened male criminals are sent to penal colonies, where specially bred giant women dispense rough justice. Of course the danger of a quick summary like the one I've just offered is that the tale will seem like a one-note song, a clever conceit, but the story is much more subtle. Despite the repulsiveness of the prisoners and their crimes, Fowler invites us to ponder the morality of capital punishment; unlike the title's "big girl" with her unshakeable certainty, we're left uneasy about the justifiability of her violence.
There are moments of whimsy to be found even in dystopias. In "The City of Grandmothers," food and comfort are plentiful in a city where men aren't allowed. "There was arguing, . . . but mainly about whose pie was better." In "Practice Baby," a woman's increasing frustration with a scarily lifelike imitation-infant is narrated with deadpan wit.
Motherhood and the mother-child bond come across as fraught and problematic in several other stories besides "Practice Baby." In "Three-Star Girl," an art teacher consistently awards her small daughter only three out of five stars for her art projects, a slight that rankles well into her daughter's adulthood and overshadows her subsequent achievements in science. In Fowler's skilled hands, that withholding of praise is as unnerving and memorable as the more egregious aggressions occurring in other stories.
The travails of motherhood are also front and center in "Child-Silencing Devices," one of the gems of the collection. The scene is rural California, the interaction between farmer's wife and traveling salesman—vulnerable woman on one side of a screen door, unsavory man on the other—reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor and Joyce Carol Oates. One of the story's many twists is that this particular salesman, Woodrow Wilson (yes, really), is a pre-operative male-to-female transsexual, who owes his sales successes to his androgynous erotic appeal. Interestingly, despite his ostensible desire to self-identify as female (though the omniscient narrator refers to Woodrow as "he"), Woodrow seems to feel no sense of solidarity with the women he encounters, exhausted and demoralized by squalling children, endless chores, and uncaring husbands. Their misery is good for sales.
Another standout is "The Muse Box," which traces a novelist's complicated relationships with two men. On the one hand is her husband, the handsome, cheerful Hal (evoking the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey?), whom Gilly loves but doesn't find terribly stimulating. On the other hand is her very stimulating but problematic ex-friend B, a fellow writer who was on her own intellectual level and creative wavelength, but was unpredictable and infuriating. "B was never comfortable—unless one meant the kind of comfort one had from morphine after surgery." When Gilly suffers a major case of writer's block, she decides, at Hal's suggestion, to re-create B holographically.
Even the story-within-a-story, the novel Gilly struggles with, is dystopian and dire, yet oddly beautiful: after an asteroid hit the earth and destroyed all life, "ash vapors expanded for miles and miles from the place where something particular and intimate had been, into the infinite, black, diffuse universe, which was itself a mystery of particles."
One of the pleasures of reading the stories is the challenge of teasing out the literary lineages—the authors who may have inspired Fowler or to whom she may be responding—and also thinking about the differences between dystopic fiction, realist fiction, science fiction, and the large amorphous category called, among other things, magic realism. (And Fowler is so prolific that she has the luxury of gathering her magic-realist works in separate collections, including her wonderful debut, Suspended Heart.)
I've already mentioned O'Connor and Oates, arguably in the realist camp. Certainly science fiction is an important influence: Ray Bradbury is quoted in the book's epigraph, and there are echoes of Ursula K. Le Guin, particularly Le Guin's famous cautionary fable about social injustice, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." But Fowler's stories in This Time are generally not so much futuristic as taking place in an alternate present—everything as it is now, with the addition of one ingredient (a procedure to erase traumatic memories; a drug to mimic the feeling of being in love; holographic consumer electronics) that sets the plot in motion and serves as a catalyst for her insights about human relationships and human nature, our frailties and our potential. People still have the ordinary capacities/limitations—no one levitates or sprouts wings (thus separating these stories from magic realism)—but there is an eeriness that evokes The Twilight Zone and perhaps horror fiction as well, at least in chilling stories like "The Cabin" with its valiant Last Girl confronting the bad guys.
The collection's multilayered literary lineage doesn't obscure the uniqueness of Fowler's wry wit and artistic vision. Her poetic gift is evident even in the midst of grim scenarios. At the end of "Please Be Careful with the Children," the middle-aged school administrator goes to the torn fence used by her truant student, and decides to crawl through it herself. She is "surprised to discover just how easy it was to get out of the schoolyard and into that open patch of blue sky and trees outside the grid, to slip away from these grounds whilst turning tail against the repetitive bureaucracy, to follow one illicit out into a through."
As implied in the collection's title, these inventive and politically aware stories seem to say to us, While we're awake, let's be awake. Let's head for that hole in the fence.
It may seem incongruous to apply the word "pleasurable" to the dystopian visions conjured by Heather Fowler in This Time, While We're Awake. The sixteen stories in the collection feature technology run amok, ecological devastation, a smattering of horrible deaths. There's no doubt that the subject matter is disturbing.
But after my initial read-through, one of the first notes I jotted down was "breath of fresh air." The stories, interwoven with subtle critiques of rampant consumerism, class inequality, and violence against women, do what good literature should do: make you step back and look at your world with a more critical eye. So let's call them "refreshingly disturbing."
A couple of stories do express guarded optimism. "Eugenically, Dear" portrays a society structured around a new form of eugenics, but a dissident doctor may actually succeed in subverting the practice of rating the "quality" of newborns. In "Please Be Careful with the Children," a school administrator takes a stand against the soul-crushing skills tests that derail students' futures. She genuinely sympathizes with children, including the small girl who punches a playground bully, and the boy who plays hooky every day by disappearing through a hole in the fence.
Men guilty of anti-women violence get their comeuppance in "A Big Girl Has a Good Time with Small Men." Hardened male criminals are sent to penal colonies, where specially bred giant women dispense rough justice. Of course the danger of a quick summary like the one I've just offered is that the tale will seem like a one-note song, a clever conceit, but the story is much more subtle. Despite the repulsiveness of the prisoners and their crimes, Fowler invites us to ponder the morality of capital punishment; unlike the title's "big girl" with her unshakeable certainty, we're left uneasy about the justifiability of her violence.
There are moments of whimsy to be found even in dystopias. In "The City of Grandmothers," food and comfort are plentiful in a city where men aren't allowed. "There was arguing, . . . but mainly about whose pie was better." In "Practice Baby," a woman's increasing frustration with a scarily lifelike imitation-infant is narrated with deadpan wit.
Motherhood and the mother-child bond come across as fraught and problematic in several other stories besides "Practice Baby." In "Three-Star Girl," an art teacher consistently awards her small daughter only three out of five stars for her art projects, a slight that rankles well into her daughter's adulthood and overshadows her subsequent achievements in science. In Fowler's skilled hands, that withholding of praise is as unnerving and memorable as the more egregious aggressions occurring in other stories.
The travails of motherhood are also front and center in "Child-Silencing Devices," one of the gems of the collection. The scene is rural California, the interaction between farmer's wife and traveling salesman—vulnerable woman on one side of a screen door, unsavory man on the other—reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor and Joyce Carol Oates. One of the story's many twists is that this particular salesman, Woodrow Wilson (yes, really), is a pre-operative male-to-female transsexual, who owes his sales successes to his androgynous erotic appeal. Interestingly, despite his ostensible desire to self-identify as female (though the omniscient narrator refers to Woodrow as "he"), Woodrow seems to feel no sense of solidarity with the women he encounters, exhausted and demoralized by squalling children, endless chores, and uncaring husbands. Their misery is good for sales.
Another standout is "The Muse Box," which traces a novelist's complicated relationships with two men. On the one hand is her husband, the handsome, cheerful Hal (evoking the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey?), whom Gilly loves but doesn't find terribly stimulating. On the other hand is her very stimulating but problematic ex-friend B, a fellow writer who was on her own intellectual level and creative wavelength, but was unpredictable and infuriating. "B was never comfortable—unless one meant the kind of comfort one had from morphine after surgery." When Gilly suffers a major case of writer's block, she decides, at Hal's suggestion, to re-create B holographically.
Even the story-within-a-story, the novel Gilly struggles with, is dystopian and dire, yet oddly beautiful: after an asteroid hit the earth and destroyed all life, "ash vapors expanded for miles and miles from the place where something particular and intimate had been, into the infinite, black, diffuse universe, which was itself a mystery of particles."
One of the pleasures of reading the stories is the challenge of teasing out the literary lineages—the authors who may have inspired Fowler or to whom she may be responding—and also thinking about the differences between dystopic fiction, realist fiction, science fiction, and the large amorphous category called, among other things, magic realism. (And Fowler is so prolific that she has the luxury of gathering her magic-realist works in separate collections, including her wonderful debut, Suspended Heart.)
I've already mentioned O'Connor and Oates, arguably in the realist camp. Certainly science fiction is an important influence: Ray Bradbury is quoted in the book's epigraph, and there are echoes of Ursula K. Le Guin, particularly Le Guin's famous cautionary fable about social injustice, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." But Fowler's stories in This Time are generally not so much futuristic as taking place in an alternate present—everything as it is now, with the addition of one ingredient (a procedure to erase traumatic memories; a drug to mimic the feeling of being in love; holographic consumer electronics) that sets the plot in motion and serves as a catalyst for her insights about human relationships and human nature, our frailties and our potential. People still have the ordinary capacities/limitations—no one levitates or sprouts wings (thus separating these stories from magic realism)—but there is an eeriness that evokes The Twilight Zone and perhaps horror fiction as well, at least in chilling stories like "The Cabin" with its valiant Last Girl confronting the bad guys.
The collection's multilayered literary lineage doesn't obscure the uniqueness of Fowler's wry wit and artistic vision. Her poetic gift is evident even in the midst of grim scenarios. At the end of "Please Be Careful with the Children," the middle-aged school administrator goes to the torn fence used by her truant student, and decides to crawl through it herself. She is "surprised to discover just how easy it was to get out of the schoolyard and into that open patch of blue sky and trees outside the grid, to slip away from these grounds whilst turning tail against the repetitive bureaucracy, to follow one illicit out into a through."
As implied in the collection's title, these inventive and politically aware stories seem to say to us, While we're awake, let's be awake. Let's head for that hole in the fence.
July 4, 2019
Go, get this book!!!
Search high and low if needs be, but get your copy! You won't regret it.
Search high and low if needs be, but get your copy! You won't regret it.
October 18, 2013
Heather Fowler’s collection of short stories, This Time, While We're Awake, is one that I highly recommend reading. Each story presents the reader with characters trying to live in a flawed society of the near future. Even knowing that the stories in this collection are fiction, I can see a possibility of any one of them becoming true.
Reading Fowler's stories left me contemplating our present world and wondering about our near future. Societies have become ever more dependent on technology. Preserving the environment has become an afterthought. In her stories, Fowler addresses what could happen if we let the influence technology has on us today run rampant. She analyzes human behavior in unjust settings and highlights the efforts made by those who desire to be good in spite of the movement away from hard work, honesty, and kindness.
This Time, While We’re Awake will always have a place on one of my bookshelves. I recommend reserving a place on one of yours and ordering the book today!
Reading Fowler's stories left me contemplating our present world and wondering about our near future. Societies have become ever more dependent on technology. Preserving the environment has become an afterthought. In her stories, Fowler addresses what could happen if we let the influence technology has on us today run rampant. She analyzes human behavior in unjust settings and highlights the efforts made by those who desire to be good in spite of the movement away from hard work, honesty, and kindness.
This Time, While We’re Awake will always have a place on one of my bookshelves. I recommend reserving a place on one of yours and ordering the book today!
April 15, 2014
One of my favorite writers. I love this book--full of fascinating characters and weirdly wonderful plots. Be sure to read this one!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews