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Nemonymous #8
Cone Zero
Short Fiction by various authors
“The Fathomless World” by Colleen Anderson
“The Point of Oswald Masters” by Neil James Hudson
“Cone Zero” (page 23) by Sean Parker
“Cone Zero” (page 33) by Kek-W
“Cone Zero, Sphere Zero” by David M. Fitzpatrick
“An Oddly Quiet Street” by S.D. Tullis
“Always More Than You Know” by John Grant
“Cone Zero” (page 129) by Grant Wamack
“Going Back For What Got Left Behind” by Eric Schaller
“Cone Zero” (page 147) by Stephen Bacon
“The Cone Zero Ultimatum” by Bob Lock
“Angel Zero” by Dominy Clements
“How To Kill An Hour” by A.J. Kirby
“To Let” by Jeff Holland
“The Fathomless World” by Colleen Anderson
“The Point of Oswald Masters” by Neil James Hudson
“Cone Zero” (page 23) by Sean Parker
“Cone Zero” (page 33) by Kek-W
“Cone Zero, Sphere Zero” by David M. Fitzpatrick
“An Oddly Quiet Street” by S.D. Tullis
“Always More Than You Know” by John Grant
“Cone Zero” (page 129) by Grant Wamack
“Going Back For What Got Left Behind” by Eric Schaller
“Cone Zero” (page 147) by Stephen Bacon
“The Cone Zero Ultimatum” by Bob Lock
“Angel Zero” by Dominy Clements
“How To Kill An Hour” by A.J. Kirby
“To Let” by Jeff Holland
Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
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24 people want to read
About the author
D.F. Lewis
73 books24 followersWriter, editor and publisher, active in the small press. Winner of the British Fantasy Society Special Award (the Karl Edward Wagner Award) in 1998.
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April 20, 2020
ConeZero is many things, perhaps first and foremost an anthology of fantastic fiction from the UK, the 8th in a series, edited anonymously by majordomo Des Lewis, whose claims to fame are also many, including, quite possibly, an utterly unbreakable record for the most short fictions ever published by a single author in the independent press. Add to this his markedly odd vision, akin to a herky-jerky whirling disco mirror ball with distinctly uneven facets alternating flashes of dada, surreal, fabulist and existential light through a churning mist from someplace the other side of the Twilight Zone. And then there is his sense of…what? Purpose? Humor? Identity? Mood? Prankishness? Even the “8” of “Nemonymous 8” is turned on its side, like a faux infinity symbol, yet it is still very much an 8 turned on its side.
For whatever reason, manifesto of authorial/editorial selflessness not withstanding, fourteen authors (Neil James Hudson, Colleen Anderson, Jeff Holland, John Grant, A.J. Kirby, Eric Schaller, Kek-W, S.D. Tullis, Stephen Bacon, Sean Parker, Dominy Clements, Bob Lock, Grant Wamack and David M. Fitzpatrick) have agreed to forego their bylines (in exchange for a place on the list of contributors on the back cover which in no way corresponds to the list of stories in the table of contents, as well as the chance to appear in an issue of Nemonymous) offering fourteen tales inspired by the odd title of the anthology, which itself may be little more than an anagram (with an extra O) of the title of the previous collection, Zencore.
(If you really must know who wrote what, take a gander at the next issue, Cern Zoo, or possibly Cerne Zoo—yet another anagram, possibly with an extra E in the same series—which will contain the proper TOC for this one.) To further complicate matters, four of the stories are titled “Cone Zero,” two others have “Cone Zero” within their title, and another concerns itself largely with the value and esthetics of a “cone of zero height, zero radius and zero volume.” Am I beginning to convey any of this to you?
Perhaps short fictions posing as hyper-creative essays subtitled “What Cone Zero suggests to me” may best describe what we have here, but that is an impossibly dry and totally unsuitable description, and is, like any attempt to define or elucidate the Tao, doomed to failure by the inherent impossibility of the task. The tales themselves, by and large, are too much fun to pigeonhole in any event.
The first offering, “The Fathomless World,” addresses the enigma of creativity—anonymous creativity, appropriately enough. An allegory, perhaps also a dream, or maybe just a glistening abstraction of an ice crystal, the Tall Man is banished for innocently thwarting an attempted spontaneous gestalt construction by the Gawkers by chopping a branch from a tree to sculpt. He is left the impossible task of extricating himself from a labyrinth of monochromatic mediocrity, which he just might have done—hard to say for certain—leaving the reader wondering if in this world creativity is a gift, a curse, a delusion, an idle pastime or simply an incurable disease of the mind, and just how much this world and the one the reader occupies have in common.
“The Point of Oswald Masters” is quite silly, but fun and very funny, too, parodying, debunking and ridiculing the art world while at the same time seemingly whole heartedly embracing the all too mental aspect which currently dominates the conceptual/performance arts. The artist and the hired craftsman who manufactured the components of his latest concept piece struggle for the rights to and possession of an object d’art—one that usually appears an appropriate adornment for the emperor’s new clothes, although at other times becoming impossibly all too real—with a savvy gallery owner as the narrator seeking to profit from the work in every way possible.
The first of four tales titled “Cone Zero” is a trip about tripping; a tale of someone literally stuck within the tale, told by a narrator seemingly likewise stuck tripping in the 80’s. Rock’n’roll, cone shaped joints, unrelated fraternal twins, and “decidedly unhealthy” pretty women emerging from a surreal bathroom waving ‘bye like clowns ambling from a tiny automobile under the big top, told by an addled fool who is only marginally credible. None of this begins to do the story justice. Possibly it is better likened to a mobius strip with an ending, which is, after all, the beginning. Very nicely done.
On to the 2nd “Cone Zero,” another well written mobius strip, set in an alternate UK past. An Orwellian adventure in which the protagonist is willingly condemned to repeat a generalized routine involving a struggle to reclaim his awareness in order to experience a transformation in which instinct does battle with sensation in the name of revolution—every paranoid’s fantasy—within a series of realities that may be one thing and then again may actually be something else altogether. The words “Cone Zero” trigger each new transformation. Are you still with me here? A decided winner.
“Cone Zero, Sphere Zero,” is another allegory, touchingly delightful, almost child-like in the telling. The protagonist’s questioning of the inconsistent social dictums that form the rigid status quo of a simplistic conical world unexpectedly discovers the most unlikely like-minded companion leading to the revelation of what actually lies beyond their dangerous speculations, replete with a new set of pressing questions. Galileo meets Dr. Seuss in an Escher landscape.
“An Oddly Quiet Street” is a pleasantly moody straight-forward HPL inspired horror yarn somewhat strained by the use of the cone motif which has obviously been grafted onto the story as the roof of an otherwise six sided sunroom MacGuffin and also, quite unconvincingly, as hand gestures. There are several minor inconsistencies leading me to conclude this one could benefit from a rewrite or two; the first tale that wasn’t altogether up to snuff.
“Always More Than You Know,” the second longest story in the anthology, involves a Hollywood stunt double who gradually morphs into the leading man in a world dominated by a zealous religious right. It is ambitious, largely well written, suggesting more than hammering its odd milieu. “Know” adroitly holds the reader’s interest as it accelerates to its conical conclusion which, for me, uses some genuine stuntman logic requiring a huge leap of faith on behalf of the reader as one abruptly enters the vortex at the tip of the metaphysical cone, which is, in fact, the story itself.
The third “Cone Zero” is a place, a state of mind, a dream, a brief and bumpy tale of obsession, that to say any more will surely give it all away.
“Going Back for What Got Left Behind” is quite possibly the tightest woven tale in the collection. Here, Cone Zero is a place where loved ones return from the dead, seemingly oblivious to the change the experience has wrought upon them—a place where those who grieve and love them are forced to make an overwhelmingly painful decision, as told by two men who made vastly different choices, equally devastating. Rod Serling collaborating with Thomas Ligotti might have arrived here eventually.
In the 4th “Cone Zero,” a circumloquitous cautionary tale of sorts, the term refers to a work of art, and, purportedly, a mystical device. There is a wonderful madness in the telling as Damian seeks clues to the reasons for his mother’s suicide, the blood red snow whose true color only he can see, a recluse’s visionary art and to himself. Very mysterious, very moody, and often compelling, but unfortunately offset by an irritatingly amateur writing style, especially at the beginning, and the mathematical impossibility of it being “years before she was born” fifteen years prior to his mother’s suicide as an adult, unless I’ve completely missed something here.
“The Cone Zero Ultimatum,” decidedly the longest story of the batch, might have been inspired by watching “The Brave Little Toaster” while casually inhaling nitrous oxide. CONE Zero, an anagram for Consciousness of Non Entities—Zero, is a new law the Flesh have implemented after their appliances and other machines are given sentience by the World Wide Web in the not too distant future. Arnold Washiator, the self-aware washing machine and his motley band of mechanical friends must surreptitiously make their way to Eden, a bio-dome in the northern UK that has been contaminated by a virus released by human terrorists lethal only to humans. Escaping the dangers of the Flesh, their killer Doberdroids, bad puns for names, an elevator of questionable gender, sophomoric humor and other machines speaking English flavored with an assortment of thick accents and attitudes native to their country of manufacture, the machines deal with tragedy and success en route to salvation. This one never lets up.
“Angel Zero” is an oddly satisfying and tightly woven account of a recently widowed woman’s overcoming her grief by delving deeply into her late husband’s hobby. Henry Trenchard’s immaculately catalogued collection of old films contains a quiet mystery that rapidly becomes a fixation for Eleanor. With the aid of the “Urban Turban,” a master imaging tech, she sets out to discover what became of the waif with the hypnotic eyes who seemingly materializes then vanishes on an otherwise innocuous street scene filmed a century before. Cone Zero is implied here, and what an implication it is.
With a frenetic tip of the hat to Sartre’s maxim, hell is other people, “How to Kill an Hour” is the accelerating existential nightmare of a mean spirited obsessive-compulsive utterly lost within the imagined importance of his own rocket propelled commentary on life as it passes by him. The first half of the tale deals with his attempts not to miss the train he is certain he is doomed to miss; the second half with the havoc the hour’s wait for the next train wreaks upon him. You may want to run up and down stairs just to calm down after reading this one.
The collection closes with a short piece, “To Let,” about a young couple down on their luck expecting their first child. Suffice it to say should you ever rent a small furnished flat with a dusty old vase on the mantle, brown and orange with an odd pattern of criss-cross lines both straight and curved like an odd Celtic knot but without the symmetry, just smash the damn thing at the onset and be done with it.
All in all this collection is well worth the time spent perusing it. There are several bona fide gems, and most of the rest are very readable. Even those few whose literary flaws are a bit more glaring have their saving graces.
For whatever reason, manifesto of authorial/editorial selflessness not withstanding, fourteen authors (Neil James Hudson, Colleen Anderson, Jeff Holland, John Grant, A.J. Kirby, Eric Schaller, Kek-W, S.D. Tullis, Stephen Bacon, Sean Parker, Dominy Clements, Bob Lock, Grant Wamack and David M. Fitzpatrick) have agreed to forego their bylines (in exchange for a place on the list of contributors on the back cover which in no way corresponds to the list of stories in the table of contents, as well as the chance to appear in an issue of Nemonymous) offering fourteen tales inspired by the odd title of the anthology, which itself may be little more than an anagram (with an extra O) of the title of the previous collection, Zencore.
(If you really must know who wrote what, take a gander at the next issue, Cern Zoo, or possibly Cerne Zoo—yet another anagram, possibly with an extra E in the same series—which will contain the proper TOC for this one.) To further complicate matters, four of the stories are titled “Cone Zero,” two others have “Cone Zero” within their title, and another concerns itself largely with the value and esthetics of a “cone of zero height, zero radius and zero volume.” Am I beginning to convey any of this to you?
Perhaps short fictions posing as hyper-creative essays subtitled “What Cone Zero suggests to me” may best describe what we have here, but that is an impossibly dry and totally unsuitable description, and is, like any attempt to define or elucidate the Tao, doomed to failure by the inherent impossibility of the task. The tales themselves, by and large, are too much fun to pigeonhole in any event.
The first offering, “The Fathomless World,” addresses the enigma of creativity—anonymous creativity, appropriately enough. An allegory, perhaps also a dream, or maybe just a glistening abstraction of an ice crystal, the Tall Man is banished for innocently thwarting an attempted spontaneous gestalt construction by the Gawkers by chopping a branch from a tree to sculpt. He is left the impossible task of extricating himself from a labyrinth of monochromatic mediocrity, which he just might have done—hard to say for certain—leaving the reader wondering if in this world creativity is a gift, a curse, a delusion, an idle pastime or simply an incurable disease of the mind, and just how much this world and the one the reader occupies have in common.
“The Point of Oswald Masters” is quite silly, but fun and very funny, too, parodying, debunking and ridiculing the art world while at the same time seemingly whole heartedly embracing the all too mental aspect which currently dominates the conceptual/performance arts. The artist and the hired craftsman who manufactured the components of his latest concept piece struggle for the rights to and possession of an object d’art—one that usually appears an appropriate adornment for the emperor’s new clothes, although at other times becoming impossibly all too real—with a savvy gallery owner as the narrator seeking to profit from the work in every way possible.
The first of four tales titled “Cone Zero” is a trip about tripping; a tale of someone literally stuck within the tale, told by a narrator seemingly likewise stuck tripping in the 80’s. Rock’n’roll, cone shaped joints, unrelated fraternal twins, and “decidedly unhealthy” pretty women emerging from a surreal bathroom waving ‘bye like clowns ambling from a tiny automobile under the big top, told by an addled fool who is only marginally credible. None of this begins to do the story justice. Possibly it is better likened to a mobius strip with an ending, which is, after all, the beginning. Very nicely done.
On to the 2nd “Cone Zero,” another well written mobius strip, set in an alternate UK past. An Orwellian adventure in which the protagonist is willingly condemned to repeat a generalized routine involving a struggle to reclaim his awareness in order to experience a transformation in which instinct does battle with sensation in the name of revolution—every paranoid’s fantasy—within a series of realities that may be one thing and then again may actually be something else altogether. The words “Cone Zero” trigger each new transformation. Are you still with me here? A decided winner.
“Cone Zero, Sphere Zero,” is another allegory, touchingly delightful, almost child-like in the telling. The protagonist’s questioning of the inconsistent social dictums that form the rigid status quo of a simplistic conical world unexpectedly discovers the most unlikely like-minded companion leading to the revelation of what actually lies beyond their dangerous speculations, replete with a new set of pressing questions. Galileo meets Dr. Seuss in an Escher landscape.
“An Oddly Quiet Street” is a pleasantly moody straight-forward HPL inspired horror yarn somewhat strained by the use of the cone motif which has obviously been grafted onto the story as the roof of an otherwise six sided sunroom MacGuffin and also, quite unconvincingly, as hand gestures. There are several minor inconsistencies leading me to conclude this one could benefit from a rewrite or two; the first tale that wasn’t altogether up to snuff.
“Always More Than You Know,” the second longest story in the anthology, involves a Hollywood stunt double who gradually morphs into the leading man in a world dominated by a zealous religious right. It is ambitious, largely well written, suggesting more than hammering its odd milieu. “Know” adroitly holds the reader’s interest as it accelerates to its conical conclusion which, for me, uses some genuine stuntman logic requiring a huge leap of faith on behalf of the reader as one abruptly enters the vortex at the tip of the metaphysical cone, which is, in fact, the story itself.
The third “Cone Zero” is a place, a state of mind, a dream, a brief and bumpy tale of obsession, that to say any more will surely give it all away.
“Going Back for What Got Left Behind” is quite possibly the tightest woven tale in the collection. Here, Cone Zero is a place where loved ones return from the dead, seemingly oblivious to the change the experience has wrought upon them—a place where those who grieve and love them are forced to make an overwhelmingly painful decision, as told by two men who made vastly different choices, equally devastating. Rod Serling collaborating with Thomas Ligotti might have arrived here eventually.
In the 4th “Cone Zero,” a circumloquitous cautionary tale of sorts, the term refers to a work of art, and, purportedly, a mystical device. There is a wonderful madness in the telling as Damian seeks clues to the reasons for his mother’s suicide, the blood red snow whose true color only he can see, a recluse’s visionary art and to himself. Very mysterious, very moody, and often compelling, but unfortunately offset by an irritatingly amateur writing style, especially at the beginning, and the mathematical impossibility of it being “years before she was born” fifteen years prior to his mother’s suicide as an adult, unless I’ve completely missed something here.
“The Cone Zero Ultimatum,” decidedly the longest story of the batch, might have been inspired by watching “The Brave Little Toaster” while casually inhaling nitrous oxide. CONE Zero, an anagram for Consciousness of Non Entities—Zero, is a new law the Flesh have implemented after their appliances and other machines are given sentience by the World Wide Web in the not too distant future. Arnold Washiator, the self-aware washing machine and his motley band of mechanical friends must surreptitiously make their way to Eden, a bio-dome in the northern UK that has been contaminated by a virus released by human terrorists lethal only to humans. Escaping the dangers of the Flesh, their killer Doberdroids, bad puns for names, an elevator of questionable gender, sophomoric humor and other machines speaking English flavored with an assortment of thick accents and attitudes native to their country of manufacture, the machines deal with tragedy and success en route to salvation. This one never lets up.
“Angel Zero” is an oddly satisfying and tightly woven account of a recently widowed woman’s overcoming her grief by delving deeply into her late husband’s hobby. Henry Trenchard’s immaculately catalogued collection of old films contains a quiet mystery that rapidly becomes a fixation for Eleanor. With the aid of the “Urban Turban,” a master imaging tech, she sets out to discover what became of the waif with the hypnotic eyes who seemingly materializes then vanishes on an otherwise innocuous street scene filmed a century before. Cone Zero is implied here, and what an implication it is.
With a frenetic tip of the hat to Sartre’s maxim, hell is other people, “How to Kill an Hour” is the accelerating existential nightmare of a mean spirited obsessive-compulsive utterly lost within the imagined importance of his own rocket propelled commentary on life as it passes by him. The first half of the tale deals with his attempts not to miss the train he is certain he is doomed to miss; the second half with the havoc the hour’s wait for the next train wreaks upon him. You may want to run up and down stairs just to calm down after reading this one.
The collection closes with a short piece, “To Let,” about a young couple down on their luck expecting their first child. Suffice it to say should you ever rent a small furnished flat with a dusty old vase on the mantle, brown and orange with an odd pattern of criss-cross lines both straight and curved like an odd Celtic knot but without the symmetry, just smash the damn thing at the onset and be done with it.
All in all this collection is well worth the time spent perusing it. There are several bona fide gems, and most of the rest are very readable. Even those few whose literary flaws are a bit more glaring have their saving graces.
August 5, 2008
Excellent mix of weird and wonderful short stories by various authors (I was one!)
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews