Image by Rob Hughes via Flickr"Cucumber Gravy" is the next piece of short fiction in Lightspeed Magazine's January, 2011 edition.This story is something of a combination of two things that I have been thinking about for awhile: marijuana and science fiction. My ongoing work with the book, The Northern Lights, is a marriage of those two very things. However, it's not at all similar to this work.
The protagonist is Whitewell Smith, or Welly. He's a paranoid, possibly schizophrenic, living out in the middle of nowhere growing and selling marijuana.
I suppose it's not schizophrenia that is causing him to see and hear alien cucumbers sing and dance.
A priest comes along to pick up a bit of weed for a friend of his who's undergoing chemotherapy. He shares the mystery of the dancing, singing cucumbers from another planet.
It's these types of stories that generally keep me away from these types of magazines and makes me wonder how low their standards really are.
Care to elaborate on why you feel this story reflects low literary standards in sci-fi magazines? I don't know this magazine, the story, or the author beyond what you've said, but that's not much. Are you simply prejudiced against dancing, singing cucumbers? I don't see anything implicitly wrong with them. I want to see a full and proper review of the story.
ReplyDeleteIt could be that many sci-fi magazines have low standards and that this story is simply a reflection of that. In this particular magazine, I did spot one tale that was even worse. It looked like it was written by someone who was illiterate. That said, I couldn't see a real link to science fiction in the cucumber story. It was simply a matter of some pot growing paranoid farmer who happened to welcome some odd-ball singing cucumbers to his home so that they could die. In the magazine, "The Elephants of Poznan" was pretty good, and the one using social media as a vehicle was thought provoking. The singing cucumbers simply don't reflect what I consider good science fiction to be. Have you read that particular story? If so, then maybe you can answer the following question, is it science fiction because the cucumbers came from space and that they sing and dance? It might have been more interesting if the guy had actually hallucinated the whole ordeal. It was only slightly better than the 'trailer trash who slept with an alien' story, "Black Fire," which followed it.
ReplyDeletePerhaps I could go so far as to say that the cucumber story did not lack in terms of character or literary style, but for all of the positives, deep down inside of the story it's empty. There's nothing to see. I would prefer to read a piece of fiction that lacks strength in terms of character developement or literary style but is strong under the skin with ideas that are provoking and interesting. With Tanith Lee's story, I can kind of understand why it was published: 1) she has a well known name. 2) the narrative style was experimental, even if it looked like it was written from an illiterate's point of view. Really, it read like an experiment that was never really intended to see the public, but there it was nevertheless.
Finally, this is not really a review site so much as it is a journal of my thoughts about the books that I read.