 |
| (Cover Artist: Howard Lyon) |
This story, Body Language, follows a puppeteer living in a near-future world where advanced motion-capture technology allows actors to physically become animatronic characters appearing in film and television. Using advanced virtual reality systems, these actors remotely operate robotic puppets via elaborate "rigs" which translate their movements into those of their on-screen character. The protagonist of this story, Saskia, is a performer famous for starring as the titular role in a series of children's television programs about the misadventures of a robotic terrier named "eDawg." Yet as the story opens, one of Saskia's stage performances is interrupted by a team of FBI agents who arrive asking for her help.
As these agents grimly inform Saskia, the son of a wealthy businessman has recently been kidnapped, and for reasons no one can quite understand, the kidnappers have demanded that the ransom money be delivered by a toy version of the "eDawg" character which Saskia is famous for having portrayed on-screen. Unwilling to entrust a task as important as this to a simple children's toy, and unable to find an agent with the expertise required to convincingly imitate the body movements of this fictional character, these agents ask Saskia to interface with the "real life" version of the eDawg rig--taking control of this electronic puppet so that she can remotely carry the ransom money to the designated drop-off point. In this way, the agents hope that Saskia's presence on the scene will allow them to not only rescue the kidnapped child, but also gather the information needed to apprehend the kidnappers.
This complicated and admittedly slightly contrived setup allows Body Language to straddle several very different narratives simultaneously. Partially the tale of an actress who suddenly sees her own work reflected back at her in the most unlikely of contexts, partially a high-concept crime thriller in which that same actress becomes wrapped up in an elaborate conspiracy, and partially the "heartwarming tale" of a young boy who is rescued by his beloved robotic dog (complete with all the cliches which that latter narrative demands), what ultimately makes Body Language so engaging is the way that Kowal's prose weaves together this mesh of contradictory demands and audience expectations. Just like the term from which the story's title derives, Body Language ultimately shows how subtle movements and changes of expression within a story can influence how the audience perceives these events.
To be clear, the majority of the stories in Word Puppets are not about actors (or for that matter futuristic puppeteers), but with one or two exceptions, this tendency of Kowal's work to test and twist her reader's expectations appears regularly in her fiction. Over and over again, the stories of Word Puppets feature characters existing within outwardly simple and archetypal sci-fi and fantasy narratives, and then challenges these characters to expand upon their own stories in order to survive.
The first story in this anthology, The Bound Man, is a good example of this. The story starts out by following a seemingly generic sorcerer, Halldor, who in the fantasy world in which he lives is conducting an ancient and forbidden ritual to summon a being who he assumes to be a demon. While initially familiar, Kowal quickly twists this setup into a darkly wry feminist commentary on the ways in which East-Asian societies are often objectified in Euro-centric fantasy. Upon summoning the so-called "ancient demon," Halldor discovers this being to not in fact be a demon at all, but instead a very human woman who lived centuries earlier named Reiko--an individual whose fabled supernatural abilities derive mostly from the fact that hundreds of years earlier she spontaneously vanished into thin air (as if summoned by an unknown force).
Yet this narrative setup soon becomes tragic when both characters realize the true magnitude of what Halldor has done. In summoning Reiko, Halldor has not only permanently separated this woman from her children (bringing her hundreds of years forward in time), but also possibly altered the course of all of history for the worst. Not only is Reiko's reputation as a "demon" in fact rooted in the forbidden spell which Halldor has performed, but by summoning Reiko Halldor quickly realizes that the lengthy wars which plague his own time in part derive from the way in which Reiko's identity has been mythologized. As the plot builds towards its conclusion, Kowal ultimately constructs a story about the disturbing similarities between the processes of dehumanization and mythologization. Eventually, Reiko and Halldor are forced to confront a crisis existing both in the present moment, and also the time period from which Reiko vanished.
The story First Flight takes these social themes in a still different direction, and follows an elderly time traveler tasked with documenting a test flight of the Wright brother's prototype aircraft. As the only human old enough to survive the trip back to 1905 (within the logic of the story, humans can travel through time, but only to dates existing within their life span), the protagonist of First Flight must confront first the entrenched sexist agism of the modern world she leaves, and then also a dilemma that emerges when she inadvertently reveals her identity as a time traveler to a young boy in the distant past. The result is that Kowal takes what starts out as the tale of a time traveler doing her best to avoid damaging history, and then flips this around into a story examining how age and gender factor into the experience of social marginalization.
All of these stories demonstrate how Kowal routinely inserts new elements and perspectives into otherwise familiar sci-fi and fantasy narratives, incorporating issues of sexism, disability rights, racism, and agism into familiar narrative structures and setups. This gives Kowal's work a social dimension that still retains a core enthusiasm for it's genre elements, all while also managing to examine the function of stories, characters, and plot-lines as meaningful mediums of artistic expression in and of themselves.
The final three stories in this anthology, We Interrupt this Broadcast, Rockets Red, and The Lady Astronaut of Mars showcase all of these aspects of Kowal's fiction via a sequence of loosely connected narratives. Starting out as a kind of "reversed James Bond" scenario, We Interrupt This Broadcast focuses on a terminally ill scientist working for the Pentagon in the 1950s. Upon being confronted with his own imminent mortality, this scientist chooses to step out of the bureaucratic role he has spent his entire life upholding. Astutely realizing the threat posed by nuclear arms proliferation, this story's protagonist, Fidel, secretly plots to use a military satellite to alter the trajectory of a passing astroid, ensuring that it collides with the Earth and destroys Washington DC. Fidel's rational for orchestrating this catastrophe is that, by ensuring that the United States is no longer a dominant global power, he can facilitate the unification of all of humanity.
Ultimately dying when his efforts are successful, the wryly positive consequences of Fidel's actions are then depicted in the following two stories, both of which chart a kind of alternate golden age of worldwide technological and social advancement. The result is a series of decidedly retro space stories which juxtapose the political and social climates of the 1960s and 70s alongside advanced space colonies, and a reimagined society that finally manages to see the ways in which various forms of institutionalized bigotry hold humanity back. This anthology's final story, The Lady Astronaut of Mars, deals directly with gender roles in this alternate history, exploring the ways in which a society truly focused on confronting the challenges of spaceflight would be required by simple necessity to discard institutionalized sexism, racism, ableism, and even ageism.
All of the stories in Word Puppets demonstrate Kowal's skill as an author. In addition to their unique setups, Kowal's fiction also manages to explore the ways in which narratives influence their audiences. Her work not only plays with its underlying ideas and plots, but also actively interrogates the assumptions of the foundational mythologies of its genres in new and interesting ways. The result is an engaging and playful collection built on a strong and nuanced worldview--an anthology of short fiction whose author is willing to have fun with her premises, even as she questions them.