Pandemonium: Stories of the Smoke

Anne C. Perry and Jared Shurin (eds), 2012

(October 2012)

I’m a winner baby! Well, runner-up at least. If you’re at all interested in speculative fiction then you should be aware of the fine pair who run pornokitsch, and occasionally edit short story collections such as this under the Pandemonium umbrella. I made a mildly amusing comment on a competition blogpost a while back and this ebook was my reward.

As the name suggests, this is a set of themed SF short stories inspired by Dickens’ London. Personally that sounds very appealing, but despite the scope for invention that brief would seem to offer, a lot of contributors here have interpreted it primarily as an invitation to write in a stiff, faux-Victorian idiolect. Taken as individual pieces that’s fine but, in all honesty, taken en masse it starts to grate a little. I took several breaks reading this to try and avoid that grating. That’s not the drawback for an anthology that it would be for a novel, it should be noted.

The cumulative effect is that those stories who strive for a different voice really stand out. Uncle Smoke (by Archie Black), a bird’s eye view history of London, is the best example of this and probably my favourite story in the collection. James Wallis’ mash-up of Macbeth and Oliver Twist in the post-crunch Square Mile has a less distinctive voice but is an interesting concept done well, despite the weak title (Aye, There’s the Twist. Multiple allusions does not automatically equal good, more's the pity. It's not even from the right play). Inspector Bucket Investigates (Sarah Lotz) is the opening story and well chosen as such, being the one that cleaves most closely to the brief, and is fully deserving of its place at the top of the order.

It’s tempting to say that this all feels a bit like China Miéville-lite but that would be unfair. This is a strong collection overall and the only real low point is Necropolis (Jonathan Green), which is a walking tour of the city through the eyes of an attempted rapist. It’s as awkward as it sounds, and isn’t helped by the author’s seemingly deliberate ignorance of Orwell’s first rule of writing. No cliché is left unwrung, and when a vaulted space is described as ‘sepulchral’ for the second time in less than a few hundred words you almost start to miss the girl from the opening paragraphs and the awful blandness of the ‘form-fitting black leggings showing off the sculptural curves of her long legs.’ At least those curves are ‘sculptural’ and not ‘sculpted’ (or indeed 'sepulchral'). Small mercies, eh?

In sum though, this might just be the thing that finally prompts me to invest in a Kindle or the like. If there’s more stuff like this available primarily in that medium I wouldn’t want to miss out. I might even be willing to pay for some of it.