Michael Bishop Unaimed Prayers: The Silurian Tales of Steven Utley

Hope, she believed, was an unaimed prayer.

—Steven Utley

The "she" in the foregoing epigraph stands for a female character surnamed Wheeler in "Cloud by van Gogh," a story in Volume 1 of Steven Utley's Silurian Tales, The 400-Million-Year Itch. Wheeler, a soil and insect specialist laboring in a weird but physically visitable facsimile of the Silurian period, aspires to paint a cloud just as she sees it and thereby to make, as Vincent van Gogh did (or would, some four hundred million years later), "you know, art."

In the next story, "Half a Loaf," we learn Wheeler's given name, Helen, an ironic one, because no one—certainly not Wheeler herself—regards her as a beauty. But in this stark Silurian environment, all the scientists refer to one another, as do the navy service people supporting their research, primarily by surnames. And, in "Cloud by van Gogh," Wheeler deflects her tent-mate (Carol) Bearden's lament of sleeplessness by confessing to "only minimal sympathy for the problems of anybody who's as slim, graceful, blonde, and sought-after" as Ms. Bearden.

But snagging a man occupies Wheeler far less than does painting a cloud with utter faithfulness. When Gabbert, the overbearing male leader of the astronomy team, rebukes her many balked efforts to render a cloud perfectly as "beyond pathetic," indeed as "Sisyphean," she declares that she has no choice: "Gotta keep rolling that rock up the hill"—the tall slope of her aesthetic aspirations—and "believing that one of these times it won't roll back down."

This focus on a mid-level female scientist's hopes for her archaic hobby is not the standard emphasis of a science fiction tale. But it typifies Utley's approach in nearly all thirty-six stories in the two unorthodox prayer books constituting his Silurian Tales: The 400-Million-Year Itch and Invisible Kingdoms (Greenwood, Western Australia: Ticonderoga Publications, 2013; 286 and 288 pages). In fact, I would wager that this method—lighting the hopes of his dramatis personae against the backdrop of an austere geological period—sprang from a hope that the author himself could neither ignore nor repress, that of reflecting our world, as he perceived it, through the lenses of his own dark but humane imagination.

Each story in these volumes, whatever its level of ambition, embodies just the sort of unaimed prayer that Helen Wheeler lifts when she strives to paint a cloud—to capture its essence in flake white on her masonite board. She knows that, on a fundamental level, succeeding in this hope will make her happy.

Incidentally, in Volume 1's title story, "The 400-Million-Year Itch," a drunken, overweight science fiction writer visiting the Silurian to see what kinds of salable tales it might suggest to him says to another character, "All stories, all kinds of stories, are about people trying to be happy. A few of them pull it off." Moreover, "The 400-Million-Year Itch" leads with an epigram by George Eliot, aka Mary Ann Evans, to wit: "One gets a bad habit of being unhappy."

I can't pinpoint the date—perhaps October of 2012—but, near the end of his life, Steven assured me by phone that every Silurian Tale pivots on its characters' efforts to attain personal happiness. (Forgive me, but, the rules of critical objectivity aside, I just can't keep calling him "Utley" here.) He told me this in his singular, half-incredulous voice, a voice tinged with an edge of fog, a voice I had no clue I would hear only one more time before, on January 12, 2013, a peculiarly virulent cancer put period to our friendship of over four decades.

Once, after a "grisly" week early in January of 2012, Steven recounted in his blog <impatientape.livejournal.com> that "on the plus side," his Silurian tale "The End in Eden" had sold to Analog and that a critic had posted "a terrific review" of his reprinted collection Ghost Seas. At once truthful and self-mocking, Steven observed, "It takes so little to make me happy." In a previous entry (7 Nov 2011), he had written, "I have no idea what I'll be working on tomorrow, but as long as I'm working on something, I shan't complain."

That shan't delights me. What other contemporary science fiction writer would deploy this archaic verb without irony or self-consciousness? It derives from Steven's eclectic erudition, his fondness not only for Leigh Brackett but also for Jane Austen, and it discloses a lot about his wide-open, receptive personality, even if, like a flower-loving Emily Dickinson—esque woman in a famous James Thurber cartoon, he did tend to "get fed up occasionally."

My thesis for this essay stems from my awareness that Steven found his raison d'être and thus his happiness in writing. And the writing of his Silurian stories may have given him the most fulfilling tastes of accomplishment and acclaim he ever experienced. He never received a Hugo or Nebula for them, but several titles in the series wound up in best-of-the-year or best-of-the-best volumes. Editors Ellen Datlow at SciFi.com, Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams at Asimov's, and Gordon Van Gelder at Fantasy & Science Fiction looked with favor on Steven's submission of new Silurian stories, and these two volumes may at last secure for him recognition as a writer of truly estimable stature.

Granted, even within the field where he made his reputation as an insightful, if mordant, story writer, Steven often covered the pain of his relative obscurity with barbed or self-effacing witticisms. His "About the Author" notice in The 400-Million-Year Itch describes him as leading, in small-town Tennessee, "a quiet life, surrounded as I am by my books, my cats, and my dangerously inbred neighbors." And his own third-person bio-note in Invisible Kingdoms reads "Steven Utley is an internationally unknown short-story writer and minor Minor Poet."

Steven was funny that way, but "Silurian Darkness," Barry Malzberg's admiring but oddly focused introduction to Volume 2, claims that his disinclination to write novels and his manic depression, or bipolarity, "wrecked his career." Malzberg concedes that Steven produced a vital body of work, but argues that it is "characterized by nothing so much as a reflexive and bewildered dismay" and "an anger which can be seen at the center of all these stories." I don't dispute the dismay or the anger (which any sensitive person must feel in the face of human folly and the implacable absurd), but Malzberg projects too much of his own disillusionment into Steven, who strove against his depression and his atheism to find humane consolations for both. In person, he rarely seemed dismayed or angry; more often, he self-disclosed as bemused but compassionate.

And—often, if not always—these tales point to and uplift hope. Given that Steven shaped from the grim materials of the Paleozoic Era a forbidding stage for many human conflicts and interactions, these stories reveal his own hope. In them he evinces for nearly all his characters—women and men, scientists, navy personnel, artists, drudges, clerics, nonbelievers, peons, celebs—a degree of empathy that dramatically evokes their essential humanity. Don't mistake me. I do not mean to paint Steven as a latter-day Saint Francis of Assisi (even if he did love cats as much as, or more than, he did some people), but to redeem him from his incomplete portrait in "Silurian Darkness" as an angry man robed in bitterness and bewilderment.

Despite his tendency to tweak those whom he thought fools, poltroons, or outright jerks, Steven usually did so with hyperbole and humor. He also felt for people, even those who appalled him. He admired the philosophy of Carl Sagan, who once said, according to a blog post of Steven's (13 Sep 2011),

Every one of us is precious in the cosmic perspective. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

Steven's own sardonic gloss on this Sagacious epigram reads: "Not that I don't reserve the right to go on believing that some among our current crop of right-wingers are crazy enough to bark at their own excrement."

The understanding that Steven shows Helen Wheeler in "Cloud by Van Gogh," Chaplain Madiel in "Half a Loaf" and "Chaos and the Gods"; the bargeman Bud Walton in "The Despoblado"; the lovers Mike French and Carol Bearden in "Chain of Life"; and even the creationist interloper Jim Farlough (a man who in real life would have provoked Steven to discreet eye-rolling) in "Babel," "The World Within the World," "Diluvium," and "Sidestep," a fine mini-sequence of Silurian tales—well, this empathy disproves any assessment of his work as evidence solely of his anger or of his career as a sad affliction. Instead, along with art, music, and fiction of all kinds; comics; camp TV and movies; and other human beings (not necessarily in that or any other order), his work was his treasure and writing, something like his salvation.

Let me digress. Steven and I tried several times to collaborate. I still have the e-file of one such crippled effort, ready to revise when the time is right. Or not. As things turned out, we jointly edited a reprint anthology, Passing for Human (PS Publishing, 2006), and later finished and sold a short story, "The City Quiet as Death" (Tor.com, 2009). Both projects gratified us in the energetic give-and-take of their doing and in the fact that they achieved publication.

In the case of "The City Quiet as Death," Steven gave me an evocative opening on a fictional Caribbean island and a vivid, indeed startling, ending, and asked if I could bring these parts together with an appropriate middle. He did not trust himself to write this middle because it required an intense colloquy between his doubting protagonist and a young barrio priest. Steven claimed that he did not feel qualified to spoon-feed words into the mouth of a priest. He regarded me—as a Bishop, perhaps?—better suited to offer the clerical point of view.

However, when in his Silurian tales "Half a Loaf" and "Chaos and the Gods," I read the dialogue and thoughts of Chaplain Madiel, a man self-confessedly "raised on the Bible and Bulfinch," and also the dialogue and thoughts of creationist Jim Farlough in the sequence about his and his two associates' mission to the Silurian period, I scratched my head. Why hadn't Steven trusted himself to ghost-write for our priest when he had ventriloquized Chaplain Madiel and his three creationists with such authority? I honestly don't know. Maybe, because writing is so often an insular activity, he simply wanted the companionship of collaborating.

In short, reading The 400-Million-Year Itch and Invisible Kingdoms—even though I had read many of these tales beforehand in e-files—surprised me. The contrasts, resonances, and parallels set up among the stories make nearly all of them seem more astute in their observations, more acute in their plotting, and richer in their achievement.

They create a world, an alternate reality, an analog of the multiple universes that the physicist Cutsinger posits in these volumes as a likely but unverifiable effect of the wave-function collapse that allows twenty-first-century human beings to "time-travel." In fact, Cutsinger takes pains to explain that these persons do not time-travel (from a navy-run jump station near Corpus Christi, Texas, to the Silurian period, and back again), but are instead hurled to and from a simulacrum of that time, usually with excruciating pain and sometimes, albeit rarely, with death or transfer to an inescapable sidestep universe as two potential horrific results.

I've just argued that the Silurian Tales create for us a realistic spatial and temporal context, a world. In aesthetic fact, they do. And this world quickly acquires the palpable verisimilitude of Frank Herbert's Dune or Brian Aldiss's Helliconia. The chief difference is that Steven did not work out the geography or the names—if you set aside the fragrant moniker "Stinktown" for a major base camp—of his "imaginary world." He did not have to. He researched to master its geography and nomenclature and then skillfully appropriated them. (In his blog, Steven happily admits making "indispensable" use of John McPhee's trilogy, Annals of the Former World.) Is this a lesser achievement than either Herbert's or Aldiss's? Is it a kind of cheating?

I regard these questions as nonsensical. Steven wrote fantasy and horror as well as science fiction, but I believe that he loved sf for the hard-nosed empirical approach of its most rigorous practitioners, even as he loved his "Main Man," Ray Bradbury, rarely a rigorous empiricist, for refusing to make crucial human interactions in his tales secondary to Analog-style "nuts and bolts." In fact, I would argue that Steven's Silurian stories are more akin to Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles than to Dune or the Helliconia trilogy, for they kneel to the Chronicles even as they implicitly rebuke Bradbury for his scientific errors and his less than fully adult handling of interpersonal relations.

Skeptics of this opinion may legitimately point out that the space-time anomaly permitting Steven's characters to travel to a mock-up of the Silurian beggars empirical experience and most scientific standards, and that the multiple-universe theory advanced by Cutsinger sounds like mumbo-jumbo. (It does have proponents among real theoretical physicists.) But these tales all self-identify as fictions—generally, we distinguish "tales" from "stories" by declaring that tales are "imaginatively recounted"—and if one grants Steven these two conceits, he does his damndest to play fair with them in all thirty-six tales. The Silurian "past" that he creates in relation to the near-future world from which his characters hail remains consistent, too, albeit revitalized from story to story by new discoveries, fresh emphases, and changes in everything from characters, points of view, tale-specific motifs, Paleozoic settings, and salient themes.

As Gardner Dozois notes in his helpful introduction to Volume 1, "Utley doesn't cheat." He settles on this "age of mud and slime" as his characters' chief destination, a period devoid of dinosaurs, saber-tooth tigers, or wily hominids as pat sources of conflict or adventure. And yet, Dozois marvels, his "protagonists don't discover aliens, or find an ancient crashed spaceship, or encounter other time-travelers with whom they become embroiled in a time war." Moreover, as a direct consequence, they "are free to interact in the most subtle and movingly human of ways with little else to distract the reader from them." In many respects, this strategy of Steven's seems an obvious one, but not many science fiction writers have had the guts to deploy it for character stories as unflinching as these.

The first paragraph in the first Silurian tale, "All of Creation," proves Dozios's assertion, for it focuses on its narrator's family rather than on the space-time gateway to this faux-prehistoric world or on the multiple-universe theory that provides dizzying plot twists for several stories to come. The tale dates from 2008, fairly late in the composition of the series. Here is its first paragraph:

My mother's mission, late in life, has been to keep her children in touch with each other and with all our many relatives. She lived as a military wife, following my father around the world at the Pentagon's whim, herding offspring the whole while. (1: 17)

Like Bruce McAllister's recent novel The Village Sang to the Sea, "All of Creation" has an obvious autobiographical aspect. Not autobiographical, however, is narrator Eric's discovery, along with his cousin Trey, a marine biologist in Corpus Christi, of a plethora of "big ugly water bugs," all dead, on the beach of a nearby island. These "bugs" turn out to be specimens of an extinct marine arthropod from the Paleozoic era, trilobites. Their presence, at first a profound enigma, foretokens the irruption of a space-time zone, some two hundred yards in length, upon which Steven bases all the tales in these two unusual collections. Trilobites abounded in the Silurian. They abound in these stories. The word is properly pronounced TRY-loh-bytes, although I mentally sounded it TRILL-o-bytes, until I realized that the spelling trillobite does not represent an erratum in the text, but instead Steven's orthography of choice for speakers, often either navy personnel or creationists, ignorant of the term's correct pronunciation.

This realization, several stories beyond "All of Creation," shook me but did not sabotage my certainty that Eric, the narrator, shares too many of Steven's passions and quirks—paleontology, dinosaurs, devotion to family—not to act as his fictional proxy; and so "All of Creation" comes first in the series, even though Eric never reappears. It also introduces Jim Farlough, a foe of all evolutionary theory, who does show up in later stories, particularly Volume 2. Further, it takes place over a single day, Eric's natal day, and ends with Eric saying "Happy Birthday to me" and affirming that "all of creation" is "vast and magnificent and full of wonderful things."

One strange feature of the tales is the frequency with which the word world appears in their titles. Volume 1's second story, "The Woman under the World," is a nape-freezing seven-pager about Phyllis Lewis, who fails to pass through the space-time tunnel between the Holocene and the Silurian because of a technical misalignment that lets her irradiated echo, or ghost, enter this anomalous conduit. Within it, the glowing woman persists in a "timeless interval" that she cannot escape. Admirers of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen will experience a frisson akin to that triggered by Jon Osterman's radiation accident in the chapter "Watchmaker." But, here, Steven works on a more intimate scale, albeit one that rakes our emotions just as brutally as does the spectacular calamity that befalls the future Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen.

The eighth tale in The 400-Million-Year Itch, "The Wind over the World," one of its more substantial offerings, presents another jump-station mishap in terms that reduce it to an engineering problem—"spatial drift and temporal spread"—for almost everyone but Bonnie Leveritt, a young scientist in training who goes through the anomaly ahead of an unprepossessing man named Ed Morris.

Morris lets Leveritt go first, gives her a reassuring wink as she departs, and then fails to arrive in the Silurian when he ought. His echo, or specter, haunts Leveritt, not in the traditional horror-story sense, but morally and emotionally, so that the story achieves a (Henry) Jamesian philosophical weight. Its title derives from this remark to Leveritt by Michael Diehl, a character assigned to meet Morris:

Never mind what religion says about souls. Souls're just puffs of air. The only thing [that] makes a man's death meaningful is remembrance. Without remembrance, he's just a wind that blew over the world and never left a trace. (1: 105)

This idea haunted Steven as much as it does Leveritt, and it reappears throughout these volumes, in variations, as a theme. "The Wind over the World" became the second of the Silurian Tales to appear in one of Dozois's Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies, the Fourteenth Annual Collection (St. Martin's, 1997).

Two stories with world in their titles occur in Invisible Kingdoms: "The Real World," its second offering, and "The World Without," its fifteenth piece, in which the agoraphobic physicist Cutsinger, relegated to a nursing home, tries to convince a doctor that he doesn't belong there, that he was once "tops in kew em" (Quantum Mechanics), "the leading expert in time travel," not a drooling nobody fit for geriatric warehousing. This life is not his; it occurs in a copy of his rightful universe, which endured a wave-function collapse and dumped him in this noxious split-off. Call "The World Without" one of the least pleasant of these stories—a couple of others rival it—but confess, too, that Steven may have viewed Cutsinger, as he did Eric in "All of Creation," as a stand-in for himself. Here, however, he envisions his talented but ill-appreciated surrogate toward the end of his days.

Hence, I prefer to look at "The Real World" more closely than I have "The World Without." If one can point to certain tales of Flannery O'Connor's as her "masterpieces" ("A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "Good Country People," "Everything That Rises Must Converge," et al.), then why not do the same with Steven's? And I would cite as many as seventeen Silurian tales as among his major efforts.

Situating "The Real World" at the top of my list, I would add "All of Creation," "Beyond the Sea," "Promised Land" (with its resonant final line, "Is anyone ever really happy?"), "The Age of Mud and Slime," "The Wind over the World" (earlier touched on), "Cloud by van Gogh" (ditto), "Chaos and the Gods," the moving love story "Chain of Life," the farcically satirical "The End in Eden," "The Despoblado," "Sidestep" (never before published), "Slug Hell," "There and Then," "Silv'ry Moon," and the title stories of both collections. On a different day, I could make good cases for appending "Walking in Circles" (which, fittingly, ends where it begins), "The Tortoise Grows Elate" (a first-person tale featuring a narrator with an unforgettable voice), "Variant" (a succinct piece of sf horror), and "A Paleozoic Palimpsest" (a Borgesian story with a poignant human dimension) to my first list. If my approbation now begins to seem indiscriminate, let me add that even stories I haven't mentioned have praiseworthy attributes, especially in the context of the overarching series.

For now, though, I return to "The Real World." Here, Steven introduces us to Ivan Kelly, one half of the first two-man team of "time-travelers" to visit this anomalous mock-up of the Silurian. Kelly worked as a pedologist, or soil scientist, in this realm, and for those unfamiliar with or dismissive of his specialty, he "calmly explain[ed] ... that the origin and evolution of soil ranked among the major events in the history of life on Earth," for it led to the emergence of life onto land during the Paleozoic.

As "The Real World" opens, however, Kelly sits in an airliner on his way to Los Angeles, long after his historic contributions to Silurian research. At the invitation of his brother Don, a successful screenwriter, he has chosen to visit Don and his niece Michelle, just out of high school, whom the childless Ivan loves inordinately. Moreover, he knows in his heart that he "always shall." Once in Don's home, he discusses with Michelle the three books he's currently reading: Will Durant's The Story of Philosophy, the People's Almanac, and a title on quantum mechanics. (Not incidentally, the physicist Cutsinger appears in this tale in flashbacks.)

Ivan admits that advanced physics may be "just a lot of philosophical wanking set to math," but the topic interests him. "Somewhere between physics and philosophy," he tells his niece, "is the intersection of our real world. Out of our subjective perception of an objective reality of energy and matter comes our interpretation of being and meaning." Whoa. Good-naturedly rather than snarkily, Michelle replies, "Whatever you say, Uncle Ivan." And Ivan backs off the heavy stuff to talk a little about how he and Don achieved success in wholly different fields. Michelle's dad and Uncle Ivan both liked literature, but disagreed on which parts of a book afforded the most interest and pleasure. Ivan expands on this point:

I'd read The Big Sleep or The Time Machine and pass 'em on to Don, and then we'd discuss 'em.... Don was interested in the characters, the story. Who killed so and so. I loved Raymond Chandler's, Ross Macdonald's descriptions of the southern California landscape.... My feeling was that setting is as vital as plot and characterization. A good detective-story writer had to be a good travelogue writer, or else his characters and action were just hanging in space. Don argued that a good story could be set anywhere.... If the plot was good, it would work anywhere. (2: 37)

Obviously, Steven identifies more fully with Ivan than with Don, at least on this matter, but it's a schizophrenic identification because the Kelly brothers, who resemble each other, embody and dramatize different aspects of Steven's personality. The settings of these stories mean as much to Steven as do his characters, and the interactions of his characters against the prehistoric backdrop acquire a dynamic patina that heightens and augments their significance, both for the characters and for the reader. In effect, Steven serves as both playwright and puppet master. Most of his dialog rings true, even when Cutsinger resorts to expository backfill; and he gives his people distinctive voices and crucial things to do, all in as challenging a setting as he could devise, without importing stegosaurs and pterodactyls—once, at least, the reader gets past the fact that the Silurian "looks like a cross between a gravel pit and a stagnant pond."

However, "The Real World," despite its flashbacks, takes place mostly in the real world to which Ivan Kelly has returned after his Silurian sojourn, to wit, Los Angeles and the Hollywood hills. Never mind that Ivan cannot be sure if he has returned to the precise world he left or to a one-off, or a quadrillion-off, replica of that world, in which, at least, his brother and his niece seem unchanged ... except that Michelle has grown from a cute monkey-faced girl to an exemplary near-woman. Whom, he reiterates to himself, he will love "[w]hether it's really you or not."

And then, because brother Don has an unavoidable invitation, Ivan plunges from the comforts of this domestic scene into the absurd quasi-reality of a Hollywood party, complete with "gorgeous chattering people ... intent upon displaying themselves." I haven't read a more acutely shown and more guiltily relished party scene since my last look at The Great Gatsby. Here, Steven's discomfort and cynicism stand out, but so do his humor, his humane regard for his protagonist, and his refusal to treat the busty starlets and wannabe moguls as absolute caricatures of themselves. Sure, they don't know beans about pedology (the study of soil, not "the nature and development of children"), but who among even us smart non-Hollywood types does?

Eventually, after Don goes off to "schmooze with" someone else, Ivan meets John Rubis, a rotund mogul sort, who asks Ivan his "claim to celebrity." Ivan, in a devil-may-care mood, announces that he was "one of the first people to travel through time." Rubis assumes he has come west to hype his life story for a movie producer and asks him his angle, especially since "Trillobites [note the spelling] never did catch on with the public." Rubis believes that only dinosaurs can lift a time-travel tale to profitability. Playfully, Ivan tries to pitch a more complex idea to this friendly bottom-feeder, the notion that a traveler between multiple Earths returns to what may or may not be "his own present-day Earth." This character then seeks to determine if it is or isn't on the basis of its specific details. Do they gibe with his memory of the Earth he left or do they not?

Rubis interrupts Ivan to say he gets it and predictably concludes, "But I still think it needs dinosaurs."

After the party (whose flamboyant essence I have not even begun to gloss here), Don drives Ivan home in his luxury automobile. Their talk touches on the party, but also on what it means to do authentic, that is to say, meaningful, work. Tellingly, Steven gives Don as a younger man a job that Steven himself held when he lived in Texas in the 1970s to the early 1980s, that of writing resolutions for the state legislature. Don relates to Ivan his specific take on this exasperating time:

I was the anonymous flunky who unlimbered the "whereases" and the "be-it-resolveds. " Every now and then, I wrote about forgotten black heroes of the Texas Revolution, forgotten women aviators of World War Two—something, anyway, that meant something. But, of course, in these resolutions, everything was equally important.... people's fiftieth wedding anniversaries, high-school football teams, rattlesnake roundups. Finally, I was assigned to write a resolution designating, I kid you not, Texas Bottled Water Day. (2: 58)

Don objected to this assignment and his boss took the first available opportunity to fire him. Don tells Ivan that in the midst of this often galling drudgery, he "lived for those few brief moments when the work really meant something." As he drives his fancy car, his face evanescently reflects "some memory of happiness."

Even with its acidulously satirical scenes, "The Real World" manifests as the real deal. Some of the satire may come a tad too easily ... but not much, so hot does Steven's self-critical intelligence burn. And the ending, although not even close to the standard wrap-up of a death or a wedding, has a stunning aptness and so a gasp-provoking impact. In a just world, an Earth catawampus to the Earth we live on, "The Real World" would have elicited huzzahs, won awards, spawned imitators, and turned up in The Year's Best Short Stories, not solely in sf anthologies.

Frankly, I cannot adequately detail the pleasure that this many-faceted Utleyarn—Steven's own wry coinage—delivers, but to know it for yourself, you need only read it. And then read it again. You will then have the sense that pellucid prose, not hackneyed boilerplate or angry vituperation, has revealed that happiness stems not from a smoothly cornering automobile, say, but from real, i.e., meaningful, accomplishment. This news may not strike us as world-shattering, but in this story, in this setting, it feels mighty like a hard-won epiphany.

In his last telephone call to me and my wife Jeri, a call to disclose his illness (and, I understand, he made several such calls), Steven alleged in that bemused, fog-touched voice of his that he was okay with what was happening—the diagnosis and the prognosis alike—and that he was ready. I didn't read this as surrender to a terminal ailment or even as an admission that he had one, but simply as a courtesy call, his way of telling Jeri and me that we had a right to know that he might not be able to stay in touch as often as he liked ... until, that is, he got better.

But Steven never said anything about getting better. I conjured those words, put them into Steven's mouth, and then assumed that he had implied them, even if he had not spoken them. The news of his death on January 12, 2013, stunned me, for I had denied its possibility—mentally, if not aloud—during his last call, and I dropped into denial again after getting word of his final coma and his mortal release from it. I stayed in quasi-denial for at least three months.

On some basic level, I did not emerge from that state until a hardcover copy of Invisible Kingdoms arrived at our post office one morning. I carried it home and sat down to look it over. After examining the cover painting, the epigraphs from George Santayana and the Talmud, the contents page, and perusing Barry Malzberg's introduction, "Silurian Darkness," I turned, almost by chance, to the dedication page:

for

Michael and Jeri Bishop

That did it. I wanted to telephone Steven. I wanted to thank him. I wanted to hear his self-effacing voice again. A blubbering gasp dragged me straight out of denial into a grief as biting as vinegar.

I resolved to read The 400-Million-Year Itch again, to read Invisible Kingdoms as soon as possible, and to take notes. It wouldn't be enough, it isn't enough, but I could not in any way ignore or defer this charge. And so, for better or worse, this knockabout essay stands as my eulogy to the person and my salute to his work, the writing of hard, hopeful, idiosyncratic stories.

Steven was not at all religious, but he had a quirky sense of the sacred and fed his spirit in a host of unorthodox ways, including courtesy to others and writing as well as he could. He got better as he got older, and his Silurian stories, singly and together, testify to a talent nearly fulfilled and a legacy extended. That we have lost him at the height of his yet increasing powers stings like ... well, what? How about a swarm of prehistoric sea scorpions?

The personal hurt persists, but so, too, does my respect for the quietly courageous life that Steven forged and the good, if difficult, work that he did in spite of his trials and setbacks. If he finally rests, he deserves to. But I regret that I cannot tell him that face to face. I would say, "Wheeler in 'Cloud by van Gogh' never captures in paint that essence of cloud she struggles to catch, but you, by noting her aspiration and grit, succeed for her in these tales." Or maybe I'd just put on a spookily moody Billie Holliday ballad and lift with him a toast to the sunset.

Two addenda:

First, Russell B. Farr and Ticonderoga Publications of Australia deserve praise for championing Steven's work, not only by publishing his initial gathering of short stories, Ghost Seas, but also for seeing both volumes of his Silurian Tales into print. By so doing, they have preserved a worthy segment of Steven's exceptional canon.

Second, in fairness to Barry N. Malzberg, I must quote the last brief paragraph of "Silurian Darkness," because his introduction—and I may have led the reader to suppose otherwise—clearly notes and duly lauds Steven's abilities. In fact, earlier in his piece he concedes to Steven "wit, style, cunning, terrifying knowledge of the Saurian Period and the kind of savagery intrinsic to the good writer." Further, when he agreed to write his introduction, he had no notion that Steven would die before Volume 2 appeared or that his words would thus "take on a funerary aspect," with "some inferred necessity to sum a career which at that time seemed far from complete."

Malzberg does his best to fulfill these requirements, and he reaches not unreasonable conclusions about his subject's underlying attitudes toward his writing life. I don't agree with the conclusions, but I do not think them foolish or unkindly arrived at. Please, then, read his affecting words:

I wrote James Sallis about a decade ago "I can see my own career as nothing so much as a 35 year affliction." Without undue projection I hope and with all the charity I can summon I suspect that Utley felt similarly. I will never know. I cannot claim to know. I never heard his voice, you see. (2: 16)

Michael Bishop lives in Pine Mountain, Georgia.

Steven Utley's Silurian Tales: A Guide

The 400-Million-Year Itch: Silurian Tales, Vol. 1:

• "Introduction" by Gardner Dozois
• "All of Creation" (ss), Cosmos Magazine Online (Jan 2008)
• "The Woman under the World" (ss), Asimov's (Jul 2008)
• "Walking in Circles" (ss), Asimov's (Jan 2002)
• "Beyond the Sea" (ss), Revolution SF website (Aug 2002)
• "The Gift Horse" (ss), previously unpublished
• "Promised Land" (ss), Fantasy & Science Fiction (Jul 2005)
• "The Age of Mud and Slime" (ss), Asimov's (Mar 1996)
• "The Wind over the World" (nv), Asimov's (Oct/Nov 1996)
• "The Tortoise Grows Elate" (ss), Fantasy & Science Fiction (May/Apr 2010)
• "Cloud by Van Gogh" (ss), Fantasy & Science Fiction (Dec 2000)
• "Half a Loaf" (ss), Asimov's (Jan 2001)
• "Chaos and the Gods" (ss), Revolution SF (Aug 2003)
• "Foodstuff" (ss), Fantasy & Science Fiction (Feb 2002)
• "Chain of Life" (nv), Asimov's (Oct/Nov 2000)
• "Exile" (ss), Asimov's (Jan 2003)
• "The End in Eden" (ss), Analog (Oct 2012)
• "Lost Places of the Earth" (ss), We Think, Therefore We Are, edited by Peter Crowther, intro by Paul McAuley (DAW Books, 2009)
• "A Silurian Tale" (ss), Asimov's (May 1996)
• "The 400-Million-Year Itch" (nv), Fantasy & Science Fiction (Apr 2008).

Invisible Kingdoms: Silurian Tales, Vol. 2:

• "Silurian Darkness" (Introduction) by Barry Malzberg
• "Invisible Kingdoms" (ss), Fantasy & Science Fiction (Feb 2004)
• "The Real World" (nv), Sci Fiction (Aug 30, 2000)
• "Babel" (ss), Analog (Mar 2004)
• "Another Continuum Heard From" (ss), Revolution SF (Apr 2004)
• "Variant" (ss), Postscripts 15 (PS Publishing, 2008)
• "The World within the World" (ss), Asimov's (Jul 2008)
• "The Despoblado" (nv), Sci Fiction (Nov 22, 2000)
• "The Wave-Function Collapse" (ss), Asimov's (Mar 2005)
• "Treading the Maze" (ss), Asimov's (Feb 2002)
• "Diluvium" (ss), Fantasy & Science Fiction (May 2006)
• "Sidestep" (nv), previously unpublished
• "Slug Hell" (ss), Fantasy & Science Fiction (Sep 2008)
• "There and Then" (nv), Asimov's (Nov 1993)
• "Silv'ry Moon" (ss), Fantasy & Science Fiction (Oct/Nov 2005)
• "The World Without" (ss), Asimov's (Jul 2001)
• "Five Miles from Pavement" (ss), Sci Fiction (Mar 21, 2001) *
• "A Paleozoic Palimpsest" (ss), Fantasy & Science Fiction (Oct/Nov 2004)

*The contents page of Invisible Kingdoms omits this story, which nonetheless starts on page 253 and concludes on page 266.