Questionable Practices by Eileen Gunn, reviewed by Fran Wilde

Easthampton, Massachusetts: Small Beer Press, 2014; $16.00 tpb; 208 pages

Several excellent reviews of Eileen Gunn’s Questionable Practices—her first collection of short stories in ten years—have already called out the dangerous play that takes place among the pages. This is absolutely worth mentioning: Gunn’s stories spin ideas done up with sharp edges; they hijack pop-culture favorites and redirect the actors within; they draw for us a series of what-ifs that carry reader and characters away into the dark, there, perhaps, to breed more ideas.

These characteristics by themselves shape Questionable Practices into a resonant and delightful collection of short stories. But what sticks with me long after are two additional features of Questionable Practices: resonant voice and that experience of being carried away.

Eileen Gunn is a master impersonator, as are her coauthors within the collection, Rudy Rucker and Michael Swanwick. From the dual points of view in the first story, “Up the Fire Road,” and the mute golem in “Chop Wood, Carry Water,” to a soldier’s thoughts in “Phantom Pain,” the multiple homages of “The Steampunk Quartet,” and the pure play of “Shed that Guilt! Double Your Productivity Overnight!” Gunn’s character voices are unique, playful, and sharp. While in “Shed that Guilt,” Swanwick’s and Gunn’s own voices come closest to the surface, each story in Questionable Practices has an individual cadence and lexicon. Better, each story leaves its character’s echo, rather than its author’s resonating in the reader’s ear. Gunn gives voice to modified canines in “Speak, Geek,” and—with Rudy Rucker—translates the voice of the data cloud into something more in “Hive Mind Man.” Most strikingly, Gunn steps into the voices of popular characters, from 1950s The Honeymooners’ Alice in “To The Moon, Alice,” to Jim and Spock experiencing something shockingly real on the Star Trek set in “No Place to Raise Kids.” In each of these stories, Gunn captures these voices and lets them reverberate until the set pieces fall away and the characters escape.

And it is that escape that takes Questionable Practices to an even higher level. Someone once said (Okay, fine, it was Schopenhauer. Don’t judge.) that observing “very violent, destructive objects” produced a full experience of the sublime. This is an accurate description of Gunn’s stories as well. Throughout Questionable Practices, characters are carried off (“Up the Fire Road”); they also hitchhike, stow away, and stumble through time. We find them moving through walls and through memories—most particularly with the elves who come through mirrors in “The Train that Climbs the Winter Tree,” and the mirrors that eventually come through the elves in the related story, “The Armies of Elfland.” At first, characters practice the act of carrying away on each other, but by the central stories of the collection, especially “Hive Mind Man,” the act of being carried away reaches a peak and the stories begin to break free on their own: a modern variant on the experience of the sublime.

The final stories in the collection bring the reader back down through other means of escape and breaking free, both from traditional story tropes (“The Armies of Elfland”) and from the traditional story frame (“Phantom Pain”). At the conclusion of the collection, each seemingly destructive, violent, dangerous, or sublime situation Gunn chooses to explore creates an arc: we go up the mountain under our own power, are lifted up by the hive mind, and are in the end carried away with the final voices of the last story.

Treading the dangerous edges of the sublime is a thing elegantly done in any genre. Doing it using the familiar voices of tell-all talk shows, direct mail, and characters we think we already know? That’s the mark of a puckish genius, and the sign of a collection worth reading and rereading.

Fran Wilde lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Nature.