Contemporary British
Short Fiction
THE ENIGMA exercise:
Read carefully the text below:
She nodded; and he thought, how simple it is, or can be . . . when they don't beat
about the bush, say what they actually think and know, actually live today
instead of fifty years ago; and actually state things he had felt but somehow not
managed to say to himself. He had grown not to like Fielding much, either; or
that way of life. Just that one became brainwashed, lazy, one swallowed the
Sunday colour-supplement view of values, the assumptions of one's seniors,
one's profession, one forgot there are people with fresh minds and independence
who see through all that and are not afraid...
And be ready to answer:
1. What the detective means by saying live today instead of fifty years ago ? In
what sense the Fieldings live a life from long ago?
2. What the Sunday colour-supplement view of values might be?
3. Why the phrase “one”, “one’s” is repeated so many times at the end of the
passage? What kind of style is this?
Contemporary British
Short Fiction
THE ENIGMA exercise:
Read carefully the text below:
'You never had chat with Mrs Fielding?'
'Nothing else.' She pulled a little face. 'Inch-deep.'
'This not wanting to be alone with him —'
'It was such a tiny thing.'
'You've already proved you're telepathic.' She smiled again, her lips pressed
tight. 'Were these bad vibes sexual ones?'
'Just that something was suppressed. Something ...'
'Let it come out. However wild.'
'Something he might suddenly tell me. That he might break down. Not that he
ever would. I can't explain.'
'But an unhappiness in him ?'
'Not even that. Just someone else, behind it all. It's nothing, but I'm not quite
making it up after the facts.' She shrugged. 'When it all happened, something
seemed to fit. It wasn't quite the shock it ought to have been.'
'You think the someone else was very different from the man everyone knew?'
She gave her slow, reluctant nod.
And be ready to answer:
1. Why the girl did not like to be alone with Mr Fielding?
2. What she means by saying It wasn't quite the shock it ought to have
been ?
3. She also says something was suppressed – is “The enigma’ a story about
suppression? Suppression of what?
Contemporary British
Short Fiction
THE ENIGMA exercise:
Read carefully the text below:
'I'm sorry I said that thing just now. About police brutality.'
'Forget it. It does happen. Coppers also have small daughters.'
'Do you really feel a leper?'
'Sometimes.'
'Are all your friends in the police?'
'It's not that. Just the work. Having to come on like authority. Officialdom?
Obeying people you don't always respect. Never quite being your own man.'
That worries you ?' ,
'When I meet people I like. Who can be themselves.'
She stared into the distance. 'Would it ever make you give it up?'
Would what?'
'Not being your own man ?'
'Why do you ask?'
'Just...' she shrugged. That you should use that phrase.'
And be ready to answer:
1. Why the detective is not his own man? Who else in the story may say the
same?
2. Why the girl is surprised by this confession?
3. Why the young generation hates the police?
Contemporary British
Short Fiction
THE ENIGMA exercise:
Read carefully the text below:
'What do you think would strike the writer about his story to date - if he re-read
it ?'
'He ought never to have started it in the first place.'
'Why?'
'Forgot to plant any decent leads.'
'Doesn't that suggest something about the central character? You know, in
books, they do have a son of life of their own;
'He didn't mean evidence to be found?'
'I think the writer would have to face up to that. His main character has walked
out on him. So all he's left with is the character's determination to have it that
way. High and dry. Without a decent ending.'
The sergeant smiled down. 'Except writers can write it any way they like.'
'You mean detective stories have to end with everything explained? Part of the
rules?'
'The unreality.'
'Then if our story disobeys the unreal literary rules, that might mean it's actually
truer to life?' She bit her lips again. 'Leaving aside the fact that it has all
happened. So it must be true, anyway.'
'I'd almost forgotten that.'
And be ready to answer:
1. Is The Enigma itself a story which disobeys the unreal literary rules? If
no, why? If yes why? Does it mean it is it true to life?
2. Can a writer write any way he likes?
3. Has Mr Fielding rebelled against the author of the story and what we are
left with is the character's determination to have it that way. High and
dry?
Contemporary British
Short Fiction
THE HEAT DEATH exercise:
Read carefully the text below:
(4) BREAKFAST TIME AT THE BOYLES' HOUSE ON LA FLORIDA
STREET, ALAMEDA, CALIFORNIA, THE CHILDREN DEMAND SUGAR
FROSTED FLAKES.
With some reluctance Sarah Boyle dishes out Sugar Frosted Flakes to her
children, already hearing the decay set in upon the little white milk teeth, the
bony whine of the dentist's drill. The dentist is a short, gentle man with a
moustache who sometimes reminds Sarah of an Uncle who lives in Ohio. One
bowl per child.
And be ready to answer:
1. ‘LA FLORIDA STREET, ALAMEDA, CALIFORNIA’ how does this
sound? What stereotypical associations these names – and California
primarily – have?
2. Point to contrasts in the text – both literal and implied.
3. Discuss the way this short subchapter works – how are the subsequent
pieces of information linked? What do you think about this method of
writing? Where does it come from?
Contemporary British
Short Fiction
THE HEAT DEATH exercise:
Read carefully the text below:
(8) Three offers on one cereal box. To Sarah Boyle this seems to be oversell.
Perhaps something is terribly wrong with the cereal and it must be sold quickly,
got off the shelves before the news breaks. Perhaps it causes a special, cruel
cancer in little children. As Sarah Boyle collects the bowls printed with bunnies
and baseball statistics, still slopping half full of milk and wilted flakes, she
imagines in her mind's eye the headlines, "Nation's Small Fry Stricken, Fate's
Finger Sugar Coated, Lethal Sweetness Socks Tots."
And be ready to answer:
1. Discuss the style of "Nation's Small Fry Stricken, Fate's Finger Sugar
Coated, Lethal Sweetness Socks Tots," name the rhetorical figures used.
2.
How does the everyday life of Sarah Boyle reflect her anxiety? What are
the reasons of this anxiety? What kinds of contrast do you see in the
quoted passage?
3. Contemporary people, people like Sarah Boyle live within the mediascape
– an artificial environment composed of images and bits of diverse kinds
of discourse spread by media and commercials. What do you think is the
subliminal message of this mediascape? What vision of reality they
reinforce?
Contemporary British
Short Fiction
THE HEAT DEATH exercise:
Read carefully the text below:
(20) Sarah Boyle pours out a Coke from the refrigerator and lights a cigarette.
The coldness and sweetness of the thick brown liquid make her throat ache and
her teeth sting briefly, sweet juice of my youth, her eyes glass with the
carbonation, she thinks of the Heat Death of the Universe. A logarithmic of
those late summer days, endless as the Irish serpent twisting through jewelled
manuscripts forever, tail in mouth, the heat pressing, bloating, doing violence.
The Los Angeles sky becomes so filled and bleached with detritus that it loses
all colours and silvers like a mirror, reflecting back the fricasseeing earth.
Everything becomes warmer and warmer, each particle of matter becoming
more agitated, more excited until the bonds shatter, the glues fail, the deodorants
lose their seals. She imagines the whole of New York City melting like a Dali
into a great chocolate mass, a great soup, the Great Soup of New York.
And be ready to answer:
1. Discuss the use of capital letters in the passage.
2. Where do the symbol of ‘the Irish serpent twisting through jewelled
manuscripts forever, tail in mouth’ come from? What does it represent?
3. Find allusions to art and science in the passage, what is their role?
Contemporary British
Short Fiction
THE HEAT DEATH exercise:
Read carefully the text below:
(41) She thinks of the end of the world by ice.
(42) She thinks of the end of the world by water.
(43) She thinks of the end of the world by nuclear war.
(44) There must be more than this, Sarah Boyle thinks, from time to time. What
could one do to justify one's passage? Or less ambitiously, to change, even in the
motion of the smallest mote, the course and circulation of the world? Sometimes
Sarah's dreams are of heroic girth, a new symphony using laboratories of
machinery and all invented instruments, at once giant in scope and intelligible to
all, to heal the bloody breach; a series of paintings which would transfigure and
astonish and calm the frenzied art world in its panting race; a new novel that
would refurbish language. Turtles are supposed to live for many years. To carve
a name, date and perhaps a word of hope upon a turtle's shell, then set him free
to wend the world, surely this one act might cancel out absurdity?
And be ready to answer:
1. Why is Sarah Boyle obsessed with the end of the world? Where do the
images of the ice, water and nuclear war disaster come from (the story
was written in the late 1960s)?
2. What do you think Sarah Boyle means by ‘absurdity’?
3. How – stereotypically – can we gain immortality?
Contemporary British
Short Fiction
SCIENCE FICTION exercise:
Read carefully the text below:
Dolbak had touched on the source of my deep frustration and sorrow.
This perversion of archaeology into a source for trinkets and bits of frippery to
adorn rich men's homes and wives has always rankled me. Although I have
never seen Earth, I like to believe I work in the great tradition of Schliemann
and Evans, whose greatest finds were to be seen in the galleries of the British
Museum and not dangling on the painted bosom of some too rich wench who
has succumbed to the current passion for antiquity.
When the Revival came, when everyone's interest suddenly turned on the
ancient world and the treasures that lay in the ground, I felt deep satisfaction—
my chosen profession, I thought, now was one that had value to society as well
as private worth. How wrong 1 was! I took this job in the hope that it would
provide me with the needed cash to bring me to Earth—but instead I became
nothing more than the hired lackey of a dealer in women's fashions, and Earth's
unreachable museums lie inch deep in dust."
Robert Silverberg
And be ready to answer:
1. What do you think “Revival” was?
2. Why is the narrator frustrated? Is this a universal human frustration or
something you experience on alien planets only?
3. Robert Scholes defined SF as "fiction that offers us a world clearly and
radically discontinuous from the one we know, yet returns to confront that
known world in some cognitive way." How do you understand this
definition – refer to the quote above.
Contemporary British
Short Fiction
SCIENCE FICTION exercise:
Read carefully the text below:
"This morning," he said, "one of the aliens came to me with an idea. It's a good
one. Briefly, he suggested that, as expert archaeologists, we teach the
Voltuscians how to manufacture Terran artifacts. There's no more market for
anything from Voltus—but why not continue to take advantage of the skills of
the Voltuscians as long as the market's open for things of Earth? We could
smuggle the artifacts to Earth, plant them, have them dug up again and sold
there—and we'd make the entire profit, not just the miserable fee the Company
allows us!"
"It's shady, Sturges," Darby said hoarsely. "I don't like the idea."
"How do you like the idea of starving?" Sturges retorted. "We'll rot on Voltus
unless we use our wits."
Robert Silverberg
And be ready to answer:
1. Christopher Evans argues: "Perhaps the crispest definition is that science
fiction is a literature of 'what if?' What if we could travel in time? What if
we were living on other planets? What if we made contact with alien
races? And so on. The starting point is that the writer supposes things are
different from how we know them to be." Discuss this definition in
reference to the quote above.
2. How would you use the post-colonial studies is order to describe the
social and political situation on Voltus?
3. What is “the Company”? How does it influence the Terra-Voltus
interplanetary affairs?
Contemporary British
Short Fiction
SCIENCE FICTION exercise:
Read carefully the text below:
Your stress level is remarkably high," continued the thin man, turning his gaze
away from the spectacle. "But where you fail is where you all fail. Like Earth's
insects which imitate vegetables, your cleverness cripples you. You can only be
carbon copies. Because Jagger did nothing in the house, all the rest of you
instinctively followed suit. You didn't get bored—you didn't even try to make
passes at Dapple—as personable a Non-Man as I ever saw. Even the model
spaceship jerked no appreciable reaction out of you." Brushing his suit down, he
rose before the skeletal being which now cowered in a corner.
"The inhumanity inside will always give you away," he said evenly. "However
human you are outside."
Brian Aldiss
And be ready to answer:
1. Judith Merril defines SF as: "stories whose objective is to explore, to
discover, to learn, by means of projection, extrapolation, analogue,
hypothesis-and-paper-experimentation, something about the nature of the
universe, of man, or 'reality' ... I use the term 'speculative fiction' here
specifically to describe the mode which makes use of the traditional
'scientific method' (observation, hypothesis, experiment) to examine some
postulated approximation of reality, creating an environment in which the
responses and perceptions of the characters will reveal something about the
[human] characters". Discuss the definition referring to the quote above.
2. What does it mean to be human in the story?
3. Why aliens are like “Earth's insects which imitate vegetables”?
Contemporary British
Short Fiction
SCIENCE FICTION exercise:
Read carefully the text below:
Deal with one thing at a time. Grope your way gently to the abyss. Categorize
your knowledge. One: Earth was getting slightly the worst of a cold war with
Nitity. Two: the Nititians possessed the alarming ability of being able to
assume the identical appearance of their enemies. Three: by this means they
could permeate human society. Four: Earth was unable to view the Nititian
civilization from inside. Inside ... a wave of claustrophobia swept over Harley as
he realized that these cardinal facts he knew bore no relation to this little world
inside. They came, by what means he did not know, from outside, the vast
abstraction that one of them had ever seen. He had a mental picture of a starry
void in which men and monsters swam or battled, and then swiftly erased it.
Such ideas did not conform with the quiet behaviour of his companions; if they
never spoke about outside, did they think about it?
And be ready to answer:
1. Brian Aldiss once wrote that "[S]cience fiction is the search for a definition
of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but
confused state of knowledge and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or
post-Gothic mode" – discuss the definition referring to the quote above.
2. The character in the quoted interior monologue uses deduction. Why? Can a
SF story be similar to detective fiction? How?
3. How is an alien mind shown in the text?
Remember myths, fairytales, legends etc. you know and get ready to share your cultural
associations concerning the concept of:
PASTORAL
Remember myths, fairytales, legends etc. you know and get ready to share your cultural
associations concerning the concept of:
ANDROGYNE
Remember myths, fairytales, legends etc. you know and get ready to share your cultural
associations concerning the concept of:
SOLSTICE
Remember myths, fairytales, legends etc. you know and get ready to share your cultural
associations concerning the concept of:
WALPURGISNACHT
Remember myths, fairytales, legends etc. you know and get ready to share your cultural
associations concerning the concept of:
A VERY BIG RED-EYED BLACK DOG
Remember myths, fairytales, legends etc. you know and get ready to share your cultural
associations concerning the concept of:
A WILD GARDEN HIDDEN BEHIND THE WALL
Remember myths, fairytales, legends etc. you know and get ready to share your cultural
associations concerning the concept of:
A DROWNED CITY ON THE OCEAN FLOOR
Remember myths, fairytales, legends etc. you know and get ready to share your cultural
associations concerning the concept of:
WEAVING OF THE GRAY CLOTH
Remember myths, fairytales, legends etc. you know and get ready to share your cultural
associations concerning the concept of:
A SHELL FROM PRIMORDIAL OCEANS
Remember myths, fairytales, legends etc. you know and get ready to share your cultural
associations concerning the concept of:
THE WORLD IN THE MIRROR
Remember myths, fairytales, legends etc. you know and get ready to share your cultural
associations concerning the concept of:
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOON
Remember myths, fairytales, legends etc. you know and get ready to share your cultural
associations concerning the concept of:
NIRVANA
Remember myths, fairytales, legends etc. you know and get ready to share your cultural
associations concerning the concept of: A MAGIC KISS