The Margins of Mundania

By Leigh Kimmel

A tween boy's Christmas gift opens a world of wonder and brings joy to a whole town fallen on hard times. A young New Englander in the early Twentieth Century discovers that some parts of human history don't bear too close examination. A literary critic in the old Soviet Union must confront his own moral cowardice.

These stories, along with a multitude of bite-sized works of flash fiction, carry you from the most prosaic of events to the moments of awe that offer glimpses of matters larger than ourselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Starship Cat Press
• Release date: Feb 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215917367

Book preview

This book is a work of fiction. All names of persons, places and organizations are fictitious or used fictitiously.

COVER CREDITS:

Floating island: m k from Pixabay

Sky with clouds: Dimitris Vetsikas from Pixabay

Font: akaPosse

Introduction

This collection has its roots in a weekly writing challenge sponsored by a blog aimed specifically at writers interested in indie publishing. I began participating in it at the end of 2019, just in time for the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, with its closure and attendant dislocations.

So how was this important? If you're familiar with Heinlein's Rules for Writers, you'll recall that the first two are 1. you must write, and 2. you must finish what you write.

In those dark and uncertain days of the lockdowns, when events were being canceled left and right, to the point we didn't know from day to day what would be happening with our retail business (as it turned out, we didn't have a single convention in 2020, and none in 2021 until July), my focus and concentration evaporated. Writing challenges were what kept me putting out words when it was all but impossible for me to sustain an effort for any length of time.

However, that just helped me fulfill the first of Heinlein's rules. For most of the writing challenges that I'd been doing for years, I could respond to the prompt with character sketches or random scenes from much larger works that I'd been planning to write. The Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Writing Challenge was different: we were to write a complete story, with characters, setting, conflict and resolution, all in no more than 250 words.

This meant I was not merely writing, but finishing a story every week (I did miss the deadline once, the week the first lockdowns began – but I still wrote the story and posted it on my LiveJournal). Sometimes it took some rigorous pruning to bring my stories down to the requisite length, which meant learning to suggest rather than elaborate upon things. At times I'd do a a story entirely in dialog, just to keep it within the length limit, and leave the rest to the reader's imagination.

After three years of participating these weekly writing challenge, I'd accumulated quite a stack of these stories – and while some of them had been improved by being trimmed down to the 250-word limit, more than a few had suffered, losing vital bits of flavor to squeeze out another five or ten words. So I really wished there were some way for my readers to see what I considered to be the perfect edition of those works.

At the same time, I realized that a number of the pieces I'd produced for other writing challenges were in fact complete stories in their own right – and really deserved a larger audience than the blogs that hosted them. The obvious solution was to assemble them into a collection, much as I had with The Space Race Trilogy Omnibus, which brought together three stories of cosmic horror that formed a story arc larger than the sum of its parts.

However, the longer I looked at the stories in that pile, the more I could see that they represented far too wide a variety of genres and styles to fit into a single collection. Maybe it would be preferable to sort all those stories out by genre and produce several collections. That way I could include other stories that were simply too short to be published individually, but were beyond the scope of flash fiction.

The title of this collection refers to its focus on mainstream and slipstream fiction. For those who are not familiar with the term Mundania, it comes from the science fiction fan community. Specifically, it is the fannish term for non-fannish society, which was popularized in Piers Anthony's Xanth novels as the word for the non-magical world to which Xanth was a magical peninsula into which waves of migration could flow. Particularly before Star Wars made science fiction respectable, there was a very real divide between those who enjoyed the speculative genres and those who did not.

Discussing genre in fiction can be a tricky task, because the term can be used both as a taxonomy of literature and as a marketing tool. Typically the biggest divide lies between mimetic fiction, which mimics life, and speculative fiction, which seeks to imagine what might happen if certain parameters of the universe were changed, whether it be a new technology or the existence of magic. Speculative fiction includes science fiction and fantasy, but also encompasses some horror subgenres (particularly traditional supernatural horror and cosmic horror), but excludes psychological horror in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Although mainstream fiction is the most recognizable genre of mimetic fiction, it is not the only one. For instance, most readers will make a clear distinction between mainstream and literary fiction, although readers on both sides of the divide often have difficulty articulating the differences that distinguish them (beyond the fact that literary fiction tends to be put out in short print runs by artsy small presses, while mainstream is produced by major New York publishers in five and six-digit print runs).

Slipstream is often defined as works that can be read with a mainstream sensibility, but hint at something beyond the prosaic. Although there are similarities between slipstream and magic realism, they are still distinct genres (the latter having its roots in South America, and particularly in efforts by dissident writers to avoid political censorship through the use of surrealistic and fantastical motifs that may be interpreted literally or psychologically), and while there may be an overlap in their readership, each has its distinct tastes.

Mystery and romance have typically been seen as genres of mimetic fiction (if not quite as prestigious as mainstream or literary fiction), but by the final decades of the Twentieth Century, we see increasing appearances of speculative elements in them. Mysteries with speculative elements tend to be niche (Isaac Asimov and Randall Garrett being the best-known practitioners), mostly because of the difficulty of establishing the speculative elements in a way to allow one to write a fair mystery using them.

By contrast, romance with speculative elements has branched off whole sub-genres of space opera romance, paranormal romance, and the like. Many of them have a superficial appearance of science fiction or fantasy, such that those of us who grew up in earlier decades, hungry for anything with speculative content, have been apt to grab them. However, when one actually begins to read, it is clear that the fundamental structure of the work follows the pattern that is expected by readers of romance, not readers of science fiction and fantasy. Even if the work technically follows the definition that the story would fall apart without the speculative element, the central conflict is still the quest for that happily ever after romantic dyad, and the plot arc is focused upon overcoming the obstacles to recognizing and connecting with one's intended as a genuine soulmate.

Technothrillers are another subgenre that borders on science fiction, but don't quite belong. We may have bleeding-edge technology that's just a little ahead of where it stands at the time it's written, but otherwise the storyline is clearly rooted in the here-and-now. For instance, the thought-controlled weapons system in the titular super-MiG Craig Thomas's technothriller Firefox was beyond the applications of EEG technology when it came out in the 1980's, but the novel's plot structure is closer to the spy or action sub-genres. Although technothrillers have not-yet-developed technologies handled with the meticulous care of hard science fiction with rivets, the focus of the story is on the action hero's use of the tech to attain a political or military objective, not the nuts and bolts of how the tech works.

Likewise, political cautionary tales such as Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here or George Orwell's 1984 may be set in a near future Anglosphere that has become a dictatorship, but neither of these novels are science fiction in the sense of Robert A. Heinlein's ...If This Goes On. Although 1984 features some technologies that were not yet available at the time it was written, such as the two-way television system, the focus of the story is on the protagonist's powerlessness in the grip of a totalitarian government, rather than how the technology works and drives social change.

As a result of pondering on these blurry boundaries, I've divided this collection into five major sections:

Stories that have no visible speculative elements and could fit into a mainstream publication.

Stories that could happen as a result of social change, especially the sort best avoided.

Stories that appear to be mainstream, but with hints that events ran a little differently in the past.

Stories with an element of wonder.

Stories with a hint of something uncanny or eldritch.

Changing Times – A Memoir

When I was little, the world was full of magic. There were tiny people living under the steps, and I knew all about their lives hidden from the ordinary world. The mats in the gymnasium hid secret doors into an underground world with dangerous villains that had to be outwitted. The house I saw going up as I passed on the school bus was being built for the deposed crown prince of a magical land.

Much as I loved all those stories, I soon discovered that the patience of adults for hearing about them was limited. Say more than two sentences in a row and I was going on and on, even as adults yammered forever about the tedious and the boring. But their things were Real, and therefore important and worthwhile, while mine were just made up, and therefore trifles, a waste of time.

Somewhere along the line, one or another adult encouraged me to write my stories down instead of chattering about them. But as my skills improved and writing narrative came more easily to me, it suddenly became the object of Adult Authority’s hostility. Writing was well and good as a hobby, but it was not work, and must not be allowed to crowd out the tasks they expected me to accomplish, even the boring and repetitive busywork assignments that I loathed. Besides, it was so very hard to get published and become a real writer, and so very few ever became successful. Better to resign myself to writing for the dresser drawer, in my spare time, and focus on getting a good job.

I refused to be dissuaded, although the endless stream of rejection slips filled folders, boxes, whole file cabinets. Even when the World Wide Web made it possible for anyone to put their writing before the public, the experts warned that putting up your fiction would succeed only in branding you a perpetual amateur, foreclosing forever the possibility of making the leap to professional writer.

And then everything changed, as several online platforms opened new programs that allowed anyone to publish their digital books, and then paperback books, not in a separated literary ghetto, but right alongside the offerings of the big New York and London publishers. Instead of struggling to figure out what acquiring editors were buying this year, you could write the book you believed in and sell it to a worldwide market.

At first I hesitated, fearing some kind of gotcha. I’d lived too many years under the old rules, and stepping off the traditional path seemed an invitation to trouble. But finally I took the plunge and put up one of those novels that had gotten an endless stream of very nice, but not quite for us rejections.

Maybe it’s not the five and six-figure advances we used to dream of, but I’m getting my writing out there at last. Instead of the endless stream of rejections, my biggest problem is finding my audience, making it possible for them to discover my works amidst the explosion of creativity the Indie Revolution has unleashed.

Section One – The Heart of the Matter

Mainstream fiction is often defined in opposition to genre fiction, particularly by teachers who regard genre fiction as inferior, often on the grounds that it encourages juvenile flights of fancy rather than mature expectations grounded in reality. However, one can also argue just as persuasively that mainstream is a genre in its own right, with its own story structure, beats and reader cookies just as distinctive as those for romance, mystery, science fiction, etc.

The stories in this section are ones set in the present or the recent past.