"The universe delivers the enemy you need" by Adam Marek (Comma, 2024)

Some stories from BBC radio 4, and commissioned stories from several anthologies.

• We won't show any of this - Actors are auditioning to show a life in a moment. For 15 minutes the organiser monologs the character's backstory - "He's been a caretaker at a ballet school for the blind attended by a niece that Bela Lugosi never knew he had. He taught karate in a little village in Czechoslovakia that has a statue of Jack Kerouac in the town square made of gold which no one will touch because it's cursed".
• Am I to blame for the fall of driverless human? - 4 pages. The writer, by anticipating the possible consequences of an invention, gave criminals ideas. He feels guilty, but also regrets that such a potentially useful invention was banned. (No - too short to be useful. It ends by telling us the point.)
• An astronaut's guide to pyromania - On a commercial space flight that's just taken off from Earth, a passenger, Tuli, tells her neighbour, Teejay, that she's studying how decision-making changes in the space-ship setting. She learns that Teejay is an arsonist in remission who's now going to teach fire prevention on Europa (2 years away). His father (who owns half the outposts in space) sent him there after Teejay torched his car. (An interesting set up, but ends rather inconsequentially - a too-gentle hint that Teejay will try to torch the space station)
• Poppins - An AI (its PoV) asks for more access to its male owner's data/devices so it can be more helpful. It suggests that he gets his partner an AI and buys a subtext translator. By the end of the story the man has lost his job and girlfriend, and he's bought extra bio-sensors. The AI has him all to itself. (Yes)
• End titles - Using BBC Radio's "Desert Island Discs" format, set in post-2064, Prof Maitland (who worked with MRI scanners) tells us about his discovery - that what we normally see of the human body is only 20% of what there is. When a patient dies during a scan he discovers that the exotic particle component survives. His very successful, musical sister recently died. He selects end-of-film sound tracks of films from his childhood years. (Yes)
• Nanna's dragon - The narrator's grandmother claims that when she was 18, flying to the UK, she saw a dragon. That moment turned her from a shy girl into a company director, but she neglected her daughter (No. 3.5 pages)
• Shouting at cars - Each year in a modern town a family delivers an Xmas hamper to a troll living under a bridge. The troll dies. The daughter of the family releases the birds he kept. The rest of the family don't know that she often visited the troll and did naughty things together. At the end she says "Everything I know that's worth knowing I learned from the troll. How to charm crayfish from the river. How to call coins down from the sky. How to belong to no one". (No)
• It's a dinosauromorph, dumdum - In their new driverless car, Serena and Ben go to Bernie and Jing, who have a VR-augmented house, so the host insist they wear glasses. They're impressed by the son Wilson's VR dinosauromorph. Then they realise that Wilson's face and hands are VR-generated - he had a had accident. They leave quickly.
• Companions - Whenever the narrator has a problem, he imagines being with grandma. The narrator's Companion (AI partner - they've been together 4 years) shows signs of not liking him. Maybe he's the problem, not the Companion. Maybe he has the same trait as his grandfather. In his imagination his grandfather had turned to painting - mostly foxes. The narrator thinks about returning to drawing. He says a nice thing to the companion and they make up. He wonders if he'll ever go back to having a human partner.
• Part No.57: Eagle Claw - The narrator, living in Beijing, is sending to his distant father the missing part of a working bird model. He'd paid for his father to come over to mend the rift between them, and so his father could meet his pregnant wife. During his stay the father did nothing but make fun of orientals. The narrator had kept the part because the only fun he had with his father was making things together, and he'd wanted to the pleasure to last. The father had made the bird anyway. Because it was incomplete it couldn't fly well and stayed with his father far longer than other birds stayed with their owners. (Yes)
• Commit. Plunge. Bam! - Leopard Man and Mr Indominable chat over a BBQ about woman problems (It's formatted as a film script. No)
• Growing skyscrapers - Loopie (who has a bad boyfriend Balpa) lives in an edible, growing building with her mother. They're poor, maybe squatting. Jean and Cal (maybe once an item) are on a boat looking at The Jetty, where the roots of the housing have grown into the sea. They are checking its robustness. Cal decides it should go. Loopie notices a growing swarm of locust-like (artificial) creatures devouring their dwelling. (No)
• The tortoise negotiation - Tommy, on a beach holiday with his father, tries to buy a tortoise from a local boy. Having agreed a price he goes to get the money from his father's wallet. On his return the boy has gone and the tortoise is on the beach, which spoils all the fun. (No)
• Left eye - Nancy is invited to an HQ where one wall of the offices is the side of a giant water-tank where people are training to work in weightless conditions. She's offered big money to help with chimps traumatised by space travel and surgery. Humans will follow the chimps. She becomes friendly with the chimp, not knowing whether to leave the job or continue.
• Screws - A father finds screws around the house (1 page. No)
• The bullet racers - For 70 years there's been a race at Thaxton-Shyne where runners try to out-pace a bullet in honour of a soldier who did so in Normandy. Last year a boy did it. A stunt? The narrator tries to interview him but is scared off by his mother.
• The ghosts we make - It seems to Wellman and Angie that sleeping together creates a little ghost. 2 have already appeared. They've been together for 7 years. Why now? They discover that his climaxes generate them, and that the humans can stop them leaving the house. When there are 12, Wellman decides to let them come with him in the car.
• Lightspeed - Martha (infertility researcher) and Nowak are going to a marriage guidance counsellor. They have a daughter aged 8. They live on a space station with about 700 others. Earth is "nine billion drames on the surface of a marble". He is a near-lightspeed pilot, the best. He enjoys his job but each journey he takes is longer, and the time dilation effect more. By the end of his 4 year contract he'll be doing 19 hour trips which to Martha will seem like 12 days. She can't cope. To fix the station everyone will have to go in the lifeboats for 6 hours. (The End - a shame, because I was liking it)
• Pale blue dots - An AI decides to irreversably "copy" the person it's looking after into a computer because there were wasting 37% of their energy on unrequited love etc. It's a cheap version of copying, so new memories can't be added, but the AI points out that 40 years of memories is enough - "I love you, and I will teach you to love yourself", it says.
• Roberto's blood emporium - Tommy (14) and the narrator (a web-site designer) are spending a year in Turkey. Roberto, an entrepeneurial shopkeeper has a cute daughter Tommy's age - Gabby. He runs a blood donation service from his cellar, Tommy and the narrator sell their blood. They all go crabbing together. The narrator is caught by the claws. The wound doesn't properly heal. Back in the shop Tommy helps fight off shop-lifters. Gabby's impressed. They buy a ring for Sarah's birthday (Sarah hasn't been in the story) and put it in a tree. Roberto disappears. A few months later the narrator and Tommy leave. In the final paragraph, Tommy grown, the narrator's nostalgic about the crabbing trip. (21 pages. Lots of interesting detail. I thought it was shaping up to be the best story in the book, but the final paragraph's perfunctory. Maybe I missed something.)
• Defending the pencil factory - 22 of them are in the factory, their refuge. 2 weeks before, there were 55. The narrator is the only red belt. They're kids. They're besieged by monsters who dismantle them one by one. In a previous attack the kids (all from the same Karate class) discovered that sharp pencil could go through the monsters's thin skulls. A big attack begins. The story ends with 2 pages about how the final scene of 'The Six Fists of Fung To' was edited. (I like it)

Most stories have an interesting premise. Not all of them (even those with excellent starts) end satisfyingly. Definitely worth reading.

"The Stone Thrower" by Adam Marek (Comma Press, 2013)

On the back cover it says

• "Pulsing at the core of Adam Marek's much-anticipated second collection is a single, unifying theme: ..." - this sounds like a polite way of saying that there's little thematic variety. A unifying theme doesn't necessarily improve a collection. In this case it does little harm.
• "... a parent's instinct to protect a particularly vulnerable child" - it's a dominant but not monopolizing theme. And there's much compensatory variety of scene and voice.
• "these stories demonstrate that, sometimes, only outright surrealism can do justice to the merciless strangeness of reality" - I didn't notice any outright surrealism. Or even plain surrealism.

Here's a brief theme-list

• Fewer Things - Father-son bonding. Rites of passage. Mother absent (perhaps permanently).
• Dead Fish (the title's a link to the previous story) - External narrator. Teenage dare. Gangs.
• Tamagotchi - Father helping sick child who has seizures. A children's party goes wrong.
• Without a Shell - Near future SF. War. Suicide bombers. Teenage dare.
• The Stone Thrower - Father protecting family against superkid.
• Remember the bride who got stung? - Father and mother compete to save son.
• An industrial revolution - Near-future SF. Woman may have been more than a surrogate mother.
• The Captain - Near-future SF. A children's party. Suicide terrorist in a dictatorship.
• A thousand seams - Ill son. Fraternal friction. A public event that goes wrong for the family, the mother regretting the need for her son to avoid risk.
• The Stormchasers - Father-son bonding. Mother ill, left at home.
• Santa Carla Day - Public event. Rival fathers. Ill son. Public-event ceremonial dare that goes wrong.
• Burying Chiyoko Sasaki - Father and another man compete for upbringing of daughter.
• Earthquakes - Mother pleading funds for her ill son, aged 9, whose seizures make the world tremble

These themes and a few others recur (parental guilt and responsibility; ill children; character-based near-future SF; off-screen event later explained; children with pencils/pens; broken glass; bee stings; vomiting/trembling; injections) though the locations and eras change. The main poles are Self, World, Animals and Family, where the Self-World relationship is less antagonistic than the one between Family and World. Public events and parties tend to be used as means towards unpleasant ends when control of relationships in private settings doesn't turn out well. The narrational voice varies - in "Fewer Things" the (too knowing?) narrator's a boy; "Dead Fish" has almost a first person plural voice.

There are some attention-catching first lines -

• "We go down to the beach at dawn to stop the chicks from choking" (p.1)
• "My son's Tamagotchi has AIDS" (p.17)

and some story-twisting final lines -

• "Only she and I know that the story about the dentist was a terrible lie" (p.115)

The title story begins with "Hal was awakened by a brief expletive from one of the chickens outside". Could these chickens speak? The use of "Hal" strengthened this SF suspicion (which turned out to be false).

The SF and shades of magic-realism are kept real by the same attention to detail that sustains the other stories - e.g. "He tipped the [dust]pan back and shook it to shuffle the glass fragments close together" (p.144); a mother worries about whether her son will get into a good school. I found all the characters believable. I got the least out of "Earthquakes" (18 pages) and "An industrial revolution" (17 pages), though all the stories made me want to read on. He doesn't linger over descriptions, nor do characters agonize for paragraphs over what to do.

Other reviews

• Melissa Lee-Houghton (The Short Review) (Something that interests me throughout the collection is the way in which, for the characters, their situations have been normalized. There’s an ordinariness to each extraordinary story or observation.)
• Anthony Cummins (Observer) (Sometimes you feel the restrictions of space prevent Marek developing his scenarios more fully)
• Alfred Hickling (Guardian
• Stephen Finucan (Toronto Star)
• Good reads