Reality by Other Means. James Morrow

      Introduction

       An Audience with the Abyss

      James Morrow’s Short Fiction

      GARY K. WOLFE

      At the 1999 International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts — the most eclectic of the various academic conferences dealing with science fiction and fantasy — a panel discussion on the work of James Morrow drew such interest that it became the basis for a special Morrow issue of the academic journal Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres. The impressive list of contributors included writers as well as critics — Samuel R. Delany, Michael Bishop, Élisabeth Vonarburg, Michael Swanwick, Brian Stableford, and F. Brett Cox among them — and the journal has since devoted only one other issue to a single fiction writer, Ursula K. Le Guin. As insightful and brilliant as some of the essays were, they also occasionally indulged in that favorite critical game of connect-the-dots. In trying to situate Morrow’s unique satirical voice, the essayists came up with a dizzying list of possible influences, analogues, and sheer wild guesses — Swift, Voltaire, Twain, and Vonnegut most often, but also Philip K. Dick, Robert Sheckley, Chaucer, Dostoevsky, Kafka, J.G. Ballard, Donald Barthelme, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Irving, Ray Bradbury, Anatole France, Evelyn Waugh, and for good measure, Nietzsche and maybe Heidegger. And all this before Morrow had written The Last Witchfinder, possibly his most complex and rewarding novel, or The Philosopher’s Apprentice, or his delightful pop-culture fables Shambling Towards Hiroshima and The Madonna and the Starship, or Galápagos Regained, or more than two-thirds of the stories in the present collection.

      One of the more bizarre of many bizarre sketches from the Monty Python troupe — whose sense of absurd juxtapositions is not entirely incongruent with Morrow’s own — involved the ridiculously militaristic “Confuse-a-Cat” service, designed to rouse bored and mopey cats from their torpor. Since the beginning of his fiction career in the 1980s, Morrow has been cheerfully providing such a service for readers of science fiction and fantasy, and increasingly for a much broader readership in such literary journals as Conjunctions. The earliest story here, “Bible Stories for Adults, No. 17: The Deluge,” immediately throws us off balance simply by virtue of its central character: what on earth is a prostitute named Sheila, a self-described “drunkard, thief, self-abortionist … and sexual deviant,” doing on Noah’s ark, let alone completely undermining Yahweh’s scheme for the redemption of the human race — which scheme, as she points out, is really nothing more than simple eugenics? The range of deliberate anachronisms, from Sheila’s allusion to a nineteenth-century pseudoscience to her apparent knowledge of how to freeze sperm for later fertilization, was startling enough — and maybe just science-fictional enough — to earn Morrow his first Nebula Award in 1989. (Interestingly, Morrow returns to a very secularized version of Noah’s ark in “The Raft of the Titanic,” in which the crew and passengers save themselves by constructing a huge platform which becomes their home and eventually an independent nation, choosing to forgo rejoining the world altogether after learning of the madness of the First World War.)

      “The Deluge” was one of a sharply satirical series of “Bible Stories for Adults” that Morrow published between 1988 and 1994 (another included here, “Bible Stories for Adults, No. 31: The Covenant,” hilariously deconstructs the Ten Commandments). Together with his “Godhead” trilogy of novels (Towing Jehovah, 1994; Blameless in Abaddon, 1996; The Eternal Footman, 1999), these stories helped establish Morrow’s reputation as science fiction’s premier religious satirist. It was a role that science fiction readers, who often felt besieged by the same forces of irrationality that were Morrow’s targets, embraced with enthusiasm.

      Science fiction had grappled with religion before, of course, but often in simplistic or sentimental