Arrows of ErosEdited by Alex Stewart
New English Library, paperback, 272 pages, £3.50
Review by David Clark (1990)
An SF anthology about sex. Oh dear. Well, SF and porn do kind of go together. Are we in for silly fanboys being daring, or the worst kind of stodgy, pretentious middle-aged academics wearing jeans and/or cardigans (most of them, I’m informed), or a decent anthology of ‘stories we want to read’, as Stewart says in his editorial? Well, SF (when it’s any good, and whatever ‘SF’ means today) is a ‘literature of ideas’, and this is actually an OK collection of idea-driven stories. Stewart proves himself a capable editor. There are few venues for SF short stories written to a professional standard in Britain and paid for at a professional rate and there ought, perhaps, to be a few more like this one.
My favourite story here is probably Kim Newman’s. Set largely in a semi-ruined and jungle-filled Buckingham Palace, Newman’s post-cyberpunk story features a semi-Virtual Reality game where a couple hunt each other to the (pretend, though the wounds have to be healed later) death. Just offstage are the descendants of the Windsors, who’ve interbred in the depths of the Palace: ‛feeble-minded, lazy-limbed ichabods with huge ears and rabbit teeth, by all accounts’ (no change there, then) and there are ‛rumoured to be a pack of feral corgis’ in there somewhere. (Someone should invent a VR game where you hunt Windsors. I’ll pay to play.)
Tanith Lee’s flair for erotic writing is well known, so it’s hardly surprising that she’s been included. Personally I think that she’s underrated, so I’m pleased she’s here with ‘The Beautiful Biting Machine’, which is a culture-clash SF story rather than her usual fantasy.
It’s also good to see the highly competent Brian Stableford featured, here visiting a kind of hollow earth culture, a civilisation dating back to the ice ages. Their place is civilisation, we’re a potential threat from the ‘Wildlands’. Iain Banks is also good, with his story of unrequited love, and one must also mention Stephen Gallagher, Diana Wynne Jones (imaginative choices), Freda Warrington and Garry Kilworth.
Several women have stories in Arrows of Eros. They don’t add up to 50% of the population of this book, but then that’s true for SF/fantasy in general anyway, unless ‘we want to read’ endless romantic medievalist sub-textually* right wing fantasy sagas or stuff about fucking dragons.** We don’t, and fortunately neither, on this evidence, does Stewart.
There are, almost inevitably for an anthology, flaws. The front cover has that pulpy look that I wish would go away from new stuff. ‘Unearthly tales of love and death’, its strapline proclaims, above a buxom, beckoning wench in clothes that look a bit impractical for wear in orbit. And if it’s love and death, shouldn’t that title actually be Arrows of Eros and Thanatos? Still, Stewart could easily be without blame here, this sexist, antediluvian crap is probably the publisher’s doing. SF book covers tend to the ugly. Also, David Langford’s story is a dud, and one could very well argue that Ballard space has been left unexplored, that there could have been some forensic stuff in Arrows of Eros, and some more experimental approaches to fiction. ‛Stories we want to read’, again?
In that respect, the range here is narrow, and I’m not sure I’d care for a volume 2. However, Arrows of Eros as it is contains some good stories, and I wish that there were more column inches available for them. Aim for this collection in your local library at least.
*There’s probably no such word as ‘sub-textually’, which doesn’t feature in any of the dictionaries or other learned tomes in my vast library of books of pretentious terms for budding hacks, but I think that there should be.
**Literally. Serious comment. •