Friday short fiction #35: more dreams

Tony Wilkinson   Dream........   2010
Patricia Abbott, 'Bit Players'  (SPINETINGLER, 5 OCTOBER 2010)
Winner of Spinetingler Magazine's 'Pay the Bitch Back" Award. Dead and forgotten actors find the only work they can get with an afterlife casting agency is to play minor roles in other people's dreams. It helps if you're familiar with the five career stages of an actor as defined by Jack Elam (and later appropriated by Ricardo Montalbán), otherwise this may take a couple of reads before you truly get it.

Guy de Maupassant, 'Was it a Dream?'  (GIL BLAS, MAY 1887)
A re-read, I've always thought that this tale had the kind of title that doesn't actually serve the story: yes, what happens may have been a dream but it becomes more unequivocal if that ambiguity is removed, and the protagonist actually has learned by supernatural means something that would otherwise have been kept hidden. Thankfully this week I've learned the story was actually titled in French as 'La Morte' / 'The Dead Woman', (a small kernel of bibliographic information that seems to exist nowhere on the English language internet but established with the help of aliettedb), so how did it gain such an unconvincing English title? Anyway, I'm nitpicking. Title notwithstanding, 'Was it a Dream?' is still a minor classic of early eldritch horror – one which implies that the truth is often best left unsaid – and it presents a final classic scene.

Nadine Gordimer, 'Dreaming of the Dead'  (NEW STATESMAN, 29 JANUARY 2007)
Gordimer dreams of sharing a meal with departed friends Susan Sontag, Edward Said and Anthony Sampson, in a New York Chinese restaurant. This is a dense story that possesses no plot, yet like good conversation still manages to go round in circles in a rather attractive left-wing way.

Favourite short story of the week: Jack Vance, 'Sjambak'  (IF WORLDS OF SCIENCE FICTION, JULY 1953)
Who – or what – is the Horseman of Space who's welcoming spaceships arriving at the planet Cirgamesç? An Earth media station needs to dig deeper than expected to get a TV exclusive. One of Vance's many 'gadget' stories that he wrote as 'work for hire' to put bread on the table, despite its thin scientific veneer it's nevertheless rendered exotic and colourful by drawing on Javanese and Arabic cultures, without which this novelette might well have fallen completely flat.