Labyrinth Inhabitant Issue 4

It's up! And here's the part of it I wrote:

Let me quote a dialogue from Neal Stephenson’s recent novel Anathem:

MENTOR: “[The] whole point of living in a cloistered math is to reduce our causal linkages with the extramuros world to the minimum, isn’t it?”

STUDENT: “Socially, yes. Culturally, yes. Ecologically, even. But we use the same atmosphere, we hear their mobes driving by—on a pure theoric level, there is no causal separation at all!”

MENTOR: “If there were another universe, altogether separate from ours—no causal linkages whatsoever between Universes A and B—would time flow at the same rate between them?”


(In Anathem, a “math” is a sort of monastic order for mathematicians and scientists who shut themselves off from the outside or “extramuros” world for one, ten, one hundred or one thousand years. “Mobes” are cars, except awesomer.)

The question the wise old mentor raises in this passage is central to the labyrinth inhabitant subgenre: If humans create such a self-sufficient environment for themselves that it effectively becomes a world unto itself, is there any meaningful connection between events inside the artificial environment and events in the outside world? The mentor speculates that there may have been a secret math whose inhabitants cut themselves off for ten thousand years, and who separated themselves from the outside world so effectively that they created a separate causal domain unknowable to people in the rest of the world, like the inside of that box that contained Schrödinger’s cat. In a phenomenon called “Causal Domain Shear,” their timeline ended up drifting so far afield from the timeline everyone else inhabited that when they finished their ten-thousand year mission and came out their front gate, only some three thousand years had passed in the outside world.

Anathem spends hundreds of pages showing how artificial environments enable the development of unique cultures despite the abjectly postmodern global monoculture outside the maths’ gates (the cloisters themselves aren’t in the form of labyrinths, but when the inhabitants choose to promote themselves to a math that will be cut off for a longer period, they do so by traversing a labyrinth to reach the more isolated area where their new order lives). But Anathem isn’t just a labyrinth inhabitant novel; it’s a meta-labyrinth inhabitant novel. Events force members of the maths to come out of their cloisters so they can influence one another and be influenced, and they tangle with enemies who live in an artificial environment of a different sort and who have a habit of spinning off new causal domains right and left. In fact, the discovery of the different ways that causal domains can influence one another is arguably the central intellectual adventure of the book. It’s a question that quickly runs into some thorny issues of quantum physics and philosophy. I couldn’t do justice to Anathem by trying to summarize Stephenson's ideas any further, but I recommend it as a thought-provoking book and a good example of why there deserves to be a whole subgenre of stories about people who live in giant artificial environments of mystery.

But do the stories in this fourth issue of Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine happen to address the very same theme? Why, yes, it seems that they do!

The prison cell in Terence Kuch’s “Simon Says” is a perfect example of an isolated causal domain. The prisoner seems to have some residual knowledge of what the outside world is like, but ever since he got imprisoned by some totalitarian overlord his access to new information has been strictly curtailed. And, of course, the assumption that there is a totalitarian overlord is part of the problem. In the prisoner's mind, the system that keeps him in captivity is personified as a single Keeper doling out the same rations and stimuli every day and every year. But in the outside world, it’s just as likely that the prisoner has a succession of jailers working from the same set of directions, or perhaps an automated feeding device programmed by the now-dead Keeper long ago. Maybe the Keeper is so far out of the prisoner’s causal domain that he’s in an indeterminate state between all of these possibilities. At least, until the day when the prisoner gets out of his cell and learns that his causal relationship with the outside world is even stranger than it seems.

That’s right, “Simon Says” isn’t one of those prisoner stories where the hero is trapped in a cell and he thinks some thoughts and then the author gives you the “artistic” ending leaving it up in the air what, if anything, will ever happen. In “Simon Says” the prisoner is in the cell, and then he is outside the cell, and then something further happens. Here at Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine we get things done.

In Therese Arkenberg’s “The Wall,” I’m pretty sure the heroine’s causal domain includes the entire planet except for a dead zone right in the center of the city where she lives. It’s as if humankind fanned out and started exploring the planet at the exact antipodes of her city, and now the normal rules of reality apply everywhere except that one spot they don’t quite have a handle on. My theory is that the city is essentially a donut-shaped labyrinth. What I’m trying to say is that if somebody who lived in the city was to sneak into that mysterious area in the center—I’m not saying somebody will sneak in, I’m just saying if somebody was to sneak in—some crazy shit would probably happen to that person.

And in Lindsey Duncan’s “Ten Cities Down,” the causal domains are arranged in a hierarchy one on top of the other like the levels of the Inferno, and there are strict immigration controls between them. The privileged people who live below are free to travel to higher levels, but travel in the opposite direction is prohibited. As a result, people from the lower levels are free to influence whoever they want in the higher levels, but they can prevent the Hylaean flow from running in the opposite direction (I can’t explain it; read Anathem). But the normal order of things turns upside down when one man returns from the dead in the lowest city, and the authorities must keep him from escaping to the surface.

Thanks to this issue’s authors, and thanks to all of the approximately 100 authors who submitted to Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine during its first year!

"The Organist of Congress Avenue"

My story "The Organist of Congress Avenue" appears in the (slightly late to press, I guess) July/August 2008 issue of the Victorian speculative fiction magazine The Willows. The Willows in only published in media that would have been speculated about by Victorians, i.e. paper, and its full list of stories doesn't appear online, and so my claim to have been published therein is both totally plausible and inconvenient to verify!

As for issue four of Labyrinth Inhabitant, one story is posted and another has been bought, so I'm still looking for at least one more. I'd like to wrap the issue up by mid-October. Don't bother sending in any reviews of Anathem or Minotaur China Shop--I'll handle those.

LabInhab Issue 3 Slush Report

Issue 3 is up. Issue 3 is the most terrifying issue. This is the first issue since the pay rates for stories have gone up to $20-$40, and the quality of submissions has improved. I've been getting strong submissions from the beginning, but I'm no longer getting very many awful submissions. In particular, there are fewer submissions completely from out of left field; most people now seem to read the guidelines first.

There were a couple of nonfiction subs, but I didn't feel they'd fit. An accepted article would have to be something unique, with original research or at least original observations. What I got were more like general facts about labyrinths (not plagiarized though, as far as I could tell! I googled!).

Overall, the four accepted works were culled from a total of 22 submissions. Those aren't such bad odds for a writer, so keep submitting!

LabInhab Issue 2: The Library in the Labyrinth

All right! The internet came through for me again with three more terrific labyrinth stories, and once again they arguably share at least one other theme: Libraries in the Labyrinth. Combining these two great flavors probably seems like a natural idea, since LabInhab patron saint Jorge Luis Borges wrote about them both, often at the same time. So what do these two themes have to do with one another?

When I think of characters trapped in the labyrinth of a library, the first one to come to mind isn’t from Borges. It’s the Reverend Edward Casaubon, the old, dusty love interest from George Eliot’s Middlemarch, who the heroine mistakes for the next Milton. His thing is that he wants to compose a “Key to All Mythologies,” a book to prove Jesus equals Osiris equals Vishnu etc., unifying all human spirituality into one big scheme with Christianity at the center and basically proving the existence of God. Naturally, Casaubon buries himself up to his eyebrows in what amounts to a pile of cross-referenced index cards, and dies of old age with his great work hardly begun. Neil James Hudson brings us a similar character with his Curator in The History Eaters, who stores the entire records of the history of Earth on a space station that was once as well-organized as the Dewey Decimal System, but is now breaking down into unshapely miscellany.

It’s one of those universal stories, you see. A well-meaning wannabe polymath tries to lay out all the world’s data in some kind of universal monument to human knowledge, but he inevitably ends up wandering lost in his creation until he dies. There’s just too much knowledge to get a handle on in one lifetime (since I’ve got cross-references on the brain anyway, see also Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and its librarian “Jorge of Burgos”).

But maybe by harnessing the work of hundreds of researchers, rather than working alone, it would be possible to achieve total knowledge? That’s the approach of the sorcerer in Daniel Ausema’s The Canyon of Babel, who (spoiler alert) discovers that an abandoned canyon is a library of multilingual echoes. He impresses every left-handed man, woman and child he can find into service cataloguing these echoes in the hopes of finding one in the “Language of Wisdom,” the language so perfect that knowledge of any one word would imply the whole language, and some metaphysical secrets besides. I guess if Reverend Casaubon had written his Key to all Mythologies in the Language of Wisdom, he could have fit it on the back of a postcard.

The tragedy of these quixotic archivists is their dawning realization that there’s no organizing principle, no grand unified theory tying all their knowledge together. When we meet the Curator in The History Eaters, he’s well on his way to that understanding, but it’s only Judith, the Librarian from Subodhana Wijeyeratne’s The Sentinel Gate, who has given up the notion of enlightenment and found a way to go on, writing in the sand in forgotten languages but sweeping her work away before it can be read. Maybe she understands her actions as a way of preserving the skills of literacy for future generations without fostering the illusion that writing is itself a means to lasting knowledge, and without adding more needless complexity to the labyrinth where she lives. But one thing Judith can’t preserve for posterity is her sad knowledge that there’s nothing to be found out in the maze. Despite Judith’s warnings, the young hero of the story is driven to journey out and read the gnomic inscriptions on the labyrinth walls for himself. Maybe that’s for the best.

Who’s to say Judith didn’t miss something?

Labyrinth Inhabitant Slush and Egosearch Report 2

With one story posted and two more acceptance emails sent, I'm closing in on the end of the submission period for issue 2. It's still a small zine, but the good news is that everything I've accepted has been well-written, mysterious, and appropriate to the labyrinth subgenre. The updated submission count is up to about 75, with 5 fiction acceptances and 2 poetry acceptances. I haven't seen much poetry lately, and I kind of miss it. The most common issue with rejected stories is still genre inappropriateness. A few extra pointers:

• It's not enough if the characters just live in a mysterious artificial environment. The plot of the story also has to be about addressing that mystery, either by resolving the mystery or learning to live with it. (Or just dying. Dying is allowed.) I hate to say I'd never take a romance story, for instance, but the mysterious setting would have to be a very major theme, if not the focus of the story.
• Also, if your character can easily come and go from the mysterious place that is the setting for your story, you may be in trouble. Part of the idea of a labyrinth story is that you're kind of stuck there, at least for the time being.
• The plot of the show Lost would make a good Labyrinth Inhabitant story (If it hadn't already been written! No fanfic!). The plot of Battlestar Galactica, or an X-Files episode, would get a sympathetic rejection letter.

Just today I googled "Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine" to see if it was listed on enough writers' market sites. I came across this encouraging note on the Novel and Short Story Writers' Market blog:

The editor sounds a little desperate on his blog, so if you have a story that fits his criteria, you should have a good shot at getting it up.

At least somebody noticed!