NB: Not unconnected to previous postings on the subject of schlock, socialist sci-fi author and CM semi-regular P.V. Tims (pictured below) has published another collection of short stories. About which, I will now pontificate.
Short Eternities
As reviewed by Fran Lock
For those familiar with the work of P.V. Tims, Short Eternities offers familiar metaphysical – in the Early Modern poetic sense of knocking the square peg of one implausible idea through the round hole of another equally strange, often wildly disconnected idea – fare. For those who are not familiar, expect ingenious conceit-driven short stories that both span and burlesque our most beloved genre conventions, expect intelligent philosophical speculation and demented language-play; expect excess, in all of its libidinous literary guises. And yet, readers should be equally braced for an unsettling measure of anger; for ontological discomfort, and political despair. If Small Infinities (2024) tempered its keen sense of injustice with hope, Short Eternities places the notion of hope itself under scrutiny, asking us to move beyond saccharine naivety and wilful obliviousness into a realm of courageous and clear-sighted kindness, to – like the protagonist Attion in 'The White Hole Garden' – persist in trying to save a world that is already doomed. If that sounds a little heavy for a collection of short-stories, then don't worry: there will also be wizards.
Tims' opening salvo is 'Mandelbrot Blues', and in many ways this sets the tone for the collection as a whole while easing us into the book's darker thematic concerns via familiar (and whimsically inventive) P.V.T territory. The action takes place at the Edge – the literal edge of infinity itself – a shifting vista of Mandelbrot fractals (hence the title), described by Tims in sumptuous and super-saturated detail. This excess of description is an aspect of the author's shtick I've come increasingly to relish. So much so, I have mentally minted a term for it: Purple to a Purpose. To unpack that a little: the hyperbolic language that often animates a P.V. Tims story is so much more than a matter of authorial affectation. Rather, Tims' over-the-top descriptions signal to a sensuous intensity of experience that exceeds the bounds of literary taste and the often reductive, tedious referential frameworks of capitalist realism. To me, Tims' writerly excesses embody an effort to punch through the strictures and limits that literary and socio-political convention sets upon imagination itself. In this way his work calls to mind George Bataille's notion of gloriously unproductive, and potentially radical expenditure (The Accursed Share, 1949).
It also puts me in mind of poet Joyelle McSweeney – about whom, more anon – who has described her practice as: “maximal, dandified, camp, ill-gendered, millenarian” suggesting that it requires “an undue attention to style, flair, garments, gestures rather than actions and plot, descriptions only of things which never were, an uncanny, transporting voice not tied to any body, around which flesh accrues and decomposes.” Reading Tims through this poetic lens is something I have found immensely fruitful. While his work differs from McSweeney's in that it is absolutely plot and action driven, it shares a profound understanding of the political (radical) uses and ends of excess.
But I am getting ahead of myself: what succeeds in 'Mandelbrot Blues' is the way in which Tims plays the nostalgic conventions of genre against his mind-bending visual field, and its conceptually unsettling frame. Here, the sci-fi/ horror staple of the isolated and claustrophobic crew – think The Thing (1982) or Alien (1989), or even The Lighthouse (2019) – are forced to grapple not with an embodied, creaturely threat but with the very forces of being and non-being. In this way 'Blues' combines psychological tension, skin-pickling existential terror, and what I can only describe as neon freak-out body-horror to superb effect. The Void (2016) might be another significant forerunner, except that whatever else you might say about The Void, it isn't known for its big-spirited curiosity about the unknown or each other. While Tims never subordinates the science-fiction elements to the “human drama” of his text – as so much thoroughly insipid recent sci-fi has done – he nevertheless takes care to build convincing relationships between his characters. There isn't an Everyman/woman among them, they are, like ourselves, uniquely realised, flawed, sometimes profoundly strange people. We care about them, as they care about one another. This gives Tims' narratives – even at their most outlandish – a great deal of tension and power.
Yet I want to shy away from offering an oversimplification along the lines of people-are-at-heart-of-these-stories. Because yuck. And what a profound waste of the sci-fi/ horror/ weird fiction framing that would be. What I will say is that a significant theme emerges throughout Short Eternities: the question of what it means to be a person, particularly within the context of forces (whether cosmic, political or both) beyond either our comprehension or control.
'Tribunol' is the second story in the collection: a short, tightly-turned conceit in which an archetypal “loser”, Kestler, steels his nerve to take a drug that will allow him to know, with absolute and horrible certainty, whether or not his life has meaning. He suspects not, but before he makes the ultimate decision to end his life, he has to know-know in whatever unspecified way the drug promises. This knowledge does not arrive in the way Kestler imagines: the narcotic allows him access to a disconcerting elsewhere in which a bowler-hatted being – Mr Likewise, the Angle (not a typo) of Justice – is preparing to adjudicate upon his fate. As the title hints, Kestler is about to be subjected to a tribunal, and while the paraphernalia of sinister bureaucracy is ordered and explained, we begin to assume we know where this narrative is heading: a Kafka-inspired morality play about the dangers of surrendering our autonomy; a metaphor for the powerlessness of the poor, ground up within the labyrinthine workings of a system we entrust to confer meaning on our lives, but which is calibrated at core to find all poor life inherently meaningless. Spoiler warning: we do not know where this narrative is headed.
Because for all his unsettling other-worldly trappings, Mr Likewise' doctrine is the polar opposite of our current political reality. For the Angle of Justice 'being worthy of life is the default'; while an individual may do things to deplete or lose that worth, its prerequisites are nothing more than kindness in your soul and in your actions; your capacity to give and experience joy. This is potentially incendiary, but could have sounded trite if it wasn't delivered dispassionately from a metaphysical incarnation of justice itself. Mr Likewise doesn't act out of kindness, he serves an immutable law, a fundamental truth. The very obviousness of this truth is, in itself, unsettling, throwing into sharp relief how little credence it is given within most human societies. Further, knowing this truth doesn't “fix” Kestler. It returns him to his life exactly as it – as he – was, only armed with the potential for radically reorienting the way he experiences and acts in the world. If we knew this fact, accepted it, kept it before us every day, what would we do differently? Again, the story invites us think about the minute degrees of difference between thinking a thing and really knowing it. Rather than offering some cautionary tale about the abdication of responsibility, 'Tribunol' is, in a sense, about rediscovering that responsibility. To ourselves, yes, but also to each other.
This is a classic P.V. Tims theme, and it plays out in a variety of ways throughout the book. 'High Score' is a fabulously weird adventure quest that takes place – and there's no easy way to say this – within a pinball machine. That is, the world – its physical structure, topography, modes of locomotion, system of government – is analogous to an arcade pinball machine from our own reality, although of course, the inhabitants do not understand it as such. If this sounds like a step too far, you'd be wrong. While the conceit is completely bonkers, Tims crafts this world with a winning mixture of hallucinatory jouissance and meticulous verisimilitude, so that the reader becomes quite comfortable suspending their disbelief and allowing themselves to swept along in the story. And what a story! While 'High Score' has the initial imperative thrust of all quest narratives, what enables Tims to sustain that tension is the characterisation (and slowly developing relationship) between his two protagonists, Bowe and Cadwen.
Again, it isn't merely that these characters provide a “love interest” or inject some much-needed human drama into an otherwise bizarre conceit, it is that through each other and their interactions with the world around them we follow the painful unfolding and shaping of class-consciousness itself. In another (realist) context, this might have felt heavy-handed, but precisely because the story takes place outside of our own reality, in a world where the language has not yet evolved for describing such concepts, Bowe and Cadwen's faltering explorations of intergenerational poverty, exploitation and misuse, emerge as profound situational responses, and as such are deeply moving. In other words, we see how the characters got there, and Tims allows them to stumble towards a less-than-perfect articulation of their dawning awareness. It feels – as counter-intuitive as this sounds – real. In particular, Bowe's 'I can, so I should' punches through the apathy and inertia of naturalised power to sound a convincing revolutionary clarion.
'The Destination of Consciousness' strikes an entirely different, far more troubling note. And depending on which way you tilt this story, allows a little more texturing darkness to seep into the collection – perhaps into our world. On one level this piece is a poetic figuring of the creative process. The high – almost medieval – register recalls work by the late Gene Wolfe, while the conceit itself is more suggestive of a particularly feverish Arthur Machen. The story grapples with the origins of artistic inspiration: an urgent internal summons, or a compelling outside force? And it answers this question with an uncanny vision of the 'High Metaphysical' realm; of twisted time and 'lugubrious horror[s]' known as the Hauntologicals, writhing beneath the skin of reality, looking for an out. While I don't want to give the game away, I'll say that for anyone who fancies themselves in authentic individual control – of their destinies, their decisions, or their art – this piece will hold particular horror.
Horror similarly slithers into our dimension via 'Checking into the Hilbert', which literalises the mind-bending thought experiment – named for its originator, David Hilbert – demonstrating the counter-intuitive property of infinite sets, using the example of a fully occupied hotel with infinite rooms still being able to accommodate guests – even an infinite number of them. If this wasn't disturbing enough in the abstract, the bricks and mortar (ish) hotel of the story is a disorienting House of Leaves-like landscape, a shifting, de-familiarised terrain, full of necrotising distortions, monstrous excess, unknown (and unknowable) terror.
This abject aspect of the horror genre feels more readily legible within Short Eternities than in its predecessor. As if in response to our own grotesque political reality, violence erupts, flesh suppurates, the very structure of experience seems to rot. This is certainly the case in 'Hollow Point' where Tims' brings his inventive skill to bear upon a vividly, viscerally imagined death-dealing society; a cipher not only for our own military-industrial complex, but (I would argue) an interrogation and two-fingered salute to the fetishisation – and cultural ascendency – of its lethal apparatus, our glorification of war with its fascistic and necrophiliac tendencies. The world of Hollow Point is itself is built from the discards and carcinogens of war; the story begins: 'The buildings in the seaside town looked like spent bullet casings because they were. They had been repurposed after their lethal payloads had been sent flying across the ocean by guns large enough to fire skyscraper-sized rounds hundreds of spans.' The image is at first comic (contrasting the quaint 'seaside town' with the incongruity of armaments, the cartoonish excess of Tims’ description) and then, as the landscape becomes inhabited, it feels less and less so.
'When the World Blinks' is similarly populated by nightmares, or rather, it is a nightmare that has been populated. Here, Tims takes our curated realities and wilful ignorance to their logical (and horrible) conclusion: when cell towers fall and the wi-fi signals fail the world stands revealed, not merely dystopian or desolate but abjectly fucked, 'already ended', a mad Cronenbergian shit-show. We see this brave new world through Cuttler's eyes, as he grapples with the implications of this new knowledge for himself and for others. The conclusion the story reaches is not an edifying one.
I would suggest that both these works owe something to the schlocky eat-the-rich body horrors of the 1980s in that their political allegory is so stark as to pre-empt and defy analysis or argument. Rather, inciting abjection, proliferating grotesqueries, splattering us with the gore is the medium and the message. The wrongness of the world is itself so obvious and total that it cannot be defeated by subtle intellectual argument. You need shock tactics. You need force. You need schlock.
Here, I am back at excess again, and the poet Joyelle McSweeney, who, writing about her mode of practice as “necropastoral”, defines it in the following way, as: 'a political-aesthetic zone in which the fact of mankind’s depredations cannot be separated from an experience of “nature” which is poisoned, mutated, aberrant, spectacular, full of ill effects and affects.' Tims work often inhabits a similar space, although we might usefully replace “nature” with “culture”. For Tims, and his trashy body-horror forerunners the grotesque becomes an unassimilable mode of critique, something “polite” cultural discourse cannot reincorporate into its denial of reality. It becomes a way of harnessing the power of abjection to drive critical insight and (just maybe) revolutionary change.
Perhaps. But to suggest Short Eternities was only abject would be to do it a great disservice. 'The White Hole Garden' – a dynastic saga most similar in structure to Small Infinities' stand-out story 'Enlightenment for All' – explores the meaning of existence in carefully paced increments, leading us through a complex navigation of futility and hope.
'The Labours of Lacurio' is a marvel of characterisation and on-going world-building. We first met “The Great Lacurio” in Small Infinities, and while his narrative gathers a-pace, putting him in direct conflict with the forces of non-begin, it is his mixture of arrogance and idiosyncratic kindness that draws the reader. He is an occasionally maddening, frequently mercurial, majestically “big” character. As such, he is one of the most straightforwardly entertaining figures in Short Eternities, and across the series as a whole. Tims' most urgent themes constellate around him; he is a through-line for m/Metaphysical shenanigans, for the forces of being and unbeing, inspiration and entropy, physics and magic, reality and its multiplicity of psychedelic spin-offs. Using Lacurio as a kind of axis or fulcrum upon which the series pivots is shaping up to be a structurally savvy, formally elegant move, one which shows (amongst other things) that while Tims may gleefully define his own writing as “schlock” or “pulp”, it is intelligently rendered trash.
Short Eternities is indeed an appropriate title for a collection it is so easy to get lost in. There is much more to say about this work, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise. Instead, I will end on a piece that serves as an outlier within the collection, and that is 'Stone Love Letter', a frankly beautiful story that imagines the first ever act of artistic creation, with its impetus and inspiration located firmly in love. The piece is a note of hope: that however far we have come along the roads of cynical acceptance, cruel indifference or wilful ignorance, our first-best thought was an open-hearted and vulnerable gesture, was a reaching through art towards another. Amen to that.
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You can slake yourself on P.V. Tims playful engagement with schlock-as-genre (and buy a hard copy of Short Eternities) here: https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/pvtims
