Introduction to Mad Scientist Meets Cannibal

Fifteen or twenty years ago there were a number of books published about the field of science fiction, each aimed at enticing the new reader and giving him a road map to the treasures and pitfalls that lay ahead. One of the things almost all those now-forgotten books did was offer comparisons, based on the potential reader’s potential tastes. They were filled with statements such as, “If you like Asimov, try Clement,” or “If you like Tenn, you’ll love Sheckley.”

Except when it came to R. A. Lafferty, possessor of the most unique and idiosyncratic voice of his era. In his case, the books all said, in essence, “If you like Lafferty, buy everything of his you can find, because no one else is remotely like him.”

In the couple of decades since those books came and went, there’s been only one writer like that: multiple Hugo nominee Nick DiChario.

And now, twenty years later, there’s another, because nobody sees the world quite the way Robert T. Jeschonek does.

This little book gives you five Jeschonek stories, and I hope it starts off with “Dionysus Dying” and “Something Borrowed, Something Doomed,” both of them fine stories, both a bit off the beaten track, written with an easy grace and skill, and just the sort of things to lull you into thinking that the rest of the book won’t contain the most off-the-wall trio of stories you’ve read in years, or will read for years to come.

Take “Food Chains.” I suppose it actually qualifies as a hard science story. It has a sympathetic narrator, a scientific extrapolation, a conflict that must be (and is) solved—and by the end, the wily Mr. Jeschonek not only has the reader accepting cannibalism as a viable and beneficial practice, but has him actually rooting for it. It’s a really fascinating mind game he’s playing here—but anyone can play mind games; playing them within the context of a well-wrought story is something only the Laffertys and DiCharios and Jeschoneks of the world can do.

And then there’s “The Day After They Rounded Up Everyone Who Could Love Unconditionally,” a small masterpiece that breaks all the known rules of storytelling and works anyway. It’s 750 words. It’s told in the present tense. It’s episodic, or a montage, or (choose your own term), but what it isn’t is a strong continuous narrative flow, which is usually fatal in novels and novellas and is supposed to be nonexistent in short-shorts. He takes a title that could be a bad 1960s folk-rock song, shows you in the first 100 words that whatever you thought it was going to be about you were wrong, and comes up with a kicker at the end that will have you thinking about it not only immediately after you’ve finished it, but at the oddest times weeks and even months afterward. The late Fredric Brown was the acknowledged master of the short-short, and he wrote more than his share of cute ones, but Brown never attempted anything like this, either thematically or stylistically.

And then there’s my favorite, and not just because I grew up reading the moldering old pulp magazines. “Playing Doctor” is an almost-love-story between a mad scientist and her slavishly-devoted sycophantic toady…and only Jeschonek would have had the—I don’t know: skill? lunacy? chutzpah?—to tell it in the first person of the toady, and to make it work. I don’t have a thing for mad scientists (oversexed, scantily-clad Pirate Queens are more to my taste), and I have no idea why the toady admires this one, but by the time you’re halfway through you are missing a couple of nuts and a bolt if you don’t start rooting for him to win her heart (or whatever passes for it). It is a totally unique, off-that-wall, completely successful almost-love-story, and you don’t get any more individualistic than that.

I’ve never met Robert T. Jeschonek, but I expect that’s going to change pretty soon. He’ll be at some convention or other that I’m attending. He’ll be easy enough to spot. I’ll look past all the guys in costumes, all the weirdos with wall-to-wall pupils, all the goshwowboyoboy fans lined up for autographs. Instead, I’ll look for a perfectly normal-looking guy who gives the impression that he is happily looking at a world (probably but not necessarily ours) that no one else can see, and when an errant thought crosses his mind and a little wouldn’t-that-make-an-interesting-story smile flickers across his face, I’ll know I’ve found him.