Reality Got You Down? Here's a Hit of Fiction to Get You Through the Day

Most of us can recall that moment when we first fell in love with books and stories and reading. For me it was the Saturday afternoon in fourth grade when I was snooping through my mom's closet, looking for--well, I don't know what I was looking for; some interesting and hidden artifact from the adult world, I suppose. (I was a little too young to be looking for dirty magazines; that came later.) Anyway, what I found was a cardboard box on the closet floor, filled with paperback science-fiction and fantasy novels. Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren was way over my head, but Robert Heinlein's The Rolling Stones was about right; the math and science parts were beyond my ken, but the character and plot stuff was fun, and the writing was just challenging enough to make me have to reach for it. And reach I did, into that cardboard box, again and again. I think my mom was so pleased by my enthusiasm for reading that I didn't even get in trouble for closet-snooping.

Since then my reading tastes have broadened considerably, but a love of fiction is the acorn from which all my subsequent love of reading and writing has grown, which is why I'm glad to see fiction on Web del Sol. Do we got fiction? Boy do we got fiction. Not only do we link to, like, a million or so good literary journals that publish excellent fiction, but we also grow our own. See the estimable 5_trope for a great example: "Three Fantasies about Women I Sort of Know," a short-short by Trevor Houser.

This story has a sense of humor, thank god, and it's well-written besides. The tone is generally light, but Houser sneaks in events and turns of phrase that raise the emotional stakes, until by the end it almost feels as if the fate of humanity depends on the possiblities inherent in the fantasy life of one relatively small-minded man. Here's a paragraph from the story's first section, "Fantasy No. 1: My Tennis Instructor Sue":

Life is perfect from that point on. We spend our days full of contentment. We have intercourse all the time, and she revitalizes my backhand. I school a roving gang of howler monkeys on how best to bash in the heads of possible rescue parties. Sue keeps busy on her tan using real coconut oil because the island we've chosen is loaded with them.

Sweetness and aggression, violence and tenderness, and prose that reads easily without being simple or dumb. This, my friends, is a good story. Go ye forth and read, and look at the rest of what 5_trope has to offer while you're in town. Tell 'em Blog del Sol sent ya.