2 posts tagged “literary mash-up”

There’s no certainty in the Budayeen, but if you visit the neighborhood, two things are likely: you’ll get laid and you’ll get killed, and the order is negotiable. I live here.

I claw my way out of bed and take three blue pills. The blue ones keep me from sticking a gun in my mouth. There’s a sloshing noise in my head, like you’d hear in a shell at the ocean. I pop two more blues, no help. I feel behind my left ear for a chip, and sure enough, I’m plugged in. ‘Sounds of the Sea.’ Fuck.

I pop the sound chip out and the world comes back to me, like being hit by a truck. My phone had been buzzing for God knows how long. Before answering, I stumble to the bathroom for more pills: a white one to kill the headache, and two red ones to wake me up. I wash them down with a beer and check my voicemail.

It was Olsen. “Pick up the phone Kent. Why’d you ever give me this faggot signal watch anyway? You never answer. I’ll be at the club at noon tomorrow. Christ, Kent, it’s urgent.” Another beer and I’m out the door.

Lois’s is the only place that lets me in the door these days, so I start there, four hours late. Sure enough, Jim Olsen is there, tucked into a corner booth with three Power Girls. They’re arguing about their origin when I sit down. I order a beer, and Jim does a line of coke off the tit shelf of the Atlantean PeeGee, a Brazilian girl with a bad blonde dye job and a zoned-out look that comes from taking too many pills, the kind of look I have right now too. Power Girl of the future nuzzles up to me, but he’s a lot less friendly when I tell him I’ve got no blow. Number three, Superman's cousin, is 'roided up that I can't guess the gender. Technology gives us a world where we can be whatever we want, and this is what we pick.

Olsen finally got rid of the PeeGees and got down to business. He was pale and shaky, and I could tell it wasn’t just the coke. “JT is dead,” he tells me. JT was a street kid with a Robin mod; Jimmy took him in after he got attacked about a year ago. I don’t pry, so I can’t say what they had going, but JT never complained once.

I didn’t ask how it happened, or why, and frankly I didn’t care. “Five hundred a day.”

Olsen slid an envelope across the table, “A week,” he tells me. I count it. When I’m satisfied the thirty-five hundred is there, he drops the bomb. “I think JT owed The Hippo.” The Hippo was the fat, old Amazon who played the city like it was her violin. She had dirt on everyone and had no problem reminding you of it. I knew from experience.

“Seven fifty a day plus expenses.”

“But you said f-“

“Before you said ‘The Hippo.’ Things change.”

“I’ll need some time to get the rest, Clark.” He’s too scared to lie to me, so I just let him go for now. If I was going to look into this, I needed to get into my work clothes.

My adopted parents named me Clark Kent, but that’s not who I am. I’ve always known that I was different, not a normal man.

I put on my wig, slide on the bracelets, and try to hide that horrible stray curl as I do my face up. Go-go boots, the bustier, three more blue pills, the earrings, and, most important, the lasso. I shake a cigarette out of the pack and plug in the mod behind my left ear and, before I can even light the cig, Clark is gone and I’m Diana now, Princess of Themyscira. I hate Man’s World. I’m Wonder Woman, armed with the Lasso of Truth, Bracelets of Submission, and a pair of legs that can strangle a horse so that he’d thank me for it. I fix my tiara, take a drag of my smoke, and leap out the window into the warm, wet night. I need to ask my mother about a dead Robin.

Technology gives us a world where we can be whatever we want, and this is what we pick.

excerpted from George Alec Effinger's Wonder Woman.

When I was in grad school, one of my profs always participated in these writealike competitions; he even had all the certificates and plaques he'd won on his office wall. I'd thought at the time (and this is seven years ago, so I'm what? 21, 22?) that trying to write like someone else was somehow less beneficial to your craft that writing in your own voice.

With some perspective, it's obvious to me that there's a lot of benefit to this sort of exercise, and not just because I need an excuse for doing a third one of these damn thing; I could always blame Palette for that, anyway. Doing something like this keeps you out of the trap of writing characters that always sound like you, and knowing what I sound like (I think I used the term 'overliterate pseudo-scholar' back) it's not a fate I wish on my characters. Not ever.

Now to get to work on The Pearl Poet's Fin Fang Foom. How did they say 'pants' in the Medieval period? Just pants?

I lately attended a meeting of the citizens of New Genesis to speak regarding the problem of slavery on Apokolips. I was shocked to discover that the assemblage wished to speak at great length about slavery in the far-off Vegan system, or the subjugation of the Manhunters by one Henry Henshaw (known by many unfortunate denizens of Coast City as the ‘Cyborg Superman’) on the world of Biot, but that on the subject of slavery on Apokolips, the crowd remained silent. Forager would not speak of the oppression perpetrated by Darkseid and his unjust government. Orion, too, was silent, though that is far from atypical. When asked to take the podium, Lightray discussed his hair and how fabulous it was.

Supertown is on fire, not the Bug Mound! And yet we so-called ‘New Gods’ care not to stand by our own Boom Tubes, and speak only of venturing to far-off Adon or some other barbaric asteroid. Our Vykins, our Moonriders, and our Big Bears – they have all gone hence at the summons of some ‘Infinity Man’. But there is not one slave on Adon, while there are one million slaves on our own sister planet. Scott Free, hailed as ‘Mister Miracle’ by the abolitionist press, has been confined on countless occasions for his actions against Darkseid’s tyranny, and his fellow Fourth Worlder has not once mourned it! He is the world’s greatest escape artist, they claim, as though such a talent invalidates the man’s principles! Let his manly spouse come to his rescue, my fellow New Genesians say. I cannot stomach it.

As always, the Highfather is satisfied to speak about slavery on Apokolips as abstraction, and to address the problem with naught but half-measures. His politics, yea, all politicians, have long since outlasted their usefulness whereas it concerns this vital matter. When given the chance to govern decisively, they have squandered it on petty debate over the annexation of the Source Wall and the taxation of the bugs. When confronted with the Female Furies’ lives of forced bloodsport, Highfather counsels patience and contemplation of The Source. I call his counsel cowardice. On Apokolips, those who do not support the Anti-Life Equation are thrown into the slave pens of the Armaghetto, to be abused bodily by that dictator’s cruel and many Parademons, and yet Metron sits on his throne without judgment, and I say to Metron the time for sitting is over. Now, my friends, is the time for standing. There is a time for Mother Boxes, Fourth Worlders, but there also comes a time to deactivate the Mother Boxes and take up Mega Rods.

The laws of Apokolips are unjust laws. Shall we sit idly by simply because we are not their victims? Is it not our duty as men and women to force the cessation of unjust laws and obey only just ones? Do prophecies not state that Orion will defeat his cruel father? And yet when his people need him, when the state of affairs demands action, Orion is off gallivanting with this supposed ‘Justice League’.

With his Omega Beams, Darkseid could dispose of me easily, as would Grayven or even the imbecilic Kalibak. But the question of slavery on Apokolips would still remain to be settled, brethren; my total disintegration cannot stop it. On that day of settlement, we shall all rejoice, but until that day, we must stand in opposition to our adversary’s dire legions.

Horribly late to the party, but I've thrown my hat into the metaphorical ring, said ring being Erin Palatte's Phantasmagorically Amazing Literary Mash-Up Challenge. All in all, I don't expect that it sucks too badly. And hell, now I can say that I've done something useful with all of that studying I've done.