Jubilee by Jack Dann

Jubilee

by Jack Dann

(Stephen's updated bibliography of short fiction)

(Review first appeared in The West Australian)

Jack Dann is the best-selling and award-winning author of The Memory Cathedral, The Silent, Bad Medicine, and The Man Who Melted. While he's often identified as a science fiction author, and has won Nebula, Aurealis and Ditmar awards, few of the stories in Jubilee are science-fictional either on the surface or at the core.

There are exceptions, and when Dann chooses to use sf and fantasy themes - space travel, alternate history and strange technologies, or the supernatural - the results are fascinating. In his Nebula-winning 'Da Vinci Rising', Leonardo builds his beautiful flying machines and discovers how readily they can be turned into weapons. In 'Going Under', the Titanic is re-created so that the bored and wealthy can decide whether to live or die. In 'Jumping the Road', a reptilian race of aliens have created a religion identical to Judaism. In 'Blind Shemmy' a couple travel to Paris in a transparent Plasticine egg so that he can legally gamble his organs in a telepathic game of blackjack. In the hilarious 'Fairy Tale', a Jewish comedian tells the story of how he became involved in the war between the Seelie and Unseelie courts. While most of the other thirteen stories in this collection twist reality far enough to qualify as fantasies, they are more akin to the magic realism of Jorge Luis Borges, or some of the best work of Harlan Ellison or Avram Davidson, than to the sf mainstream.

For example, in 'The Diamond Pit', a homage to F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Diamond as big as the Ritz', a man sitting on a mountain of diamond demonstrates how absolute wealth corrupts absolutely. 'A Quiet Revolution for Death' does a wonderful job of capturing the disorientation you experience in a nightmare without using overtly frightening images.

Though the stories in Jubilee were written over a period of more than twenty years, there are themes that run through many of them: death, survival, religion, guilt, atrocity, and forgiveness. 'Voices', 'Marilyn', 'The Black Horn' and 'The Extra' all concern death visions, though of very different people in different eras. In 'Bad Medicine', a middle-aged Jewish man, in search of a religion he can believe in, goes on a vision quest in a shamanic sweat lodge; in 'Kaddish', another man looking for God borrows a speedboat and heads out to sea; while in 'Jubilee', a man is drawn to the sea after seeing it full of corpses. In 'Tattoos', a tattooist uses his art to take the pain and sickness of others - including a survivor of Auschwitz - onto himself, while in 'Camps', a young man in hospital dreams that he's an inmate in a concentration camp, and in 'Tea', an old woman who has shut out the world by taping foil over her windows learns that her friend and neighbour has been accused of being a Nazi war criminal.

Sometimes frightening, sometimes funny, erudite, inventive, beautifully written and always intriguing, Jubilee is a celebration of the talent of a remarkable storyteller.

Publisher: Tor Books (hardcover January 1, 2003) ; Tor Books (paperback February 1, 2004)

ISBN: 076530676X (Tor hardcover) ; 0765306778 (Tor paperback)