Punktown by Jeffrey Thomas

Punktown is a powerful collection of short stories that creatively pose age-old questions through bizarre and intriguing circumstances on another planet in the future.

As in Dali's paintings, this is a tangible, three-dimensional world, with shadows and depth. Regardless of the species or origin of the characters or even whether they are robotic, they exhibit credible emotions and motivations. You can understand why they do what they do, and may empathize with them, regardless of whether they have non-human characteristics and abilities. The longer you stay, the more real this bizarre landscape feels.

Meet Drew in "Reflections of Ghosts." He's an artist whose medium is his own DNA. He makes clones of himself and deliberately reduces their intelligence to near zero (so they can't be considered intelligent beings and, technically speaking, he won't be breaking the law), and sells them to the wealthy who enjoy sadistically playing with and destroying them. But when a client requests a female, and he makes a female version of himself, he finds he has feelings for her, and is repulsed by what the purchaser is likely to do to her, but yet he can't cancel the deal.

Meet Magnesium Jones in "Immolation." He is a slave worker clone who has broken free. But in the midst of "his newfound pride" looking back on his former life, he wonders, "Had he been better off in his first days, not yet discontented? Disgruntled?" "...he felt like a human boy who longed to be a wooden puppet again."

Meet MacDiaz in "The Library of Sorrows." He's a policeman whose successful career is based on a chip his parents had implanted into his brain as a child -- a very expensive operation that made it so he remembered everything. But the burden of horrible memories from all the bizarre cross-species crimes he has investigated is simply too much for him to endure. His mother is in a nursing home, which in this world means that she is kept in a coffin-like drawer, on life-support. "He smiled down at her, and she smiled weakly through her bubble up at him. Her headset, on which she spoke with him when he called and on which she and the other tenants of this nursing home spent their days watching movies, soaps, talk and game shows, lifted out of her way so she could see him with her naked eyes. She had to squint them to adjust. She was a skeleton which he doubted could have taken two steps, were it freed from its glass sarcophagus." When his mother dies, MacDiaz decides to have the chip surgically removed from his brain -- regardless of cost, and regardless of the fact that without it he will lose his livelihood. After the operation, "...days passed, weeks, months, and the faces of the dead -- burst by bullets, grinning mysteriously at their own fates, bloated like the faces of pudgy plastic dolls and shriveled to crusted skulls -- began to fade to smoke and shadow. Gray and difficult to see. As elusive and vague as ghosts -- and memories -- should often remain."

Meet Soko in "Wakizashi." A prison guard of Japanese descent, he has to deal with a L'lewed, a creature that by nature and by culture must periodically, slowly and cruelly kill humanoid creatures, being renewed by the vibrations of their death throes. This particular L'lewed is an ambassador, with diplomatic immunity, and while he is waiting to be removed to his home planet for having brutally killed humans when his regular supply of victims ran out, he needs a new victim, and the government of Paxton (AKA Punktown) is trying to arrange that for him. They have found a volunteer -- a Waiai, a kind of human-like creature that "sees" not with eyes but with a sort of sonar, like bats. This Waiai, Oowah Kee, is on death row for having killed several young men in defense of his wife's honor. He explains, "We do not turn away from those women who are degraded. We avenge their honor. It is the very least we can do for them. Dying for my woman... it will be an honor, in a way. Because I am dying for all our women, who bring us our lives." Now he is willing to not just to die, but to undergo the horrible painful death the L'lewed wants to inflict, in exchange for a large sum of money -- enough money so his wife will be able to return to their home planet, where she will be safe. But before the ritual death can be carried out, Oowah Kee is murdered by another inmate, which means his wife will get nothing. Soko visits her and presents her with an antique samurai sword, his most valued possession. He wants her to sell it and use the money to return to her world. When she objects that she couldn't accept such a valuable gift from him, he explains, "'If I used that money, I would dishonor my father, Mrs. Kee. I have no son to pass the sword along to. Beyond me, I don't know what fate that sword has. This is the only honorable fate I can think of for it. I want this sword in effect to have been the weapon that killed those men who disgraced you. I want this sword... to protect you." In response, "The Waiai lowered her head. She had no eyes from which she could weep, but a strange soft whistling came from her; whether from her mouth or the aperture in her forehead, he couldn't tell. 'You do me great honor, Mr. Soko,' she told him. 'I accept your gift.'" So a tale of alien brutality becomes a lesson in honor -- honor mediated and modified by culture and species, but fundamentally transcending such minor differences.

Time and again, the author presents us with totally bizarre, futuristic, and alien sets of circumstances and then uses that situation to illuminate emotions and values, showing them as timeless and not just limited to humanity. The book itself is far too short -- you end it wanting and expecting more.

Fortunately, more is available and in the works. For followup reading, check Punktown City Limits at msnhomepages.talkcity.com/TimesSquare/necropolitan/index.html There you'll find additional stories set in Punktown, as well as photos of characters.

For more about the author, Jeffrey Thomas, and his other books, visit the Web site for his Necropolitan Press at www.necropolitanpress.com. Or join us for a chat with the author on July 13. For details see www.samizdat.com/chat.html

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