Finalist for the Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award
There are ten stories here including one readers have waited ten long years for: in new novella The Border State Rowe revisits the world of his much-lauded story The Voluntary State. Competitive cyclists twins Michael and Maggie have trained all their lives to race internationally. One thing holds them back: their mother who years before crossed the border … into Tennessee.
Praise for Christopher Rowe:
“Rowe’s stories are the kind of thing you want on a cold, winter’s night when the fire starts burning low. Terrific.”
—Justina Robson (Glorious Angels)
“As good as he is now, he’ll keep getting better. Read these excellent stories, and see what I mean.”—Jack Womack (Going, Going, Gone)
“Rowe’s work might remind you of that of Andy Duncan. Both exemplify an archetypically Southern viewpoint on life’s mysteries, a worldview that admits marvels in the most common of circumstances and narrates those unreal intrusions in a kind of downhome manner that belies real sophistication.”— Asimov’s
“As smooth and heady as good Kentucky bourbon.”— Locus
“Christopher Rowe’s new book of stories, “Telling the Map,” (Small Beer Press, $16), features Kentucky and Tennessee — just not the way you know them. They’re the Kentucky and Tennessee you know, geographically speaking — but they’re also places of strange occurrences, bizarre histories and technology that seems to permeate the very air molecules.”
— Lexington Herald-Leader
“It is no accident that Christopher Rowe dedicates his first story collection Telling the Map to fellow Kentuckians Terry Bisson and Jack Womack. It’s also no accident that Rowe, on the basis of no more than a couple of dozen stories over nearly 20 years (of which 10 are collected here), managed to gain a reputation as one of the most distinctive voices to emerge from this period. This is not only because he writes with lyricism and great precision of style, but because of his firm geographical grounding, which is reflected in all the stories here (as well as in his title), but is a key factor in several (‘Another Word for Map is Faith,’ ‘The Voluntary State,’ ‘The Border State’). This isn’t the geography of fake world-building, with all those Forbidden Zones and Misty Mountains, but rather the geography of locals who measure distances between towns in hours rather than miles, and who know which bridges you’ll need to cross to get there. It’s also a world in which agriculture and religion are daily behaviors rather than monolithic institutions. As weird as Tennessee gets in Rowe’s most famous story, ‘‘The Voluntary State’’ (and that is very weird) it’s a Tennessee we can map onto the trails and highways that are there now.”
— Gary K. Wolfe, Locus
“[T]here is one other consistent thread running through the entirety of the collection, and that is setting. In Telling the Map, Rowe has rendered Kentucky over and over again with a lush, loving, bone-deep accuracy—one that startled and thrilled me so thoroughly, as a fellow native son, that I had to read the book through twice to begin to form a critical opinion. . . . Across these stories, the drive to achieve and to exceed is a common factor. . . . Overall, though, this was a stellar set of stories that mesh well together. . . . Truly, Rowe’s skill at shifting the weirdness of the Appalachian South—the odd border state that Kentucky is—to a magic realist or scientifically fantastical future is singular and impressive. The result for a native reader is a feeling akin to awe, or perhaps just homecoming, but I suspect the result wouldn’t differ much for an unfamiliar audience either. If anything, the depth and breadth of comfort with a not-often-accessed culture and setting makes these stories fresh and engaging. It’s home for me; it might be a provocative unexplored landscape for someone else—but regardless, Rowe’s facility with language, description, and emotional arcs makes for a solid, intentional, and satisfying collection of short fiction.”
— Brit Mandelo, Tor.com
“Though most of the stories in Christopher Rowe’s new collection Telling the Map are SF, its cover is reminiscent of Edward Gorey’s weirdly off-kilter illustrations for disturbingly dark children’s books. That cognitive dissonance is a perfect replication of Rowe’s style: in “The Border State,” long-awaited sequel to his acclaimed 2004 story “The Voluntary State,” Rowe pits hymn-singing, bicycle-racing teens against a nanotech-wielding rogue AI; in “Another Word for Map Is Faith,” earnest Christians remake the world in the image of holy maps — with deadly consequences. Delightfully strange, these ten stories transport readers to futures full of sentient cars pining for their owners, automated horses, and tomatoes grown to give blood transfusions — an odd and interesting and deceptively bucolic setting for the narration of some astonishing events.”
— Nisi Shawl, Seattle Review of Books
“Science fiction isn’t always about futuristic cities, as Christopher Rowe reminds us in the complex and inventive stories that make up Telling the Map, his first collection, which often take place in rural Kentucky or Tennessee. But there’s nothing rustic about Rowe’s most famous story, ‘The Voluntary State,’ set in a Tennessee ruled by an artificial intelligence that has radically altered the environment through nanotechology. Police robots appear on flying bicycles, cars have personalities and try to repair themselves, and telephones literally chase you. A story new to the collection, ‘The Border State,’ explains something of how this world came about. It’s more traditional in form, concerning a brother and sister entering a Tour de France-style bicycle race through this transformed landscape.
“One of the best stories, ‘The Contrary Gardener,’ involves the Kentucky Derby. When the title character, a girl skilled at growing vegetables, gets a ticket from her father, she soon finds herself caught up in corporate conspiracies and emerging artificial intelligences. Another story, ‘The Force Acting on the Displaced Body,’ recalls the tall-tale traditions of the mid-South, describing a wine enthusiast who saves up enough corks to build a boat for a journey from his local creek all the way to Paris. Rowe is endlessly inventive in presenting us worlds that are often dystopian, sometimes funny, but always original — and completely his own.”
— Gary K. Wolfe, Chicago Tribune
Out now from Small Beer Press.
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