In short, Tina Connolly's 'On the Eyeball Floor' is both visionary and insightful
In case you’re wondering about the title, the “Eyeball Floor” is the part of the cyborg factory where the eyeballs are added.
For some readers, that might already be enough information to decide not to read this book. For others, the ones who enjoy surrealistic fantasy and science fiction, there are definitely some gems in this collection of 24 stories (10 of them very short “flash” fiction), one short play and three poems.
The title story is a representative example of what to expect from Tina Connolly — a little gruesome, a little humorous, with characters who can be counted on to approach life with a certain degree of obsession. The lesson of that story, by the way, is not to get emotionally involved with your cyborgs because quality control may force you to recycle them.
The theme of mental awakening or mental reprogramming shows up in more than one story; “Turning the Apples” is about a boy whose bout with a usually fatal disease has given him the power — exploited by organized crime — to reprogram the comatose victims of that disease, including his own mother. In “Old Dead Futures,” a boy used by a security agency to alter the future eventually changes it so he won’t hurt somebody he loves.
Childhood oppression, poverty and class stratification are frequent themes, as in “Selling Home,” a surreal fantasy set on a bridge with hundreds of levels, the poorest people living at the bottom. Consciousness surfaces in strange places. In the very short “Left Hand,” which is reminiscent of a scene in the movie “Dr. Strangelove,” a replacement hand with an electronic mind of its own comes up with its purpose in life. Time can be stratified as a physical presence, as in “On Glicker Street: A Seasonal Quartet,” where “it was always fall,” but there are other streets for people who prefer spring, summer or winter.
The collection has several humorous stories, including a set of “comfort measures” for women bearing children to the aliens that have conquered Earth: “It is quite normal to have a period of morning sickness for the first eighteen months of your pregnancy.” One of the funniest is a prequel to Connolly’s teen novel “Seriously Wicked,” in which the teenage babysitter (not a witch) organizes her magical charges to turn around a trick their witchy parents are planning. In another story, the children at a preschool develop a variety of superpowers and go out of control until a mom with the superpower of calming crowds arrives to cool things off. The single play mixes steampunk, Victorian ladies’ societies and superpowers in a hilarious mashup.
Two of the best stories, “Silverfin Harbor” and “Facts of Bone,” seem like bits of longer pieces, with particularly well-developed characters and settings. Both of them have to do with physical transformation, the first about an experiment with giving humans gills and fins to save them from a volcanic eruption, the second with a genetic disease that gradually turns muscles into bone. What makes the stories feel realistic is that the surrealism of the transformation is downplayed in favor of the very human problem of coping with physical challenge.
Science fiction short stories are sometimes difficult to pull off — usually they depend on some degree of shared universes. The successful “One Ear Back” is based on an Icelandic folk tale about a human cursed to be a cat until she’s done a good deed that no one has ever done before. The story draws on our common understanding of giants, little people and the apparently medieval society that often shows up in folk tales. The riddle, which seems unanswerable, leads to a long cat’s life of grudging good deeds.
The difficulty of writing short science fiction may be the reason that Connolly’s flash fiction ranges the most in quality. One of the most interesting very short stories is a variation on the Greek legend of the huntress whose suitor distracts her with golden apples as he tries to beat her in a race and force her into marriage. In this version, the apples don’t work. She’s looking for an “apple of freedom,” and none of her suitors understand what that means or how she is not “free.” “Hard Choices” gives the reader (or character) various alternatives at decision points; unfortunately, they all lead to being eaten. But several of the flash fiction pieces, such as “Inflection,” seem too short, too opaque and end too soon. Surprisingly, the three poems, one about a benevolent alien visitation, another a reflection on life by a wicked witch and the third about the difficulty of pinning down stories, work much better.
Besides the teen novel, Connolly’s written a trilogy; the first of the set, “Ironskin,” is a Nebula-award-nominated rewriting of “Jane Eyre,” with a human-fairie war for dominance added in. Her novels, like these stories, bear out her ability to weave a credible plot with believable, if sometimes very strange, characters.