Recommend Fakes

In our regular season of recommendations, we’ve asked a handful of writers, editors, artists and other friends to tell us briefly about their favorite fake, hoax or fraud—long a topic dear to the hearts of any postmodern speculative fiction reader! Take a look at some of the recommendations below, and then please leave a comment telling us about your favorite fake…?

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Rachel Linn (author page)

At some point during my childhood, I saw the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin footage of Bigfoot on television. My little brother and I were obsessed with Harry and the Hendersons (a John Lithgow comedy about a family that befriends a Sasquatch—a film that only an eight-year-old could love, as I discovered when I tried to watch it again a few years ago and couldn’t make it through the whole thing) and I was also fascinated by Diane Fossey (and her book, Gorillas in the Mist, about studying mountain gorillas in Rwanda), so I was very excited when I found out that people may have seen these human-like beings somewhere near our our neck of the woods. Initially, since I was only in second or third grade, I didn’t know that most people thought this video was a hoax. And, though it is still the consensus that this video is likely fabricated, the strange thing about this "hoax" is that no one seems be able to definitively prove that it was one. This really intrigues me--you'd think that fifty years after the footage was shot (and almost thirty years after I originally saw it), we'd have some fancy CSI-type technology to reconstruct what "really" happened using in-depth analysis of zoomed in hair fibers or the shadowy parts of the frames. But no one has found a hidden zipper (to my knowledge, at least). Regardless of the truth about this video, I like knowing that there are some things that technology can't demystify, even if some of them are secretly just elegantly-executed hoaxes.

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E. Saxey (fiction site)

I'm fond of frauds and errors in taxidermy. Birds of paradise had their feet removed to dry them, and on arrival in Europe were assumed to never perch, and live perpetually in the air. There's a sloth mounted on its hind legs, claws aloft, turned into a terrifying attacking predator. But fake mermaids are in a class of their own. These critters are mostly constructed from a big fish and a small monkey, and have a long history in Japan, but appeared in the US in the nineteenth century (beginning with the Fiji Mermaid in Barnum's collection). There's one with a toothy grin in the London Horniman museum, mocked up with wood and papier mache.

You can see the fantasy logic behind a lot of taxidermy myths: it's a tantalising idea that birds of paradise are too precious to land on the ground, and whoever shot that sloth probably wanted to seem braver. But fake mermaids—wizened, fluffy, dusty things—are utterly different from legends of tempting sirens. I appreciate them as a sideways step into a less obvious, more sinister mythology.

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Rhys Hughes (The Spoons That Are My Ears)

My uncle was a fraud. Not a criminal but a more gentle form of fraudster, the deadpan exaggerator. When I was young he told me that there were six continents in the world, Africa, America, Asia, Australasia, Europe and Britain. There was absolutely no doubt that Britain was separate from Europe. In Europe people did peculiar things; they spread chocolate on bread for breakfast and melted cheese in communal pots in the evening. Europe was a place of mystery, a patchwork of suspense, and crossing its borders wasn’t easy. My great dream back then was to build a raft and paddle it to France, which seemed an incredibly exotic destination, and my enthusiasm was increased rather than diminished when my uncle told me that dinosaurs existed there. They had become extinct everywhere else but flourished in France. I couldn’t wait to drag my raft ashore and encounter my first stegosaurus.

My uncle also informed me that we were living in Australia, not Britain, but that everyone else would try to trick me into thinking this was Britain and that they were all in the joke. My favourite of his absurdities concerned the International Date Line. Because Australia was so many hours in the future, people who lived there (like ourselves) could phone relatives in Europe with the results of football matches, horse races and boxing competitions that hadn’t yet happened in the past, enabling those relatives to make a big profit at the betting shop. But my uncle wasn’t unusual. That’s how life was when I was young. If you didn’t tell amusing lies then you were regarded as rather odd, dubious even, a spoilsport and also perhaps a saboteur or foreigner. I would look at adults in the street and wonder if any of them were French and on familiar terms with dinosaurs.

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Bruce Stenning (TFF slushreader)

The story of Marvin Hewitt (recently told in Futility Closet, Episode 180 “An Academic Imposter”) is the story of just how easy it was to get by as a white man in mid-century USA, and just how much leeway you could expect, even as an unashamed imposter. I won’t recap the whole story, as the podcast is worth listening to in its entirety and does so adequately and succinctly, supported by multiple sources.

Hewitt employed secretarial staff to intercept mail and continue the deception. Surely these women had a good idea what was going on but would have had neither social or legal protections to dare expose the duplicity.

FC generally present their fascinating, lurid tales from history in an apparently objective—read amoral— tone, without comment or analysis. In this case, just the briefest acknowledgement at the end of the main story suggests that it was not a good idea to let such duplicity continue as long as it did. We miss any analysis of gender or race, or the leniency shown to such a fraud, beyond simply stating multiple, astonishing occurrences of it. (Can you imagine a woman, much less a woman of colour, at any point in history, being given such leeway? Can we imagine her taking such a position of academic responsibility even without any fraud or imputation?)

Technology might have made sustained identity theft more difficult, but the systemic and sociological privileges would largely be unchanged in this day and age. Stepping outside the academic context, I might mention that a certain individual in a prominent position of power must surely be the quintessential example of leniency in the face of unrepentant fraud. But there are many others.

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Valeria Vitale (TFF bio; City of a Thousand Names)

My favourite fake-related story is told in the movie F for Fake by Orson Welles. The protagonist is Clifford Irving, acharming conman who, in the 1970s, tried to fake the autobiography of the eccentric tycoon Howard Hughes… while the subject was still alive! Irving relied on the fact that Hughes, at the time, was living as a recluse, but the plan didn’t work out, and Irving was arrested. However, the resourceful man managed to sell another project to the publishing house: The Hoax, a true(?) account of how he organised the con. In the movie, Wells suggests that Irving could produce convincing (fake) autograph documents by Hughes, thanks to the help of his friend Elmyr de Hory (or that was one of his many fake names), a professional forger who claimed to have sold paintings in the style of famous artists to all major museums. He doesn’t name names, but his repertoire, as shown in the movie, is astonishingly convincing. Moreover, the movie has been crafted by Wells using almost entirely footage that had been shot for other projects, sometimes completely repurposing images and dialogues. A sort of fake movie on fakes, if you like.

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Now tell us something about a fake or hoax that you think is worth the story…

Seeking experimental microstories

Call for Stories

The TFF-X (The Future Fire—ten years) anthology will contain 15 reprinted or slightly revised stories, plus at least as many new pieces that we hope will give an idea of the sort of things we’d like to see more of in the magazine in the future. We’re enthusiastically looking forward to the next decade, as well as celebrating the last one.

If you think you can help us to exemplify different and experimental modes/kinds of social-political, diverse, progressive and speculative stories, we’d love to hear from you. Some of our ideas are listed below. We're looking for very short pieces, so 500-1000 words is about right (or equivalent, for comics/poetry). We'll pay $20 per piece, and this call will remain open until we have the 5-10 new pieces we need to fill the volume (or until the end of October at the latest, at which point we'll have to firm up the table of contents if we’re to publish the anthology before the end of 2015). If you have any other experimental ideas—try us! Email your submissions or pitch ideas to fiction@futurefire.net with a subject line beginning “TFF-X submission: (title of work)” and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Genre, style or conceit (many of these can be summed up as “ekphrasis”—a representation of one art form via the medium of another):

1. Story written as a theater or radio play, or as an interview
2. Story written as a pitch for a TV show or web series
3. Story in the form of an online user review for a science-fictional/fantastic product (hoverboard, replicator, magic wand? You can think of something more original than this!)
4. Design a poster or one-page advert for a made-up book or film
5. Story in the form of a critical review of a non-existent book (no spoilers!)
6. Story in the form of a user guide for a videogame or a module for an RPG
7. Story told via a letter or letters (letter to a magazine advice column; letter of complaint; rejection letter for a job/story/grant; letter of condolence/congratulation; any letter that isn’t just the sender telling a story to the recipient)

Theme, content or medium (can be combined with one of the above, if you want to be hyper-efficient):

1. Stories written largely/partly (or with dialogue) in a language or dialect other than US-English—with no apology or translation for the reader
2. Bi/pansexual and trans/nonbinary characters (we do pretty well with queer representation otherwise)
3. Utopian story—a world that satirizes our own by being visibly better than it in some significant way (doesn’t have to be perfect)
4. Absurdist or nonsense piece—any combination of surrealism, dadaism, bizarro, dream-quest
5. Horror and dark fantasy (so many possible modes)
6. Poetry (any style; up to 40 lines)
7. Graphic/comics story (2-4 pages)

All stories should of course be social-political, diverse, intersectional, and all the others things that TFF want to see in fiction anyway!

(If you would like to read more about what some of our editors would like to see more of in TFF in the future, the question has been addressed by Kathryn, Cécile, Valeria and Djibril in recent interviews. More suggestions welcome!)

Submission guidelines summary:

Length: approx. 500-1000 words (poems 40 lines, comics, 2-4 pages)
Email submissions as attachment to fiction@futurefire.net
Deadline: October 31, 2015, or sooner if filled
Pay: $20 (USD) per story, poem, comic, etc.

Cool Wikipedia categories and lists

Wikipedia is not only an ever-changing, almost pathologically up-to-date, populist source of post-encyclopaedic information ("knowledge" is maybe too distilled a concept for this resource); because of its born-digital, crowdsourced, collectively tagged content, it is also a veritable tangled-net of categories, lists, statistical flukes and fortuitous agglomerations of tenuously related items. I know people who have used Wikipedia links as a mini-Semantic Web to test relationships between concepts and places. Some of the most interesting pages on the web are the Category pages, where one can browse the keywords with which this meta-encyclopaedia's entries have been tagged.

Last night, George Dvorky listed twenty of his favourite lists on Wikipedia, only a few of which were organic categories as I describe them above. You can see his interest in paradoxes, unsolved problems and natural disaster (just as the category ghosttown in my Delicious reveals my obsession with abandoned human settlements). All fascinating lists, by the way, especially the ones with statistics attached.

It got me thinking about the category pages that I find most fun and scintillating to browse. One of the nicest things about these is that their contents page have changed since I linked to them. The other nice thing is that they're a mine for story ideas.

• Out-of-place artifacts - these are interesting precisely because they're not in the next category: in archaeology, as in hard science, a one-off is often considered a fluke or a hoax, but these seem to be real. Hard to explain, lacking in context, but not obviously bogus.
• Archaeological forgeries - there are more fun, but fodder for "what if" or alternate history type stories: what if they weren't forgeries, but real? (Okay, let's not get into van Dänicken territory...)
• Fictional writers - we all love writers, especially, it would seem, writers.
• Nonexistent people - people who were or are thought to really exist
• People whose existence is disputed - people we just aren't sure about
• List of people reported to have lived beyond 130 - almost all of these are probably spurious, but what's the fascination with historical longevity? (This is not a category, but the curated list is more useful than the closest category I could find.)
• Fictional languages - again, these are not hoaxes, in most cases, but languages invented for fictional worlds, like Láadan or Klingon. What does it take to invent a language?
• Feminist science fiction - different kind of category, but this is one that could grow as more items get tagged this way. What can you think of that isn't here already?
• List of hoaxes on Wikipedia - a meta-list if ever there was one: entries that were created in Wikipedia, spuriously, and went unnoticed long enough to catch on, or spread to other media, before they were deleted. Catalogued here for posterity, along with a convincing appeal for why you shouldn't try to do this again.

B is for Borgesian

Google’s doodle on the 24th of August celebrating Borges’ 112th birthday greatly pleased me since I have always felt the Argentinian writer never got the credit he was due. The fact that he never won the Nobel prize confounded me, just as it did the author himself: “Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition; since I was born they have not been granting it to me,” he once remarked.

I was first introduced to the works of Jorge Luis Borges during an ‘Interactive Narrative’ module in Trinity College Dublin. I was blown away by the required reading text of ‘The Garden of Forking Paths,’ not just for its experimental narrative or its magical realism (my favourite genre back then) but for how the story eerily encompassed so many issues I was concerned with at the time. I got chills while I read a reference to the Irish historical period I was researching: the description of Richard Madden, the “Irishman in service of England” in the year 1916 of all years; one of the most turbulent in my country’s history, one that set in motion the long, violent and tragic process of Ireland gaining independence from Britain.

The mention of Dr Yu Tsun’s ‘resources,’ among them a red and a blue pencil – for years ‘my’ signature writing implements, ones that always seemed to evoke interest from others for some reason. I knew these parallels were sheer coincidences; however a small part of me liked to think that I was co-creating a sort of collaborative fiction with the deceased writer, that there was a sort of hive mind at work; not constricted by time, just like the forking paths he described in the story. It was as though one of those different yet equal paths through the networks of time had found itself in me, the reader…

After reading ‘The Garden of Forking Paths,’ such improbable and delusional notions seemed somehow plausible. Only the best fiction could induce such an immersive response in a reader; but for speculative fiction, the barre is raised even higher, as the author has to present unreal concepts convincingly. No better writer than Borges to successfully accomplish this however; anyone who can formulate the universe into hexagonal library rooms (as he did in ‘The Library of Babel’) is clearly adept at presenting the most complex ideas in a succinct and compelling way.

These days I am somewhat more objective about my love for Borgesian literature. Borges’ legacy is so widely encompassing it is hard to quantify its numerous and varied facets; but here are the areas that stand out for us in his vast contribution to literature:

Magical Realism and Surrealism

Borges’ work is full of monsters, alternate histories and fantasies, surreal stories that undermine traditionalist structures by their very eschewing of realism. Even if on the surface they may seem to be pure fantasy, Borges stories often twist reality (as in many entries in The Book of Imaginary Beings or A Universal History of Infamy), subvert it to comic effect, or warp reality in an absurdist manner, creating a new world which is then taken deadly seriously, literally, and in doing so reveals the absurdity of our own socially-constructed reality.

Experimental narratives

Borges is known for his postmodern story structures; meta-fictions that address issues of writing, art, creativity and lying, implying that reality itself is as constructed as our stories and myths. He writes pieces that illustrate the social and historical contingency of writing, such as ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quijote’ (a theme he also addresses in the essay ‘Kafka and his Precursors’, further blurring the distinction between fiction and criticism).

Other experiments with narrative form include ‘The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’, a story disguised as the précis of a novel (also involving revolutionary Ireland!), or hoaxes such as his fake book reviews, which combine creation with the mischievous and postmodern wit that was his particular genius. If inventing stories is a form of lying, then what greater lie than to pretend not to be creating a story at all?

Bibliophilia

It is hardly surprising that Borges was a librarian. His love of books and learning is omnipresent in his writing, with motifs such as the library (‘The Library of Babel’), the encyclopaedia (‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’) recurring with reassuring regularity. There is a circularity in a story about books destined to be printed in books, written by a man who will never read them by himself (Borges became blind mid-way through his career), but whose whole life was surrounded by them. Almost every novel, story, or film centered around a mysterious book or based in an antiquarian bookseller feels Borgesian to me.

Borgesian stories in 'The Future Fire'

Given the great man’s range, we should think a bit about what would make a short story written today “Borgesian”. Recent authors who deserve this soubriquet might include mischievous and postmodern writers such as Umberto Eco and Salman Rushdie, cheeky and not afraid to be clever, always confounding expectations; writers such as Isabelle Allende and Ursula K. Le Guin who have adopted the sheer beauty and poetry of writing as core to everything they do; authors who exhibit the wicked inventiveness and bibliophilia in their twisted works, like Jonathan Carroll, Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker; absurdist fantasists like Rhys Hughes; and writers of mercilessly mocking, political meta-narratives like Joanna Russ. Many other authors who work in the genres of magical realism, surrealism, postmodern/metafiction, fantasy have drawn from the infinite library of Borges’ inspiration. These writers have helped to make our reception of Borges what it is today: as he himself said in ‘Kafka and his Precursors’, “every writer creates his precursors.”

At another level, every author who lets their writing, while beautiful and exciting, reflect an undiluted political sensibility, could be deemed ‘Borgesian.’ Although Jorge Luis Borges himself was a social conservative, and we at TFF tend to a more progressive and speculative approach, his sensitivity to the social and political relevance in all stories, without needed to slap the reader in the face with it, is something we admire and encourage.

If you have written something “Borgesian” in any of the senses above; or if you want to try something unusual in structure or format or medium; or if you want to write a story that is disguised as a book review, as an exchange of blog posts, as a social media phenomenon; or if you want to publish a fake review of a nonexistent book in a reviews blog or a nonfiction section... Call us. I mean it—we are especially fond of this type of thing. (It’ll have to be good, as everything does, but we really are willing to be playful.)