The Ant King: and Other Stories

by Benjamin Rosenbaum

Overview

"Rosenbaum's The Ant King and Other Stories contains invisible cities and playful deconstructions of the form. In "Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, With Air-Planes,' by Benjamin Rosenbaum"—yes, his name is part of the title—the author imagines a world whose technologies and philosophies differ wildly from ours. The result is a commentary on the state of the art that is itself the state of the art."
—Los Angeles Times Favorite Books of 2008

* "Give him some prizes, like, perhaps, "best first collection" for this book."
—Booklist (Starred review, Top 10 SF Books of the Year)

"Featuring outlandish and striking imagery throughout—a woman in love with an elephant, an orange that ruled the world—this collection is a surrealistic wonderland."
—Publishers Weekly

"Rosenbaum proves he’s capable of sustained fantasy with "Biographical Notes," a steampunkish alternate history of aerial piracy, and "A Siege of Cranes," a fantasy about a battle between a human insurgent and the White Witch that carries decidedly modern undercurrents.... Perhaps none of the tales is odder than "Orphans," in which girl-meets-elephant, girl-loses-elephant."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Urbane without being arch, sweet without being maudlin, mysterious without being cryptic."—Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

"Lively, bizarre, and funny as well as dark, sinister, and sensual."
—Boston Phoenix

A dazzling, postmodern debut collection of pulp and surreal fictions: a writer of alternate histories defends his patron’s zeppelin against assassins and pirates; a woman transforms into hundreds of gumballs; an emancipated children’s collective goes house hunting.

Benjamin Rosenbaum’s stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction and McSweeney’s, been translated into fourteen languages, and listed in The Best American Short Stories 2006. Shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula awards, Rosenbaum’s work has been reprinted in Harper’s and The Year’s Best Science Fiction. He lives in Switzerland with his family.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781618730138
Publisher:	Small Beer Press
Publication date:	08/01/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	259 KB

About the Author

Benjamin Rosenbaum (benjaminrosenbaum.com) grew up in Arlington, Virginia, and received degrees in computer science and religious studies from Brown University. His work has been published in Harper's, Nature, McSweeney's, F&SF, Asimov's, Interzone, All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, and Strange Horizons. Small Beer Press published his chapbook Other Cities. He and his family live in Switzerland.

Read an Excerpt

The Ant King: A California Fairy Tale

Sheila split open and the air was filled with gumballs. Yellow gumballs. This was awful for Stan, just awful. He had loved Sheila for a long time, fought for her heart, believed in their love until finally she had come around. They were about to kiss for the first time and then this: yellow gumballs.

Stan went to a group to try to accept that Sheila was gone. It was a group for people whose unrequited love had ended in some kind of surrealist moment. There is a group for everything in California.

After several months of hard work on himself with the group, Stan was ready to open a shop and sell the thousands of yellow gumballs. He did this because he believed in capitalism, he loved capitalism. He loved the dynamic surge and crash of Amazon's stock price, he loved the great concrete malls spreading across America like blood staining through a handkerchief, he loved how everything could be tracked and mirrored in numbers. When he closed the store each night he would count the gumballs sold, and he would determine his gross revenue, his operating expenses, his operating margin; he would adjust his balance sheet and learn his debt-to-equity ratio; and after this exercise each night, Stan felt he understood himself and was at peace, and he could go home to his apartment and drink tea and sleep, without shooting himself or thinking about Sheila.

On the night before the IPO of gumballs.com, Sheila came to Stan in a dream. She was standing in a kiddie pool; Stan and his brothers and sisters were running around splashing and screaming; she had managed to insert herself into a Super 8 home movie of Stan's family, shot in thelate seventies. She looked terribly sad.

"Sheila, where are you?" Stan said. "Why did you leave me, why did you become gumballs?"

"The Ant King has me," Sheila said. "You must rescue me."

* * * *

Stan woke up, he shaved, he put on his Armani suit, and drove his Lexus to his appointment with his venture capitalists and investment bankers. But the dream would not leave him. "Ant King?" he asked himself. "What's this about a goddamn Ant King?"

On the highway, near the swamp, he pulled his Lexus over to the shoulder. The American highway is a self-contained system, Stan thought. Its rest stops have video games, bathrooms, restaurants, and gas stations. There's no reason ever to leave the interstate highway system, its deadness and perfection and freedom. When you do reach your exit, you always have a slight sense of loss, as when awakening from a dream.

Stan took off his shiny black shoes and argyle socks, cuffed his Armani suit pants above the knees, and waded through the squidgy mud and tall reeds of the swamp. He saw a heron rise, flutter, and soar into the midmorning sky. Ant King, Ant King, he thought.

Editorial Reviews

Benjamin Rosenbaum is a fierce talent whose knack for genre mash-ups is represented well, if spottily, in this debut short story collection.
—The Washington Post

Edward Champion

A storyteller concocts flights of fancy that move science fiction and fantasy just a bit further "out there."These fanciful stories were originally published in venues ranging from McSweeney's toArgosy, as well as some sci-fi and fantasy magazines. The title story opens with a bang, as an ambitious capitalist's longtime girlfriend explodes into a fountain of yellow gumballs. Starring a junk food-addicted subterranean overlord, a turncoat systems administrator named Vampire and a reluctant hero named Stan, the story is loaded with reverential geekery and laugh-out-loud snipes at corporate culture. Rosenbaum proves he's capable of sustained fantasy with "Biographical Notes," a steampunkish alternate history of aerial piracy, and "A Siege of Cranes," a fantasy about a battle between a human insurgent and the White Witch that carries decidedly modern undercurrents. The only true misstep is "Other Cities," an inventive but ultimately pointless travelogue of imagined metropolises. It's in the briefest of stories that Rosenbaum wields the greatest level of literary verve. The ten paragraphs of "The Orange" recount the rise to power of an orange entrusted to rule the world. A similarly succinct vignette, "The Blow," upturns the conventions of hard-boiled noir with the story of a detective laid low by a crippling blow. Perhaps none of the tales is odder than "Orphans," in which girl-meets-elephant, girl-loses-elephant. An imaginative debut collection.

Kirkus Reviews