The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Leviathan 3: Libri quosdam ad sciéntiam, álios ad insaniam deduxére, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Forrest Aguirre
reviewed by Steve Tomasula

Untitled document

Jeff VanderMeer and Forrest Aguirre, eds. Leviathan 3: Libri quosdam ad sciéntiam, álios ad insaniam deduxére. Ministry of Whimsy, 2002. 468 pp. Paper: $21.95.

This third installment in the Leviathan anthology series bills itself as a showcase of “fantastical fiction.” But to get a sense of this anthology, it’s more useful to note that the oxymoron of the publisher’s name comes from Orwell’s 1984 than it is to think of the occult or big-bosomed space heroines. In seeing how many ways the bounds of the “real” can be stretched, the anthology also reaffirms how uncategorizable literature can be when practiced as a freewheeling art-form. Borges is clearly an important influence in the editorial selection, while the anthology’s Latin subtitle serves as an Umberto Eco-esque riddle whose significance really does emerge, as the introduction says it will, while readers wander the “libraries” that make up this book. Along the way, the anthology presents consistently strong work by some twenty authors, including exemplary short works by Michael Moorcock and Tamar Yellin. Lance Olsen’s “Village of the Mermaids,” a lineated meditation on time coming apart during the disintegration of an airliner, lays bare the pensive substrate of most of his fiction. “The Progenitor,” a language-intense story by Brian Evenson, is almost a cubist painting in words, the disjunctions Evenson creates between his and normal vocabulary-usage underscoring the consequences of the unthinking acceptance of legacies. Likewise, the poetic lyricism of Rikki Ducornet’s prose is enough to seduce a reader through “Buz,” even if her descriptions of an imaginary land by that name didn’t offer the insights that they do on their own. Jeffrey Ford’s “The Weight of Words,” a story about a man who has discovered a means to convey meaning through the physicality of written language, is both philosophical and funny: a story that, like Leviathan 3 itself, is a potent antidote to the quotidian thinking (and writing) that infuses much of mainstream life.


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Leviathan 3: Libri quosdam ad sciéntiam, álios ad insaniam deduxére, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Forrest Aguirre reviewed by Steve Tomasula Untitled document Jeff VanderMeer and Forrest Aguirre, eds. Leviathan 3: Libri quosdam ad sciéntiam, álios ad insaniam deduxére. Ministry of Whimsy, 2002. 468 pp. Paper: $21.95. This third installment in the Leviathan anthology series bills itself as a showcase of “fantastical fiction.” But to get a sense of this anthology, it’s more useful to note that the oxymoron of the publisher’s name comes from Orwell’s 1984 than it is to think of the occult or big-bosomed space heroines. In seeing how many ways the bounds of the “real” can be stretched, the anthology also reaffirms how uncategorizable literature can be when practiced as a freewheeling art-form. Borges is clearly an important influence in the editorial selection, while the anthology’s Latin subtitle serves as an Umberto Eco-esque riddle whose significance really does emerge, as the introduction says it will, while readers wander the “libraries” that make up this book. Along the way, the anthology presents consistently strong work by some twenty authors, including exemplary short works by Michael Moorcock and Tamar Yellin. Lance Olsen’s “Village of the Mermaids,” a lineated meditation on time coming apart during the disintegration of an airliner, lays bare the pensive substrate of most of his fiction. “The Progenitor,” a language-intense story by Brian Evenson, is almost a cubist painting in words, the disjunctions Evenson creates between his and normal vocabulary-usage underscoring the consequences of the unthinking acceptance of legacies. Likewise, the poetic lyricism of Rikki Ducornet’s prose is enough to seduce a reader through “Buz,” even if her descriptions of an imaginary land by that name didn’t offer the insights that they do on their own. Jeffrey Ford’s “The Weight of Words,” a story about a man who has discovered a means to convey meaning through the physicality of written language, is both philosophical and funny: a story that, like Leviathan 3 itself, is a potent antidote to the quotidian thinking (and writing) that infuses much of mainstream life.

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