The web's first magazine devoted to stories about life in giant artificial structures created by forces beyond human comprehension

How Are You Going to Get Out of This One?

by Matt Carey

When I read, sometimes it gets tough for me to accept characters trapped by the workings of fate. I always want to coach them to a happy ending. Desperate to get back to your beloved, Romeo? Let’s just stay rational and put down that knife. Ostracized by your lover and your community, Anna Karenina? Walk out that door and keep on going! I hear California is nice! Need a place to spend the night, Harker? Why don’t you try some other castle? (That one goes for Mario, too.)  

As readers, we’re used to being masters of time and space. We see everything. We know what the characters know, and we also know what we know. Half the time we even know the story’s ending before we start reading. Often, we start to expect characters to do what we wish they would do. Maybe we get really confused and wonder why literature only gets written about people so much dumber than we are.

But in real life, we’re as baffled by blind chance as we ever could be by walls and corridors. Every day we make a hundred decisions without any clue what the results will be. When we decide whether to walk down this street or that one, or whether to do the shopping at five o’ clock or six, we may be putting ourselves in the path of tragedy, but we have no information enabling us to make a meaningful choice until it’s too late. It's fate, and it's inescapable .

And like Anna Karenina, we’re trapped in other ways. A lucky few of us can leap from one lifestyle to another, but most of us have to learn one way of getting through life and stick to it. In a hundred years, how are people going to appreciate stories about modern-day Americans spending their tax money to stimulate oil consumption, racing toward destruction by driving back and forth dumping carbon and heating up the atmosphere? They’ll ask our fictional stand-ins, “Why don’t you rearrange your cities and your lives to avoid the danger?” (Well...we just can’t.)

The labyrinth genre is an antidote to all that. A fictional labyrinth may be smaller than the real world, and it’s almost certainly simpler, which lets the reader see the limited range of the characters’ options. In a labyrinth story, the obscurity of the spatial environment stands in for the unpredictability of time that we all have to face. Often the characters’ only choice is whether to travel down one blind alley or another. To read a labyrinth story is often to see the unknown future spread out right in front of you. 

For the hero of R. E. Hartman’s Phobia, exploring the labyrinth means searching for an escape from a world in which only omnipresent but half-guessed-at terror has any meaning. For the princess of Louise Norlie’s The Kingdom Defaced, the labyrinth is more personal and more political, the tomb of her royal ancestors but perhaps also the hope for her kingdom’s future. For the poor denizens of Greg Beatty’s Tangled Legs and Kristine Ong Muslim’s The Fifth Stranger, their labyrinths seem to be permanent ways of living, with no prospect for escape or even improvement. Sometimes, that’s just what the future looks like. 

Thanks to all the contributors to this first edition of Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine: your works are even better than I hoped for when I dreamed up this site.But I want to end this column with some potential food for thought for future contributors. 

It seems to me that labyrinth stories would be a great way to explore ecological issues. It can be tough to write about ecology in short fiction, partly because it’s hard for authors to know the subject well enough to be authoritative, partly because by the time you get through explaining the complexities of the issue your short fiction is no longer short. But it’s easy to imagine a mysterious artificial environment having a kind of ecosystem. Maybe it’s some kind of artificial life; maybe it’s like Easter Island. Writing about an imaginary world a bit simpler than our own could be a great way to explore a single environmental issue in isolation, perhaps an issue that doesn’t exist in the real world, without being strictly accountable to real-world facts.

I’d like to write the next of these columns about labyrinths and ecology, so if you submit a story with those themes you’ll give me something to discuss three months from now. If that idea sparks your imagination, use it, but don’t let it limit you, and please don’t hold any submissions back simply because they don’t have any ecology in them!

Matt Carey is the editor of Labyrinth Inhabitant Magazine.