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Wunderkindergarten
Marc Laidlaw

‘Sad to say,’ Marc Laidlaw writes, ‘not only has the single gone the
way of the portable manual typewriter, but the LP is now for all purposes
more extinct than the baby condors they are always feeding with
mama-condor regurgitating handpuppets on our local news. I finally had
to break down and buy cassettes of the latest Joni Mitchell and Elvis
Costello “albums”; in the US they’re only on CD and tape . . . How easy it
is to get out of touch with technology when one simply doesn’t have the
money to keep up. I remember when I was a kid, going into old people’s
houses, full of old things, vaguely wondering why they didn’t have all the
great new stuff, realising that was one of the ways the generations
differed so greatly. No doubt they might have wanted some of the stuff I
grew up with, the electronic gadgetry, ceaselessly interesting - but on a
fixed retirement, who can afford it? So they made do, just as I make do
with an old turntable and a tape player, and simply shuffle past those
expensive CDs and read about the latest advances that are going to
make even them obsolete.’

Marc Laidlaw’s first published short story, a collaboration with
Gregory Benford, was nominated for a Nebula Award. He has also
collaborated with Rudy Rucker on a series of stories which collide pop
culture with the wilder fringes of mathematical theory (their ‘Probability
Pipeline’ was a benchmark story for this anthology), as well as
publishing two novels and solo short fictions in most of the SF
magazines and anthologies such as Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades, Rudy
Rucker’s, Peter Lamborn Wilson’s and Anton Wilson’s Semiotext(e) SF
and Dennis Etchison’s The Cutting Edge. He’s a self-confessed guru of
the Californian freestyle movement of SF writing, the ideology of which
can be summed up as ‘Write like yourself, only more so.’

Hence, ‘Wunderkindergarten’. Like a monster movie in which the
monster gets to tapdance. Only more so.

****

The One and Only Entry in Shendy’s
Journal
 D
abney spits his food when he’s had too much to think. Likki spins in circles
till her pigtails stick out sideways from her blue face, and she starts choking
and coughing and eventually swallows her tongue and passes out, falling
over and hitting me and cracking the seals on my GeneKraft kit and letting
chimerae out of ZZZ-level quarantine on to the bare linoleum floor!. Nexter
reads pornography, De Sade, Bataille, and Apollinaire his special
favourites, and thumbs antique copies of Hustler which really is rather
sweet when you consider that he’s light-years from puberty, and those
women he gloats and drools over would be more than likely to coo over him
and chuck his chin and maybe volunteer to push his stroller, though I’m