A Short, Sharp Shock

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson, award-winning author of the bestselling Red Mars, Green Mars, and the soon-to-be-published Blue Mars, was called "a literary landscape artist, creating breathtaking vistas" by The Detroit Metro News. Now he confirms his reputation for brilliance and for the unexpected in this luminous short work.

A Short, Sharp Shock

A man tumbles through wild surf, half drowned, to collapse on a moonlit beach. When he regains consciousness, he has no memory of who he is or where he came from. he know only that the woman who washed ashore with him has disappeared sometime in the night, and that he has awakened in a surreal landscape of savage beauty -- a mysterious watery world encircled by a thin spine of land. Aided by strange tribesmen, he will journey to the cove of the spine kings, a brutal race that has enslaved the woman and several of the tribesmen. That is only the beginning of his quest, as he struggles to find her identity in this wondrous and cruel land -- and seeks out the woman whose hold on his imagination is both unfathomable and unshakable.

Haunting and lyrical, filled with uncommon beauty and terrible peril, A Short, Sharp Shock is an ambitious and enthralling story by one of science fiction's most respected talents.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Fiction, Audiobook, Horror, Speculative Fiction, Novella

208 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published May 1, 1990

About the author

Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction writer. He has published 22 novels and numerous short stories and is best known for his Mars trilogy. His work has been translated into 24 languages. Many of his novels and stories have ecological, cultural, and political themes and feature scientists as heroes. Robinson has won numerous awards, including the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award for Best Novel and the World Fantasy Award. The Atlantic has called Robinson's work "the gold standard of realistic, and highly literary, science-fiction writing." According to an article in The New Yorker, Robinson is "generally acknowledged as one of the greatest living science-fiction writers."

Reviews

[Claudia · Rating 4 out of 5]

* LE: I'm delighted to see I guessed corectly:

"My other mountain writing

[...] A novella called A Short, Sharp Shock (1991) is set on an ocean planet's world-wrapping peninsula with a lot of Sierran features."
(from The High Sierra: A Love Story, pg 477)
-----

This is the type of story that everyone understands something else from it. For me it's an allegory of searching for one's conscience or inner self, or the best path for the future, when one is facing a hardship in life. But just as well could be a surreal story, born from imagination.

Either way it's a beautiful one, haunting and mesmerizing. Reading VanderMeer and Mieville I had encountered a fair share of odd characters, but I must confess none is weirder than the ones I found here: people with trees growing on their shoulders, others with faces within faces, but none of them the monster type, on the contrary - almost all are in perfect resonance with the surrounding environment and nature.

Of one thing I'm sure: the mountains described here are from Sierra Nevada.* I wouldn't have known if I wouldn't currently be reading The High Sierra: A Love Story. And I dare to extrapolate and presume that the main character is KSR on his hikes. Could be a wild guess but it's a lovely one, and I will stick to it.

[Therese · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe a Buddhist meditation? Maybe a thought experiment? Maybe science fiction? Maybe not? Whatever it is, I really liked it. The setting is a ribbon of land encircling an ocean world. Along this spine travels Thel, meeting odd folk and thinking about his journey. Presaging the New Weird by a decade, Robinson introduces people living in giant snail shells, "facewomen" with Mandelbrot eyes, an intertidal bridge keeper, and many more delights. Plus a few wince-worthy scenes that I'm trying to blot from my mind. For those who need a plot, this ain't the book. But if you are comfortable with movement as the whole reason for a story, then you might like it as much as I did.

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's hard to know how to classify this book -- it has aspects of both science fiction and fantasy. It is also very retro in a way, in that I mean that it seems like it was written in the 60s rather than the 90s.

But in the end I really enjoyed it. It's very short, only 200 pages, and I finished in in a few hours. It's like reading someone's dream. It's otherworldly, hallucinatory, and has layers of meaning and metaphor that escape you upon initial reading. I think I'll be reading it again at some point, just to absorb it more.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Surreal with a strange logic underlying it all. The geography of the world is fascinating: a thin peninsular continent that runs across the equator of a water world. It's populated by strange creatures: men with trees growing out of their shoulders and women with faces on their eyes. The infighting crab beach shellcottage people are the best.

He said to the swimmer, "were you ever the queen of an ancient kingdom?"

"Yes," she muttered sleepily. "And I still am." But this, he supposed, was another of their misunderstandings. Thel had first noticed this phenomenon when he had seen a windhover, hunting over the meadows inland. "Look," he had said, "a kestrel." But the swimmer had thought him crazy for pointing into the sky, for that to her was the name of a kind of fish. And later he found that when he said loyalty she understood it to mean stubbornness, and when she said arbitrary she meant beautiful, and that when she said melancholy she did not mean the sadness we enjoy feeling, but rather mendacity; and when she said actually she meant currently; and when he said I love you, she thought he was saying I will leave you. They had slowly worked up quite a list of these false cognates, Thel could recite scores and scores of them, and he had come to understand that they did not share a language so much as the illusion of a language; they spoke strong idiolects, and lived in worlds of meaning distinct and isolated from the other. So that she no doubt understood queen of an ancient kingdom to mean something like a swimmer in the deep sea; and the mystery of the ancient alloy coin was never explained, and, he realized, never would be. It gave him a shiver of fear, thinking about it –- it seemed to him that nothing would ever be explained, and that all of a sudden each day was slipping away, that time was flying by and they were getting old and nothing would ever become clear. He sat on the beach watching clouds tumble overhead and letting handfuls of sand run through his fingers, the little clear grains of quartz, flecks of black mica, pieces of coral, shell fragments like small bits of hard ceramic, and he saw that a substantial portion of the sand was made of shells, that living things had labored all their lives to create ceramic shelters, homes, the most permanent parts of themselves; which had been pummeled into shards just big enough to see, millions upon millions of lives ground up and strewn under him, the beach made out of the wreckage of generations. And before long he and the swimmer too would become no more than sand on a beach, and they would never really have understood anything.

[Marschlako · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ez a könyv nagyon kilóg KSR életművéből, de csak a témája miatt, mert amúgy kiváló alkotás, amit azonban nehéz besorolni. Sci-finek nem gondolnám, bár nyomokban sci-fi elemeket is tartalmazhat. Fantasynek már inkább, mivel vannak benne különös lények, varázslók, mágikus események, de teljes bizonyossággal azért ezt sem merném állítani; engem – bár egészen más jellegű történetről és világról van szó – Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio: Industrias ​y andanzas de Alfanhuí c. könyvére emlékeztetett. Egy biztos: egy nagyon különös (weird) és nagyon érdekes világba csöppenhetünk bele Thellel együtt. Thel – aki ezt a nevet a fa-emberektől kapta – ugyanis szó szerint belecsöppent ebbe a különös világba – ahol a végtelen óceánban az egyenlítő mentén egy változó magasságú, keskeny sziklavonulat fut körbe –, a tengerben találkozunk vele, miközben éppen megpróbál nem megfulladni. A parti fövenyre kivetődve egy gyönyörű – eszméletlen – nőt talál maga mellett. Egyikük sem emlékszik rá, hogy kerültek ide, honnan kerültek ide, kik is ők valójában. Mire hajnalban Thel magához tér, a nőt már magukkal ragadták a hegygerinc királyai; mindezt a parton üldögélő furcsa asszonyoktól (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/list...) tudja meg. Thel azonnal az úszónak elnevezett nő és elrablói után ered, s itt kezdődnek kettejük különösnél különösebb kalandjai. Útjuk során (a helyzetet egy különös erővel bíró tükör is tovább bonyolítja) meglepően változatos létformákkal (pl. a mandelbrot-arcú, hármasával járó asszonyokkal) találkoznak, s próbálják megismerni ezt a fura világot, s élni benne új életüket. A 30 rövid fejezetben leírt események mögött lehet mögöttes értelmet, tanulságot is keresni (a szereplőknek is van több bölcs mondása, miként legendája is e fura világ keletkezésére), de lehet egyszerűen csak hátradőlni és élvezni a történetet.

[Bart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Please read the full review on Weighing A Pig...

(...)

The themes of the book are rich & diverse, and have to do with companionship, sexual attraction, the nature of time, memory, the inherent miscommunication between individuals, aesthetics, geology, the animalistic nature of man, the freedom of waves, and being determined by one’s surroundings. The novella’s world – a ridge among the equator of an ocean world, circling it like a spine – determines the narrative structure too: there’s nowhere to go but forth, following the path along the ridge. Or not?

(...)

[Peter Tillman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I somehow missed this, back in the day. Bart's review is the one to read, nearby. Full review: https://schicksalgemeinschaft.wordpre...

@p. 30/180 (mmpb, novella) I'm not wild about it. Great opening but now he's noodling around, playing games in a fantasy alt-California. Protag is chasing a good-looking girl he washed up next to on the beach . . . She's been taken by the Spine Kings! Huh. Bart's comparison to Gene Wolfe is accurate, but since I'm allergic to most of Wolfe's stuff . . .

Palmyrah's 2-star is accurate if pessimistic: "A thoroughly mystifying book, full of well-drawn and often beautiful images, of which I could make neither head nor tail. Is this a halfway house inhabited by souls between reincarnations? A simulated reality gone wrong? What Purgatory is really like?"

By p.71, things are much better. Thel (name of convenience for the nameless protag) got the girl! She's nameless too ('the swimmer'), but a beauty, and friendly. Those fractally-recursive facewomen are wonderfully strange! And the fellows with fruit-trees growing on their shoulders! Breakfast every day! Really, the whole thing is surreal. And very well-crafted!

Well. The novella comes to a melancholy end, Thel and the swimmer are parted, their love is at an end. Despite moments of piercing beauty, at the end it's a 3-star book for me. It is striking how the images of long hikes under arduous conditions map to his recent High Sierra non-fiction doorstop -- which I liked a lot: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Guy Haley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book's been in my collection for 15 years, according to the press release slip I found still preserved inside the cover. Fittingly, I read it on top of a cliff by the roaring sea.
A man wakes up on a beach in a strange world, next to him is a woman he doesn't recognise but who he knows means everything to him. When she vanishes, he sets off to rescue her, taking him on a mind-bending journey that is a little like the Wizard of Oz for grown-ups, but with a lot more sea and a lot more sex.
Themes of circularity, eternity, free will, love and the persistence of self in the face of death means this lines up very closely with my own stories, so I was bound to love it.
Pleasingly enigmatic, gloriously written and full of invention, A Short, Sharp Shock is a book I'll come back to, perhaps in my twilight years. There's a certain comfort to it that takes the edge off mortality.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rec. by: Chapter 2
Rec. for: Castaways

As amnesiac as Kim Stanley Robinson's protagonist, I failed to remember much at all from my first encounter with A Short, Sharp Shock, the mass-market paperback edition that I read (and even got autographed!) back in 2003. I remembered that I'd read it, though, and so when I ran across this handsome slipcased and autographed hardback edition during a recent trip to Minnesota, in the marvelous Chapter 2 Books there, I snapped it up, and was able to experience it anew.

A Short, Sharp Shock is very short, to be sure—not even 150 pages long, in this edition. It's also sometimes shocking (Chapter 6, in particular)—you may want to consider this a trigger warning for graphic violence. There's also sex, some of it quite explicit, later on, and the illustrations (by one Arnie Fenner, who also autographed this copy) do follow suit.

I myself was, of course, quite pleased with these aspects of Robinson's story.

I'm not so sure about "sharp," though—the language Kim Stanley Robinson employs in A Short, Sharp Shock is lyrical, sensual, and not often (despite that trigger warning) sharply pointed. Although the word "dreamlike" is very much a cliché, it does suit this book.

Consider this passage, for example, which reproduces one page in its entirety:

A village hanging in the sky
And nothing ever brings us home
But something makes us climb.

And climb they did, all that long day, until they came over a rise in the ridge, and there facing the southern sea, tucked in a steep scoop in the top of the cliff, was a cluster of whitewashed blocky buildings, lined in tight rows so that the narrow lanes were protected from the wind. Terrace after terrace cut the incurved slope, until it reached an escarpment hanging over the sea; from there a white staircase zigzagged down a gully to a tiny harbor below, three white buildings and a dock, gleaming like a pendant hanging from Oia.
—p.43

Or perhaps this paragraph:

They rode like that for days. Each day the peninsula became lower, narrower, more stripped of life. The thick mats of dune grass reduced to occasional patches, the tufts of grass as sparse as the hair on a balding man. Each tuft had been blown in every direction by the winds, creating a perfect circle of smoothed hard sand around it, deepest at the outer edge; the dunes became geometrical worksheets, sine waves covered with circles. One sunset walking in the deeply patterned sand Thel looked down at a tuft of grass and the perfect circle around it, and thought, That is your life: a stalk of living stuff blown in every direction, leaving a brief pattern in sand.
—p.70

I myself have seen and photographed the phenomenon Robinson describes, the circular pattern in the sand made by beach grass buffeted by the shifting wind.

*

One of the things I most love to do while traveling is to seek out and visit the independent bookstores that, even in this benighted age, still manage to survive.

The moment my wife and I walked into Chapter 2 Books, we were greeted by Guildenstern, the store's resident cat, a tabby as friendly as he is chonky (there is a tip jar at the register for Guildenstern's insulin fund), and then no less cordially by the store's proprietor himself, author Daryl Lanz.

Perhaps, if you're ever in the town of Winona, Minnesota (not the one from the song...) then you'll want to stop in. After visiting the Lakeside Drive-In for one of their root beer floats, of course.

And, as always, these are unsolicited endorsements...

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is bizarre. I picked it up not knowing much about it, and assuming that KSR writes ONLY sci-fi. Apparently not! This book is definitely fantasy. Very surreal. It's like Gulliver's Travels meets Dungeons & Dragons. But with a super sleep-deprived dungeon master. If you're into creation myths, I think you'd like this book. The different types of beings are cool—tree people, recursively-faced women, shape-shifters. Kinda reminded me of The Three-Body Problem, though not in length or density—A Short Sharp Shock is a super quick read.

[Thom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some wild world building, from geology (a long spine with ocean on both sides) to flora and fauna - and both (a group of people with trees growing from one shoulder - and one outcast with a tree on his opposite shoulder!). While I may think about the world, I won't consider much for the plot - it's more a series of interludes. I also may never look at nude women and cats the same way again...

In a mirror (which shows the truth?) there is a hint that the protagonist is a space traveler. Other than that, this is hardly science fiction or fantasy. It *is* weird. This short book (novella?) was released in 1990, before the authors well known Mars trilogy. I'm not sure how it ended up on my reading list. Down deep, I didn't love it.

[Rahma]

This was originally published EXACTLY ONE YEAR before I was born, so of course I have to read it 👻

[Hirondelle (not getting all notifications) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read long ago, and another book made me think of this. This is a very strange, dream like book, I can't actually remember any plot but that is OK because I am pretty sure it had none. It was like a dream, part nightmare made literature. That being said, I liked it, and I still remember it 20 years after I read it, so yeah, I thought it was good.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this 70 page story a man and a woman are washed ashore on a peculiar, narrow strip of a continent that stretches on and on. Both have lost their memory and after being separated the man tries to find the woman. Once they find each other together they travel along the narrow continent and encounter different communities and cultures. They are continuously being pursued by a group of dangerous villains that want to get hold of a ritual object the couple have taken from them.
This short story makes pretty intense reading unlike anything you might have read, and the experience may stay with you for a while. It reminds a little of Stephen King's 'The Dark Tower', only that travellers are being pursued themselves on their journey. It is written in a very dreamlike half-lucid style and the events happening are not always rational. The story and the encounters with other cultures are full of Jungian psychological motives.
Unverified accounts claim that KSR wrote the story on the Greek island of Santorini, also a barren and narrow stretch of mountainous land with a special, dreamlike, atmosphere. He was sleep deprived as a baby had just been born.
Perhaps the Jungian motives of the story emerged through this state of sleep deprivation? The story is a powerful exploration of themes such as violence, home, love and care.

[Jason · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am dismayed when I am reading and realize the writer is going to be literary and allegorical. There should be a disclaimer warning the reader of this self-indulgent conceit.
I found little to interest me in this novella. I knew it would go nowhere and have no ending, and in this, unfortunately, the author did not fail. In the end, the reader is left to write an ending, not sharing a co-authorship nor royalties.
I give it two stars, rather than one, because the author is a fine ‘world-builder’(read his RED MARS and GREEN MARS and know), and I like the description of the fractal-faced women, and the people who have tiny trees growing from their shoulders. I love trees. Oh, to have a bonsai on my shoulder!
I would sing:
‘Bonsai,
On my shoulder
Makes me happy!...’

[Mazzy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A weird, intriguing novella. Somehow it feels post-post-apocalyptic; millions or billions of years into the future, science fiction becomes fantasy; beautifully written, strange places and stranger creatures; the unclear is not explained.

Also, reminiscent of Ursula K. Le Guin’s City of Illusions.

[Shauna · Rating 4 out of 5]

On a metaphorical level, this short book works and is reminiscent of some medieval literary works. The beautiful language is also satisfying. As a story, though, I found it somewhat frustrating because the main story question is never answered.

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow, that was weird... I think I kinda liked it!

[Sofia Dolan · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5
Inexpert fusion of Ringworld, Dharma Bums, and the Odyssey.

[Penny Ramirez · Rating 3 out of 5]

What on earth did I just listen to? A fever dream, perhaps.

I love KSR, but apparently I need to stick to his science-based works. This was beautifully written, but I had no idea what I was supposed to get out of it.

[K. Axel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Story...
Try to hang on and if you have questions afterwards, well, you must clearly read the book on your own!

A man wakes up surrounded by water. He fights his way to the shore where he learns that another person has washed ashore as well. A woman. He describes her as a swimmer, built for the ocean. He closes his eyes and when he opens them in the morning, the woman is gone. She has been taken by a tribe called the spine kings. These savages are cannibals and will sacrifice the woman when they reach a place called Kataptron Cove.

The man does not know who he is and soon finds that while he has no recollection of anywhere else, this place and its people are very strange indeed. Some grow trees from their shoulders, while others know how to shapechange. Whenever he meet a new group of people, he asks them about the world and how it was created, but will these stories reveal anything of his identity and past?

My Judgment...
What sold me on this book was a reviewer on Goodreads who had stopped after 50 pages because it was too weird for him. This is always a positive thing in my book and therefore I began to read. After 50 pages, I was completely involved in the beautiful and mysterious story. One thing you must understand before reading this... it is almost like a long poem with lots of symbols and metaphors. The story is pretty straightforward, but if you want to dig a little deeper than the obvious... you will be richly rewarded.

In many ways, this story reminded me about Tanith Lee's Flat Earth stories. It has the same poetic language and fantastic world, although you will not meet any demons here. The ending was a little unfulfilling, but maybe there was something that I missed. The good thing is, now I have a reason to go back and read it one more time.

Also, I was a little uncertain about the genre, and had originally classified the book as both fantasy, horror and sci-fi, but now that I've read the book it is unmistakeably... fantasy!

This book comes fully recommended, at least by me.

[Andreas Sekeris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Much of the book reminded me of a series of short-stories a high-schooler might write. Cool creatures thrown in at random. A woman who doesn't even get a name, referred to only as "the swimmer", and who doesn't get any depth in her character at all. To be fair none of the characters here get any depth and that's the point.

The point being to learn to live in the moment, stop worrying about the past or even the future. Just take each moment as it comes and dive through the looking-glass. Literally. A metaphor made real by a mirror that is never explained. The environment is minimally sketched as well. Just an endless ocean broken up by a long, narrow band of land that encircles the world. Why? Well, then you're just worrying about the past which you shouldn't even be worrying about. Even a book as short as this felt like it was too long and could've been shorter.

At least the chapters were short, barely two pages most of them.


I struggled reading this book as there really is no point to it. I'm also reading a book about the Tao, and that gets its point across in short stanzas that are less than a page. This takes much longer to say the same thing. Of course the swimmer becomes a lover because, well, she's there I guess. Each encounter with a group feels pointless because they just leave when things become difficult. An allusion to letting go? Maybe. But the characters are just so empty, and even little things like everyone speaking the same language become annoying by the end of the book. Ugh.

[MonumentToDecency · Rating 4 out of 5]

Science fiction, fantasy, philosophy, and maybe a bit of geology, all rolled into one nice neat conch.
Can be hard to follow if the reader doesn't pay attention, or if you have zero interest in metaphor.
Maybe an allegory on how single minded determination often means we don't learn from our mistakes and are, therefore, destined to repeat them. Maybe not.
Maybe an allegory on how change brings incredible opportunity but only if we stop to allow the opportunity in. Maybe not.
Maybe an allegory on taking things for granted; never realising that your understanding of things is not necessarily shared by all. Maybe not.
Maybe a mind bending story about devolution, vaginal cats, shell homes, purple people, magic mirrors, dragons fists, 10,000ft high cliffs, a water rat, love, loss, memory, illusion, and lots and lots of water.

4.5/5 because perfection is impossible.

[Harlan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book, a quasi-magical quasi-SF novel about a man with no memory, finding his way on a bizarre planet, was totally enthralling and absorbing. After finishing it, my perceptions of reality had changed, and it took a while before I was able to relate to the real world again! Robinson's writing in this work, more than most of his other novels, is artistic and literary, almost Kafka-esque. I would also compare A Short, Sharp Shock to a similar book, also a surrealistic fantasy written by an SF author -- The Bridge, by Iain Banks. Aside from their superficial similarities (fish-out-of-water protagonist traveling on a trip of land/bridge on an endless sea), both are astonishingly thought-provoking and deep. Very highly recommended for those willing to challenge themselves.

[Alsha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this one in a 50c bin in a used book store a couple weeks ago. A lovely story - much more lyrical and fantastical than KSR's Mars trilogy, which are the only other books of his I've read. He has always shown a knack for beautiful imagery coupled with the detail and expertise of a scientist, and this story exemplifies his style. There were some truly inspired passages in this one - mostly about the past; it was in great part about the past, including a series of different creation myths along the way. A very serendipidous find.

[Mark · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did something with A Short Sharp Shock which I rarely do -- abandoned it after about 50 pages. It was just too weird. Guy wakes up on beach with no memory, there's a woman there. Next morning she's gone. He goes to look for her for reasons that nobody understands. There are people made of seaweed and other people with fruit trees growing out of their heads. What, exactly, did you smoke while writing this one, KSR? Anyway, it was too weird for me.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I would have had any clue about the ending I would have gulped this fantasy-sci-fi-literature down. Luckily I didn't and sipped it with leisure. I recommend you do the same. This book is for everyone except minors. There is some references to a particular kind of civilization that most would consider lewd. This story is deeper than what you get on the surface (pun intended for those who have read it). I don't know what took me so long to read something by Kim Stanley Robinson but I will be looking for my next fix soon.

[Palmyrah · Rating 2 out of 5]

A thoroughly mystifying book, full of well-drawn and often beautiful images, of which I could make neither head nor tail. Is this a halfway house inhabited by souls between reincarnations? A simulated reality gone wrong? What Purgatory is really like?

I own the book. Maybe I should try reading it again. If I do, I'll modify this review as appropriate afterwards.

[Pamela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mythical type story. Reminded me of The Cleft by Doris Lessing, but is entirely different. I think it's just the mythical quality that prompted the similarity.

It has trees that are alive! Tree Folk. :)

[Debra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I could just say, "It was a strange book and leave it there." However that wouldn't be very helpful to other readers. This story actually reminded me of creative writing assignments I had in high school where the teacher encouraged you to use your vivid imagination. Like the world the author has landed you on, the story loops around, back and forth, forever and ever.