David Rix of Eibonvale Press has just announced a call for submissions for a new anthology. The theme is trains and railways. The wonderful title is drawn from a story by Wolfgang Borchert.
I will always have a soft spot for Borchert. His stories ‘Das Brot’ and ‘Nachts Schlafen die Ratten Doch’ were the first pieces of German fiction I read in their original language – like Kafka, and like Chekhov in Russian, Borchert’s talent for expressing complex truths in a deceptively simple way makes him an ideal starting point for anyone trying to learn his language. I was moved by these stories, but it wasn’t until I tried translating his rather longer story ‘Billbrook’ that I began to fully understand the power of his writing and the extremity of his wartime experience.
Anyone coming to ‘Billbrook’ unannounced, as it were, might be forgiven for taking it to be a science fiction story set in the days following a nuclear holocaust. In fact it’s about the blanket bombing, in WW2, of Borchert’s home city, Hamburg.
Borchert loved his city, and he is brilliant at portraying the multitudinous multiplicity of the urban environment. He loved the magic and the mystery of the city as organism, and his grief at the utterly needless and wanton destruction of his home-place – its literal reduction to rubble – might be said to be at least as much the cause of his appallingly early death (aged 26) as the complications from hepatitis that are usually cited. Borchert, like so many Germans, was a victim of both the Nazis (he was arrested more than once by the Gestapo for his anti-Nazi views, imprisoned and then sent to the Eastern Front as punishment) and the Allies.
Borchert also loved railways. We know that from the way they shimmer and creak and thunder into his stories. When he likened the human soul to the railway track – ‘rusty, stained, silver, shiny, beautiful and uncertain’ – he was recognising the possibilities for change, for beauty and above all for exploration that railways provide in both the physical and spiritual realm, the way trains – somehow much more than cars and at least equally with space rockets – excite and stimulate and prompt the creative imagination.
I don’t think it’s too presumptious to argue that Borchert would have loved the idea of an anthology of SF railway stories. He might even have written one for Rustblind himself. Let us hope he would at least approve the use of his words in the choice of title.
I know that this project is very close indeed to David’s heart and has been long in the planning. He first mentioned it to me more than a year ago – while we were watching a ‘cab ride’ DVD shot from a train running the Tren a las Nubes line across Argentina. His train addiction is one I share. Indeed a love of trains is common to many writers, who value the opportunities they provide for the most productive kind of solitude, for the observation of people and places, for meditation and reflection, for extended reading time. Not to mention being a mobile workspace.
It’s going to be thrilling to see what stories people come up with.
You can – and please do – read the full submission guidelines for Rustblind and Silverbright right here.