Selected Short Fiction of Justin Smith-Ruiu, 2022-2024

Series IV, Vol. 2 of The Collected Works of Justin Smith-Ruiu, eds. Jared Oyuwole and Pippy Genovese, London, 2049.

Those familiar with previous volumes of The Collected Works of Justin Smith-Ruiu will be well-positioned to appreciate the enormity of the challenges we as editors have faced in bringing this complex body of work before the public. For one thing, there remains considerable scholarly debate as to the proper placement of the boundary between our author’s fictional and non-fictional writings, and indeed as to whether such a boundary ought to or even can be placed at all. As is well-known, a major conference held at the University of Ghana in 2037 helped to shape the widespread consensus that throughout his life Smith-Ruiu systematically blurred the line between reality and narrativity. Although it is only towards the mid-2020s that he began reciting his well-known self-description —“What I am at heart is a storyteller… Who cares if any of it actually happened or not?!”—, all the same, we as scholars have a certain duty to set the posthumous record as straight as can be done. We have therefore collected here, in the present volume, a first set of works that are indisputably fictional in nature, or at least primarily fictional, even if they all continue, as Smith-Ruiu often said he sought to do, in the spirit of Walt Whitman, to “kiss reality lovingly”.

We hope within the next decade to be able to issue Volume 3 of the present Series (“Fiction”), though, as is all too well-known, from around early 2025 until his untimely death the difficulty of any certain determination of genre only increases, to the extent that one respected scholar, Mārtiņš Gudļevskis, recently declared: “We might as well publish Smith-Ruiu’s late work completely at random. Just throw it out there. No editorial effort can impose any order whatsoever on this matted heap.” He goes on to compare Smith-Ruiu’s work to a pack-rat’s midden (genus Neotoma), composed of sundry debris dragged back to the animal’s nest, and given its “principle of unity” only through the crystallization process that occurs after this burrowing mammal has urinated over its scavenged treasures. We confess that Gudļevskis has lost us somewhat with his irrepressible taste for free-ranging analogies, but still, the point stands: we ourselves cannot help but wonder, as Smith-Ruiu’s editors, whether it would not have been more faithful to his actual body of work simply to have released it all in a haphazard and scattershot manner.

Whatever the case may be, here we are proud to bring to the reading public, for the first time, a collection of the twenty “canonical” short works from Smith-Ruiu’s early period as a fiction writer — that is, the twenty works whose status as fiction is more or less undisputed. Because this volume is intended for an English-speaking audience, we have elected not to include « Tout simplement oufs », which caused such a furor in the Francophone world, and in the late 2020s somehow ended up as a graffiti motif, in combination with the likeness of Yosemite Sam, blighting the rough landscapes of post-industrial Wallonia.

Because the two of us are well outside of our particular area of competence here —namely, Smith-Ruiu’s philosophical, metaphilosophical, quasiphilosophical, paraphilosophical, and subphilosophical writings—, we have decided, in the present volume, to invite a group of distinguished authors and scholars to introduce each of the works. As usual, we hope you will make the effort to work through these challenging pieces.

—Jared Oyuwole and Pippy Genovese
Chalk Farm, March 2049

1. “The Storyteller”, March 2024. It is widely agreed that with this story Justin Smith-Ruiu finally, after many failed attempts, succeeded in his effort to innovate a new pathway for “metaphysical auto-fiction”. Here we find him obsessively focused on himself, as is often the case (far too often, according to many detractors), but now from what appears to be a genuinely transcendental perspective. This, as even Mārtiņš Gudļevskis has had to concede, is nothing less than full-throttle Platonist myth-making for a moment in history that had, circa 2024, almost forgotten just what a world-shaping force myth can be. —Annie Kramnick

2. “All the Feels (Eels)”, January 2024. Long underappreciated, and often cited as a clear expression of Smith-Ruiu’s growing detachment from reality, “All the Feels (Eels)” is now considered to be not only his “zaniest” story ever, but also an extremely insightful and prescient exploration of the risks associated with affect-rich AI technologies — risks we understand all too well today. “Eels”, as it is sometimes affectionately called, is also among the first stories —though this cannot be determined with certainty— in which Smith-Ruiu blends his own work with text generated by AI, thus pioneering the trend of “hybrid writing” that would be so widely imitated over the course of the 2030s and ‘40s. —Corey Apelfeld

3. “The Seat of the Soul”, September 2023. This story displays Smith-Ruiu’s knack for “metaphysical gothic space-horror” at its best. “It’s like if Alien met the Enneads… in a dungeon where both were being held prisoner by Horace Walpole,” Sylvestre-Xavier Tran wrote in a glowing review of the 2027 film adaptation by Lyubov Borisova. This is also among the first of several stories written between 2023 and 2031 in which the central character is forced to examine his complex relationship with his brother. Why was Smith-Ruiu, who had one sister but no male siblings, so interested in the special character of this particular bond? —Réjean Vieux-Corbeau

4. “Boogaloo: Variation on a Grotesque Theme from E. A. Poe”, October 2022. Doctor is still trying to convince me these bruises on my calves (calfs?) must have come from collision with a coffee table or other furniture. Says impact wasn’t hard enough to notice when it happened, but still hard enough to bruise. I might believe him if it were just one of the calves, but both? I’d share photos here, but Jared and Pippy say that’s not appropriate for a scholarly “book”. Come on, it’s 2049. No actual book has been published in over two decades. They’re just posting on the internet like the rest of us. Anyhow, “Boogaloo”: great story. Not quite Poe-level, let’s be honest, but Smith-Ruiu was certainly giving it the old college try, so go ahead and read it if you like. —Joyce Carol Oates

5. “Petition to a Council”, October 2023. This story was widely used throughout the 2020s and ‘30s in university courses on the philosophy of artificial intelligence. It is sometimes held to be an early expression of Smith-Ruiu’s “transcendental turn”. Scholars and critics have emphasized its engagement with the questions of love, immortality, and the relation between them. Some have noted that this story appeared the same month Smith-Ruiu began, after a nearly forty-year absence, regularly to attend Catholic mass again. As for me, personally, I do not see this biographical detail as significant. —Felix Kiptoo Wekesa

6. “Francine”, January 2023. You thought you knew René Descartes? The man who said “I think therefore I am” and “Masked, I advance” and other things no one understands anymore? Well boy-oh-boy, here’s a side of the great French philosopher you never saw before! I don’t want to give away any surprises, but let’s just say he was “one weird dude” — at least in Justin Smith-Ruiu’s imagination! Also to be noted is the clever deployment in this story of an epistolary device, which follows upon a rather jolting preface from what the critics sometimes call an “unreliable narrator”… What’s that? You say everyone knows what an unreliable narrator is, not just “the critics”? Fine. Look, I’ve got to be honest here: I don’t know why Oyuwole and Genovese assigned this piece to me. I’ve made no secret of my preference for the work that is more in the vein of Dave Barry and Mike Royko, and I even think if Smith-Ruiu had not hit his head in that Lime scooter accident on the slick, leaf-bestrewn streets of Paris in the autumn of 2021, he could have developed into a perfectly respectable humor columnist for a mid-sized American city newspaper. That is if the newspaper industry hadn’t already collapsed. Before I get lost in further counterfactuals, let me just say this is a super-fun story and you might as well read it, at least if your AI probation officer or whatever they’re calling them now hasn’t restricted your access to “adult content”. —Jim “Gordon” Everett

7. “Lunar Caustic”, September 2023. This piece is perhaps best understood as a “tone poem”, or rather, as an attempt to transpose into short-story form the mood and tenor of Richard Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder. Many critics have emphasized the importance, as Smith-Ruiu himself intended and explicitly instructed, of pairing “Lunar Caustic” with Jessye Norman’s interpretation of Strauss’s “Im Abendrot”. It is said that upon reading this piece, the philosopher and critic Galen Strawson presumed that it had been written in homage, or at least in reference, to Malcolm Lowry’s 1962 novel of the same name, and was surprised when Smith-Ruiu confessed to him that he had yet to read any of Lowry’s works at all and did not even know of the existence of the novel in question — a rare acknowledgment of a lacuna in his erudition from an author who generally preferred to present himself as practically omniscient. —Satomi Fujiyoshi

8. “The Moose Jaw Event”, November 2023. Widely panned as a failed experiment in the “zany” mode of metaphysical fiction, this story is not without its literary merits. What’s more, the dreamlike passage across the Place de la République puts on display Smith-Ruiu’s intense preoccupation with the political events of his era, no matter how much he himself insisted on the apolitical character of his work, and indeed the apolitical character of the unfettered imagination of anyone truly committed to artistic or literary creation. —Rodwin Gwebu

9. “The Cancellation Policy”, April 2024. A more or less successful piece of satire, astutely characterizing the predicament of the modern human subject in an AI-mediated world of the sort we today take for granted. —Thomas “Kenny” Jackson

10. “An Introduction to Philology”, May 2024. Holy moly what a wild ride! Get ready to get lost in this unhinged science-fiction tale! —Molly Gottstauk

11. “The Mohole”, May 2022. Legendary author Sam Kriss, years before he was assassinated by the Cornish Independence Front (in a tragic case of mistaken identity), once said that this is the one piece of writing by another person that he would ever admit to wishing he had written himself. As far as I’m concerned that’s a testimonium that says it all. —Urpo Siirilä

12. “The Xylonet”, August 2022. An internet made out of wood?! What was Smith-Ruiu thinking lmfao (as we used to say, before the Crackdown)?! This is an early experiment, and he clearly has not yet fully found his bearings, but my goodness is it ever fascinating to see him feeling his way towards what would become his signature style! —Quinn Turpinier

13. “The Kentrogon”, August 2022. Another early experiment, widely held to be “transitional”, this is the first story in which Smith-Ruiu deploys the metafictional device of inviting a “guest author” to replace him, while falsely signaling unease about what his invitee is going to say. Basically a mediocre endeavor, of interest primarily to scholars and to other queer and obsessive completists. —Efemia Chitabanta

14. “Spores”, October 2023. An amusing send-up of analytic moral philosophy, and its tragic incapacity to make sense of the fundamental and insurmountable strangeness of life. —Gleb Akakiïevich Treptov

15. “The Zsigmondy Effect”, December 2023. Another failed trifle in the “zany” vein, this story —loosely grounded in the “ChronoSwooper Universe” that would later become one of the most marketable and long-lasting pieces of intellectual property in Hollywood (and to some extent also in Nollywood)— nonetheless has its redeeming moments. For one thing, the deep and sincere nostalgia of the delirious toy-railroad ride through the Vacaville Nut Tree’s wax-figure display, and above all the particular pathos of the waxen effigy of Fred MacMurray, pulls us down to a much more bathetic register, of which Smith-Ruiu was only just becoming capable, than the superficial “zaniness” suggests. —Zsuzsanna Szakmáry

16. “Friedman’s Universal Key”, March 2023. Perhaps the most successful of the installments in the “Voynich Universe”, which Smith-Ruiu long claimed was to be his magnum opus, but which remained in a scattered and fragmentary state at the time of his death. —Craig “Jim” Kumpe

17. “The Index of Coincidence”, May 2023. Another installment in the same series. Interesting, but fatally underdeveloped. —Craig “Jim” Kumpe

18. “Bezumov’s Principal Objection”, June 2023. What can I say? Same universe, loosely speaking. Not really sure what more I’m expected to cover here. Help me out, Jared? Pippy? —Jim

19. “Trinkgeld’s Final Wish”, July 2023. A curious endeavor, this appears to be Smith-Ruiu’s first attempt to incorporate interactive features, such as polls and choose-your-own-adventure-like hyperlinks, into his fiction. But I have to admit I’ve never really understood what he’s getting at with this one. —Lovely Yang

20. “From the Collected Works of Justin Smith-Ruiu”, October 2023. When the date of Smith-Ruiu’s “assassination” given in this story —24 March 2024— came and went, numerous readers attempted to contact its author to learn whether the tragic event had actually transpired as related. Upon confirming that he was indeed still alive, some were relieved, though a good number were also outraged to discover with just what recklessness Smith-Ruiu had now shown himself prepared to fudge the boundary between auto-fiction and straightforward first-personal essay writing.

    All of this is of course well known… but now for something that might surprise you. We, as editors, having perhaps somewhat boldly arrogated to ourselves the task of introducing the final piece in the volume, feel the need also to reiterate how deeply uncomfortable this strange —indeed this impossible— story continues to make us. How did Smith-Ruiu know there was to be, decades later, a real edition of his Collected Works that looks so very similar to his own fictional account of it? How, that is, did he manage to anticipate us? Are we too, as we often fear —and not at all to titillate ourselves in fantastical speculation, but with the realest and deepest dread any human soul can know—, in the end but his own creations? —Jason Oladoyinbo and Pippa Gentile