By an odd coincidence, all three of the Hugo-nominated novelettes I saved for last are about memory and death. Hard-hitting stuff here. They’re also about the stories we tell and why we tell them: to remember the past, to link us to each other, and to make us reach for something more than just survival. Click the jump for a brief review of the novelettes by Simone Heller, Naomi Kritzer, and Brooke Bolander.
I’ve been trying to think how to describe Simone Heller’s “When We Were Starless”. It’s a post-apocalyptic ghost story, Kurosawa meets Black Mirror but a lot more uplifting. The narrator is a scout for her nomadic tribe, and she stumbles across something that she’s been trained her entire life to destroy.
The worldbuilding happens in the brief spaces between all the things the author doesn’t tell you. We only get enough hints to know that the main characters are…different from us but not in what way, their planet is in pieces from a disaster that’s never fully explained, the ghost that the scout finds doesn’t know it’s a ghost, and everyone else has forgotten how to be alive. It’s sad, and inspiring, and just lovely, and Heller nails the voice of both the scout and the lonely ghost (who I imagine being played by Orlando Jones in his role from “The Time Machine.” You’re welcome.)
The most interesting thing about ghost stories is that almost everyone has one.
Hauntings feature even more prominently in “The Thing About Ghost Stories” by Naomi Kritzer. The main character, Leah, is writing her doctoral dissertation on ghost stories. Not on ghosts themselves, but on the need that people have to tell those brief, sometimes frustrating snippets about the times they ran into something they can’t really explain. Then Leah’s mother passes away, and Leah finds herself in the middle of a ghost story of her own.
The research for the dissertation involves collecting hauntings from anyone who’s willing to talk about them (which is pretty much everyone), and these interweave with the way Leah is affected by losing her mother to Alzheimer’s, a disease that reduces a loved one to a confused, ghostly shadow of the person they were, long before they’re actually gone. There’s a lot of yearning here, for the dearly departed, for confirmation that there’s something after death, and for the ability to believe that messages from beyond the grave are something more than just wishful thinking (“Every time I find a penny I know my grandmother is with of me.”) The ending wraps up very neatly, and you’re left thinking “Boy, that would be so nice. But did it really happen? Really?” It’s oddly unsatisfying, and I think that may be the point.
They were at the end of their collective ropes; the waste kept piling up and they needed to let whoever took over in ten millennia know what it was, where it was, and why they probably shouldn’t use it as a dessert topping or rectal suppository.
It starts with a thought-experiment: If you have something that’s going to be dangerous pretty much forever, what would you use to warn people thousands of years in the future when you don’t even know what they’ll recognize as a symbol for “DANGER”?
For a little background, (and to get yourself good and angry at corporations that try to duck responsibility for horrible decisions that hurt a lot of people) look up an article about The Radium Girls. In “The Only Harmless Great Thing,” Brook Bolander merges their story with the tragic history of Topsy the Elephant, setting the tale in an alternate world where elephants can speak in sign-language and are recruited (enslaved, actually) to take the place of the women who’s bones rotted away from years spent painting glow-in-the-dark radium on watch faces.
This one is very, very angry, for very good reason. But it’s about more than rage and revenge. Bolander tells this across several different tracks: the flunky having to deal with the way stories are corrupted to hide the parts of history we don’t want to deal with, the dying Radium Girl Regan who has to teach an elephant how to do the job that’s killing her, and the elephants’ sing-song tales of the Mother Who Freed The Stories and the Truce With The Dead. It’s Just So Stories mixed with the nastiest effects of corporate propaganda and lordy but this one made me cry. If I have one complaint it’s that the story doesn’t resolve so much as just stop, and I wanted to see the part that happens just after the ending.