My Thanksgiving time travel story for your enjoyment

Once in a while, I put one of my own stories on this blog. They seem to get as many readers when I do this as they do when I get it published somewhere. And even if I did get this one published, it'd be hard to get it timed exactly right to come out right on Thanksgiving, which seems like the best time to read this. 

So here goes, one of my own stories.

 

Herald

At first, it annoyed me that Elmer made me learn time soaping from her in person. Truth be told, it annoyed me at second, too. Couldn’t she have just given me the password to a secret wiki page or something? Why had she made me practice with the dispenser in her basement over and over for months? And why had she made me go all the way into Greenpoint for one particular kind of apple fritter she just had to have before bringing it all the way back to her place in Brooklyn to practice?

Now that I was actually holding one of the bones to a four-story high baby Yoda, though, I was glad she’d made me do all the training in person. Soaping wasn’t about science or technique as much as it was about psychology in practice. Not really something a wiki page could teach you. It was a kind of Jedi mind trick, an irony not lost on me based on the balloon I was trying to keep more or less tied to the Earth. I was so nervous, I couldn’t even feel the bone—what viewers at home would call a rope—in my hands, and I half feared I’d be carried off into the sky with the baby Yoda. I guess the name of the thing was actually Grogo. I don’t know. I don’t have Disney Plus.

“This is more of a workout than I thought,” one of the other volunteers said to me, huffing as she said it and pulling down more than was necessary. She was short, and the physics of it pretty much dictated that all the taller handlers would be shouldering the real weight. She should have faked effort until we got to Herald Square to deliver her message. That was her real purpose in being here. That was all of our real purpose in being here. How else would the competition to stand in the cold all morning for free be so fierce?

I forget what her story was, what kind of message she was hoping to send as a stowaway. We’d all exchanged our stories in the pre-dawn dark. Hers was probably something about love. That’s what more than half of us were here for. It’s what got me into soaping in the first place. When I first reached out to Elmer to teach me, I wanted to make Elaine forget the things I’d said to her at Thanksgiving a year ago.

“Port side, a little more slack!” Elmer ordered the volunteers, running up and down the columns. “And don’t forget to smile! You’re in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Enjoy yourselves a little.”

We all tried to smile, but we forgot her command almost as soon as she moved around to the other side of the balloon. Who could smile when we were all so close to the moment of truth? To work right, time soaping required absolute focus at the right moment, and we all feared that if we focused too much on anything else before we got to the end, we’d wear ourselves out prematurely.

Having run from one end of a column to the other and back again, Elmer eased up to the front and slowed to a walk.

            “I know it’s hard to relax,” she said, in a voice low enough only the first row of spectators in Bryant Park could hear. “But trust me, your message will go out a lot better if you’re calm. You’ve got this. Good luck, washers.”

            With that, our backs straightened and our flagging arms grew strong again. Elmer was a good pilot. Actually, her name wasn’t Elmer. It was Nancy, but I hadn’t known that until she’d introduced herself in the wee hours of the morning as the pilot to the other balloon handlers.

 

            She’d had me call her Elmer from the first time we met. She said it’s what all the time soaping mentors went by. I guess it came from something they used to do a million years ago called Ham radio. Back then, before the Internet and wiki pages and helpful how-to TikToks to show you how to do everything, there was no way to learn the hobby except to have someone who’d been doing it a while show you. There were guidebooks and stuff, I guess, but there was a lot of equipment involved, and it was pretty complicated, so the best way to learn was to sit with an actual human guide. These guides were called Elmers. She told me why, but I forget. I’ve called her Elmer since I first found her through Bubble, which is like Craigslist, but on the dark web and only meant for time soapers.

            Dark times led to the dark web for me. After two years with Elaine, I’d said one stupid sentence at her parents’ house, and that was the end of it. I wanted Elmer to help me undo it, or to at least make it seem undone to Elaine.

 

            “We’ll pull up right at the end,” Elmer Nancy said to me in an even lower voice. “While we’re waiting, the actors will run on and do their thing. That’s your moment.”

            It wasn’t as cold as we’d hoped. It’s a lot easier to hide the dispenser over your ear if you’re wearing a hat. For that reason, most of the volunteers had started out with them on in the morning, but I was sweating so bad I had to take mine off back at Columbus Circle. The few still doggedly keeping theirs on looked like they’d been cooked in one of those roasting bags for turkeys. Hiding it in my pocket wasn’t a bad second option, though. I could still pull it back out when I needed it.

            “Remember,” Elmer Nancy advised us one more time, “You aren’t trying to convince anyone, because there’s nothing to convince them of. The way it is in your head is the way it is.”

           

“The way it is in your head is the way it is” is a mantra she’d been drilling into me since the first time we’d met. When I knocked on the door to her brownstone, she’d opened it quickly, snatched the box of pastries from me, pulled me inside with a quick glance down each side of the street, and took me to the basement. She’d inhaled both fritters and waited until the last bite had fully travelled down her gullet, her eyes closed to savor every hint of flavor. At some point, she decided she was done, opened her eyes, and that’s the first thing she said to me. The way it is in your head is the way it is.

I was confused, because I was hoping to make it so the way it was in my head wasn’t the way it really was anymore. I wanted to change the past, undo what I’d said. She said that’s not how time soaping worked. Time travel was impossible—another frequent truism of the time soaping community—but if you could convince someone that something else had happened in the past, didn’t that come to the same thing? Anyway, she said what I was feeling was regret, but that regret wasn’t how to change the past. If you transmitted even a sliver of regret, the dispenser wouldn’t work. You had to believe that the way you wish things were or the way things had been was the way they really were. That was the only way to change the mind of the receiver, and in so doing, to change the past.

 

We passed 37^th, and I found that now I was pulling harder on the bone than was necessary, wearing myself out as much as the woman next to me had been doing. We all were. We were in the zone now where the crowds thinned out, because the television broadcast limited viewing near Herald Square and the big finale. We were all getting close to show time. Volunteers patted their pockets with a free hand to make sure their dispensers were still there. We’d all been given these white and black jackets that said The Mandalorian on them, and we’d tucked our devices into them.

It was an open secret that nearly all the balloon handlers were there to time soap. At first, the parade had tried to stop it, but then they almost couldn’t get anyone to participate, so they had to relax a little bit. You were allowed to soap as long as you kept it reasonable. Convince the person you’d been crushing on that he’d actually been in love with you their whole life? Fine. Get your bosses to unfire you for that outburst? No problem. Just keep it discreet. The main time soaper on top of Macy’s was for the big corporations that paid for it. Your ideas were allowed to hitch a ride, but only if it wasn’t something that would go messing with their profits. One year, a soaper tried to convince the whole world that Santa Claus didn’t exist. For thirty minutes, capitalism seemed doomed, until Santa came along at the end of the parade and the corporate soapers managed to undo the damage just in time. Considering how well you have to understand the subtleties of the human heart to make soaping work, it’s amazing how well the folks who work for evil corporations do at it. Because of scares like that in the past, you could only get into the parade now if you had someone who’d vouch for you. Elmer Nancy had gotten me in. She’d been a balloon pilot for years. Nobody questioned her.

I thought one more time about scrapping the mission Elmer Nancy had given me, of going back to the original plan of trying to soap Elaine into thinking I’d never said what I’d said. It was so stupid. Her parents had kept pushing wine on me, and I don’t usually drink, but I didn’t want to be rude. And then it took so long to get dinner out, I just kept getting drunker and drunker. Elaine’s mom, whom I just called Mrs. Wanjiru, said that she hoped I wouldn’t find her cooking too strange. She’d never seen a turkey until she was twenty-five, she said.

“I’m sure if you can cook a warthog, you can cook a turkey,” I said. Mr. and Mrs. Wanjiru both laughed, but Elaine went cold, and she dropped my hand she’d been holding on the couch as we watched the parade. She didn’t say anything, but I knew she was angry. I would have asked what I said that was wrong, but someone named Jordin Sparks came on to perform, and suddenly I realized that I’d always loved her music and I pulled out my phone to download all of her songs on Spotify.

Elaine barely spoke during dinner. I should have been concerned, but I was, for reasons I didn’t stop to consider, so excited to go book a trip on a Disney Cruise Line, I just couldn’t bring myself to think about it. It wasn’t until after dinner when I was taking Elaine home that I realized how badly I’m messed up. I didn’t catch everything she said, but as words like stupid and Americentric and insulting and racist burst out, each one popped a bubble of thought that had been floating in my mind, bubbles having to do with a movie I suddenly wanted to watch or Broadway show I suddenly wanted to see or how glad I was that Al Roker was still alive and how much I hoped he’d be back next year.

I tried to stammer out some kind of explanation. Wait, did I want to explain? Should I just apologize? But if I apologized, would that mean I thought I was totally wrong? Hadn’t her parents just made a joke about how easily I got sunburned, and wasn’t I just trying to make us all comfortable with each other by making it okay for us to tell jokes we wouldn’t say in public? I felt like maybe I was two-thirds wrong and one-third right, but that my two-thirds wrongness was mitigated by having been a hundred percent soused. But I couldn’t both apologize and explain at the same time. I had to pick one or the other, and it confused me so badly I chose neither, and I yelled at her instead, and we were done by the time I pulled into her driveway.

That’s why I’d volunteered. We’d all volunteered for some reason similar to that. I wanted to make her think I’d never said it. Was I going to punt that all away now because Elmer Nancy had filled my head full of talk about responsibility to society?

There were more delays as we got closer to the finale in front of Macy’s. Some acts performing in Herald Square hadn’t had to march the whole way—who was going to make Cher wave along the whole damn parade route?—and they had to be weaved into the rotation so they could perform in front of the cameras. It didn’t really seem right to me. Was this a parade or a lip-synch concert? If something couldn’t be marched along a parade route, did it belong in a parade? But there was big money paying to put those acts in, so the definition of a parade got stretched as long as the route along 6^th Avenue.

I was waiting for one of those acts to go on. That was going to be my moment. If I held to my course, that is. Elmer Nancy had seemed so convincing in her basement when she’d asked me to do it, I couldn’t tell her no. But now I was thinking back to Thanksgiving a year ago and reliving how lonely I’d been in the year since, and I didn’t care about the world. I wanted Elaine back.

 

“Time soaping isn’t time travel,” she’d said to me when she first pulled out a dispenser in her basement and started to show me the basics of it. “It was invented as sort of a side effect of the search for time travel, though.”

I tried to listen as I turned the dispenser over and around in my hands. It looked like the kind of headset we’d all had to start using for video meetings when the pandemic started, the kind with a pullout microphone, only the microphone was sort of a jagged ball and it was supposed to go to the back of your skull instead of in front of your mouth.

“Scientists and nations tried for a long time to discover time travel,” she said. “But they finally decided it was impossible. The universe protects causality, it turns out.”

I thought I could guess what “causality” meant, although it was a word I’d never used before. It didn’t help me to follow what she was saying, though.

“Early on, we realized that you couldn’t send, say, a whole person into the past or future. Their mass was too great. In order to travel in time, you’d have to somehow have negative mass, so you could go faster than the speed of light. Nothing we know of has a negative mass, of course, and a whole human being has a mass so large it couldn’t begin to get near that fast.”

I install heating and cooling systems for a living. I can read a schematic and I understand how electricity works. I can even do mental math pretty well, which has given me the false impression over the years that I’m smart in science and math. But this stuff was over my head. I thought hard of a question I could ask that would sound halfway smart, enough that she didn’t kick me out for being too stupid to learn.

“If you can’t send a whole person into the past, what about a message, like a radio message? Those go about the speed of light, don’t they?”

“We used to think there was some hope in that,” she told me. “But over time, we started to think about it. Let’s say you could send yourself a message in the future. So you start to send it, but as you’re about to send it, a message comes to you from the future telling you to destroy the machine. So you destroy it, but by doing so, you make it so the device never existed, meaning you couldn’t have gotten the message from the future in the first place. It makes no sense.”

            She brushed crumbs from her blouse. I didn’t know if she really understood physics or she was a crank. She seemed a little undignified for a physicist.

            “Aren’t you just describing what makes sci-fi stories about time travel confusing? Just because it’s confusing doesn’t mean it’s impossible, right? I mean, the soapers work, don’t they? If not, what am I doing here?”

“Oh, they work alright,” she said. “But those paradoxes aren’t just potential plot holes. They’re the reason we know time travel can’t work. Have you ever heard of Hawking’s cocktail party?”

I knew who Stephen Hawking was, and I thought of making a joke about how lively a party a guy in a wheelchair could have thrown, but then I realized that jokes like that were the whole reason I was looking to go into the past to fix my love life in the first place.

“Hawking threw a cocktail party in 2009. It had champagne and caviar and balloons and everything. But he didn’t send out the invitations until after the party. He figured that if anyone actually figured out time travel in the future, they’d be able to get the invitation and come back in time to attend. Since nobody attended, he figured that time travel was impossible.”

I stood there trying to understand how the timing of that worked.

“So if time travel is impossible, what am I doing here?”

“Time travel doesn’t work because the universe doesn’t violate the law of causality,” she said. She was standing in front of a wooden workbench under a long, hanging fluorescent tube light. Dust was falling on her, and she looked gray and indistinct.

“A city is burned because a cow kicked over a lamp. If the cow doesn’t kick over the lamp, the city doesn’t burn,” she said. “Everything causes something else. Time travel would alter the series of causes and events, and the universe just doesn’t like that, it would seem.”

“So the dispenser…”

“There is something, though, that confuses causes and events all the time. The human brain. If you can convince the human brain that the past was something other than it was, you can make someone see the whole chain of causation differently. For them, at least, the message got there before the event. Get enough people to change their perception, and the world, at least this world run by human brains, really does change.”

This sounded like an episode of something I’d seen.

“You mean like a brain worm? Something that inserts itself into your memory and makes you think it was there all along? Like Photoshop for somebody else’s brain?”

“That’s a little bit crude, but it’s not too far off, I guess. People’s memories aren’t really all that stable to begin with. They’re always looking to rewrite their past to what they wish had happened. They just need a little push. That’s what the time soapers are. The same way soap changes water molecules so they penetrate clothes better, the time soap dispenser sort of makes the brain a little more absorptive. Enough that you can send a thought to it and it will accept that thought as its own.”

I felt a little disappointed. I wanted to go back in time and unsay what I’d said. But here she was talking about some kind of hypnosis or something where I’d just convince Elaine I’d never said it. What would happen when some stimulus made her snap out of it and she realized she hated me again?

“Of course, to make it stick takes a lot of power. I’m talking 1.21 gigawatts kind of power here.”

I felt like that was a reference she expected me to get, but I had no idea what it meant.

“When the first bubble makers were being made, it was nations that paid for them. You can see why the CIA would be interested in technology that could make all our enemies think they’d already lost, or that they loved us after all. But all of our adversaries developed similar technology at about the same time, meaning they kept cancelling each other out. Every nation still has a dispenser or two, just to keep things equal, but they’re useless now, except for making sure nobody else takes over the world through suggestion.”

“So this dispenser I’m holding…”

“Is useless in itself. It’s far too weak to soap a brain on its own. It has to hitch a ride on something much more powerful. You need your signal to hide in a much stronger signal.”

“How am I going to do that?”

“Well, the biggest soaper still in existence is at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade,” she said. The dust below the light shimmered like a halo around her head. I couldn’t tell what color her hair was.

“The parade? You mean Santa and Miracle on 34^th Street and Snoopy balloons?”

“That’s the one.”

“What the hell is a soaper doing there?”

“Nations can’t use soapers for defense purposes, but companies can. They just have to keep their purposes below the level of something another nation would care about enough to fight it.”

“So who is behind the Macy’s Parade soaper?” I asked.

“Oh, whoever has a shitty movie or television show nobody cares about but which they need people to care about. So they have a huge and powerful soaper sitting on the roof of Macy’s. When a balloon for some Nickelodeon show goes on the air, they hit the soaper and suddenly, children all over America who are watching the parade at Aunt Sally’s find they need to borrow their parents’ phones immediately to stream the show. A singer nobody has paid attention to in a decade suddenly has a resurgence. A musical about to open its run that nobody has bought tickets to suddenly sells out.”

“How does it work so well?” I asked. I was hungry and wishing I’d gotten a pastry for myself.

“Think about it. Everyone watching the parade is in some kind of awkward family setting. They’re at a house they’re anxious to leave. They’re hosting family members who annoy them. They’re meeting their future in-laws and they’re nervous. And it’s not even noon yet, so they’ve got hours left to go. And here’s this parade of floating balloons and vanilla announcers losing their absolute fucking minds with excitement over it. It’s all very disorienting. Leaves the mind very open to soaping, especially when the world’s most powerful commercial-grade soaper is beaming thoughts at you.”

 

We were making the turn onto 34^th Street now. Elmer Nancy was busy guiding us through the turn, which wasn’t easy. It would have been challenging for the Marine Corps, getting the left flank to wheel while the right flank held firm. I was near the front of the balloon, and I looked into the baby Yoda’s eyes. They were black and expressionless with no pupils, sort of blank the way an ancient Greek statue was. It was as if the baby Yoda didn’t want to influence anyone with its own emotions. It wasn’t going to tell me what to do. Within your own heart look you must.

We were in Herald Square now, within site of the front of Macy’s and the cameras and the performances. I could almost hear Al Roker, now back at the parade, frothing at the mouth and about to give himself a heart attack with excitement.

“Okay, we’re going to hold up here while they bring an act on in front of us,” Elmer Nancy said. Then, lower, she added, “Clear thoughts. Best wishes.” She was looking at me when she said it. I still couldn’t tell what color hair she had, and I swore her face looked different than it had before. I wouldn’t have recognized her if it weren’t for the voice in my head asking me one last time for a favor. Remind me of why I did this, it said.

As we held Grogu in front of the performance area, a DeLorean pulled out in front of us. Its doors popped open, and out came an Einstein-looking older man in a white hazmat suit and a younger man with curly hair, tennis shoes, and a red sleeveless vest. Music came on, and they danced and lip-synched their way through a routine. I couldn’t really hear what the song was about, but I thought maybe it was something about science and time travel. Eight very attractive female dancers came on, shaking their way through what was probably the exposition to whatever musical they were brainwashing people into wanting to see.

Elmer Nancy had said it was a movie when she was a kid. A series of movies, actually. It had meant a lot to her, but she didn’t think I needed to watch them in order for me to help her. In fact, maybe it was better if I never watched Back to the Future. I’d have a clearer head that way.

A week before the parade, she’d told me what she wanted from me.

“I need you to send a message that time travel is possible. That if someone only works hard enough, they’ll be able to find a way to make it happen. I want you to say that this has been a dream since someone was a kid and first watched those movies.”
            “Who am I sending this message to?” I asked her.

“To me.”

 

I pulled out my dispenser and put it on my head. I would only get the chance to soap once. All the companies who paid Macy’s for a spot in the show had their own bubbles going out. You could sneak in a small message here or there, but if you tried to soap a second time, they’d catch you and squelch your message. I had to decide. Would I help out Elmer Nancy or would I wait until Back to the Future the Musical cleared off the stage and go send Eileen a message of love with all the other balloon holders?

Grogu’s eyes seemed to grow a shade darker, as if to emphasize that the answer wasn’t anywhere outside me. To send a message with my own brain that would implant in the brain of another, I had to be absolutely clear in my own mind. I looked at Elmer Nancy. She gave me a slight smile and blinked slowly. Not really a blink so much as a message of understanding. I know it’s hard, she said. I’d do it myself if I could soap my own mind. Wouldn’t the whole world be easier for all of us if we only could?

The song changed. You gotta get back in time, it said. Over and over, it said it. I looked into Grogu’s eyes and thought yes, you’ve got to get back in time. You can do that through time travel. Isn’t this a wonderful story and not in any way convoluted and isn’t this musical delightful and not at all a shameless cash grab aimed at Gen X and their sentimental money? This is brilliant, I thought, and I tried to mean it. This is brilliant, and everyone should aim to be an eccentric scientist in a hazmat suit with white Einstein hair who turns a car into a time machine. Ignore the plot holes. It makes sense. Do this with your life.

 

The actors cleared off the stage. Elmer Nancy directed us forward. The crowd cheered. We were on, and while sixty balloon holders sent their desperate messages as inconspicuously as they could, the announcers said something cheery. Then our time was up and we were headed off to go deflate the balloon by sitting on it until all the air was out.

Had it worked? After the balloon was folded and put away for next year, I couldn’t tell that Elmer Nancy was any different. All the people I’d marched with for the last few hours were texting the loved ones they’d just tried to soap. Some got immediate responses and some were still waiting, chiding themselves for not having believed enough.

Relieved at last of her piloting duties, Elmer Nancy strode over to me with such determination, I was afraid she was coming to yell at me for not having done my job right. Instead, she asked me to go eat at a place in Koreatown she knew was open.

 

I let her order for me. I didn’t know a damn thing about Korean food, and I wasn’t even sure I could locate Korea on a map. A year ago, I might have made a joke about Gangnam style or whether the restaurant served dog, but I didn’t make jokes like that anymore. I was going to shut up, eat what she told me, and wait for her to talk.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve had to ask someone to do this for me,” she said. She wasn’t half bad with chopsticks, and she was digging into a number of bowls filled with green or red plants I didn’t know.

“Why hasn’t it worked before?” I asked, wondering if our talking about it this way meant it also hadn’t worked this time.

“Oh, it’s worked, but each time, the same conglomerate that sponsors the Macy’s time soaper has gone back and erased the memory. So I have to fight back.”

“Why would they care what opinion you hold of a silly 80s movie?”

“Because that movie is what inspired me to first get interested in time travel. Which then led me to realize that it would never work, but time soaping might. Which then led me to invent the technology.”

“You mean you’re….”

“Nancy O, the inventor of the time soaper, the technology nobody admits exists but every powerful entity on Earth is using.”

And suddenly I saw her. The brilliant Korean-American scientist even I’d heard about. She was quoted on every documentary about anything involving science. But I, and probably most of the country, didn’t know what she was famous for or why everyone thought she was so brilliant.

“I never wanted to make the soaper for commercial or government purposes,” she said. “I originally thought of it as a tool for therapists. Something to help people out of their bad habits. If you think you’ve never smoked, it’s a lot easier to quit smoking. If you think you’re assertive enough to tell your boss he’s creeping you out with his sexual jokes, you’ll be assertive.”

I tried stabbing one of the green things enough to get the pointy end of the chopstick through it and use it as a skewer. It only worked enough to flatten it out. Elmer Nancy picked it up and put it on a little plate in front of me. I stared at it, not sure how to get it from the plate to my mouth. I wished she’d have just fed it to me.

“Of course, you can’t develop something like a soaper without the resources of a big institution. I started with my university research lab, hoping that’s all I would need, but before long, we needed help from the government, and then industry heard about it and got involved. We didn’t just need help with equipment and power, we needed test subjects to send and receive the ideas. We needed psychologists to figure out what kind of suggestion would work. It got away from me very quickly.”

I gave up on using the chopsticks like pincers and just picked up the green thing with my fingers and put it in my mouth. It was oily and spicier than I expected.

“There was a scary moment there where it seemed like governments were going to be able to use it for domination through hypnosis. We got lucky that it was possible to cancel out soap with more soap. But then companies came in to use it for advertising, which of course had been their intent all along. I resisted. I started to speak out in public, making it known to everyone that this technology existed and what it was being used for.”

A server piled meat on a grill. She didn’t look at me, but Elmer Nancy spoke to her in Korean, and the server handed the tongs to her and left.

“I suppose you can guess why not everyone knows about it even though I’ve made it known to the world?” she asked me.

I thought about it. Normally, I’d have failed to come up with the answer right away, written myself off as an idiot, then panicked and lost the thread completely. For some reason, though, this time I didn’t. I kept on track. What was the most likely reason? And soon, I had it.

“The companies that use the soaper erased it from everyone’s mind?” I said.

“Exactly. Of course, soaping isn’t an exact science. It’s kind of frothy, so to speak. They couldn’t completely wash away the memory of something that had so fully gotten into the public consciousness. And there are irresponsible uses of it that threaten its secrecy. A few years ago, they loaned a soaper to a rich man who wanted to be a politician. He started using it all over the place to make everyone think he hadn’t said things he’d clearly said before, or that he hadn’t done things he’d definitely done. It actually got him elected president. It would have worked even better, but he was so capricious about how he used it, the time soaping would start overlapping with other time soaping, and soon the people he was trying to influence just started running into each other. The companies eventually had to steal it back from him to get him to quit messing up their tool. So there is still some public knowledge of it they can’t erase, but it exists somewhere between rumor and conspiracy theory. Only people desperate enough to need it end up finding out the truth.”

People desperate enough to need it. People like me. I’d screwed things up with Elaine. Elaine, who I’d loved from the minute she met me at the door when I showed up to fix her thermostat. She’d been holding a six-pound dog in one hand and a spatula covered in cake batter in the other. She was wearing a purple tank top and white shorts in the middle of winter because her thermostat wouldn’t shut off and her apartment was eighty-eight degrees. When she said, “The damn thing won’t shut off, I’m sweating my tits off in here,” I’d thought that if I were around her, I couldn’t imagine ever feeling sad again. And here I’d been without her for a year and I’d been sad the whole time.

“I’ve been playing a game of cat and mouse with the big corporations,” Elmer Nancy told me. They half erase my mind to get me to quit trying to tell the public about their tool or to develop a rival to it, then I, who have just enough memory of being a part of it to know I need to reverse it, manage to get my memory back. I fight them for a while, then they manage to get the next soap savant to override my memory again.”

She seemed calm for someone whose brain was a battleground and knew it. She had the serenity of a baby Yoda balloon. The barbecued meat, which she’d handled herself, was half gone.

“If you already know who you are, more or less, what do you need people like me to remind you of it for?”

“Because I want to design something so good, it breaks the corporate soapers altogether. Something that people can use to improve their lives, not just something companies can use to sell crap to us. To do that, I need to believe I can with all my heart. I need to believe I’ve been wanting to do this my whole life. I need a story about having seen a story about time travel when I was a kid and making up my mind that was what I was going to do.”

“But you know I put it there. How can you still think it’s real?”

“It honestly doesn’t matter if you know it’s made up. If the memory is there, it’s real. People who’ve been through trauma keep living the same thing over and over even after they know it’s gone. The dispenser does the same thing, but in a more useful way.”

I was still hungry, but I was out of water and didn’t see the waitress anywhere to ask for more. Without water, I was afraid to keep eating.

“Each time, I come back a little better,” she said. “A little smarter about how it all works. That much soaping, that much openness to suggestion in the brain—it doesn’t make you softer. It makes you stronger. And here’s what I think I realize this time, now that you’ve helped me break free again. Causation. It isn’t what you think it is. You aren’t miserable because of what you said. You’re miserable because of what you didn’t say afterwards. There’s no soap in the universe that can take back the worst things we’ve done. To some extent, you can’t change causes, even in people’s minds. But you can change effects, and when you do that, it changes how people perceive the cause itself. The way to change the past isn’t in the past. It’s in the future, in how you react to what you did.”

With that, she tucked into the meal and didn’t speak again until she’d cleaned up everything on the table. I was hungry after marching all morning, but I looked around helplessly for someone to ask for water while she finished it all. When the last morsel was gone, she stood up and dropped what looked like a poker chip on the table. I picked it up and looked at it. It had an engraving of bubbles on one side and Buddha on the other.

“Here you go. Congratulations, you’re an Elmer now. Use it wisely, and pass on what you’ve learned.”

After she had gone, I realized she’d left me to pay the bill.

 

On the train back to Queens, I signed up for a free trial subscription to Disney Plus. Even if you knew you were being manipulated, even if you were part of the manipulation, literally pulling the strings the whole time, the trick could still work on you. I started to watch the first episode of the Mandalorian.

When I came out of the station by home, I turned off the show. I wanted to do something about the future that would change not the past, but the effect the past was having on me. I pulled up a text box for Elaine. My phone still remembered the last angry thing she’d sent to me a year ago.

I thought of explaining myself, of telling her that of course I hadn’t meant it like that and how could she think that I could, after I’d learned so much because of her I could even tell when she was speaking Kikuyu and when she was speaking Swahili. I could have tried to explain it, but explanations don’t change the future or the past. I could only think of one thing powerful enough to do that. So I wrote Elaine nothing is right without you and nothing ever will be and I’m so sorry and I sent it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

             

           

           

Looking for life after literary fiction

Can one Marie Kondo one's reading life? Decide to leave unread that which does not bring one joy? It seems obvious that one could, although since my late teen years, I've made a lot of my reading decisions based at least in part on what I thought I should read. In fact, I probably weighed should over want to most of the time. It comes with making literature your major, I guess. You fall into a habit of thinking that if you're not reading something on an assigned list, you'll pay for it in the end. 

Since I took up writing seriously ten years ago, I've probably gravitated toward literary fiction at least in part because I thought it was what I should read. It wasn't the entire reason, though. There were at least two other reasons. First and by far the larger of the two reasons is that I read seeking answers to life's big questions, and I thought I'd find that more in literary fiction than in, say, books about sexy cowboy werewolves. I mean, I'm sure Renee Rose and Vanessa Vale have a lot of great thoughts about why there is something rather than nothing and the Kantian distinction between phenomena and noumena, but perhaps it's fair to say that these thoughts don't quite make it into their fiction. I wanted fiction that met my expectations of substance. So in a very real sense, literary fiction is what I want to read. The second reason is because I felt like my own writing was probably more like literary fiction than anything else, and I wanted to learn from others to improve my own work. 

After ten years of it, though, I've been a little disappointed in literary fiction's ability to come through in either category. On the one hand, I can count on one hand the novels and short stories I've read in the last ten years that I found deeply transformational in terms of how I view my place in the universe. Meanwhile, although I've definitely improved as a writer and now accomplished things that are pretty good for an amateur, I'm stuck and unlikely to get unstuck. My ceiling seems to be to occasionally get a good response from the top tier journals but never quite make it in. Since I do not wish to only be a consumer of fiction but a producer as well, I've found my participation in a scene I can't break into very frustrating. Frustrating enough that I will drop my annual critical project in the middle because a story rubbed me the wrong way and I wasn't quite able to explain why. 

But it's not like I'm going to quit reading altogether. At times over the last ten years, I've wondered whether I really am a lit fic writer (or primarily a lit fic reader). I love a well-made sentence, or a voice that sticks with you for days after you read it, but there were times I found myself wishing I could read a story once in a while where you could summarize the plot in a few sentences. Or where I could even tell what the plot was the first time through reading. 

So after putting down this year's Best American Short Stories, the first thing I picked up was an anthology of science fiction short stories. There wasn't an obvious equivalent to BASS in sci-fi, but "The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023," edited by R.F. Kuang, had "American" in it, so I picked that. 

It's different, all right

The first story in the anthology was first published in Conjunctions, which I know as a publisher of lit fic, so I was wondering if I'd even made a change. This story, "Readings in the Slantwise Sciences" by Sofia Samatar, could have been in BASS. Well, kind of. If could have been in BASS if the guest editor were really into hippie fantasy. But in general, it was still what I would characterize as being a somewhat language-centric story. 

After that, though, there started to be a real divergence from lit fic. One thing that surprised me was the prevalence of fantasy. I guess the name of the book did have fantasy in it, so I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was sort of guessing the mix would be about 17 sci-fi to 3 fantasy. Some of the stories were a little bit tough to classify as either, but I believe the anthology more or less alternated between sci-fi and fantasy, with some of the fantasy entries being horror.

I did not care for most of the fantasy, and I found myself wishing the publishing industry did not find it necessary to package sci-fi and fantasy together. I don't find they really have that much to do with each other or scratch a similar itch, and rather than making each other strong by joining forces, I found that the combination was in danger of causing their mutually assured destruction. I'm not going to go into depth about why I disliked most of the fantasy entries, because it's not my thing and that really is all there is to it. I find few things less magical than magic. "Pellargonia: A Letter to the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology" by Theodora Goss was an exception, but for the most part, I was much more interested in the sci-fi stories.

One of the difficulties in writing science fiction is how to explain how your world is different from the reader's world (and often how your world got to its current state from the reader's world) without boring the reader with exposition. 

This is an especially perplexing problem for a sci-fi short story, which has very little space in which to build an alternate world. Consider "Rabbit Test" by Samantha Mills, one of two stories in the collection reflecting concerns in the current, real world about bodily autonomy in the wake of the overturn of Roe v Wade. The world of this story has a whole slew of new controls on nubile and especially pregnant women to introduce, so how does it do it without a lame screen scroll type of information dump?

Guest editor R.F. Kuang, echoing advice she herself has received, recommends dealing with the problem by writing "not from the point of view of someone encountering a world for the first time, but of someone who has lived in this world all their life...What do they notice? What is new to them? What is so natural to them that it hardly warrants comment? What are the bizarre pronouncements that only they could make?" 

Some of the stories in the BASFF anthology pull this off better than others. "Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness" goes in the complete other direction. It reads like a mockumentary, and at least half of the narrative is exposition, the kind that would be given to the viewer of a non-fiction documentary. I found the effect a little bit dull, and this was one of the stories I struggled the most to get through. Other stories pulled off Kuang's advice much better. "Termination Stories for the Cyber Dystopia" by Isabel J. Kim, "Pre-Simulation Consultation" by Kim Fu, and "The Difference Between Love and Time" by Catherynne M. Valente were the three best stories in the collection. "Termination" in particular was extremely adept at getting the reader to understand its world without breaking from the narrative to explain it. 

Committing to the bit

Huang expressed her love in her introduction for stories that "commit" to whatever storytelling choices they make. This love spills over for her into "camp, silliness, and everything stylized." This includes Moulin Rouge, which I also love, but also the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, which I detest. She loves ""genres that lean fully into what they are," stories that "take themselves completely seriously."  She is tired of "leather-clad superheroes winking to declare, 'Don't worry--I'm not taking this too seriously." She is wary of irony, which she feels often substitutes for wit. 

Compare this to literary fiction. If literary fiction had a motto, it might be an adaptation of what Harold Bloom wrote about poetry in his introduction to the 1997 Best American Poetry series' "best of the best" anthology. He said that "all bad poetry is unfailingly sincere." I think this could well be the motto of a lot of literary fiction as well. It might believe that all bad fiction is unfailingly sincere. 

So we have two poles here, lit fic preferring cool detachment over sincerity, and Kuang's vision fo alternate world fiction as charmingly naive and self-serious. Since I've been reading literary fiction for a long time, I've probably come to identify a little bit with the idea that I should have some level of detachment from my own work, that I need to be its master and, no matter how emotionally I identify with its subject matter, that I should make decisions about the story with an objective eye.

There were times while reading BASFF that I could, in fact, have lived with a little less "commitment"  and a little bit more attention to language, form, and style, the very things I've been thinking literary fiction overemphasized at times. I'm not going to name stories here, but a few used words wrong or had a style that was so "sincere," so untainted by discipline and art, it became jarringly unpleasant.

However, on the whole, I found it a welcome reprieve from literary fiction. I liked stories where plot was at the center. I liked stories that were quixotically taking on universe-sized questions rather than soberly putting a small portion of existence under the microscope. While my literary fiction reading might have occasionally made me too snooty for some parts of the anthology, I also found myself wishing that many literary fiction stories could allow themselves the openness, silliness, or lack of concern for propriety in the stories I was reading. 

I suppose it should be no surprise that my preferred style might be somewhere between high art and low. I need enough plot and "commitment" to be engaged, but also enough skill and control to be entranced. I don't want so much earnestness there is no thought of form, but I don't want form to take over so much there is no possibility of earnestness trumping form, leaving some parts technically imperfect but emotionally resonant. 

Politically, I'm too conservative to be a liberal and too liberal to be a conservative, so why shouldn't I be in a no-man's land aesthetically in writing as well? In any event, it was enjoyable to do something different, so I'll probably continue with "different" for a while. 

 

 

Submitting to sci-fi journals seems a lot more professional than I expected

For over four years, I've been consistently writing short stories and submitting them to literary journals, the kind that focus on literary fiction. Generally, when you submit to one of these journals, you can expect to wait at least three months for an answer. I've waited over a year several times. Because of this long wait, everyone sends out simultaneous submissions, meaning you are querying more than one journal about a story at the same time. It's just assumed this will be done. Very few journals anymore object to the practice. Prairie Schooner is one journal that comes to mind that specifically says they don't want simultaneous submissions. I know there are a few more, but for the most part, journals know they can't expect you to wait six months in between attempts to get published, so they are fine with simultaneous submissions. (And a lot of writers just ignore the few injunctions against simultaneous submissions that are out there, anyway.) For the most part, if you just let journals know as soon as it gets accepted somewhere else so they don't waste time on it, you're fine.

Also, it's become pretty common for these journals to start charging a nominal fee to submit a story. Three dollars seems to be the going standard. I don't really object to this practice. As the journals will tell you, it's comparable to what writers used to have to spend in the old days to mail manuscripts out. Now that everything is done electronically, meaning it's a lot easier to submit, the number of manuscripts every journal is getting is spiking. Meanwhile, it's not like each of these journals has thousands of subscribers paying to read the journals. The magazines have costs that are usually covered by a small, charitable endowment of some sort, one they can't afford to stretch thin.

If you get published in one of these journals, you typically don't get paid. Some journals will pay you along the lines of about twenty bucks, because the principle of paying writers something for their work is important to the editors, but in general, you're getting paid in exposure and a credit to put on your resume for when you submit work somewhere else.

So it was very strange for me to submit a story to sci-fi journals. For a long time, I've written stories that were on the fringe of literary fiction and something else. I'm a lot more plot-heavy than your average lit fic writer, but overall, I've always thought that my work leaned more toward lit fic than anything else, so I've focused on those journals. I wrote a story this month that was enough sci-fi I decided to try publishing it somewhere other than a literary fiction outlet. (By "enough sci-fi," I mean I can imagine it being made into an episode of Black Mirror.)

I used this list of places to submit speculative short fiction to start with. Early on in the list, I noticed a couple of things. First, there is a stated aversion to simultaneous submissions. Just as I was about to go on the rant all writers go on about how it's impractical to expect any writer to wait this long for a single response, I realized that these sci-fi journals did something I'd never seen before: they told you where you were in the queue to be read and gave you an estimated wait time. For one journal, it was sixteen days. For another, it was ten, unless they liked it enough to send it to the second round.

They also all mentioned something I've seldom seen talked about: money. They all offer to pay somewhere between five and eight cents a word. So, a couple hundred bucks for a story. All of these indicators--a team of readers anxiously plowing through the slush pile, a jealous interest in not wasting anyone's time, and actual discussion of money, leads me to believe that sci-fi is more like a business than lit fic. Meaning they actually have some expectation of making money. That's encouraging. I'm so used to thinking of writing as a dying industry that needs life support from wealthy patrons of the arts to keep it going, it's nice to know that somewhere, there are people who see it as a viable way to make a living.

I don't know if I'm going to keep writing sci-fi. My novel that I've nearly found an agent for a few times is fairly sci-fi, but that's the only other thing I've done so far that I could sell as something other than lit fic. I kind of have to write the stories that occur to me. I'm just enjoying the surprise that there is a model somewhere in the world for something other than an all-volunteer editing team publishing an all-volunteer team of writers.

Train to Busan: Post-apocalyptic Gothic that works

A few weeks ago, I contrasted "Gothic" stories with a more rigorously defined science fiction. To summarize quickly, the Gothic is more concerned with the interior, psychological landscape of its characters, while science fiction is concerned with how humanity interacts with the environment, especially as technology both shapes humanity and is shaped by it.

In a science fiction post-apocalyptic or dystopian tale, for example, much time will be spent on how humanity got into the mess it's in, the social and technological steps it is taking to survive, and the specific details of day-to-day existence. The science doesn't necessarily need to be so rigorous it would pass muster in a peer-reviewed journal, but it must exist, and it must be central to the story. Interstellar comes to mind as an example.

In a Gothic post-apocalyptic or dystopian story, on the other hand, the focus is more on how the change in society wrought by environmental distress affects humanity psychologically. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a perfect example. McCarthy never even explains how the world inhabited by his characters came to be cold, gray, infertile, and lawless. We see the characters struggle to survive in great detail, but there's not much science that goes into it: scrounge, sneak, steal, get lucky. That's the formula. Mankind doesn't overcome the trouble by applying rational thought to solving problems, but by keeping hope alive.

The first Korean zombie blockbuster

I decided recently that my Korean skills have atrophied to an unacceptable level, so I started watching nearly everything Netflix had to offer in Korean. (I haven't yet committed enough to get Drama Fever or one of the Korean-only apps.) Netflix now has Train to Busan, the 2016 zombie blockbuster. I loved it. It reminded me a lot of the 2008 hit The Good, The Bad, and The Weird, which was Korea's first hit "Western" (set in the Gobi Desert). That movie took a quintessentially American genre that Americans have used to understand themselves for over 50 years and turned it on its head. While the American Western was about settling the frontier, The Good, The Bad, and The Weird was about what happens when where you live is someone else's frontier to be settled. I saw it as a working out of the old Korean proverb about how geopolitics apply to a small country: "When two whales fight, the shrimp breaks its back." This movie was about how the shrimp can learn to survive.

Train to Busan also took a common Western genre--one that's becoming more and more common by the day, it seems-- and gave it a uniquely Korean twist, one that managed to have moments in it of meditation on the rapid changes in Korean society.

Train to Busan (부산행) was as good as any Western movie about zombies, and better than most.

The story focuses on Seok Woo, a fund manager who will happily screw whoever he needs to in order to come out on top. He reluctantly agrees to take his daughter, whom he temporarily has custody of while he and his wife work out the details of their divorce, from Seoul to Busan to see her mother. He agrees because he feels sorry when he buys her the same birthday present he got her for Children's Day because he works too much to notice what she likes. He also missed her recital, when she wanted to sing the song she'd been practicing for him. So he gets on the train with her on her birthday.

Along the way, the great zombie outbreak happens. It's very sudden. We get very little explanation of what caused it. We learn that the company responsible for the virus was a company Seok Woo's fund was working with, so he bears some responsibility. But we don't know what the company was trying to accomplish or where they went wrong. That's not what the movie's about.

Before the train gets going, we get little peeks into the lives of some of the other passengers Seok Woo will interact with. There is a high school baseball player and the girl who likes him but he is too shy to like back yet. There are two elder ladies (ajuma), one of whom is much more caring than the other. And then there is Yoon Sang Hwa and his pregnant wife. All the passengers will work to change how Seok Woo sees the world, but Yoon will be the strongest impetus to Seok Woo's catharsis.

Seok Woo's daugher, Soo Ahn, is different from him. As the crisis unfolds, he tries to convince his daughter to take care of herself and let others worry about themselves, but she insists on helping others. She naturally takes to Yoon and his wife, who also exhibit concern for other passengers. Seok Woo's personal change takes place when Yoon unselfishly helps him and when he sees how upset his own daughter is with how much he only cares for himself.

It's not a complicated twist for a character to make, but why should it be? One thing about Zombie fiction is the way it breaks human behavior down to its rawest elements. When a crisis hits, you either throw others ahead of you to save yourself or you try to help others.

We don't get a whole ton of exposition about what abilities the zombies have. They're strong, but not the most powerful zombies we've seen in film. Tougher passengers can fight them off. We know they get confused by the dark and that they immediately calm down when they do not see live humans. One difference between them and other zombies I've seen is that the disease passes to new hosts very quickly. You get bit, and within seconds, you're turned. (The movie does cheat at the end in order to give us a tender moment, but it was worth it.)

The quickness with which the zombie virus passes is mirrored by how quickly selfishness spreads among many of the human survivors on the train. When faced with fear, they turn on each other with lightning speed.

The part where I make it about something more than just the movie

"In order for the culture to have a future, we have to go back to the past." -Korean rappers Epik High

The movie reflects an angst in Korean society that's been growing for some time. Korean society modernized with unbelievable rapidity, going from a medieval society to hyper-modern in a little over a generation. It hasn't slowed down its pace of change. Standards of living for most Koreans have skyrocketed, but along the way, old relationships that kept society together have collapsed. Korean parents used to put all their money into their children rather than retirement plans, because their children were their retirement plan. But a strapped young generation cannot pay for their elders, leading to an impoverished older generation being stuck into sub-standard poor houses.

It's not unlike when feudal relationship broke down in the West. On the one hand, they needed to go. Nobody wants to be born into relationships and kiss ass to everyone born above him. On the other hand, even though it sucked to have to serve a lord, that lord did have responsibilities to take care of you. Similarly, in Korean society, you had to show a shocking (to me as an American) amount of deference to your elders, but they in turn owed you care and concern.

In the West, The enlightenment was a result of the breakdown of feudalism, as was democracy. But so were the nightmare capitalist and industrial societies Dickens wrote about. Korea went through that, but on a highly compressed timeline.

We often see zombies as a warning of how mindlessly people now live their lives. It's a commentary on how we consume media and, nowadays, social media. Train to Busan turns zombies into something more basic. The cause of the zombie outbreak is selfishness, and the zombies are nothing more than an external monster representing what people are becoming internally.

Zombies have power on our imagination because they are humans stripped down to the reptilian brain, devoid of empathy and sympathy. This movie doesn't overthink what to do with that thematically. What is opposed to non-human humanity is human humanity. Caring for one another isn't just hippy-dippie crap. There's a strong biological basis for it, and the better we are at it, the better able we are to survive stresses in our environment, whether they are slowly creeping socio-economic changes brought about by globalization and technology or monsters hurling themselves as us as we speed through life on a train.

Nothing to take seriously: Justin Cronin's "The Passage" and what makes sci-fi worth reading

"Part of Peter knew it was all fake, nothing to take seriously..." -from Justin Cronin's The Passage

A recommendation from a friend

I mentioned a few months ago that I wanted to branch out from reading literary fiction. Lit fic didn't really seem--in spite of its reputation as the serious branch of literature--to be scratching the particular itch for meaning I look for in a book. Sci-fi, despite being sometimes despised by the literary powers that be, often did give me what I wanted, so I decided to give it a more systematic try. A friend I admire a lot recommended Justin Cronin's The Passage trilogy. If I had read what it was about, I'd probably have passed on it. If I didn't respect my friend so much, I'd have quit early on. But I kept reading. Halfway through, I realized I was just never going to like it, but I pressed on to the grim end.

If you think this post is long, trying reading this book

What's in a genre?

One can get too wrapped up in the boundaries of genre. Is Vonnegut science fiction? Is Atwood science fiction? Does it matter? Is Cronin's novel sci-fi, or does the dystopian novel have its own, separate genre? Or is the novel something else altogether, like Gothic or horror?

I don't really care what category of book you call it, but I do care about what I like. There was an excellent review of Cormac McCarthy's The Road several years ago--a novel one review likened The Passage to--that, in the process of separating sci-fi from Gothic literature, hit upon an important distinction for me. Paul Kincaid argued that science fiction, with its " espousal of rationalism and its basis in the idea of an understandable universe," was not a true descendant of Gothic literature, but horror, with its "employment of wild landscapes and weather that reflect the mental landscape of the characters...its irruptions of the extraordinary and the supernatural into the mundane, (and) its sense of charged emotions," was. Because The Road is more interested in the psychological landscape than in questions like how we came to a post-apocalyptic landscape in the first place, Kincaid argues that it is more "moral parable" than "science fiction examination of a world in extremis."

That is how I saw The Passage. It was clearly more a horror novel with an interest in the meaning of good and evil than a science fiction novel interested in man's ability to compete with his environment. Yes, Cronin does, unlike McCarthy, provide a scientific basis for how the world came to be overtaken by vampires (although we never call them that, and there is even a passage that tries to paper over never calling them that by joking about how nobody ever calls them that). But it is clearly gobbledy-gook science. A virus developed by the Army somehow switches on the thymus gland, leading to...wait for it...a "hugely accelerated rate of cellular regeneration." If this is sound science, then midichlorions are the answer to the Grand Unified Theory.

The subjects of the viral research just happen to obtain the same characteristics classically attributed to vampires. Some reviewers of the book from 2010 when it came out seemed to contrast it favorably with YA vampire fiction like the Twilight series. But the book follows the same trope of "maybe myths have some basis in fact" that Twilight did:

"The teeth, the blood hunger, the immortal union with darkness--what if these things weren't fantasy but recollection or even instinct, a feeling etched over eons into human DNA, of some dark power that lay within the human animal? A power that could be reactivated, refined, brought under control?"

This is a much abused trope in horror, that there is nothing more terrifying than what is in our psyches already. There's nothing original here. This is Gothic sentimentality in a nutshell, reading our inner conflicts into the exterior world. One reviewer insisted that the book's back-cover pitch of being about a government experiment gone wrong made it sound less impressive than it really was; I thought, though, that this description is really all the novel was, and that it never, in its rambling 800 pages, overcame its flimsy premise. (Reviewer after reviewer praised its "epic" scope, which seemed to me to just be another way of saying the book was very long.)

The eight days I spent on a book I didn't like were at least useful to me in helping to clarify what I am and am not interested in.

I wouldn't insist that a science fiction book be overly exacting about its science. There are few writers with the science chops to do that, and fewer still who could do it in an interesting way. But that doesn't mean throwing all credibility to the wind. Or if you do--if your interest is in examining something other than human ingenuity against a world that has changed in some aspect--then you cannot pair junk science with the wish to be taken seriously. Vonnegut used junk science all the time, but he was writing darkly humorous satire. Cronin was trying to have it both ways, waving a magic wand to get vampires, but also wanting to appear to have something deeply serious to say about the human soul.

You may stop reading here unless you really want to get the fruits of me reading a book way past the point of diminishing returns.

But is it a good book?

Kincaid insisted that although The Road wasn't science fiction, it was still an excellent novel. The Passage might not have been what I wanted, but was it good for what it was?

It was fascinating to me to read this book knowing Cronin was not only once a literary fiction writer, but actually came from the the Iowa Writers' program, ground zero of lit fic in America. I wondered if he would slip some writerly techniques into his vampire novel meant for mass consumption.

He did not. I'm amazed at the kind reception he got for this book from serious reviewers. Cronin seems to have abandoned everything one is taught in a writing program on the way to making hella money. Maybe it's a pointless project of me to list all the faults in the novel eight years after its release, but since I just spent 20 hours of my life reading this book, I feel I should spend at least an hour or so giving back to the world what made those 20 hours so painful.

Keep in mind, this list is greatly shortened from all the sins I found to object to.

1. Adjectives 

Any basic writing tutorial will warn writers about using too many vague adjectives. While great writers can sometimes ignore the rules, this is a very hard rule to break effectively. Cronin littered the novel with adjectives that were used to avoid the hard work of rendering a scene more fully. Here are a few examples:

Large: used about 70 times
Examples: "...set eyes and graying hair, with large hands good for work..."
                  "...long hair, prematurely gray, and large eyes, permanently damp with sympathy."
                  "...a large man with a heavy beard and powerful arms and a genial manner..."

Wide: used about 80 times
Examples: "...the big houses and wide, princely lawns of old Midtown..."
                  "Her eyes grew very wide"
                 (twenty pages later) "...their eyes wide with alarm..."
                 (nine pages later) "The soldier's eyes were wide with panic."

Long: Difficult to determine, because of words like "along," but at least 100 uses as an adjective
Examples: "...the clawlike hands and the long teeth crowding the mouth..."
                  "...pale skin and long lashes that curled upward at the ends..."


I could go on and on with the adjectival sins. Smooth, vague, slender, tall, and mild all make frequent appearances. He had to use these adjectives rather than render scenes more imaginatively, because he just included so much crap in the book he could have edited out. But let's move on.

2. Terrible or trite similes

Examples: "...fierce blue eyes, a chin that looked like it had been chiseled from stone..."
                  "...as if the muscles of his arms were hung on bars of iron."

3. Failed attempts to be poetic

Examples: "...a series of dancelike movements: bodies converging and separating, flung for brief periods into wider orbits, only to be drawn back again under the influence of some unknown power, a force as calm and inevitable as gravity."

"That was when it had occurred to Jane that the thing she'd seen was love. It could be nothing less than the force of love that had lifted Teacher into the air, into the waiting arms of the glowing bear-man, whose light was the radiance of royalty."

"Water blue like he'd never seen before." (A cheat way of describing something you can't figure out how to describe is to say the character can't describe it.)

4. Abuse of the Garcia-Marquez "looking forward to looking back" trick 

At the beginning of 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez begins thus: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” That's one of the greatest beginnings to a book ever. Cronin does this maybe 50 times in the novel, where we flash-forward to a character flashing back to the event being described. He begins many chapters this way. He also uses it over and over to convey that something has happened that leaves such an impression on the characters, they are still trying to interpret it years later. The first line of the book does this. It shows up in the middle of action sequences. ("Later, Peter would recall the scene as a sequence of discrete details.") It very much began to feel like a writer who didn't know another way to begin a chapter or to convey that something important was happening. 

5. Length

This book did not need to be so long. The first 275 pages could have been done away with, or shortened to one chapter of about 40 pages. After we see the world fall apart in pages 1 to 275, we flash forward 100 years to a colony of survivors. (All of the main characters here, in a move I'm sure had nothing to do with movie considerations, are the perfect YA age.) These survivors end up learning everything that happened in the first section anyway. 

Cronin's choice of continually shifting POV helps the reader to spread his sympathies wide, but it also adds to the length, often unnecessarily. There is a brief section in the POV of Leon, a guard at a camp who gets knocked out by the main characters. We literally never see him before or after this, and the only point of the section is to let us know that the bad guy is coming. 

And now, the plot holes

How much should plot holes matter? During the debates a few months back about whether the latest Star Wars movie was good, some apologists for the movie claimed that looking too deeply into plot holes ignored the point of a Star Wars movie. I'm sympathetic to this. It is possible to get lost in the picayune details and ignore the bigger story going on. But this story is really mired in plot holes, and that's even allowing for a virus that turns on a gland to make people into vampires.  

Two-thirds of the book is 100 years after the big vampire extinction event. In spite of that, the characters often eat food canned before the event. (One survivalist site I checked said the max date for canned food is 30 years. It might go longer, but it needs to be stored at a constant, cool temperature yet also never freeze. There should never be dents in the cans. None of this is true of the food our heroes find.)

They fix up 100-year-old cars and drive on 100-year-old tires with 100-year-old gas. They keep lights on to beat back the vampires with 100-year old power stations and 100-year-old batteries. There is one mechanic-electrician-genius who knows how to fix all of these things. 

To be fair, the book tries to acknowledge these things by having the characters bring up how you have to check the canned foods to make sure they're still good, and they do mention how hard it is to keep old rubber going. But having made these objections, they still eat canned food a lot in the book as they wander, and they drive those old tires over hundreds of miles. It felt like Cronin wrote the book, realized there were plot holes, tried to patch it over with a little bit of self-acknowledgment, then left all the holes. 

Speaking of which, how are the roads 100 years in the future even in any condition to drive on? In one section, we see a road overgrown with grass and gone back to nature, but for most of the adventure, the kids drive hundreds of miles on the highway from California to Utah and we don't ever read about a pothole.  

I was a Marine. I can tell you that if your battalion has twenty hummers in the motor pool, you're lucky if two of them actually work. But these folks manage to come across a bunch of old hummers that have zero replacement parts, fix them up, resuscitate the tires, the batteries, and so on, and drive from California to Las Vegas. They get in gun fights. They plow over stuff. The things keep working. 

It had the feel of just not wanting to keep figuring out how they got from one place to another or how they kept finding something to eat, so the author waved a magic wand over it. 

Or maybe Cronin got promotional consideration from the Hummer makers to make it look like their stupid vehicles actually work. 

Then there's the whole issue of how some rag-tag group of people are able to do what the whole of American might could not do by keeping the vampires at bay. There is some explanation of this when we realize that the vampires have become weakened after eating up nearly all the prey in America. But still, all it takes for one Colony to survive are walls and lights. You're telling me the U.S. Government couldn't have managed that? One character muses about how the world used to have so much electricity it was literally flooded with lights. How did our current world fail to build walls and turn on lights when the future can keep the lights on with 100-year-old equipment and a teenage engineer?

Cynical story-writing

I don't understand why Twilight gets hate for being fluff teenager stuff while The Passage gets a pass. At least the author of Twilight, I take it, wrote about what she really liked, while Cronin seems to have cynically written his way to $3.7 million based on a craze someone else started. There is nothing in this book that suggests it should be taken seriously where Twilight should be disregarded. In fact, the suggestion that this book is somehow better strikes me as possibly sexist. They're both brain candy. We shouldn't give one of them gravitas it didn't earn. 

I get it. People love this book. Stephen King thinks it's brilliant. Maybe I'm completely wrong. One reviewer after another (and my friend, who I still very much respect in spite of this one book) talked about how they were sucked into it after 30 pages. I pretty much hated it from the words "cellular regeneration."

Maybe I shouldn't make too much of having a different opinion from the rest of the world. I generally just don't like horror. So maybe this was just not the right recommendation for me, and I'm obtusely complaining that this Gothic story isn't a brainy sci-fi story. But it's a little unnerving to me to feel so strongly about a book so many other people like. It makes me feel like I have no idea what's good. Because if I'm wrong about this book, I'm really, really wrong.