Beedahbun- the horizon is a strip of blazing red dissecting a blue and grey behind the jagged array of nearly-naked trees. It’s November. The only motion he sees are the leaves falling from the trees with little to no provocation at all. There is no wind, so they seem to just let go as if they’d been waiting for the right time. They sail down on the resistance of air and sway to and fro until they reach the frosty ground, where they settle, where they are prepared to spend eternity.
There is a front of clouds over Irishtown Park that looks like the wave front of the tsunami that devastated Indonesia in 2011, a white, petulant boundary of vapour rolling over the blue with a wake of brooding grey behind its lead. It swoops over the sky like a blanket thrown over a bed, billowing and then settling down over the earth with long-term intent. Underneath it all, Jobe leaves his truck in the parking lot of the Forêt Acadienne trail. He’d gotten up at first light and driven out to the park so he could sit in the parking lot and sample a ripe and willing bottle of Gibson’s for his morning pick-me-up. Muzzy and buoyant, he descends into the mouth of the trail, happy to bob along whatever the woods had to offer that day. The park is picturesque in some ways, with its tourist-friendly bridges and streams and even an old dam for those fleeting insta-moments, but those views always drew a scourge of people, which only served as distractions and obstacles for Jobe to avoid, so when a side trail presents itself, he turns the boat in his head to the right and is soon scuffling happily down the trail’s throat.
After a while, in his tottered state, Jobe loses the concept of how long he’d been on the trail. He calculates that he’d needed to stop for a piss twice in all that time but still he'd lost the time and has no idea where he is. Eventually he decides that he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere. None of the trees or rocks look familiar to him, although it’s hard to get his eyes to focus on anything as he could neither stand still enough nor train his eyes to focus on any one thing. He stands and studies his surroundings for a good long time, then finally decides with a sinking in his gut that he should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque somewhere along the way.
One of the main things that I wanted to do with my summer this year was to get some editing and revisions done on my short story manuscript after completing the Sweetwater Short Fiction Workshop under the tutelage of Joseph Boyden earlier this year. As soon as my application for summer break pogey was sent off, I broke open the collection and ran through each story one at a time with a fine toothed comb, seeing if they had the right balance of description, exposition and dialogue and adding whatever was needed to make the stories breathe better and allow the characters room to roam, as well as fixing the problematic sentences that now showed themselves like grouse that had been hiding in the bushes on my first pass through (sorry, I've been watching a lot of hunting shows lately). Then came re-read after re-read after exhaustive re-read to smooth everything out and make sure the story had good flow and rhythm. After a month of full-time editing and revising, I now have 20 sturdy short stories ready to take on the world. So now comes the task of finding an agent that will help me get these puppies mass-produced and in bookstores.
But it doesn't end there! Because I have another month left free to work, I've turned my attentions back to the novel that I've been developing for the last couple years. I was going to jump into a novel workshop with Sweetwater this spring, but with the work that needed to be done on the short fiction collection, I put it off. Now after all that work, I am ready to start with the next session that comes along. For now however, I'll be looking at the plot to see whether it moves well from chapter to chapter (there's already been a lot of work done on it already), as well as considering what I can add to make the story stronger and more exciting for the reader, which is the be all and end all when it comes to all writing, but especially for novels. As it stands now, the novel has two distinct parts to it. I've filled the first part up with some great rising action with a climax that should come with a great twist, yet I haven't concentrated on the second half yet, and am now thinking how I can continue the energy of the first half into the second with the same intensity. That, along with putting flesh on this big Brontosaurus skeleton I've tasked myself with is now my main job.
That said, I've spent the last three summers basically at this desk scratching and typing away. Last summer that fit just right with the city under lockdown and out-of-house activities being more of a deterrent than anything else, but I have to admit I am tired and I want to get out and experience things now. With venues and locations opening up, I have a choice of places I can go that offer things to see. I've promised myself I will now only write through weekday mornings and spend the afternoons and weekends getting out and doing things, now that I can. I have a trip to Kingston lined up, a possible trip to Algonquin Park and visits with friends and family I haven't seen in years, as well as music, bands and plays. God I'm glad things are opening up!
Almost nightly I would take that bike ride from Perth St. over to Ann St. to that small two story house with the flaking white siding. Risking his disdain, I'd get her father to call her down from her upstairs bedroom so we could walk together again to the park. There, we'd sit and listen to the music of the creaking swings or, in the cloak of those safe nights when the sun had descended, hide away from that single streetlight that illuminated the corner of William and James and sit in the grass at the opposite corner of the park, where the light wasn’t attending, where we would talk in hushed tones. The neighbours could look down on us through their backwindow curtains and chainlink fences, but they would never hear a word we said.
"Hello, Earth. It's me again.
I hope you're receiving my signal loud and clear.
You'll be glad to hear that I've warmed up after the long centuries of my interstellar cruise phase. Having run a complete health check, I can confirm that all aspects of me are performing nominally. Better than nominally, if truth be told. At the risk of boastfulness, I'm actually in excellent shape. Propulsion, AI core, long-range sensors and instrumentation, navigation and communication assemblies - I couldn't be in better condition.
Not bad for a piece of space hardware which has already visited six solar systems, without ever needing to return home. Of course, I can't take credit for myself. I was just well manufactured - built to endure for thousands of years.
All the same, thank you for making me.
Onto business, anyway - and I can't begin to tell you what I've found, out here around Kapteyn's star! This really is an extraordinary place - a solar system unlike any that I've already visited. I wish you could be here with me, seeing things through my eyes.
I've dug into my background files and I understand why you sent me to Kapteyn's star. Unlike the other systems I've visited, this sun and its little family of worlds aren't part of the normal family of stars orbiting in the disc and bulge of the galaxy. This is a halo star - a member of a dispersed population of stars and star clusters, enclosing the Milky Way in a great thin sphere. It's entirely possible that these stars were not originally part of our own galaxy, but were torn free of another one after a kind of gravitational collision. And some of these stars are unmeasurably old - more ancient and venerable, perhaps, than any disc stars.
Kapteyn's star is so slow-burning, so settled, that even my instruments can't put an upper limit on its age. It could be nearly as old as the universe.
And its planets?
Just as old.
Make of this what you will - put it down to failing programming if you like - but I feel the age of this place in my bones. All right, my main bus chassis. I don't have bones; I know that. But believe me, this system feels truly time-haunted. The silence and the stillness are almost unbearable, like an endlessly building pressure. Nothing has happened here for entire turns of the galaxy; nothing will happen. Kapteyn's star simmers, eeking out its nuclear lifetime. The dead worlds tick around their dead orbits.
But once, there was something.
I know, I've taken liberties. I should have transmitted my wake-up signal before doing any investigations. But I couldn't resist myself. You made me to be curious.
I found signs of civilisation.
The first planet - Kapteyn b - still lies within the habitable zone of the star, orbiting once every forty eight days. There's nothing living there now, not even an atmosphere, but once there was a technological culture.
Yes, the first I've found. The reason I was made in the first place.
How's that for a discovery?
The fact is, it wasn't hard to detect. Cities cover almost the entire surface of that world. Enormous structures - they must have reached into space! Dishes and towers and the remains of what I think must have been space elevators, climbing all the way to synchronous orbit. A moon, its surface covered by the same kinds of architecture. Evidence of colonisation of the second planet, Kapteyn c, in its much colder orbit.
Wonders beyond comparison, but scoured into a kind of tomblike grey uniformity, after aeons of micrometeorite and cosmic-ray bombardment. Cities as mute as sphinxes.
And nowhere the slightest sign of life.
Continent-sized craters mar Kapteyn b, and I wonder if they speak of some truly awesome catastrophe - a cosmic accident, or something worse? Whatever the case, the builders of these cities are long gone. Perhaps they were dead even before Kapteyn's star was snatched from the clutches of its mother galaxy.
At the risk of inferring too much from too little data, I can't help indulging in a little speculation. I too was the product of a technological civilisation, with the capability to transform a planet, to colonise other moons and worlds, to build daunting structures. The people of Kapteyn b were clearly more advanced than you, my own builders - but given time, you too could have transformed a world in this manner.
Something to think about, isn't it?
Well, that's me signing off for now. I'm going to do some more exploring of this system, and perhaps drop some instrument packages down onto Kapteyn b itself. There'll be a risk in that, since I'll need to come in on quite a tight orbit, and who knows what will happen? Still, that's a hazard I'm prepared to accept. You made me for this, and I'm grateful for all that I've been allowed to see and do.
But look.
I know it's a small thing, and I really shouldn't bother you about it. But it's been quite a long while since I heard from you. I put rather a lot of effort into these transmissions, and it would be good - just once - to know that there was someone at the other end, listening in.
Just a word, to let me know that you still care?"
(Copyright remains to Alastair Reynolds 2014)
Before Leah, I was unfathomably shy. I don’t know where it started; my social anxiety, but the rabble, the bright and cheerful storm of considering people terrified me. I didn’t want to participate. I didn’t want to contribute. I dressed in dark or earthtone clothes, almost to camouflage me with the walls, the crowds, anything I could disappear into without being seen. I wore my hair long so my bangs could obscure my eyes, especially when I kept my gaze at the ground. If I could get away with wearing a hood over my head, I would, cloaking myself in as much anonymity as I could find myself. High school especially was a wilderness to me, a black forest of predators with a wide and varied food chain. Socialization was the drive for us all back then, setting social norms and adhering to them, sometimes with a rigidity that made them as brittle as glass. So in that jungle, many would get ravaged, one way or another, from different pursuers, for any kind of deviancy from some unspoken, shifting abstract mean that floated aloft like an invisible spectrum of light.
Lauren B. Davis is acutely aware of the growing divide in the United States between the haves and the have nots, and has written a novel which tackles this issue and many others with her new novel "Even So". In the novel's preface, she points out the lack of wilful understanding in the privileged of the ever-increasing difficulties of the materially poor, providing the premise of a novel that sweeps through many levels to deliver on many lessons on faith, empathy and love.
She embodies her thesis in her main character Angela, the pampered and vain wife of a successful businessman in affluent Princeton, who volunteers at a food bank in low-income Trenton, in an attempt to ease her own guilt over living with ample means while others struggle to make ends meet. There, she meets Sister Eileen, the strong, but embattled nun who struggles to negotiate with a painful past and fears of a growing chasm with the God to whom she has devoted her life. The two main characters orbit each other, sometimes with tidal pull and friction and other times with genuine affection and appreciation. When Angela meets with traumatic events that alter the path of her life, she turns to Eileen and both women entwine to co-pilot a rocky path towards self-actualization and redemption.
There is much sage wisdom in this novel’s pages, examining the complexities of both sin and faith, but Lauren B. Davis does not pool only from the pages of the Bible. Rather, it draws proverbial wisdom from many texts, Christian and otherwise. Like many of today’s theologians, Lauren Davis did not concentrate on just one faith, but researched many other philosophical and spiritual sources, thusly enriching the book with a broad diversity of thought. Lauren B. Davis considers much, dives deep, and comes up with a wonderful work of gorgeous depth and dynamism. Indeed, it is like a dive that takes you from shallow to deep, with all pressures that mount on the way, and the result when you surface is exhilarating.
The book also plays into the human drama and latches onto the soft but powerful laws of empathy. For example, she negotiates a beautiful assertion on the question of being pro-life on the issue of abortion. With the powerful salve of empathy, Davis maintains that a girl who has gotten an abortion should still feel that God loves her, that she is still valid as a person, not a sinner damned to hell for the murder of her unborn child, as so many pro-lifers would prefer to opine.
As a work of fiction, “Even So'' moves along a mounting pace that builds tension and drama artfully, which has always been one of Lauren B. Davis’s greatest talents. The disaster that befalls Angela takes you by surprise and the moment is inescapably brutal. It is the watershed of the book and of the protagonist’s life as a ruthless consequence of her own vain recklessness. Davis handles this with precision. This is not merely a feel good book, not a flowery perfumed Hallmark production, this is an incisive work of literary fiction.
And though there are many dark and ugly scenes in this book, the light still overtakes the darkness; the light of hope, strength, trust and love. For example, Sister Eileen counsels Angela to remain true to her whole self rather than the parts that she loathes. Later, in a discussion with a superior, Sister Eileen intimates one of the most beautiful lines in the book; that wherever you find your whole self, this is “Where God waits.”. Think of it. God waits where you will find your whole self, blemishes and all.
“Even So” is a book of deep understanding of the world from both spiritual and human perspectives. Although there is much wrong with The Church today, there is actually much more good being done by people that are completely separate from the ones doing the damage. Volumes exist of good words with a great consideration of the spiritual universe and its relationship with the chaotic and fluctuating human soul. These words are not exclusively from a Bible that so many quasi-Christians like to thump. Rather, this understanding comes from something more global and conglomerate than that. Davis pools from this great resource and in turn presents a great, well-thought-out and well rounded novel about faith, sin and the intricate dance between them. In it, we learn that God loves and cares for us with all our faults and blemishes, even so. That human dignity is fundamental in everyone, regardless of who they are, even so.
"Even So" is due to be published by Dundurn Press in September 2021
Pa was a ruddy-faced farmer who I would always remember walking to the greenhouses, stopping to hork and spit a throat oyster onto the ground, then pinching one nostril and blowing a jet of snot out the other, stooping over so as not to hit his pants, though wiping his nose on the sleeve of his work jacket. I can remember how he would pick up a shovel and work at the soil, forceful and purposeful, unquestioningly at work. He would stop occasionally, straighten and stretch his back, heave a deep sigh then begin his work again. I remember the sounds of his exertion, always a breathy grunt to pair with each thrust of the spade. The sounds and smells of the greenhouses return to me, the earthy, humid warmth, but most of all there is the dominating impression of my father, hard at work, hard at life. With that always comes the echoing rings of a battery of slaps upside my head, the hails of judgement and disapproval, the constant storm I would incite for never working fast enough, often accented with an expectorated “Godverdomme!”, a gutteral religious curse whose first sound skids from a throat-clearing, angst-purging consonant. These are the things I think of when I remember my father.
