Entanglements

by Tomorrow’s Lovers, Families

  I was one of those kids who would read anything. My father had a box of Zane Grey in the attic, which he had read when he was a boy. And there were twenty-six of them. I don’t know if he wrote more than that, but that’s how many were in there. I read every single one of them, and it took me all the way up till about twenty-two to realize they all had the same plot. But I didn’t care. They were romantic, they had the Wild West, as I’m sure it never was, they had all of these romantic plots. . . . I read whatever was lying around. My mother would give me books that she had had as a girl, such as Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen, which baffled me. I didn’t understand any of this guy’s attraction for this baby-talking girl, no matter how pretty she was.

  LY: Have any of the authors that you’re talking about influenced your own writing?

  NK: I don’t know. It was so long ago when I was reading them. I was [under] twelve. And I don’t admire Zane Grey any more. The style is overblown, the dialogue ridiculous, and the plots overly romantic. But at the time I didn’t care. I read for story, I didn’t read for language, I didn’t read for character verisimilitude. I was interested in story. I guess that’s what’s lingered from that childhood: the sense of story is important.

  LY: It seems as if you’re now attracted to stories that are challenging, are complicated, and make you think. That’s often true of your own fiction. You don’t give your characters easy outs; there are no easy heroes or villains.

  NK: I’m glad you said that. I almost never create a pure villain. Rarely do I create a pure villain. Once in a while. And when I’m teaching at Taos, one of the things I tell my students over and over again is that things cost. You can’t just have a completely happy ending, where everybody has sailed through and come out the other end and it hasn’t cost them anything. Things cost, and you have to show that ambiguity of real life in your fiction.

  LY: What about the fantasy that you were reading?

  NK: I read the first Narnia book, and it was okay, but I was young, and it didn’t strike me with an intensity. I read all the fairy tales. Those struck me more. I remember reading Hans Christian Anderson, who horrified me. Those are horrifying. . . . But I read them over and over. The little girl who sinks through the swamp to the Marsh King and is brutalized down there, a lot of it was . . . “The Little Match Girl.” . . . A lot of it was horrifying. But at the same time, I read them over and over again. There must have been something in there I wanted. I don’t know what.

  LY: At different points in your writing career you’ve returned to fantasy and fairy tales. What is it that interests you in those kinds of stories?

  NK: They work on a metaphorical level. My rewriting of “Sleeping Beauty” has to do with everybody else falling asleep except beauty. And there she is one hundred years, because she doesn’t age. . . . Well, she does age, but she doesn’t die. But she’s the only one awake. And how do you deal with being the only person in the world? And then how do you deal with being old when everybody else awakes around you and is still young? I was interested in using the fairy tale form to explore real questions in our world in a metaphorical kind of way. All of those rewritten fairy tales, Ellen Datlow was doing a whole series of books of them, and she kept asking me for one. So, I would pick one and try to find an angle on it that everybody else hadn’t already used. And that’s how those stories evolved.

  LY: In addition to science fiction and fantasy, you write technothrillers and young adult science fiction. Do you balance the big ideas and the intimate relations similarly in these modes of storytelling?

  NK: I don’t think I have enough flexibility to change my balance with the subgenre. I always try to balance the character stories with the science stories. The one I’m writing now has very complicated science having to do with physics and I have to get a lot of the science in there or the novel won’t make any sense, but I can’t just bore the reader with page after page after page of scientific explanation. So, you pull out every trick you know to balance the dramatic stories of the characters with the science that has to be in there for the rest of the novel to make sense. In some places this comes easy, and in some stories it comes hard.

  That’s the basic problem of hard science fiction. How do you get the science inthere in a way that is convincing? And to be convincing, it has to be pretty detailed. That is, both be convincing and yet balance with the story. That’s what I’ve spent my entire career trying to learn to do.

  LY: Does organizing your stories around families and other intimate relation-ships allow you to do something with science and technology that you might not be able to do otherwise?

  NK: I think parents have an intense investment in their children, and partners—romantic partners, sexual partners, families—have intense investment in each other. It allows me to give an intensity to the ethical aspects of science fiction more than the adventure ones. I prefer that. Ursula K. Le Guin said, “Sometimes the more there is going on in the outer space, the less there is going on in the inner space.” With families there’s a lot going on in the inner space, because there’s all of these intense personal relationships. And that’s a good arena for exploring the ethics of sacrifice, and competing needs, and things like that.

  LY: Your characters are sexual beings as well as scientific and social and familial beings. What I find particularly striking is that the characters who think and talk the most about sex in your stories are not perfect Hollywood ideals—instead, you’ve got everything from angry teenagers to globetrotting grandmothers. In your worlds, sex is for everyone! What led you to that choice?

  NK: Because sex is for everyone. And because it’s an important part of life, especially if you’re an angry teenager. It occupies a lot of your thoughts.

  It seems to me that if you’re going to create realistic people, both the sexual feelings and the feelings of love that you have for partners [need to be included]. . . . Humans have a desire for connection, I think, and the connection can be romantic, or sexual, or both, or fraternal, or sororal, or familial, and I write about the need for connection that people have. I also think that a majority of human beings, if they can’t get a positive connection, would prefer a negative one to no connection at all. So, there are negative connections, too, in my fiction.

  LY: Throughout your career, you’ve been interested in human evolution and the ways families do and don’t change over time in relation to scientific and social events. Are there any specific developments you see on the horizon that you’re either really apprehensive or really excited about right now?

  NK: The thing that makes me the most apprehensive right now . . . well, two things. Climate change, of course, and the other one is income disparity. As long ago as 1992, when I wrote “Beggars in Spain,” I was dealing with the question: as automation and computers and software and nerds run more and more of society, what happens to all of the people at the bottom who used to do those jobs? In 1992 it was a concern. Now it’s getting to be a major, major concern. . . . The truth is, there’s about a third of the people in this country that we don’t actually need economically. But they’re human beings, and what’s going to happen? How are we going to restructure society to cope with this? Because so far, we’re doing just as bad a job of that as we are of dealing with climate change.

  What I’m excited about is genetically altered crops. We’ve made enormous strides on this, on GMOs [genetically modified organisms], and we are making even more, and we’re going to need them. If the planet is really going to swell to nine billion people, and we’re really going to have climates change through desertification or rising seas or growing warmth where there wasn’t that much warmth before, we’re going to need to engineer crops that can feed all of these people and that can adapt to new environments quicker than natural evolution would have them adapt. And GMOs are doing that. They’re developing tomatoes that can grow in more brackish and saline water than they do now. They’re developing all kinds of crops that will be able to feed a burgeoning population under rapi
dly changing soil conditions and weather conditions. I’m very excited about this, and I don’t understand the anti-GMO people. . . . I have a novella coming out, sometime next year probably, a stand-alone novella, and it deals exactly with this, with GMOs. And it’s going to be controversial because GMOs are controversial.

  LY: One last question. Who interests you in science fiction right now?

  NK: There are a number of the young writers coming up that are very good. I like Sarah Pinsker. I think she’s done some really interesting things. I like Matthew Kressel. I like Rebecca Roanhorse. And I’m especially excited about Suzanne Palmer. Her novelette, “The Secret Life of Bots,” managed to do something new with robots, and something charming with robots. In fact, when I teach at Taos this year, I’m going to use it because it is an almost perfect example of raising the stakes, scene by scene, until you get to the end. It’s also an example of making a character charming and interesting without making a robot too humanoid. And that’s not easy to do.

  LY: Do these authors have anything in common beyond their interest in science fiction?

  NK: They all have a sense of humanity, even the ones writing about robots. Characters are, for me, what drives fiction, even more than plot. If I find a character interesting, I will read an entire novel in which almost nothing happens. . . . So, all of those writers create characters that grab my attention.

  3

  Echo the Echo

  Rich Larson

  “You’re not wearing the web,” I say, while my grandma lays out slices of chocolate chip banana bread and bright orange cheddar cheese on the table.

  “No.” She casts a dark look toward the sunken couch, where the neural web is sitting on top of its packaging like a desiccated jellyfish. “Ben would spit on me from heaven.”

  It does look a little out of place in her apartment, which has gone more or less unchanged for the past two decades: thick beige carpeting, stucco walls, an ancient cuckoo clock, and a wicker basket of sun-curled National Geographic magazines. Hardcopy photos of the family hang on the walls, and her other decor is comprised mostly of disturbing porcelain babies.

  Technology’s creep is inevitable, though. Some of her ferns are in smart pots, scuttling around the window to follow the slanting sunlight, and behind us there’s a screen she keeps defaulted to a world map. She uses it to keep track of us. I can see my sister’s route from Newark up here to Ottawa, my own zig-zags through Colombia and Bolivia last summer, and my usual home base out in Edmonton.

  “You have an umbrella,” I point out. “Mom bought you a nice umbrella last year.”

  “Open this,” she says, handing me an unopened 2-liter bottle of ginger ale. “Oh, your mom. She’s always buying me things, isn’t she? Always knows best for the whole gang.”

  I grip the cap and twist, and the carbonation rumbles up under my hand. She’s been buying the same big green bottle of ginger ale since I was six and walked to her house every week in the summer to eat banana bread and play Scrabble. I don’t know where she finds it now—plastic bottles are mostly extinct.

  “You know what I like to do,” she says as I pour two glasses, “is to add—”

  “Some cranberry juice,” I say. “I know. You sit. I’ll grab it.”

  She sets down in the chair like a bird perching in high wind, making little adjustments, false starts. She’s clumsy lately and hates it, so I pretend to be searching hard for the cranberry juice. When I come back she’s slumped back holding her bad wrist. Her good one has her phone dangling from a rubber strap.

  “You know, I can barely feel with this hand anymore,” she says. “Barely feel a thing.”

  “So,” I say, pouring a splash of red into her glass. “Why would grandpa spit on you for wearing the web?”

  “It’s not the Christian thing to do,” she says. “Leaving the echo behind. I’ve decided. It just isn’t right. The Lord gives us our time, and that’s that. I’m ready to go.”

  “You just don’t like how it looks.”

  “Oh, I hate how it looks.” She shoves the banana bread over to me. “It’s like wearing a dunce cap. But that’s not the important thing. The important thing is how it affects the soul.”

  I take a slice of banana bread and reverse-sandwich it with cheddar cheese. “You’ve been streaming sermons from those Korean megachurch assholes.”

  “Don’t use that language.”

  I take a bite. “How’s it affect the soul?”

  “Nobody knows,” she says, triumphant. “Nobody knows, and that’s why it’s such a bad idea.”

  “You’re worried it’s sucking your soul right out of your scalp, huh?”

  “Maybe.”

  I set the banana bread down so I can put my hands on my head. I spray some crumbs when I make the vacuum noise. “Come on,” I say. “You were a nurse. It’s medical technology.”

  “I don’t like all this new technology.”

  I point at her phone. “You like WordWhirl.”

  “You haven’t started a game with me in years. We used to have five, six games going at a time.” She pauses, conspiratorial. “You know, I beat your mom once. Leonine. That was the word that won it. Lionlike. She’s so competitive, your mom. Always has to win. Always has to be right.”

  “Yeah, she’s the worst.” I whisper it into my ginger ale, like Mom might be listening in, and that gets her to chuckle. “The web’s not taking anything from you. It’s just copying. It’s copying your brain. It’ll be like a photo album, but better.”

  “It’ll talk,” she says, sounding vaguely repulsed.

  “You love talking.”

  “I do not. You know who loves talking?”

  “Tina Reichert.”

  “Tina Reichert,” she agrees. “Invite her for tea at ten o’clock, she stays until supper.”

  “Well, the echo won’t be like Tina Reichert,” I say. “We’ll be able to turn it off.”

  “That sounds even worse,” she says. “Like I’m just a program.” She rubs her bad wrist. “This hand, you know, I can’t feel a thing with it. Not a thing.”

  “Yeah.”

  We sit without talking for a little while. I look over her wispy white head at the map, where she once traced her childhood for me, fleeing from Ukraine to Germany to England to Canada during World War II. Maybe she’s thinking about all the dead people she knows who never had the chance to get an echo: her older sister Maria who starved during the artificial famine, her older brother Fritz who had a bone disease, the boy she loved who got shot off a motorcycle. Those are the ones I remember, but I know there were more.

  “It’s for your great-grandkids, you know?” I say. “And the great-great-grandkids, et cetera. They’ll get to see you on Christmas and Easter and their birthdays and stuff. They’ll get to hear your stories.”

  “But it won’t be me,” she says. “I’m going to be like Tupac.”

  “You’re going to be like Tupac?”

  “A hologram.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Yeah, it’ll be a hologram.”

  She stares balefully down at the banana bread. “I know your mom sent you. To persuade me. Here, eat some more.”

  I take another slice. “Is it working?” I ask. “Should I sing and dance?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” she says. “During the night, especially. You know my sleeping pills ran out? So I lie there awake, thinking.” She looks up at me, and I feel a jolt of fear in my stomach because her eyes are wet. She doesn’t cry. Not since grandpa died, at least. “I’m already an echo,” she says.

  I put my hand tentatively on her good wrist. “What do you mean?”

  “I did wear the thing for a while,” she says, nodding toward the cast-off web. “What it does, it records everything I say, everything I think. All day. And then I can review it.”

  My stomach goes submarine. “Oh.”

  “I’ve been reading the same damn poem over and over,” she says. “In that book of German poetry your mom bought me. I keep p
icking it up and reading it.”

  “You like it.”

  “I keep saying the same things over and over. It’s awful. I don’t realize it. I’m probably doing it right now. I keep telling the same stories and whining about the same aches and pains.”

  “You’re ninety-seven,” I say. “You’re allowed to whine all you want.”

  “At first I thought I must have dementia,” she mutters. “But apparently it’s normal, at my age. The forgetting and the repeating. I’m just old. I’m not who I used to be.”

  “You’re plenty.”

  She glares at me. “And if it’s not Christmas, if it’s not someone’s birthday, you think your mom comes to visit me? You think anyone comes to visit me? Unless it’s an occasion, I’m just sitting here alone, thinking the same things over and over. Like a record—you know records? How they get worn out from playing them too much? That’s me. So the echo would be an echo of an echo.”

  I don’t know what to say. She got me. Here’s the truth: Since I moved out west I only come back to Ottawa for a few weeks every year to see family and old friends, usually combining it with a trip to my sister’s place in Newark. I know I used to face-call grandma every week, but thinking about it now I can’t remember when the last one was.

  I have conversations about her, usually about her health, about hip replacements and UTIs and sciatica, but those are with Mom, and some-times it’s like we’re talking about maintaining a car. And of course it was Mom who put me up to the job of convincing grandma to do the echo program.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, and I hate that because I should be the sorry one. “Let’s talk about something else. How long are you here for? Until Tuesday, your mom said?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Going to visit friends in Montreal for a couple days, then fly back to Edmonton on the Friday.”