by E. Lily Yu
World War II didn’t help matters in that regard, nor did the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945. In the midst of this turmoil, there was little room for the locomotive in SF, which might explain why trains all but vanished from the genre during this period. And when they did pop up, they were in children’s books such as Victor Appleton’s Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive (1922), William Pène Du Bois’s The Flying Locomotive (1941), and Reverend W. Awdry’s The Three Railway Engines (1945). Awdry’s book launched the long-running Railway Series, which eventually inspired the Thomas the Tank Engine TV show. It owes more to Kipling’s “.007” fantastical view of locomotives than to the hard SF of the era, set as it is on the mythic Island of Sodor—in essence, a Middle Earth for trains. Locomotives had once flung themselves toward the future, but as the first mushroom clouds blossomed over major metropolises, the train became a comforting, even infantile symbol of a halcyon past.
The Postwar Era didn’t do much for the fortunes of locomotives in SF. Aside from a few random curiosities like A. J. Deutsch’s beguiling 1950 short story, “A Subway Named Möbius”—in which a convoluted geometry of train tracks leads to loops in spacetime—trains just couldn’t capture the imagination the way rockets and time machines could in the Golden Age of SF. Ironically, trains had once served as both rockets and time machines within the genre. By the time Ray Bradbury used the machines in his 1953 classic Fahrenheit 451, they’d been relegated to incidental details. Bradbury would use trains much more centrally in his fantasy work, most notably 1962’s supernatural tour-de-force Something Wicked This Way Comes. Keith Roberts’ genre-defying alt-history masterpiece Pavane appeared in 1968, but its depiction of free-roaming steam traction engines ignores railways altogether. As far as science fiction was concerned, the locomotive had jumped the track.
A curious thing happened to the SF locomotive in 1969: Man landed on the moon. There’s no direct correlation, of course. But a zeitgeist shift occurred within the genre. With one of SF’s fundamental tropes—a human foot on an extraterrestrial surface—having been fulfilled, writers began to turn their speculative eye elsewhere. The radical New Wave of Science Fiction movement reached its peak in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and one of its figureheads, Michael Moorcock, also spearheaded a peculiar retro-futuristic style that would eventually come to be called steampunk.
Trains figured into both. Christopher Priest, a young upstart in the New Wave movement, wrote The Inverted World, a mind-bending 1974 novel that envisioned a post-apocalyptic city that inched along a massive railway track. Its inhabitants were forced to stop periodically, take up the track that had already been traversed, and reconstruct it in the path of the city’s forward trajectory. If it failed to move, the city was doomed. A unique work of post-industrial malaise and quantum psychedelia, The Inverted World helped revive the locomotive tradition in speculative literature. Preceding it by a year, though, was Harry Harrison, A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! (first serialized in Analog as Tunnel Through the Deeps), a far less angst-ridden novel of proto-steampunk adventure that features—as the title promises—a race among para-Victorians to build a submerged train tunnel through the Atlantic. Now that human beings routinely traveled back and forth to the moon, steampunk’s invigorating mashup of prognostication and nostalgia would take greater hold of the genre’s attention, even if the locomotive—that most vivid emblem of steam power—became more of a prop than a trope.
The ’70s and ’80s were a free-for-all for SF, and the genre plundered its own canon with glee. Accordingly, few of the locomotive’s sporadic appearances during that period are particularly innovative. In John Varley’s 1977 novel The Ophiuchi Hotline, Gernsback’s underground gravity train is recycled and updated. Michael Coney’s The Celestial Steam Locomotive from 1983 flexes more imagination with its vision of a train that traverses space and dimensions, and Greg Bear’s 1985 novel Eon produces an eye-popping image of a trackless millipede-like train that sadly doesn’t capitalize on that biomimetic potential. By the time Thomas N. Scotia’s 1987 book Blowout! digs up the threadbare premise of a transcontinental railroad tunnel, it seemed as though the locomotive might once again fade entirely from the SF mainstream.
Then came Desolation Road. Ian McDonald’s stunning 1988 debut is marvel on many levels, but his virtuoso depiction of locomotives on a terraformed Mars breathed new life into the possibility of trains as conceptual vehicles—as well as potent symbols. In every way, it’s the zenith of SF’s on-again-off-again obsession with the locomotive, executed with magic-realist richness and tech-geek zeal alike.
McDonald was also interested in cyberpunk, though, as was much of the SF world in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Consequently, the locomotive—perhaps the least cyberpunk-esque appliance in the SF toolbox—came closer than ever to obsolescence in the waning years of the 20th century. Apart from the wind-trains in Sean McMullen’s 1999 novel Souls in the Great Machine, the turn of the millennium came and went with SF’s great railroad tradition predominantly silent. It was McDonald himself who brought trains back from the brink in 2001’s Ares Express, his long-awaited follow-up to Desolation Road that brings his Martian locomotives—and the dynastic clans who engineer them—into even more dazzling focus.
At the same time, a nebulous new movement in science fiction, New Weird, was beginning to rise—much of it, incidentally, influenced by McDonald’s prior mutation of SF, fantasy, and magic realism. At the heart of the movement was British wunderkind China Miéville. And as the world soon learned, Miéville loves trains. In his 2004 novel Iron Council—the third book in his loosely connected Bas-Log trilogy—a band of outlaws form a roving socialist society aboard a train that runs on a limited span of track, which must be perpetually picked up behind and then relaid ahead. It’s a loving homage to Priest’s The Inverted World, but Miéville gives his purloined premise fresh purpose and relevance; in fact, his city-on-tracks may as well be a metaphor for his own career as it explores unknown territories of genre while retaining strong ties to its past. He visits the locomotive more originally—but less successfully—in his 2012 young-adult novel Railsea. This time he leans his pastiche on Moby-Dick, only instead of ships hunting whales, a locomotive scours a track-scarred desert in search of the giant, mole-like moldywarpe. The book embodies Miéville postmillennial salvagepunk ethic, even as the text itself serves as a prime example of its literary analog.
With the 21st century well underway, the locomotive has begun to gain momentum once more. Much of the previous centuries’ grandiloquent predictions about tomorrow were to have taken place already. Few have. The past, in truth, exists alongside the future—and the locomotive paradoxically feels like an anachronism than it once did. Ekaterina Sedia’s 2011 novel Heart of Iron touches on steampunk without committing to its limitations; in doing so, the book’s alt-history take on czarist Russia and the race to build a transcontinental railroad across Asia harkens all the way back to the conjoined births of both SF and the locomotive. Similarly, Genevieve Valentine’s 2013 short story “Terrain” concerns the predatory encroachment of the Union Pacific Railroad in a steampunk-accented Wyoming, a chiseled fable of human versus piston that celebrates the romance of the rails even as it chillingly deconstructs it.
Therein lies the longevity of the locomotive in science fiction. The vehicle itself may be all but abandoned when it comes to use by passengers—but so, at this point, has the spaceship. There’s a latent puissance in these metallic capsules, though, that waits to be unlocked—with a stripping of dust, a stoking of the engine, a pulling of the levers, and the tapping of a gauge or two. The future is today, and it is tomorrow, and it is yesterday. All it takes is a train to carry us there.
About the Author
Jason Heller is a former nonfiction editor of Clarkesworld. He is also the author of the alt-history novel Taft 2012 (Quirk Books) and a regular contributor to the Onion A.V. Club. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Apex Magazine, Sybil’s Garage, Weird Tales, Adventure Roc
ketship!, Tor.com, and others; forthcoming publications include a chapter of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Time Traveler’s Almanac. He is a proud graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop.
Eccentric Relatives and Raw Grief:
A Conversation with Susan Palwick
Jeremy L. C. Jones
In the opening moments of Susan Palwick’s Mending the Moon, four-year-old Melinda Soto looks up at the moon and notices the “pits and shadows” for the first time. The moon doesn’t look like she was told it should look. It is not “purely white, as spotless and serene as a newly peeled egg.”
She wants to scrub the moon clean, to fill in the craters, to fix it.
“ ‘It’s too far away for mending,’ ” Melinda’s mother tells her.
“ ‘I want to anyway. I’m going to. Will you help me?’ ” Melinda responds.
If you never meet Melinda again, you will still know her well—the first three pages of Mending the Moon make sure of that. If she fixes the moon, you will cheer her. If she is murdered, you will mourn her.
This is what Palwick does—she gives us a character to love and she takes that character away and in the process she thrusts us into the lives of the characters who also loved the deceased. There is death, but there is a beautiful sense of community, too, even when the mourners don’t necessarily get along. There is loss, but connection. In other words, Palwick gives us a family.
Why, if so much of Susan Palwick’s fiction is about grief and loss, does it seem like such a gift to read it?
“I try to write clearly,” said Palwick of her writing style. “I’m not interested in confusing readers unnecessarily, although I suppose I do sometimes anyway! I’m very interested in poetics and prose rhythm, although there’s much less of that in Mending than in The Necessary Beggar. I guess the style I aim for is ‘sophisticated transparence,’ if there is such a thing.”
Palwick doesn’t publish a lot of fiction. By her own account, she writes slowly, edits heavily, and has a bad habit of starting drafts without finishing them. She made her first professional sale (to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine) in 1985. She has one collection of stories, The Fate of Mice, and four novels, including, Flying in Place, The Necessary Beggar, Shelter, and Mending the Moon. Her first and most recent novels were published twenty years apart, give or take a year.
Palwick is a speculative fiction writer, a columnist, licensed lay preacher, and an associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. Below, Palwick and I talk about writing and life and a few other things here and there.
In what ways is writing a gift—to you, to readers, etc.—and in what ways does writing require faith—in yourself, in the craft, in God?
It’s certainly a gift to me, although it’s one I’ve worked very hard to develop. I think sometimes people think that “gifts” are presented on platters, rather than representing a lot of sweat and study. Writing’s a gift, but it’s also a discipline; maybe the gift is the desire to do it, while discipline is what confers the ability to do it well. But it’s a gift because it gives me a way to speak to people I’ll never meet, and because my characters (well, most of them, anyway) become friends I worry about, people whose stories I want to learn and follow. I don’t think readers can be curious about a character’s story if the writer isn’t curious, too.
In any case, I certainly hope my writing is a gift to my readers. Some readers feel that way and some don’t, and some feel that way about some of my books but not others. Writers are a little like eccentric relatives with hit-or-miss taste in Christmas gifts. One year they’ll bake you the most delicious cookies you’ve ever tasted, and the next year you’ll open the box to find a pair of socks, handknit in colors never found in nature, that don’t seem designed to fit human feet.
As far as faith goes . . . well, I think you have to have faith in your own ability to put a sentence together, and to tell a story other people want to hear. That doesn’t come right away, and it can vanish pretty easily. I think we all second-guess ourselves and our work. My most trusted first reader is my husband, who’s always honest and who has an uncanny ability to predict what other people will or won’t like; if he says a story won’t sell, it doesn’t, even if I love it. But conversely, if he says a story’s good, I’ve learned to believe him, even if I’m unhappy with the piece.
I do have faith in my ability to craft readable, engaging prose. I think I’m a pretty good stylist. I have faith in my characterization, too. That’s what interests me most about fiction, and it’s where many of my stories start, and I’ve gotten enough positive feedback to know that other people see it as one of my strengths. (I agree with my critics that plot is my weakness.)
As for how writing connects with my religious faith, I firmly share the belief—best articulated by J.R.R. Tolkien in “On Fairy-stories” and by Dorothy Sayers in Mind of the Maker—that humans were created by a Creator to create. Any act of making things, rather than destroying them, is holy work, whether one’s making books or bread.
Where did you start Mending the Moon?
I started Mending the Moon because Tor told my agent they’d like me to write a mainstream novel, and my agent—who never pressures me—said, “They came to us, and that doesn’t happen in this market, and you will get me a proposal in a week.” She and I kicked some ideas around over dinner, and I got her the proposal, and they accepted it. That meant, of course, that I had to write the book.
I’d written a not-very-good draft of a novella about three older women trying to help a young man through a supernatural crisis, so I took those characters and made them mainstream. Most of my work is somehow about loss or grief, so it’s no surprise that Mending the Moon is, too. I’ve always been interested in how people navigate their lives after tragedy. In Mending the Moon, that factor was heightened because my father died three months before Tor approached my agent, and my mother died while I was writing the book, so I was living in the raw grief my characters inhabit (although my parents, both in their eighties, died of natural causes, not foul play).
This was the first book I wrote entirely in response to a publisher’s request. I wrote Flying in Place and The Necessary Beggar without contracts (and I prefer to work that way, because there’s much less pressure). I wrote Shelter under contract, but had already started it when I sold it. But all of my books have started, in one way or another, with character.
How does a novel work on the reader? What should it do? And in what ways does Mending the Moon succeed or veer from that?
It depends on the novel. It depends on the reader. No novel will hit two different people exactly alike; it won’t even be the same book if the same person goes back to it at different stages in life. Some books grievously disappoint on a later reading, especially if we loved them in childhood. Others withstand the test of two or three re-readings. The best books are inexhaustible. You can reread them endlessly, and they always show you something new. The Lord of the Rings does that for me; so does The Last Unicorn. I have no idea if Mending the Moon will do that for anyone, although I certainly hope so. I’ve already been told by a friend that the book helped her through a time of grief, which moves me very much.
I do think—and this is a somewhat didactic stance, and decidedly a minority opinion—that the work of all good fiction is to increase the amount of imaginative empathy in the world, to take us into experiences we haven’t had firsthand and show us new opportunities for compassion. Several other writers, people I respect deeply, have made rather loud fun of me for saying this, but I really believe it: not, necessarily, that all books have to do this, but that books that do are the ones people will still be reading after the author’s dead. I hope that Mending the Moon does this in even a small way, in showing a response to violence that isn’t vengeful or obsessed with police procedure, and particularly in attempting to represent the experience of a murderer’s family.
In what ways did the writing of Mending the Moon challenge you as a writer? What were
some of the surprises for you?
Well, it challenged me because Tor asked for a mainstream novel, and I don’t write mainstream. That just isn’t how my writing brain works. I got around that problem by creating Comrade Cosmos, so while the book itself isn’t genre, it’s about genre, about how fandoms and popular culture help people negotiate real-world loss and horror.
Technically, it was a challenge because the narrative’s so fragmented. I’m very keenly aware of structure, and I decide what the structure of a book will be ahead of time; this helps me write it by providing a framework. Mending has three sections of seven chapters each; in each section, the second, fourth, and sixth chapters are about Comrade Cosmos (comic relief, literally!), while the others deal with the real-world narrative. Each of the real-world chapters, though, has five sections, of different lengths and in different orders from one chapter to the next, from the POV of five characters: Jeremy, Melinda (in flashback), Rosemary, Veronique, and Anna. Putting all this together became like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, especially since I cannibalized a previous version of the book to construct this one. So far, what’s surrpised me most about reader response is that nobody’s said the book feels scattered; readers seem to think it flows okay, which means the structure is doing its work and functioning quietly in the background.
Thematically, it was a challenge because the material’s so emotionally difficult, and also because it’s about seven months in the lives of a group of people who are all grieving very deeply. That early phase of grief tends, in my experience, to be fairly static. It wouldn’t have been very interesting to have them all just sitting at home—although Anna does a lot of that—but car chases wouldn’t have been realistic. So I had to balance paralysis with action, and I’m still not sure how well it came off.
I love your characters! Will you talk a little bit about where the characters in Mending the Moon came from? What inspired Melinda Soto, Jeremy, Veronique, Rosemary, and Henrietta? What goes into the character creation process?