by Lydia Millet
My mind wandered to the ruins of the resort, to which I’d already heard them planning an expedition. They were going to look for salvage we could use. There was too much there, potentially, for them to waste the chance. It was the one good thing to come of the storm, I’d heard Rone say to someone else—the fact that there would be useful objects in the rubble, important building blocks for Athens. There could be tech, there could be furniture, appliances and hardware, wires and pipes of all kinds, even minor items like drywipes and blankets. And of course food and clothing.
All kinds of objects it might have taken us years to make or get on our own.
I wondered if I would have to go with the salvage team; I didn’t want to, but I would if they asked me. What would we see there, in the ruins—people’s bodies?
There’d have to be some bodies, after a storm like that. Not all of them would have been washed out to sea. I hoped my father’s had, though. I hoped the ocean he loved had taken him back again.
And the kids, the kids that had been there. There hadn’t been many, but still—there was a lot I didn’t want to see, in those ruins.
But maybe, I thought, that was the price of living unmanaged. You had to be willing to look at what you didn’t want to see.
I thought of the animals in their pens outside, the birds with crowns, the ancient prehistoric turtles that moved their heads like defective robots, these tufted anteater things with their long snaky tongues. There was the stream that ran through Athens, the trees growing away and away down the foothills and into the valleys in their bright-green splendor. A few hours’ walk away there was the spray of the ocean’s waves as they crashed against the rocks and the mist that rose up.
This would be an unmanaged life. From now on, we had the others but we didn’t have our pills. And I was less scared than I had been before, and more excited. I didn’t believe pharma was bad all by itself—it was medicine, some of it, and I knew it could help us when we needed it. But it had been used against us, I saw that clearly now, and what we didn’t need it for was to face the world every day.
Sam had been right. I’d been flat for some time, no pharms at all, and more and more the separate parts of the world shone at their edges.
My spirits were lifting.
The best part of it all was the rawness of life without pharms—how exposed I was to the things that might happen but, in exchange, how much more this felt like living.
“Maybe not right away, but in the long run,” I said, “I think she’ll be glad. That we didn’t let her go. Don’t you?”
We stood there looking down at her—at the moons of her closed eyes, her poor claw of a hand lying on top of the blanket. She didn’t look her age, I thought: she and my father had been right, when we were all in the elevator and they were laughing hysterically. She still had a kind of beauty to her, even if it was, at the moment, like the beauty of stone.
One day maybe the stone will move again.
“I bet she’ll see the world in a new light,” said Sam.
After that we went out from under the mountain and left our mother to her long sleep.
P.S.: My Final Bulletin to the Capsule
I guess you already know, my astronaut friend, we never made it into space.
We took a step or two, though. Some guys in white went dancing on the moon—my lots-of-greats-grandmother watched them on a television from her crib, shaking a rattle as they made their giant leaps.
And later robot probes were sent to Jupiter.
But in person we never got beyond our own backyard in this huge spiral galaxy. As it turned out, we never took a spin around the planets in airships with round windows. We never headed for the stars.
We did it in books and vids and games, though. We did it in our dreams. It may be for pretend, but that doesn’t mean that out there in the universe there isn’t somebody watching. There are too many worlds, too many galaxies, too many stars for us to be alone. Somewhere there must be other homes.
These days I have this place to think about, this Earth and how to save it. But I still like to think about the faraway neighbors we must have. Sure, maybe they look a little bit different from me. Like you, spacegirl or spaceboy—maybe you even look different from how I pictured you at first, my cosmonaut.
Maybe you’re not so similar to me. Maybe you’re not young, not what I already know as beautiful.
Maybe you’re not even, technically, human.
The important thing is that you’re a friend, and like me, like all of us, you’re traveling. You’re making your way past all the things you had to leave behind—you’re passing unknown planets and unfamiliar asteroid belts, shimmering clouds of interstellar dust. You move across the diamond-and-black velvet of space and stars toward a strange and beautiful new country.
If you could see me, you would smile and wave—and at my brother too. You’re someone we’d both be glad to know, even if we’ve never known anyone like you before.
One day I’ll copy this journal into a face and send my words into the infinite ether. And one day you may find these words and take the time to read them.
The only thing left to say is this: My astronaut friend, I still believe in you.
So please, believe in me too. Believe in us, won’t you? We made our mistakes, fell when our wings melted. But we did other things too. We saw that the world we’d been given was beautiful, we tried to understand that beauty. Some people even gave their lives for what they believed was true, and a few of those sacrifices were made into stories and legends.
But far more of people’s sacrifices went unheard of, passing unnoticed into the dark.
I know we can be worthy of what we were born into, I know we can do better. I swear, we’ll never stop trying, we’ll never ever give up. We’ll hope and hope and be brave, right through the end of time.
The End
Discussion Guide
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Character
1. Nat and her little brother, Sam, live in a setting that’s at once more sheltered and more dangerous than the lives many American teenagers lead now. How have they responded to this dramatic dichotomy in their lives?
2. Have the siblings’ responses to their world been similar or dissimilar, and if so how? Do you think you’d react more as Nat does or more as Sam does to being confined to an apartment complex amid great cultural and climate chaos?
3. Considering the seriousness of what’s happening in the world outside, Nat seems fairly even-tempered and emotionally healthy. Do you think that’s believable? Why or why not?
4. Sam and Nat’s parents, like other older people in the book, decide to take out a “contract” on themselves, assisting—and even paying for—their own “managed” deaths. It’s a dark decision, and one fairly alien to us as readers. How and why can they possibly do this? Do you see anything like it today, in the real world?
5. The sister and brother react to the news of their parents’ death contract, and the company-guided events of the “final week” as they react to their world, in different ways. Yet Nat joins Sam rather than be left behind. What does this say about her? What does it say about Sam that he seems willing to suddenly leave his sister, forever, for a new life?
6. The character LaTessa is almost an antagonist—but not quite. In what way does she seem/not seem like an antagonist when they first arrive at the Hawaiian resort? And later, after the storm, how does that change?
Setting
1. In Nat and Sam’s complex, before the family sails off to Hawaii, the siblings live without much contact with other people their own age. Most of their human contact is virtual—through their computers, their Faces. One of Nat’s friends through her Face even enters her life and then dies without the two ever meeting. How do you think it affects them to know people onscreen but not in the flesh? Would you be comfortable in a social world like that? Why or why not?
2. Nat appears not to have understood just how extreme the poverty is in her world
until she’s told about it on the Big Island. Yet Sam even knows about the massacres the corporates have carried out. Is it possible to live alongside someone and have a radically different view of reality? To what degree do we see what we want to see, in the world outside—and in our homes?
3. “Dystopias” are more common than “utopias” in today’s speculative fiction, and arguably in most Sci-Fi/Fantasy Fiction—from hard science fiction novels to Hollywood blockbuster movies. Why do you think that is? Why is there such cultural demand for bleak or disastrous visions of the future?
4. If you had to design your own dystopia, what would it look like? And what about your personal utopia?
Plot and Ideas
1. Unlike, for example, The Hunger Games or Harry Potter, Pills and Starships doesn’t contain too many direct conflicts between characters—even its climax has to do as much with a “natural” event—a Category Six Hurricane—than with a battle between human characters. Much of the action occurs off the page and in the mind of the narrator. Why do you think the author made that choice? What are its advantages and disadvantages?
2. Can you imagine a future world where having babies is illegal? Why/why not? Discuss the idea that powerful authorities—whether governments or corporations—might regulate something as basic as human reproduction. Can you think of any real-life examples of this type of regulation being enforced?
3. In this world, individuals’ carbon footprints—that is, how much they contribute to the climate change crisis—are the most important measurement of their physical and social impact (at least to the powers that be). What is a carbon footprint? What would a world look like if carbon output was generally accepted to make the difference between “moral” and an “immoral” person? What do you think are the measures of morality we live by today?
4. How might a society governed by corporations differ from one governed by elected officials? How is the online voting Nat describes different from how we now choose our public representatives?
Author’s Statement
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I wrote Pills and Starships as an adventure, imagining a girl—just slightly older than my daughter—living in a world devastated by the impacts of climate change. Since I work for a nonprofit that petitions and litigates over climate and related problems, it wasn’t much of a leap for me subject-wise. But I found myself flattened and discouraged by the scientific, bureaucratic, and evasive language that accompanies so much coverage of the global warming crisis. I wanted to write about this turning point in human history in a way that felt lively and emotional to me, invigorating and possibly even inspiring, not deadening or trivializing.
The idea was that, in the wake of climatic chaos and the collapse of natural life-support and social systems that go along with it, a family is doing what used to be a middle-class American ritual: taking a vacation in Hawaii. But of course, on second glance, this isn’t like the vacations we take at all. This is the family’s “final week” together because—shepherded along in the process by powerful corporate authorities that promote life management, and finally death management, through psych meds—the parents are preparing to die.
To me, the tragic backdrop wasn’t the fanciful part of this story; to me the only pure-fantasy element of the novel was the proposition that well-meaning and even quasi-stable parents of teenagers would acquiesce in their own death-by-pills, just when, arguably, their children need them most. So it was exciting to take what I believe is a possible, if extreme, dystopian future and play it against a high-concept, extreme cultural/familial dysfunction.
If the climatologists and geophysicists are to be believed, we’re bound to see cascading paradigm shifts and desperate adjustments of life expectations as our atmosphere and oceans continue to change and eventually offer us a different, unfamiliar planet to live on. I wanted to explore one vision of a way our psychological norms might be perverted during the resulting disorder.
And even in the context of radical social collapse, something rang true to me about a teenager just still being a teenager through it all—at times cheerful, at times resentful or angry, like other teenagers anytime, anywhere. Without a long personal history on the earth, I speculated, young people might not be operating on the same assumptions as adults, and as such they might prove more resilient, more fluid in their response to the new world than those who knew it before it was transformed.
In the end, writing Pills and Starships was a joy for the same reason writing’s always my favorite thing to do—because I got to invent a voice and personality that haunts me after the book is closed.
LYDIA MILLET is the author of eight novels for adults as well as a story collection Love in Infant Monkeys (2009), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her first book for middle-grade readers, The Fires Beneath the Sea, was named one of Kirkus’ Best Children’s Books of 2011, and, along with the second in the series, The Shimmers in the Night (2012), was a Junior Library Guild selection. Pills and Starships is her first book for young adults.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher.
Published by Akashic Books
©2014 by Lydia Millet
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-275-9
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-276-6
eISBN: 9781617752841
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013956781
James Everett Stuart cover artwork courtesy of Spanierman Gallery LLC, New York, New York.
First printing
Black Sheep/Akashic Books
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