Unfrancisco

Uranians

The chance to dream, to imagine, to live, to shed our expected lives and assumed values, put all sorts of normative elements and standings and desires and drop them, leave them behind, soar, fly, rocket ahead, in time, in relationship, in community, in possibility. It’s such a beautiful thing to hold and feel reignited, reminded of how big the dream can get, how small perhaps it used to be or improbable seemed the goals in days or years past. I feel it, having dove into this book on the first week of Pride Month 2023, and to start and finish “Uranians” the day after Middletown Pride, a day that, in my second year attending, I feel a sense of marked time, of anniversary, of a chance to look back, downhill, how high I’ve climbed since then. Not in the practicalities, the quotidian, the necessities—that’s all tenuous or full-on crumbling in my hands, alas, ::woman-shrugging::—but in the beautiful and creative, in soaring queer platonics and embodied relating, in gender expressions and inner wholeness, in my mascara skills and collection of capris and sweaters.

It’s not a necessary part, but it’s certainly nice, when one holds a good piece of science fiction that goes big with the aspirational, the heart of hope and wonder, the grand cosmic scale contained in human lives. “The Uranians” is a novella, and stands well upon its own world, one that is rooted in artificial centrifugal gravity all its own, one that left Earth behind, that relates to it less and less the longer the journey and the further out of the Solar System it travels. By the time I reached its second act, I was having trouble seeing the connection back to the previous four stories, those of Earth, those of a loose past for the Uranians, even if just thematically. My one small detraction from the collection is just that: why not this story on its own? The short novel and the novella are heuristics of marketing and publishing, not of the creations themselves. (I read We the Animals by Justin Torres only last week, so I’m biased by that comparison.) All to say, I want to hold this in my hands, singly, biblically, to pass it on to queer friends and allied family alike, to press it into their hands, squeezed between my own, and nod at them emphatically and wordlessly, yes, love this, please read and swoon about it with me and when you return it I will read it again.

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Contemporaneous notes on the other stories (containing spoilers):

Toward a Theory of Alternative Lifestyles

I love when quantum theories come into my life, over and over again. The beautiful synchronicity of those encounters. I think, too, there is a fun world to be a witness to at this time, to authors and creative people, readers and non-readers alike, physicists and religious fanatics, the whole of humanity, seeing how quantum theory and cosmology seep into our lives and minds, affect how we view our experiences and relationships, social structures and moral values, even.

I really am re-excited to take my dancing adventures to Berlin, where the pandemic stymied a possible Amsterdam-Copenhagen-Berlin trip to Europe, I once imagined out loud in defiance of the gods to my NYC coworkers in the winter of 2020. I am in love with the possibility of peering into my one or more possible futures while high and sweaty and into the second day of techno, cresting, dream of dreams, with a DJ set from the one and only goddess Ellen Allien, dear lord yes please.

I’m taken, too, with the narrator, caught in the desire for radical self-change and re-imagined personality almost, that unsure longing and fumbling into hotter clothes and attitudes, though neither the perfectly imperfect black clothes nor the non-monogamous free queer love rest naturally on one’s shoulders, the frame of body/frame of mind unflattered by trying to fit in. I’d want to meet this narrator ten years later, changed as they are by that quantum polarity flipped by the open club door, and to see their joy, the comfort found in their own skin in their own way.

Lacuna Heights

It’s strange to encounter, in the second circumstantial time this week, a speculative refrain echoing in two appreciated authors and their compelling imaginations in short story form. I recently flew through White Cat, Black Dog, the new folk fantastical collection from Kelly Link, and had the uncanny feeling, in “The White Road,” of encountering the same post-apocalyptic world of Station Eleven from Emily St. John Mendel, or at least its near parallel. For Link, a traveling performance troupe runs a theater and social continuity circuit along the I-95/Appalachian Trail Eastern Seaboard, whereas Mendel’s troupe stayed on the ring route encircling Lake Ontario (Lake Michigan in the TV series). With this second of McCombs’s stories, we’re finding echoes of Severance (by Ling Ma, but I’ve only seen the TV series so far), with the implanted “neurodentistry” search tech (more alike to what the mad tech bros at Neuralink are killing lab monkeys to develop), which has a “Private Mode,” in which the user can separate thoughts, memories, and experiences from their everyday mind. Like Link, there are enough speculative variations—of tone, setting, impact, and plot—that make it possible for the reader to re-suspend disbelief and enjoy immersion into a second fictional world.

Putting that jarring element aside, I love how this world has been built up, pun intended. In writing terms, the way the world of San Franciscso, above and below, and their semi-drowned state, are added in is very much well through the eyes and unreliable memories of the narrator. The ability to understand the landscape and the technology are part of the narrative for us, and for the narrator himself to work towards understanding more deeply. And expanding on that, there are touched glimpses of New York City here (and Miami in the previous story), which emboldens me with the outlined mapping of my Speculative Pandemic Memoir, to enjoy the roaming nature of our imagination and to look out on the landscapes of places we know and see and remember. The hinted at sense of an interconnected world (as picked up from the author’s reading at Greenlight Bookstore and subsequent conversation with Carmen Maria Machado) between the stories makes each stories enriched by the narratives and settings that preceded it. And so, additionally, in this way, my own work is further buttressed by a the form of interconnection that makes the worldbuilding more fun, and in some ways perhaps easier. Speaking in iceberg terms, each of the stories that are seen jutting above the surface are supported by the one big hunk of world created underwater.

In that way, it’s really awesome to have this lawyerly mode carrying through in these first two stories. I appreciate how the everyday of being a lawyer is to varying degrees part of the backstories of these first two narrators. As a layperson when it comes to the legal profession—yet as much of us are generally and in a skewed dramatic way informed via media representations of the profession—I love the degrees further that the profession evolves with the times while also keeping to a lot of the same principles and habits of today. In that way, the author as a lawyer involved in climate change, McCombs is taking a specifically nuanced and particular to his background direction in speculating on how the elements of his world could change, could impact and be affected by the warming world. It is inspiring and instructive, as I look towards my “Bookends” story/essay, which is diving into the tech world and white psychedelia during the pandemic. Be specific and informed and push deeply on key elements that are unique to my experiences, and explode them out.

Six Hangings in the Land of Unkillable Women

I was not taken with this story at first. It was too thick with period language and setting, the formality and verbosity of the Victorian Era. I was trudging; curious about the promise of the title, but eager to get there already.

When it shifted from the husband to the wife, I perked up. I was not interested in his world, but hers. What a letdown it would’ve been to promise “unkillable women” and then to only get the men’s POV on the matter. She had so much more complexity, her relationship to the immediate problem of the sentenced woman, but to come to her own story of being assaulted and unkilled, to have the visceral memory of that traumatic (not a word she as the POV character would’ve used in that era) event living in her blood. Ooh, the layers to it. Likewise, to her concerns of that carrying generationally via umbilical blood into her daughters, was also good anachronistic work of the author.

I wished, though, that, like the previous stories, there had been more injection of a transposed moral and legal argument about the death penalty brought into the setting of this story. True, there was some of that, in the MC’s own internal debate prior to and up upon the hanging platform. But, I wondered, I yearned for more interiority that the form allowed. Perhaps by adhering to the perspective of the time, there was a missed opportunity to get further into the minds of people of that era, with our language and understanding of psychologies and cognition.

Talk to Your Children about Two-Tongued Jeremy

I came into this story prepared, prepped by the talk at Greenlight, to find a prescient ChatGPT-analogue in one of the stories. I came pre-eyerolling about it. Not out of any underestimation of the author to navigate the subject well, but because of my own propensity to actively tune out whenever the bot and its ramifications come into view. I don’t care to hear about it. It’s like so much of the newscycle that touches on the Tr*mp nonsense, pre-candidacy for 2024, outsized and misappropriated. It might be in me a reaction to put distance between myself and the topic out of a cautionary safety measure to not get sucked into it. As a former Musk-head, enamored with the promises of Mars, I was attuned to how AI would be an important and necessary member of that effort. Concurrently (circa 2013-2016), the discussions of AI were still kinda generalized and somewhat lifted from early 2000s scifi, but fixated on the practicals of driverless cars and other engineering school novelties. But here we are in 2023, and the NYPD is putting robot dogs on patrol, ChatGPT has all of Hollywood on the picket line, and deep learning models are production-ready across multiple industries eager to disrupt so many high-value aspects of economic life.

I even write all that out, and still don’t care. Did I burn out on it so completely after so many years coding adjacent to those proverbial black boxes? With all my best wishes to friends and former colleagues still in tech, but as I continue to walk ignominiously away from it all, I hope the whole fucking thing implodes in on and eats itself up. We all kept doing our little parts for it, or things like it, or precursors to it, or found ways to make less morally ambiguous use of it, and here we now are standing at the base of a tidal wave of stupidity, where the march of progress only ever got us closer to this inevitability. I will take some small ironic delight from my temporarily safe vantage point, having been cast out and landed here just outside the previous high tide line.

But this is about Two-Tongued Jeremy! Of course he is an app, of course it is made for kids, and of course they sell it under the guise of educational tool. It’s always for some innocuous but ultimately highly profitable good. Education (and healthcare, to lump in generally) is so broken and warped in its incentive systems and organizational values—totally separate from all the good humans working tirelessly within and against and in spite of those systems—that it is wonderful to watch and read how this author has seen all that and more in context with the app itself to paint this awfulness in a compelling narrative’s light.

I love this story for what it does and how it brings a nagging sets of dreadful feelings about this world and uses so well the specificities of unique characters and settings to tell a good story on its own while making such editorial comments as befit the subject matter.