Special Double Review
Joshua Berlow & C. D. Lewis
for December 22, 2014
and
C. D. Lewis reviews the special Christmas Eve story
for December 24, 2014
Terraform, December 22, 2014“Last Stop on the Floating Train” By E. Lily Yu
Reviewed by Joshua Berlow
One can hope that there will be no racism in the future, but according to this simple yet harrowing tale that won’t happen. In “Last Stop on the Floating Train,” a seemingly casual act of racism leads to a possible death. The story is relevant to today’s headlines, and also shows that racism doesn’t need a gun to kill.
A young woman named Lela is taking a train into the City to see a play. Lela isn’t white, and yet works as a waitress in a white neighborhood. She’s used to hostile stares. She tries to ignores the stares of a white man standing in the train car with her, but eventually she can’t concentrate on reading her paperback book (at least they still have paperback books in the future) and has to confront him.
E. Lily Yu handles the confrontation with the white man well. The white man is asked why he’s been glaring at Lela ever since he boarded the train. The white man answers that Lela should have relinquished her seat to him, instead of leaving him standing. The white man never mentions Lela’s being black, but it’s obviously important. Instead, the white man takes Lela to task for reading a book. This will surely resonate with science fiction geeks reading the tale! Then the white man moves on to demeaning Lela’s sexuality, with the familiar and tired remark that Lela needs to “get laid.”
In other circumstances Lela might have mixed it up with the white man, but she’s tired from working all day and ignores him. This incenses the white man even more, and he marches off the train car to find the conductor. It’s interesting that the conductor is himself black: “He was the only black man in the car.” The fact that the conductor is black and yet implicitly believes the white man instead of Lela suggests the institutional nature of racism. So as to not give the entire story away, I will end my summation there.
It’s a simple tale, yet that is what makes it powerful. There’s not much distraction from the point. “Last Stop on the Floating Train” is a bit too didactic and unsubtle for my taste, and yet I can’t deny that it is a disturbing story. In the spirit of total disclosure, I confess to being a white man myself.
Joshua Berlow is the founder of the International Psychogeography Institute.
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“Local Stop on the Floating Train” by E. Lily Yu
Reviewed by C. D. Lewis
E. Lily Yu’s “Local Stop on the Floating Train” is set on a lead-shielded train connecting seemingly-civilized areas that are otherwise separated by mutant-inhabited wastelands from which no visitors ever emerge. When the curtain rises Lela takes a seat on a train headed across “the City” and the radioactive wilds beyond. Initial details sketch the working-class Lela and her nontraditional (for Europeans, anyway) attire. Her consumption of culture (a play, a book) works to build sympathy for her as the kind of human the reader is: one who would read on a train. Her desire for the affection she sees in her companions inspires hope she’ll realize her dreams. Lela’s experience finishing work early to accompany her friend Gwen to the City, and enjoying a play, and traveling with Gwen and her unnamed boyfriend depict an innocent, confrontation-free exploration that imparts no hint that the piece’s main idea will turn out to involve public acceptance of racial percesution.
Terraform publishes near-future Science Fiction. However, one could remove all the SF trappings from “Local Stop” without requiring the conflict or characters to change at all. Its SF is window-dressing. Lela’s observation of Gwen with her boyfriend, Lela’s experience seeing a play for the first time, Lela waiting while traveling in a vehicle while reading a physical book – none of these things would be any different in the eighteenth century than in the current one. Ejecting Lela from a train into a radioactive wasteland is no different in story logic than making her walk the plank into shark-infested waters – or into waters teeming with angered mermaids. Readers who demand that SF elements actually matter in their SF won’t be pleased.
Although the whole background isn’t dumped on the reader at once, the world and its main character are sketched with speed and efficiency. The whole work is a lean 1500 words. Extremely short pieces can require keen attention to parse. This one seemed to invite more polish, however. For example, the second paragraph begins: “It was a good play, her friend said, so good he hadn’t grabbed her but once in the dark….” Then it continues: “…this was how the friend had described it, big-eyed and waving her glass-ringed hands.” Although my initial read of the first sentence suggested Lela’s friend said the play was good, then grabbed her once in the dark, this isn’t right; the friend is later a she, and can’t be the he who grabs in the dark. But there are no female names in the second paragraph until its last line, which impacts interpretation of “she” as it appears. The “he” is, on reflection, the friend’s unnamed boyfriend from the prior paragraph. To get there, the reader must interpret the two occurrences of “her” in the paragraph’s first sentence to mean first Lela, and then Gwen (who’s not named in the paragraph at all). On my first pass, the effort to read this led me to parse it incorrectly, and I misunderstand the action. But the rough patch ends; the rest ready smoothly and clearly.
The upbeat beginning sets up the reader nicely for the awful turn of events that collapses Lela’s world around her. Yu neatly conveys Lela’s innocent intentions and her shock at the outrageous behavior to which she is subjected. Lela feels like a person one would like to meet, and her reactions seem entirely believable.
Since the piece spends no effort at all explaining why a whole train full of near-future onlookers would silently tolerate what appears to be a murder attempt, the main conflict in the story comes both as an unexpected turn and as a big pill to swallow unprepared. Just as it’s naïve to suggest racism disappeared overnight with the outlawing of segregation, it’s equally disingenuous to suggest readers accept that after years of increasing scorn for overt racism, the world will without explanation become a place so steeped in accepted racism that the story’s villain can feel confident that hundreds of onlookers will silently accept a white-on-black racist attack predicated on an offense that appears to be a blatant frame. “Local Stop” never suggests segregation has been re-introduced, or that Lela violates any social rules in her conduct. It never suggests that Lela ever notices that she’s the only minority in sight. One wonders whether, in the future, we will no longer have cellphone video or wrongful death suits. It’s possible to believe any of these things about the future, when the world-building supports it – but there’s simply no underpinning to support what “Local Stop” assumes we’ll believe without any further background. Are readers supposed to be unaware of the news?
Terraform’s publication of the racially-charged “Local Stop” suggests that its editors are watching the news. Within the month before Terraform published this week’s story, major news outlets reported a number of stories involving white police officers who killed African Americans: a grand jury in New York elected not to indict the police officer Daniel Pantaleo after his videotaped restraint of the unarmed African American Eric Garner led to what the medical examiner called a ‘homicide’ death; a grand jury in Missouri decided not to indict the police officer Darren Wilson after he killed African American Michael Brown with at least six gunshots; the police who shot African American John Crawford III earlier this year were just reported to have justified it afterward by interrogating the deceased’s girlfriend and threatening her with jail in the hope of learning something incriminating (the shooter, officer Sean Williams, was not indicted); the unarmed African American Akai Gurley, whom Police Commissioner Bratton described at the time as “totally innocent” when shot by probationary officer Peter Liang simply because Gurley chose to take the stairs instead of the elevator, was just reported to have lain dying while Liang texted his union rep; and Cleveland officers shot a 12-year-old boy playing with a toy gun, despite being informed by a 9-1-1 caller that the “gun” held by the African American child was “probably fake.” Stories on all these were out in just the prior month. Suffice it to say, stories about government-sanctioned violence against people of color were in the news enough to make the topic a major current event at the time of publication. These stories – not from some fringe source hoping to foment revolution, but from major news outlets seeking to make money fulfilling consumer demand for content about racial issues in America – form a powerful testament about where America is in its willingness to acknowledge, expose, and criticize violence against people of color, even if government officials do not. “Local Stop” ignores this completely when it depicts as unremarked by onlookers circumstances that – in the real world – would immediately draw onlooker involvement. In contrast to the real stories about public reaction to killings by police, this week’s installment of Terraform depicts unprovoked socially-sanctioned racist violence by civilians in full view of numerous unrelated but completely accepting onlookers – and it depicts this without providing any explanation why readers should find this plausible.
“Local Stop” cannot be reviewed without considering its divisive racial message: in the future, non-police whites will be seen to murder non-whites, which instead of igniting protests in the streets will be greeted with the quiet support of all onlookers (except a powerless child). And they’ll provide this support not because of any future development made known to the reader, but apparently because of race. It’s hard to understand what, if anything, this image adds to the long and developing discussion of race in this country. When Maya Angelou wrote I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, she taught America something about the outlook of an African American growing up when she did, complete with the deep social commentary her observations implied. She showed how a community denied formal justice would obtain self-help justice with tools that were available, which completely explained how her rapist came to his end kicked to death in an alley instead of imprisoned. She didn’t paint a picture of separation; she showed why we’re the same, why we all need justice, and why justice must be afforded to everyone through formal systems in order to deprive the drive to obtain self-help justice of momentum. Angelou explains how she concluded – because he spoke truths about her own condition – that Shakespeare was a black girl. Angelou’s story resonates not merely because it bears witness to horrors we all agree are horrible, but because it observes how people really behave and think and reason. It holds together. It makes sense.
“Local Stop” by contrast offers paper-cutout villains whose conduct has no explanation. “Local Stop” shows nothing interesting about the society that produces them, or the effect of the villains’ racism on larger society. The premise – that a non-white takes a seat when a bus train is nearly empty, and keeps it after the seats fill and ultimately resists a demand she move – appears to cast Lela as Rosa Parks … if Rosa Parks weren’t an experienced activist, a member of the NAACP, and the elected secretary of its local chapter. In the dismal future, we’re asked to believe that Rosa Parks’ successor won’t be a powerful figure who ignites a successful campaign against mandatory segregation, but will simply fall victim to publicly-tolerated persecution, unnoticed except by a child on a departing train. “Local Stop” never explains that segregation has been re-introduced or – if it has not – how a train employee could bring himself to collaborate in a passenger’s scheme to murder a paying customer for keeping her seat. Bribery? Ubiquitous racism hidden from the reader until time to spring it by surprise? Cult membership? Mind control? Who knows. The reader can either explain it well enough to believe it, or not, as the reader likes; the text offers no assistance. The piece appears to invite readers to assume that despite generations of progress undermining social acceptance of overt racism, improvement has mysteriously reversed while somehow leaving Lela oblivious to the fact she runs the risk of provoking anything worse than a glare. It is unrealistic to posit that people of color are incapable of comprehending that their lives lay at risk from systematic oppression, just as it is unrealistic to posit a sudden but unexplained universal acceptance of senseless racist violence. How did overt public racism get to be so safe in the dismal future as to shelter unconcealed murder plots among passing strangers, without Lela or other non-whites ever noticing? I can be persuaded to believe almost anything for the duration of a story, if given some excuse to accept it. This piece, however, offers no reason to believe its key element: the conflict. Since the piece posits awful violence visited by surprise on an unsuspecting woman who can’t resist – with no cause to explain the conflict, just details about how bad it is – it feels less like it explains something about the human condition than it simply showcases something for readers who like to see it. The closest comparison that comes to mind is Christie Sims’ and Alara Branwen’s Taken By The T-Rex, the back-cover copy of which suggests no explanation why a woman should meet a T-Rex, but nevertheless offers nineteen pages of fantasy about the result. “Local Stop” does this for racist violence. If you like it, here it is.
“Local Stop” offers a portrait of the future that seems to laugh at the millions who’ve fought toward equality over the generations, and who’ve worked to crush invidious discrimination in their personal lives and in their public activities. If taken as a piece of commentary on racism rather than a lark, this piece seems to argue that their efforts don’t matter: in the future, completely inexplicable forces not worth the time to describe will prove that race is by itself sufficient cause for open acceptance of racial oppression in society. Instead of contributing to the discussion of race in our society, this piece appears to scorn the discussion altogether by declaring, by pure fiat, that the future will be worse – while hiding explanation (if any).
The 2,000-word limit in Terraform poses an obstacle to making a nuanced contribution to the discussion of race. Hatreds like the ones sketched in “Local Stop on the Floating Train” don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re so intertwined with social history, class narratives, identity politics, and other features of a full-color universe that it’s hard to get a feel for the hatred without understanding the elements that frame it. As a consequence, the villains here feel like a caricature. Although Lela’s reactions make complete sense, the unnamed white father’s decision to arrange what seems to be a murder attempt over a train seat requires that readers convince themselves of the hardest part of the story – the central conflict – and to do so without any help from the author. Even though 2-D villains are possible, it’s more enjoyable to see a villain whose background and motives make the conflict feel inevitable, so the clash and its stakes can be fully appreciated.
And, about that clash. It’s difficult to interpret the main character as a “protagonist” because there’s little feeling she made a character-defining choice. She doesn’t decide to do right and suffer the consequences of choice, or sacrifice herself for something in which she believes, she’s simply caught in the talons of monsters. She’s minding her own business, taking in some culture as the train fills … and bam! The end. (The alternative interpretation, that Lela ‘provokes’ her murder by asking the man staring at her about his behavior, feels like victim-blaming. Ick. In either case, the only decision in the piece that has any effect is the villain’s.) Like some of H.P. Lovecraft’s narrators, Lela has no agency, but simply bears witness to an awfulness she can’t resist. It feels like a short story of a snuff flick. Readers who demand their characters exert control over themselves and their surroundings will not like this; readers who dislike main-character women who are helpless victims will want to skip it.
As we envision a future that creates floating trains and nuclear wastelands, we’re tempted to assume that lots of things change – some, for the better – as we make and learn from mistakes. Recall, for example, what Deckard learns about his humanity while hunting replicants, or what the human police officer Gaff seems to tell him with the origami unicorn. But Yu says, no: we still war and we still hate and if we’ve stopped conducting lynchings it’s only because we’ve chosen to strand victims in a radioactive wasteland. Although I love dystopian futures as a setting, I have to be able to believe the characters to enjoy their story. Here, there’s just not enough world-building to frame the central conflict.
On the bright side, it’s interesting that Terraform is interested in current news trends. This casts into clearer light Paul Ford’s “One Day, I Will Die on Mars” by illuminating that its point-of-view character Uber, an AI puppetmaster using humans as pawns in its bid for global monopoly of everything, is intended to be a near-future incarnation of the real-world villain from recent news stories about rapes in cars dispatched by Uber (both in India and in the U.S.), and Uber’s prosecution for fraudulent claims about safety checks. This suggests an even darker interpretation of the story is appropriate: the humans have plans and dreams that seem to amount to so little, whereas Uber’s grand ambition promises to be both plausible and to represent a grand disaster to those who must live where it operates. Delightfully dark work, and dismal future done right.
C. D. Lewis lives and writes in Faerie.
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Terraform gifted its readers with a special Christmas Eve story.
C. D. Lewis took time from his own Christmas Eve to take a look at it for us,
for which he has our sincere thanks.
Tim Maughan’s “Four Days of Christmas” is set in Yiwu, China, where – as he reported in a nonfiction article published in the BBC earlier this month – the majority of the world’s Christmas decorations are currently made. But the action in “Four Days of Christmas” opens at the end of June, 2024, and Terraform publishes SF. So: Ho, ho, ho! Hold on to your self-illuminating Santa hat.
In nearly 1800 words, “Four Days of Christmas” offers snippets from four non-adjacent days that sketch the life-cycle of a little painted plastic Santa that recognizes anyone on the planet (apparently) by facial recognition, and greets each viewer by name. Along the way we see a snippet of life in the day of a factory worker worried about the approach of 3-D printers and automated painting machines, a few moments with a crane operator delivering containers to trans-pacific ships supporting North America’s appetite for Asian products, a shopping decision by a New York mother employed in a Detroit economic zone designed to allow Chinese work conditions in North America, and – on Christmas Day, 2107 – a child laborer’s scavenging-trip discovery of an ancient, indestructible, talking plastic Santa. Ho, ho, ho!
The vignettes are all connected by the talking Santa dolls, but each presents a new character with different work and a different angle on the mass production of Christmas paraphernalia. The characters’ ambitions and desires lay in scope far beyond anything a plastic toy could hope to impact; the toys themselves seem to have an ironic irrelevance to their lives. Instead of presenting Christmas miracles or offering magic for the young, they proclaim ho, ho, ho! and greet onlookers by name (at least, while the network connection holds out) and vibrate … which might be cute once or twice but by the end of the piece holds the slight annoyance we all feel for automated toys that brainlessly illuminate and make noise when handled. But the plastic Santa automatons don’t pass from the world as the transient entertainments they are; they endure, unaffected by time, outlasting their makers and even children’s recognition of Santa, searching for defunct networks to get cloud-based facial recognition results to insert into pre-recorded greetings. They outlast Virginia and Santa. Holiday junk outlasts us all. Ho, ho, ho!
For a dismal future, it’s pretty funny – especially the work details from the first two vignettes. The colorful depictions of the characters’ lives delight. The first two vignettes emphasize the commercial scale of Christmas gear production, which has an ironic humor all its own. Commercial magic? Holiday spirit from an assembly line? Who do we think we’re kidding with this junk? The last two vignettes seem to focus on quality-of-life degradation in a landscape dominated by scarcity. They’re darker, softened only by the humanity of their characters. The seemingly post-apocalyptic scavenging work depicted in the fourth vignette seems to comment on our mindless consumption as ultimately unsustainable and destined to lead to ruin.
“Four Days of Christmas” isn’t an uplifting holiday tale, but if you want near-future SF you’re not really looking for a happy fable about magic elves, are you? Departing from Christmas tradition, there’s no fantasy element; the depicted facts could occur, and the first three vignettes don’t seem to require much SF to pull them off. Much of it seems so close to the present one feels like one must squint to see elements the real world doesn’t yet provide, but they’re there. It’s the fourth vignette that inspires wonder. The idea that in less than a century children won’t recognize Santa takes a little work, but if the Internet is down (as suggested by Santa’s network error) and nobody’s printing physical books, it might not take long to wipe out familiarity with Santa’s image … except that there’s just no way this is the first indestructible Santa kitsch a scavenger would find in a landfill. But that only proves the story’s point, doesn’t it?
C. D. Lewis lives and writes in Faerie.