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hrj“Alive, Alive Oh” by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley (Lightspeed 6/13)
Can we take it as given that any story that makes it to the Nebula short-list has competent writing and a basic high standard of technical quality? Ok.
The writing is sound and evocative, laying out the setting and conflict in quick spare strokes combined with a richness of everyday detail. But when I step back and look at the story’s symbolic structure, I can’t help feeling that it’s very retro and stereotypical in its themes. It’s full of tropes that don’t bear close scrutiny for me. The woman who serves as our narrator is a homebody, pulled to a distant planet in support of her scientist husband and always looking backward to Earth--an Earth now forbidden to her. The man, of whom we get very little view, seems framed as a traditional stoic scientific-adventurer. Blazing forward and expecting his family to follow supportively. We get next to no insight into his inner life and what glimpse we do get emphasizes emotional repression. And then we have the daughter--and I think it’s not random choice that it’s a daughter--who is raised to be her mother's echo: looking backward to an Earth she never knew and longing for the things her mother misses in a way that can never be fulfilled. Her denial of the status quo combined with a fatal curiousity to mimic her mother's dreams of Earthly things dooms her. One might see in her Pandora’s disastrous curiousity or Persephone’s fatal hunger. I was following a Twitter discussion recently about the classic story “Cold Equations” and how the rules of the game that the author set up to drive its plot had been deliberately (one might almost think maliciously) designed to require the tragic outcome in order to hammer home the horrific moral dilemma. And I can’t help but feel an echo of that deliberate trap here. Once the colonists on this poisonous world are forbidden their return they are, in essence, doomed. Be they ever so careful, one by one they will succumb to accidents, to unexpected hazards, or simply to carelessness born of despair. But it seems a very gendered despair that brings us to the apparently inevitable tragedy. The protagonist has been assigned gender-coded sine qua nons: home, tradition, and child. And when those are denied her, she has no remaining options.
All in all, I found this story unnecessarily tragic -- not only in that the rules of the game had been set up to delivery the intended climax, but in the way the protagonist had been designed to fail in the specific ways those rules intended.
Can we take it as given that any story that makes it to the Nebula short-list has competent writing and a basic high standard of technical quality? Ok.
The writing is sound and evocative, laying out the setting and conflict in quick spare strokes combined with a richness of everyday detail. But when I step back and look at the story’s symbolic structure, I can’t help feeling that it’s very retro and stereotypical in its themes. It’s full of tropes that don’t bear close scrutiny for me. The woman who serves as our narrator is a homebody, pulled to a distant planet in support of her scientist husband and always looking backward to Earth--an Earth now forbidden to her. The man, of whom we get very little view, seems framed as a traditional stoic scientific-adventurer. Blazing forward and expecting his family to follow supportively. We get next to no insight into his inner life and what glimpse we do get emphasizes emotional repression. And then we have the daughter--and I think it’s not random choice that it’s a daughter--who is raised to be her mother's echo: looking backward to an Earth she never knew and longing for the things her mother misses in a way that can never be fulfilled. Her denial of the status quo combined with a fatal curiousity to mimic her mother's dreams of Earthly things dooms her. One might see in her Pandora’s disastrous curiousity or Persephone’s fatal hunger. I was following a Twitter discussion recently about the classic story “Cold Equations” and how the rules of the game that the author set up to drive its plot had been deliberately (one might almost think maliciously) designed to require the tragic outcome in order to hammer home the horrific moral dilemma. And I can’t help but feel an echo of that deliberate trap here. Once the colonists on this poisonous world are forbidden their return they are, in essence, doomed. Be they ever so careful, one by one they will succumb to accidents, to unexpected hazards, or simply to carelessness born of despair. But it seems a very gendered despair that brings us to the apparently inevitable tragedy. The protagonist has been assigned gender-coded sine qua nons: home, tradition, and child. And when those are denied her, she has no remaining options.
All in all, I found this story unnecessarily tragic -- not only in that the rules of the game had been set up to delivery the intended climax, but in the way the protagonist had been designed to fail in the specific ways those rules intended.
