by Douglas Lain
Also by Douglas Lain
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Billy Moon
After the Saucers Landed
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Copyright © 2015 by Douglas Lain
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
In the shadow of the towers : speculative fiction in a post-9/11 world / edited by Douglas Lain.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-59780-839-2 (paperback)
1. Science fiction, American—21st century. 2. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001—Fiction. I. Lain, Douglas, editor.
PS648.S3I536 2015
813'.0876208—dc23
2015013581
Print ISBN: 978-1-59780-839-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-59780-850-7
Cover illustration and design by Erik T. Johnson
Please see page 342 for an extension of this copyright page.
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Introduction
One: The Dead
“There’s a Hole in the City”——Richard Bowes
“My Eyes, Your Ears”——Ray Vukcevich
“Beyond the Flags”——Kris Saknussemm
“Beautiful Stuff”——Susan Palwick
Two: Reaction and Repetition
Excerpt from The Zenith Angle——Bruce Sterling
“The Goat Variations”——Jeff VanderMeer
“Our Lady of Toledo Transmission”——Rob McCleary
“The Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill”——Kelly Robson
“Retribution”——Tim Marquitz
“Until Forgiveness Comes”——K. Tempest Bradford
“Pipeline”——Brian Aldiss
Three: The New Normal
Excerpt from Little Brother——Cory Doctorow
“Unexpected Outcomes”——Tim Pratt
“Out of My Sight, Out of My Mind”——David Friedman
“Closing Time”——Jack Ketchum
Four: Civilization?
“The Last Apollo Mission”——Douglas Lain
“Giliad”——Gregory Feeley
“Apologue”——James Morrow
Copyright Acknowledgements
About the Editor
INTRODUCTION
In the Shadow of the Towers was a project undertaken with trepidation. Art always creates order out of the chaos of life, but in this case imposing an order onto chaos was especially risky. When writers such as John Updike and Don DeLillo are accused of trivializing and sensationalizing 9/11, how are we purveyors of elfin princes, ghosts, and bug-eyed aliens likely to fare? The fear from the start was that genre fiction written about 9/11 would be an exercise in bad taste.
There is history behind this concern. After World War II, a cultural critic named Theodore Adorno famously wrote that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” He later amended this and wrote that “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.” Adorno came to understand that he’d asked the wrong question. It wasn’t a matter of whether we should or could write poetry, but rather how it might be possible to go on living at all. What Adorno realized was that the survivors of Auschwitz faced intense survivor’s guilt. Many were so plagued by the conviction that they too ought to have died, unable to accept that mere chance had saved them from the ovens, that they came to believe that their lives after the camps were imaginary.
On reading this I was reminded of Peyton Farquhar in Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Published in 1890, Bierce’s fiction recounted how Farquhar hallucinated an escape from death by hanging and lived a whole life in the seconds before the rope broke his neck.
That fictional plot device, the narrative frame of an entire life passing in mere seconds, can not only help us to comprehend what it was like for survivors of the Holocaust, but can also change how we view our own history. Looking back on the Holocaust through the lens of Bierce’s tale we see a different story, a different meaning, than what readers of The San Francisco Examiner saw back in 1890.
In 1898 a little-known, and little-remembered, writer named Morgan Robertson penned a tale about an enormous steam ship called The Titan. The novella was entitled “Futility,” and in it the Titan strikes an iceberg and sinks to the bottom of the North Atlantic. We can be certain that readers of Morgan’s story read the work differently in 1898 than they would have after April 15, 1912.
What I came to realize when I first started thinking about the possibility of taking this project on is that 9/11, too, had been presaged or foretold in fiction. Specifically by genre fiction.
When the attacks happened, they said it was an unprecedented event that had changed everything, that inaugurated a new era, a new normal, and what promised to be a new and perpetual war. But for science fiction and fantasy fans and writers, September 11th must have looked terribly familiar. The whole scene, especially as the rest of the country and the world saw it through the around-the-clock news coverage, looked less like a live camera feed and more like a Hollywood disaster movie. Think about your favorite adrenalin-pumping scenes in Independence Day, or even Godzilla. The real images of debris and dust from 9/11, of terrorized crowds stampeding away from the World Trade Center, all of it was like a Disney thrill ride that had suddenly gone terribly wrong.
We genre people were faced with a peculiar dilemma, having enjoyed celluloid apocalypses for decades. Now our collective silver-screen fantasies had shattered the fourth wall, in a way that was chillingly similar to how we’d always depicted it happening, all the more horrible and terrible for being so recognizable.
The challenge for a science fiction, fantasy, or horror writer after 9/11 was not merely to take a political or moral stance, but also to find an appropriate approach to writing fiction in the face of such tragedy. After the most garish and spectacular fictional scenario had come true, all the big tropes seemed to be played out. Those who dared to write directly about 9/11 found themselves not merely navigating a minefield of opinion and partisanship, but, more dauntingly, coming to terms with how the real world was already science fiction, already a horror, and perhaps also a mere fantasy. Writers who traded in the strange, the horrifying, and the surreal were challenged to go beyond what they knew about the unknown. 9/11 made the old apocalypses seem mundane. The stories in this anthology then are attempts to face the destruction from that day and create something we might still feel wonder about.
In the days after 9/11, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen infamously said “What has happened is—now you all have to turn your brains around—the greatest work of art there has ever been.” He later claimed that his quote was taken out of context, which it surely must have been. But still, for genre writers the q
uestion remains: how can we, in the face of this “greatest artwork,” conceive of new imaginary events that might compete with the sublime horror in NY? How can we continue dreaming in the shadow of the towers? The solution for most of us was to keep dreaming, but to keep our dreams small, personal, and individual. Especially when we tasked ourselves with writing about 9/11 itself.
Eighteen years before 9/11, in her song “Three Songs for Paper, Film and Video,” Laurie Anderson complained and marveled that superheroes can bend steel with their bare hands or walk in zero gravity, but nobody asks how or why. She claimed that, in these stories of the fantastic, aimed at creating a sense of wonder, human nature is an afterthought. Her song suggests that the problem of human nature was too big for the contemporary artist to handle.
But in the new century, after 9/11, that’s changed. Writers in this new now embrace the human condition, as a refuge from the terrible mountains of data that collect around the even more horrible events on the horizon.
That’s what you’ll find here, in this collection. These are all human-sized tales about an inhumanly over-sized event.
You’ll find an array of emotion. In Rick Bowes’s “There’s a Hole in the City,” there is melancholy and shock. In Tim Pratt’s “Unexpected Outcomes,” you’ll find a numb acceptance of oblivion only overcome by personal ambition. In Tim Marquitz’s “Retribution,” there is a searing inner anger, an anger that, even after it explodes into the world, can still be traced back to a personal and private pain.
These are small stories about a terribly huge event, but they manage to hold onto the fantastic, to hold onto wonder. Because after 9/11, the greatest fantasy might be that we humans, all of us so small and fragile, might be able to pick up the pieces, to pull the fragments together again, and live on, in and through our own imaginations.
ONE: THE DEAD
On October 16, 2004, the conservative columnist David Brooks wrote a column in The New York Times satirizing the upcoming presidential election between the incumbent President Bush and Swift Boat Senator John Kerry. Written as a fictionalized transcript of a televised debate, Brooks took aim at both candidates.
At one point in the column, Kerry, who in real life never wasted an opportunity to disconnect and alienate the electorate, responds to a prompt from the moderator to “spew sentimental blather in order to connect with the American people,” with the following:
“Spirituality is important to me. I’ve always felt we humans are insignificant maggots scuttling across the muck of the universe, and that life itself is just a meaningless moment of agony between the suffocating stench of the womb and the foul decay of the grave.”
Whether intentional or not, Brooks pulls a neat trick with this paraphrase of Beckett or Nietzsche. The towers collapsed, the office workers had died, and the mightiest military in the world had been powerless in stopping a ragtag group of Islamic terrorists armed with box cutters and airline tickets.
After the attacks of 9/11 the sense of security that had defined America since the second World War, the little confidence and optimism that had not been extinguished by Nixon and the Vietnam War, all of that was destroyed.
Writing for the US News and World Report, Roger Simon said it, if not best, then at least most directly. On September 14, 2001, just three days after the attack, he wrote:
“Life as we know it in these United States ended Tuesday morning.”
We all saw the truth. Our life, as we knew it before the Twin Towers fell, could end. It had ended. The Twin Towers had fallen and with them what we thought to be true, lasting, final, and right had collapsed as well. And, for a brief moment, we were all forced to face the fact that we—not just you and not just me, but we, all of us—would die. The whole collective enterprise of the United States of America was a fragile and temporary thing. We’d watched it pulverized into dust and spread across the New York skyline in a thick cloud. We had seen it on television, this future without us in it, and it was terrible.
In hindsight, it wasn’t that absurd for Brooks to have a Presidential candidate espousing nihilism during a televised debate. In 2004 we were all, even three years later, closet nihilists. The choice Brooks was presenting us with was the choice between denial of what we knew and the fruitless acceptance of it.
That’s where we begin in this collection. The following stories present three different accountings of the dead and of our future deaths. There are zombies, ghosts, and black rectangles, censorship bars, set across the eyes of the world. And just like America in the days and years following 9/11, there is no salvation to be found ahead. There is no religious impulse in these ghost stories, nothing eternal to guide the corpses that still walk the earth and ghosts who can’t go home again. There is nothing to these stories but paperweights and memories.
See you on the other side.
Richard Bowes’s writing career started in the 1980s with the publication of his Warchild novels. Since then he has won two World Fantasy Awards, a Lambda Award, an International Horror Guild Award, and fourteen appearances in various Year’s Best anthologies. “There’s a Hole in the City” was originally published at SciFi.com and was the first chapter of his Lambda-nominated novel Dust Devil on a Quiet Street.
Told in the wake of the attacks on the Twin Towers, the Manhattan of “There’s a Hole in the City” is a haunted one, even if what Bowes has created is ultimately a realistic fiction. The author turns our attention to the past, so that what we’ve perceived before as a chain of separate events can be truly seen, to quote Walter Benjamin, as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.”
THERE’S A HOLE IN THE CITY
Richard Bowes
Wednesday 9/12
On the evening of the day after the towers fell, I was waiting by the barricades on Houston Street and LaGuardia Place for my friend Mags to come up from Soho and have dinner with me. On the skyline, not two miles to the south, the pillars of smoke wavered slightly. But the creepily beautiful weather of September 11 still held, and the wind blew in from the northeast. In Greenwich Village the air was crisp and clean, with just a touch of fall about it.
I’d spent the last day and a half looking at pictures of burning towers. One of the frustrations of that time was that there was so little most of us could do about anything or for anyone.
Downtown streets were empty of all traffic except emergency vehicles. The West and East Villages from Fourteenth Street to Houston were their own separate zone. Pedestrians needed identification proving they lived or worked there in order to enter.
The barricades consisted of blue wooden police horses and a couple of unmarked vans thrown across LaGuardia Place. Behind them were a couple of cops, a few auxiliary police and one or two guys in civilian clothes with ID’s of some kind pinned to their shirts. All of them looked tired, subdued by events.
At the barricades was a small crowd: ones like me waiting for friends from neighborhoods to the south; ones without proper identification waiting for confirmation so that they could continue on into Soho; people who just wanted to be outside near other people in those days of sunshine and shock. Once in a while, each of us would look up at the columns of smoke that hung in the downtown sky then look away again.
A family approached a middle-aged cop behind the barricade. The group consisted of a man, a woman, a little girl being led by the hand, a child being carried. All were blondish and wore shorts and casual tops. The parents seemed pleasant but serious people in their early thirties, professionals. They could have been tourists. But that day the city was empty of tourists.
The man said something, and I heard the cop say loudly, “You want to go where?”
“Down there,” the man gestured at the columns. He indicated the children. “We want them to see.” It sounded as if he couldn’t imagine this appeal not working.
Everyone stared at the family. “No ID, no passage,” said the cop and turned his back on them. The pleasant expressions on the parents’ faces fad
ed. They looked indignant, like a maitre d’ had lost their reservations. She led one kid, he carried the other as they turned west, probably headed for another checkpoint.
“They wanted those little kids to see Ground Zero!” a woman who knew the cop said. “Are they out of their minds?”
“Looters,” he replied. “That’s my guess.” He picked up his walkie-talkie to call the checkpoints ahead of them.
Mags appeared just then, looking a bit frayed. When you’ve known someone for as long as I’ve known her, the tendency is not to see the changes, to think you both look about the same as when you were kids.
But kids don’t have gray hair, and their bodies aren’t thick the way bodies get in their late fifties. Their kisses aren’t perfunctory. Their conversation doesn’t include curt little nods that indicate something is understood.
We walked in the middle of the streets because we could. “Couldn’t sleep much last night,” I said.
“Because of the quiet,” she said. “No planes. I kept listening for them. I haven’t been sleeping anyway. I was supposed to be in housing court today. But the courts are shut until further notice.”
I said, “Notice how with only the ones who live here allowed in, the South Village is all Italians and hippies?”
“Like 1965 all over again.”
She and I had been in contact more in the past few months than we had in a while. Memories of love and indifference that we shared had made close friendship an on-and-off thing for the last thirty-something years.
Earlier in 2001, at the end of an affair, I’d surrendered a rent-stabilized apartment for a cash settlement and bought a tiny co-op in the South Village. Mags lived as she had for years in a run-down building on the fringes of Soho.
So we saw each other again. I write, obviously, but she never read anything I published, which bothered me. On the other hand, she worked off and on for various activist leftist foundations, and I was mostly uninterested in that.
