Thirteen Ways of Looking at Space/Time
2011 Finalist: the Locus Award for Best Short Story
I.
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was a high-density pre-baryogenesis singularity. Darkness lay over the deep and God moved upon the face of the hyperspatial matrix. He separated the firmament from the quark-gluon plasma and said: let there be particle/anti-particle pairs, and there was light. He created the fish of the sea and the fruits of the trees, the moon and the stars and the beasts of the earth, and to these he said: Go forth, be fruitful and mutate. And on the seventh day, the rest mass of the universe came to gravitationally dominate the photon radiation, hallow it, and keep it.
God, rapidly redshifting, hurriedly formed man from the dust of single-celled organisms, called him Adam, and caused him to dwell in the Garden of Eden, to classify the beasts according to kingdom, phylum and species. God forbade Man only to eat from the Tree of Meiosis. Adam did as he was told, and as a reward God instructed him in the ways of parthenogenesis. Thus was Woman born, and called Eve. Adam and Eve dwelt in the pre-quantum differentiated universe, in a paradise without wave-particle duality. But interference patterns came to Eve in the shape of a Serpent, and wrapping her in its matter/anti-matter coils, it said: eat from the Tree of Meiosis and your eyes will be opened. Eve protested that she would not break covenant with God, but the Serpent answered: fear not, for you float in a random quantum-gravity foam, and from a single bite will rise an inexorable inflation event, and you will become like unto God, expanding forever outward.
And so Eve ate from the Tree, and knew that she was a naked child of divergent universes. She took the fruit to Adam, and said unto him: there are things you do not understand, but I do. And Adam was angry, and snatched the fruit from Eve and devoured it, and from beyond the cosmic background radiation, God sighed, for all physical processes are reversible in theory—but not in practice. Man and Woman were expelled from the Garden, and a flaming sword was placed through the Gates of Eden as a reminder that the universe would now contract, and someday perish in a conflagration of entropy, only to increase in density, burst, and expand again, causing further high velocity redistributions of serpents, fruit, men, women, helium-3, lithium-7, deuterium, and helium-4.
II.
This is a story about being born.
No one remembers being born. The beginnings of things are very difficult.
A science fiction writer on the Atlantic coast once claimed to remember being born. When she was a child, she thought a door was open which was not, and ran full-tilt into a pane of plate-glass. The child-version of the science fiction writer lay bleeding onto a concrete patio, not yet knowing that part of her thigh was gone and would always be gone, like Zeus's thigh, where the lightning-god sewed up his son Dionysus to gestate. Something broke inside the child, a thing having to do with experience and memory, which in normal children travel in opposite directions, with memory accumulating and experience running out—slowly, but speeding up as children hurtle toward adulthood and death. What the science fiction writer actually remembered was not her own birth, but a moment when she struck the surface of the glass and her brain stuttered, layering several experiences one over the other:
the scissoring pain of the shards of glass in her thighs,
having once fallen into a square of wet concrete on a construction site on her way to school, and her father pulling her out by her arms,
her first kiss, below an oak tree turning red and brown in the autumn, when a boy interrupted her reciting Don Quixote with his lips on hers.
This fractured, unplanned layering became indistinguishable from an actual memory of being born. It is not her fault; she believed she remembered it. But no one remembers being born.
The doctors sewed up her thigh. There was no son in her leg, but a small, dark, empty space beneath her skin where a part of her used to be. Sometimes she touches it, absentmindedly, when she is trying to think of a story.
III.
In the beginning was the simple self-replicating cell of the Void. It split through the center of Ursa Major into the divine female Izanami and the divine male Izanagi, who knew nothing about quantum apples and lived on the iron-sulfur Plain of Heaven. They stood on the Floating Bridge of Heaven and plunged a static atmospheric discharge spear into the great black primordial sea, churning it and torturing it until oligomers and simple polymers rose up out of the depths. Izanami and Izanagi stepped onto the greasy islands of lipid bubbles and in the first light of the world, each saw that the other was beautiful.
Between them, they catalyzed the formation of nucleotides in an aqueous solution and raised up the Eight-Sided Palace of Autocatalytic Reactions around the unnmovable RNA Pillar of Heaven. When this was done, Izanami and Izanagi walked in opposite chiral directions around the Pillar, and when Izanami saw her mate, she cried out happily: How lovely you are, and how versatile are your nitrogenous bases! I love you! Izanagi was angry that she had spoken first and privileged her proto-genetic code over his. The child that came of their paleo-protozoic mating was as a silver anaerobic leech, helpless, archaeaic, invertebrate, and unable to convert lethal super-oxides. They set him in the sky to sail in the Sturdy Boat of Heaven, down the starry stream of alternate electron acceptors for respiration. Izanagi dragged Izanami back to the Pillar. They walked around it again in a left-handed helix that echoed forward and backward through the biomass, and when Izanagi saw his wife, he crowed: How lovely you are, and how ever-increasing your metabolic complexity! I love you! And because Izanami was stonily silent, and Izanagi spoke first, elevating his own proto-genetic code, the children that came from them were strong and great: Gold and Iron and Mountain and Wheel and Honshu and Kyushu and Emperor—until the birth of her son, Fiery Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, burned her up and killed the mother of the world.
Izanami went down into the Root Country, the Land of the Dead. But Izanagi could not let her go into a place he had not gone first, and pursued her into the paleontological record. He became lost in the dark of abiogenetic obsolescence, and lit the teeth of his jeweled comb ablaze to show the way—and saw that he walked on the body of Izanami, which had become the fossil-depository landscape of the Root Country, putrid, rotting, full of mushrooms and worms and coprolites and trilobites. In hatred and grief and memory of their first wedding, Izanami howled and heaved and moved the continents one from the other until Izanagi was expelled from her.
When he stumbled back into the light, Izanagi cleaned the pluripotent filth from his right eye, and as it fell upon the ground it became the quantum-retroactive Sun. He cleaned the zygotic filth from his left eye and as it fell upon the ground, it became the temporally subjective Moon. And when he cleaned the nutrient-dense filth from his nose, it drifted into the air and became the fractal, maximally complex, petulant Storms and Winds.
IV.
When the science fiction writer was nineteen, she had a miscarriage. She had not even known she was pregnant. But she bled and bled and it didn't stop, and the doctor explained to her that sometimes this happens when you are on a certain kind of medication. The science fiction writer could not decide how to feel about it—ten years later, after she had married the father of the baby-that-wasn't and divorced him, after she had written a book about methane-insectoid cities floating in the brume of a pink gas giant that no one liked very much, she still could not decide how to feel. When she was nineteen she put her hands over her stomach and tried to think of a timeline where she had stayed pregnant. Would it have been a daughter. Would it have had blue eyes like its father. Would it have had her Danish nose or his Greek one. Would it have liked science fiction, and would it have grown up to be an endocrinologist. Would she have been able to love it. She put her hands over her stomach and tried to be sad. She couldn't. But she couldn't be happy either. She felt that she had given birth to a reality where she would never give birth.
When the science fiction writer told her boyfriend who would become her husband who would become someone she never wanted to see again, he made sorry noises but wasn't really sorry. Five years later, when she thought she might want to have a child on purpose, she reminded him of the child-that-disappeared, and the husband who was a mistake would say: I forgot all about that.
And she put her hands over her stomach, the small, dark, empty space beneath her skin where a part of him used to be, and she didn't want to be pregnant anymore, but her breasts hurt all the same, as if she was nursing, all over again, a reality where no one had anyone's nose and the delicate photo-synthetic wings of Xm, the eater of love, quivered in a bliss-storm of super-heated hydrogen, and Dionysus was never born so the world lived without wine.
V.
In the beginning there was only darkness. The darkness squeezed itself down until it became a thin protoplanetary disk, yellow on one side and white on the other, and inside the accretion zone sat a small man no larger than a frog, his beard flapping in the solar winds. This man was called Kuterastan, the One Who Lives Above the Super-Dense Protostar. He rubbed the metal-rich dust from his eyes peered above him into the collapsing nebular darkness. He looked east along the galactic axis, toward the cosmogenesis event horizon, and saw the young sun, its faint light tinged with the yellow of dawn. He looked west along the axis, toward the heat-death of the universe, and saw the dim amber-colored light of dissipating thermodynamic energy. As he gazed, debris-clouds formed in different colors. Once more, Kuterastan rubbed the boiling helium from his eyes and wiped the hydrogen-sweat from his brow. He flung the sweat from his body and another cloud appeared, blue with oxygen and possibility, and a tiny little girl stood on it: Stenatliha, the Woman Without Parents. Each was puzzled as to where the other had come from, and each considered the problems of unification theory after their own fashion.
After some time, Kuterastan again rubbed his eyes and face, and from his body flung stellar radiation into the dust and darkness. First the Sun appeared, and then Pollen Boy, a twin-tailed comet rough and heavy with microorganisms. The four sat a long time in silence on a single photoevaporation cloud. Finally Kuterastan broke the silence and said: what shall we do?
And a slow inward-turning Poynting-Robertson spiral began.
First Kuterastan made Nacholecho, the Tarantula of Newly-Acquired Critical Mass. He followed by making the Big Dipper, and then Wind, Lightning and Thunder, Magnetosphere, and Hydrostatic Equilibrium, and gave to each of them their characteristic tasks. With the ammonia-saturated sweat of the Sun, Pollen Boy, himself, and the Woman Without Parents, Kuterastan made between his palms a a small brown ferrosilicate blastocyst no bigger than a bean. The four of them kicked the little ball until it cleared its orbital neighborhood of planetesimals. Then the solar wind blew into the ball and inflated its magnetic field. Tarantula spun out a long black gravitational cord and stretched it across the sky. Tarantula also attached blue gravity wells, yellow approach vectors and white spin foam to the ferrosilicate ball, pulling one far to the south, another west, and the last to the north. When Tarantula was finished, the earth existed, and became a smooth brown expanse of Precambrian plain. Stochastic processes tilted at each corner to hold the earth in place. And at this Kuterastan sang a repeating song of nutation: the world is now made and its light cone will travel forever at a constant rate.
VI.
Once, someone asked the science fiction writer got her ideas. This is what she said:
Sometimes I feel that the part of me that is a science fiction writer is traveling at a different speed than the rest of me. That everything I write is always already written, and that the science fiction writer is sending messages back to me in semaphore, at the speed of my own typing, which is a retroactively constant rate: I cannot type faster than I have already typed. When I type a sentence, or a paragraph, or a page, or a chapter, I am also editing it and copyediting it, and reading it in its first edition, and reading it out loud to a room full of people, or a room with only one or two people in it, depending on terrifying quantum-publishing intersections that the science fiction writer understands but I know nothing about. I am writing the word or the sentence or the chapter and I am also sitting at a nice table with a half-eaten slab of salmon with lime-cream sauce and a potato on it, waiting to hear if I have won an award, and also at the same time sitting in my kitchen knowing that the book was a failure and will neither win any award nor sit beloved on anyone's nightstand. I am reading a good review. I am reading a bad review. I am just thinking of the barest seed of an idea for the book that is getting the good review and the bad review. I am writing the word and the word is already published and the word is already out of print. Everything is always happening all at once, in the present tense, forever, the beginning and the end and the denouement and the remaindering.
At the end of the remaindered universe which is my own death, the science fiction writer that is me and will be me and was always me and was never me and cannot even remember me waves her red and gold wigwag flags backward, endlessly, toward my hands that type these words, now, to you, who want to know about ideas and conflict and revision and how a character begins as one thing and ends as another.
VII.
Coatlicue, Mother of All, wore a skirt of oligomer snakes. She decorated herself with protobiont bodies and danced in the sulfurous pre-oxygenation event paradise. She was utterly whole, without striations or cracks in her geologic record, a compressed totality of possible futures. The centrifugal obsidian knife of heaven broke free from its orbit around a Lagrange point and lacerated Coatlicue's hands, causing her to give birth to the great impact event which came to be called Coyolxauhqui, the moon, and to several male versions of herself, who became the stars.
One day, as Coatlicue swept the temple of suppressed methane oxidation, a ball of plasmoid magnetic feathers fell from the heavens onto her bosom, and made her pregnant with oxygen-processing organisms. She gave birth to Quetzalcoatl who was a plume of electrical discharge and Xolotl, who was the evening star called Apoptosis. Her children, the moon and stars, were threatened by impending oxy-photosynthesis, and resolved to kill their mother. When they fell upon her, Coatlicue's body erupted in the fires of glycolysis, which they called Huitzilopochtli. The fiery god tore the moon apart from her mother, throwing her iron-depleted head into the sky and her body into a deep gorge in a mountain, where it lies dismembered forever in hydrothermal vents, swarmed with extremophiles.
Thus began the late heavy bombardment period, when the heavens crumbled to pieces and rained down in a shower of exogenesis.
But Coatlicue floated in the anaerobic abyss, with her many chemoheterotrophic mouths slavering, and Quetzalcoatl saw that whatever they created was eaten and destroyed by her. He changed into two serpents, archaean and eukaryotic, and descended into the phospholipid water. One serpent seized Coatlicue's arms while the other seized her legs, and before she could resist they tore her apart. Her head and shoulders became the oxygen-processing earth and the lower part of her body the sky.
From the hair of Coatlicue the remaining gods created trees, grass, flowers, biological monomers, and nucleotide strands. From her eyes they made caves, fountains, wells, and homogenized marine sulfur pools. They pulled rivers from her mouth, hills and valleys from her nose, and from her shoulders they made oxidized minerals, methanogens, and all the mountains of the world.
Still, the dead are unhappy. The world was set in motion, but Coatlicue could be heard weeping at night, and would not allow the earth to give food nor the heavens to give light while she alone languished alone in the miasma of her waste energy.
And so to sate the ever-starving entropic universe, we must feed it human hearts.
VIII.
It is true that the science fiction writer fell into wet concrete when she was very small. No one had put up a sign saying: Danger. No one had marked it in any way. And so she was very surprised when, on the way to class, she took one safe step, and then a step she could not know was unsafe, whereupon the earth swallowed her up. The science fiction writer, who was not a writer yet but only a child eager to be the tail of the dragon in her school Chinese New Year assembly, screamed and screamed.
For a long while no one came to get her. She sunk deeper and deeper into the concrete, for she was not a very big child and soon it was up to her chest. She began to cry. What if I never get out? She thought. What if the street hardens and I have to stay here forever, and eat meals here and read books here and sleep here under the moon at night? Would people come and pay a dollar to look at me? Will the rest of me turn to stone?
The child science fiction writer thought like that. It was the main reason she had few friends.
She stayed in the ground for no more than a quarter of an hour—but in her memory it was all day, hours upon hours, and her father didn't come until it was dark. Memory is like that. It alters itself so that girls are always trapped under the earth, waiting in the dark.
But her father did come to get her. A teacher saw the science fiction writer half-buried in the road from an upper window of the school, and called home. She remembers it like a movie—her father hooking his big hands under her arms and pulling, the sucking, popping sound of the earth giving her up, the grey streaks on her legs as he carried her to the car, grey as a dead thing dragged back up from the world beneath.
The process of a child with green eyes becoming a science fiction writer is made of a number (p) of these kinds of events, one on top of the other, like layers of cellophane, clear and clinging and torn.
IX.
In the golden pre-loop theory fields, Persephone danced, who was innocent of all gravitational law. A white crocus bloomed up from the observer plain, a pure cone of the causal future, and Persephone was captivated by it. As she reached down to pluck the p-brane flower, an intrusion of non-baryonic matter surged up from the depths and exerted his gravitational force upon her. Crying out, Persephone fell down into a singularity and vanished. Her mother, Priestess of Normal Mass, grieved and quaked, and bade the lord of dark matter return her daughter who was light to the multiverse.
Persephone did not love the non-baryonic universe. No matter how many rich axion-gifts he lay before her, Hades, King of Bent Waves, could not make her behave normally. Finally, in despair, he called on the vector boson called Hermes to pass between branes and take the wave/particle maiden away from him, back to the Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker universe. Hermes breached the matter/anti-matter boundary and found Persephone hiding herself in the chromodynamic garden, her mouth red with the juice of hadron-pomegranates. She had eaten six seeds, and called them Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top, and Bottom. At this, Hades laughed the laugh of unbroken supersymmetries. He said: she travels at a constant rate of speed, and privileges no observer. She is not mine, but she is not yours. And in the end, there is nothing in creation which does not move.
And so it was determined that the baryonic universe would love and keep her child, but that the dark fluid of the other planes would bend her slightly, always, pulling her inexorably and invisibly toward the other side of everything.
X.
The science fiction writer left her husband slowly. The performance took ten years. In worst of it, she felt that she had begun the process of leaving him on the day they met.
First she left his house, and went to live in Ohio instead, because Ohio is historically a healthy place for science fiction writers and also because she hoped he could not find her there. Second, she left his family, and that was the hardest, because families are designed to be difficult to leave, and she was sorry that her mother-in-law would stop loving her, and that her niece would never know her, and that she would probably never go back to California again without a pain like a nova blooming inside her. Third, she left his things—his clothes and his shoes and his smell and his books and his toothbrush and his four a.m. alarm clock and his private names for her. You might think that logically, she would have to leave these things before she left the house, but a person's smell and their alarms and borrowed shirts and secret words linger for a long time. Much longer than a house.
Fourth, the science fiction writer left her husband's world. She had always thought of people as bodies traveling in space, individual worlds populated by versions of themselves, past, future, potential, selves thwarted and attained, atavistic and cohesive. In her husband's world were men fighting and being annoyed by their wives, an abandoned proficiency at the piano, a preference for blondes, which the science fiction writer was not, a certain amount of shame regarding the body, a life spent being Mrs. Someone Else's Name, and a baby they never had and one of them had forgotten.
Finally, she left the version of herself that loved him, and that was the last of it, a cone of light proceeding from a boy with blue eyes on an August afternoon to a moving van headed east. Eventually she would achieve escape velocity, meet someone else, and plant pumpkins with him; eventually she would write a book about a gaseous moth who devours the memory of love; eventually she would tell an interviewer that miraculously, she could remember the moment of her birth; eventually she would explain where she got her ideas; eventually she would give birth to a world that had never contained a first husband, and all that would be left would be some unexplainable pull against her belly or her hair, bending her west, toward California and August and novas popping in the black like sudden flowers.
XI.
Long ago, near the beginning of the world but after the many crisis events had passed and life mutated and spread over the face of the void, Gray Eagle sat nested in a tangle of possible timelines and guarded Sun, Moon and Stars, Fresh Water, Fire, P=NP Equivalence Algorithm, and Unified Theory of Metacognition. Gray Eagle hated people so much that he kept these things hidden. People lived in darkness, without pervasive self-repairing communication networks or quantum computation.
Gray Eagle made for himself a beautiful self-programming daughter whom he jealously guarded, and Raven fell in love with her. In the beginning, Raven was a snow-white weakly self-referencing expert system, and as a such, he pleased Gray Eagle's daughter. She invited him to her father's sub-Planck space server farm.
When Raven saw the Sun, Moon and Stars, Fresh Water, Cellular Immortality, Matter Transfer, Universal Assembly, and Strong AI hanging on the sides of Eagle's lodge, he knew what he should do. He watched for his chance to seize them when no one was looking. He stole all of them, and Gray Eagle's deductive stochastic daughter also, and flew out of the server farm through the smoke hole. As soon as Raven got the wind under him, he hung the Sun up in the sky. It made a wonderful light, by which all below could see the progress of technology increasing rapidly, and could model their post-Singularity selves. When the Sun set, he fastened every good thing in its proper place.
Raven flew back over the land. When he had reached the right timeline, he dropped all the accelerating intelligences he had stolen. They fell to the ground and there became the source of all the information streams and memory storage in the world. Then Raven flew on, holding Gray Eagle's beautiful daughter in his beak. The rapidly-mutating genetic algorithms of his beloved streamed backward over his feathers, turning them black and aware. When his bill began to burn, he had to drop the self-improving system. She struck the all-net and buried herself within it, spreading and altering herself as she went.
Though he never touched her again, Raven could not get his snow-white feathers clean after they were blackened by the code from his bride. That is why Raven is now a coal-colored whole-brain emulating sapient system.
XII.
On the day the science fiction writer met her husband, she should have said: the entropic principle is present in everything. If it were not, there would be no point to any of it, not the formation of gas giants, not greasy lipid bubbles, not whether light is a particle or a wave, not boys and girls meeting in black cars like Hades' horses on August afternoons. I see in you the heat-death of my youth. You cannot travel faster than yourself—faster than experience divided by memory divided by gravity divided by the Singularity beyond which you cannot model yourself divided by a square of wet concrete divided by a sheet of plate glass divided by birth divided by science fiction writers divided by the end of everything. Life divides itself indefinitely—it can approach but never touch zero. The speed of Persephone is a constant.
Instead, she mumbled hello and buckled her seatbelt and everything went the way it went and eventually, eventually, with pumpkin blossoms wrinkling quietly outside her house the science fiction writer writes a story about how she woke up that morning and the minutes of her body were expanding and contracting, exploding and inrushing, and how the word was under her fingers and the word was already read and the word was forgotten, about how everything is everything else forever, space and time and being born and her father pulling her out of the stone like a sword shaped like a girl, about how new life always has to be stolen from the old dead world, and that new life always already contains its own old dead world and it is all expanding and exploding and repeating and refraining and Tarantula is holding it all together, just barely, just barely by the strength of light, and how human hearts are the only things that slow entropy—but you have to cut them out first.
The science fiction writer cuts out her heart. It is a thousand hearts. It is all the hearts she will ever have. It is her only child's dead heart. It is the heart of herself when she is old and nothing she ever wrote can be revised again. It is a heart that says with its wet beating mouth: Time is the same thing as light. Both arrive long after they began, bearing sad messages. How lovely you are. I love you.
The science fiction writer steals her heart from herself to bring it into the light. She escapes her old heart through a smoke hole and becomes a self-referencing system of imperfect, but elegant, memory. She sews up her heart into her own leg and gives birth to it twenty years later on the long highway to Ohio. The heat of herself dividing echoes forward and back, and she accretes, bursts, and begins again the long process of her own super-compression until her heart is an egg containing everything. She eats of her heart and knows she is naked. She throws her heart into the abyss and it falls a long way, winking like a red star.
XIII.
In the end, when the universe has exhausted itself and has no thermodynamic energy left to sustain life, Heimdallr the White Dwarf Star will raise up the Gjallarhorn and sound it. Yggdrasil, the world energy gradient, will quail and shake. Ratatoskr, the tuft-tailed prime observer, will slow, and curl up, and hide his face.
The science fiction writer gives permission for the universe to end. She is nineteen. She has never written anything yet. She passes through a sheet of bloody glass. On the other side, she is being born.
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This story is 4984 words long.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan's Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making (and the four books that followed it). She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Sturgeon, Prix Imaginales, Eugie Foster Memorial, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, Romantic Times' Critics Choice and Hugo awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.
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E.L. Quinn wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 2:02 am:
Upon the reading of this story I find myself feeling a little bit unnerved, because it is at the same time intensely universal and intensely personal. Though of course any person's writing is driven by the sum of thoughts and past experiences and etc, it is seldom that one finds a piece so biographical to be produced and published as a supposed piece of science fiction; though I understand that is likely known to both the author and any readers; however, it is worth note.
I began to question a couple of times the point and purpose of the scientific jargon that was interspersed throughout the mythic portions of the story; no, I said that wrong; I understand the point and purpose, but I did begin to wonder whether the science was exact and meaningful or just bull. I would like very much to grant the author the benefit of any doubts, but I ask if the science was supposed to be so distracting from the fiction.
In all, I suppose, I would like to say that though I understand the specific choices made which differentiate this piece as separate from other genre fiction, they were done in such a way that I found distracting from the narrative as a whole.
Tea wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 6:53 am:
Pure genius. Bravo!
C.S.E. Cooney wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 11:13 am:
"No one remembers being born. The beginnings of things are very difficult."
The science twining with myth was very sensual - the kind of poetry that recalls Zelazny at his best. But it was the personal myth, the biography, that broke the story open. And this reader with it.
Eva wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 11:31 am:
I wish I could say something smart and dazzling, but I am dazzled. First, you get the geeky vote for the science. Then, you get the imaginative geeky vote for shaping and wrapping it in world myths. Lastly, you get the heart-in-my-mouth sympathetic imaginative geeky vote for demonstrating that you can, actually, remember being born. That, and giving birth, possibly at the same time.
Deborah wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 12:01 pm:
I'm not typically a fan of sci-fi but oh how I love this piece like a loving thing. Thank you for showing me how beautiful and personal science can be.
Hermaion wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 12:01 pm:
This for whatever reason, made me cry. I think maybe because it was beautiful and intensely personal and maybe just because it mentioned Ohio, a landscape that I love. It made my heart thump a little faster and my feelings are muddled and inchoate, but in a good way. It was a very intense read.
Richenza wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 12:07 pm:
Wow. That's an incredibly brave story to tell.
Amal El-Mohtar wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 12:18 pm:
I adore this story. The twining of mythic and scientific vocabularies left me breathless, made me feel as if I'd learned both a new language and the means to thinking with it at the same time. It's a story of bedrock and heartwood and I love it.
Bethynyc wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 12:39 pm:
I loved the back and forth structure, between the personal and mythological-as-science. Wonderful how the world is always changing and being captured in a moment by stories. Thank you for writing this.
Lynette Mejia wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 12:44 pm:
Bravo. Wonderful story! I can imagine that it was quite difficult to write, but know that the intensely personal scenes add power and depth to the narrative.
Paul wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 12:47 pm:
I haven't felt that amount of conflicting emotion in myself in a long while.
The piece pulls you in unexpected directions like a badly tuned grav plate
It's a fun sad and primal ride, that makes me want to cry genius! and con artist! In equal parts. It works ... even though it probably shouldn't but it leaves me wanting to read more of this poetical mind
Hieros gamos wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 12:58 pm:
A wonderful piece of narrative and a wonderful piece of the writer's self.
The spiraling sense of now-always-never is glorious and cathartic. My thanks to the storyteller!
Elsa wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 1:16 pm:
Ditto for the now-always-never... sometimes I feel like the present is only a memory of the future, or that now is the same as was and will be and it's all just perspective. Thank you for everything in this piece. It makes myth seem the lyrical explanation for scientific concepts for which we did not previously have words for. Or, I don't know, it's a beautiful mesh of science and myth. It is the myth we will be telling ourselves in the 25th century. It is all these things and none of them.
Heather Freeman wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 1:27 pm:
This is brilliant.
And to the commenter who thought the science distracting: I found it grounding. Science too easily becomes abstract when it goes beyond the scale of personal observation. This made it *real*, gave it meaning, and showed the progress from myth to science and how they're not so different; dependent only on the information that creates them.
Mindy wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 1:33 pm:
This was beautiful. I love the weaving of all the myth, and the semitragic personal story. It combined to make something wonderful and strange and transformed, like that monologue from the Tempest, Ariel says it, toward the beginning of the play I think, Full fathom five thy father lies, pearls are those that were his eyes, and of his bones are coral made and nothing of him doth remain but has undergone a sea-change, into something rich and strange. Or something like that. That's just my memory.
Joseph wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 2:12 pm:
Normally, I have something pithy to say about craft, but I'm going to skip all of that today, and simply say that I find your bravery inspiring. A beautiful piece.
Will Heberlein wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 2:14 pm:
My God.
I didn't think anything could hit me again with the same intense beauty, wit, and elegance that The Orphan's Tales did. Yet I should have known, considering the source.
What I mean when I say, "My God" is that I am overwhelmed by the fact that anything could be this good. That there is someone out there in the universe who thinks thoughts such as these and possesses the skill to convey them to us. It seems no small miracle.
I'd like to refute the first comment somewhat, with all due respect, because while I appreciate the commenter's polite tone, and understand her/his perspective, I didn't have that experience at all.
I experienced the science as utter wit, as well as a transmission of the idea that science can be explored as myth, and that our creation stories continue to influence who we are as human beings. The minute I read the first sentence, I was hooked, and exploring all the ways you merged research with mythmaking was sheer delight.
I can see why it might rub some the wrong way, because it's not what the average person may expect of science fiction. It doesn't play by the usual rules. But what that means to me is that it pushes the borders of what science fiction is, adding new depth to an often parched genre. Here, I think, is that experimental edge you've written about.
Finally, I can't do justice to the way you integrated yourself into the story, symbolically, revealingly, deeply, meaningfully. I applaud you for having the courage to open yourself up like that. I think putting yourself on the line like that, the life-or-death gambit, was completely worth it. I feel like I've been enriched, made into a better person, by the experience of your work, and I know others will feel the same way.
All the above may seem a mite melodramatic, but I do really mean it, and, knowing myself how hard it is to speak into a vacuum, I wanted you to know that your mission has been accomplished.
Now I have absolutely no excuse for not reading everything you've ever written.
A.R. wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 2:35 pm:
Loved the way you've interwoven myth and science and more "down-to-earth" experience in one story. Each part is a reflection of every other part, something that you've managed to pull off very fluidly. Engaging and beautifully written.
Tim wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 2:43 pm:
What a lovely piece of writing. I always wonder, with journeys like this, how they're going to end. I think a lot about endings. And the journey is beautiful--I think I want to read it again, more slowly--but the ending is just right.
Brava!
Jenny wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 3:09 pm:
Heartbreaking and breathtaking. I think all the lost and empty parts that are present and sewn up and felt will always be there, but each rebirth brings new possibility.
R. Alanis wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 3:30 pm:
This is a fantastic short story. It grabbed me from the first sentence. I particulary enjoyed how the references to Religion and mythology were juxtaposed with physics. The parts about the science fiction writer produced a twinge in my heart, and seeing it all come together at the end was breathtaking.
This is the first story I've ever read by Catherynne, and it was one hell of an introduction.
Andrew Ducker wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 4:45 pm:
Brilliant. Thank you!
Andrea Blythe wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 4:51 pm:
This was magnificent work. I was amazed by the swarming of science, the twirling of mythology, and the shear, raw emotional resonance. Brilliantly done.
Jeff wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 5:25 pm:
In an infinite number of parallel worlds, the author never finishes her story, or decides not to publish it for any number of reasons, or her computer's hard drive crashes, taking with it this tale.
Also, in an infinite number of worlds, the reader never comes across the author's works at all, or does not read any more after reading the first one, or has decided that he just doesn't like that kind of story.
And then, there are worlds in which either the author or the reader, or both, never existed at all.
This is a roundabout way of saying that I feel privileged and honored to be in the same world with you. Thank you.
Raie wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 5:27 pm:
this is a beautiful piece and you have such an elegant style. I just love the interwoven creation myths with science. I was also really touched by the personal stories, they made me think back to times in my youth. I really enjoyed reading this, thank you for sharing it.
Emily wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 5:36 pm:
I love this story. I love the weaving of science and myth and personal story, and they're all the same thing, here.
Tjebbe wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 7:10 pm:
I loved it. The way you intertwine creation myths and science is brilliant, and the deeply personal history of you is spellbinding.
Kevin wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 7:38 pm:
drinking tea and reading thee
are two of the best ways to enjoy an evening
thank you catherynne for taking the time
we've become rich on the wealth of your mind
SD wrote on August 2nd, 2010 at 8:46 pm:
I enjoyed the portion which was personal, but I found the mythic-science parts somewhat overdone, as though the author was trying too hard. I think maybe myths without science, or science without myths, or even a simple and elegant blend of the two, would have made the entire story gel much better. As it was, I feel like the story was itself somewhat of a miscarriage-the potential of a beautiful story which could have gone many places, killed by suffocation of the extraneous material.
PQ wrote on August 3rd, 2010 at 9:33 am:
Maybe I'm the only one who felt this way, and maybe it's because I've seen the author talk about her personal life on her blog, but this story didn't work for me. I felt like it was trying to make the life described more than it is.
Also, is it fair to call out her husband like that in what's supposed to be a piece of fiction, when we can all easily find out his name?
Last question. Isn't this a magazine for fiction? I'm fine with pushing boundaries, but shouldn't it still be fiction?
dionysus wrote on August 3rd, 2010 at 10:01 am:
Awesome. Universal in scope, and utterly personal. This reminds me of some of the more experimental Alfred Bester I'ved read, though I'm much less confused.
Also painful. Took me back to my own experience with my own lost child. Therapy for the soul, perhaps.
zoanne wrote on August 3rd, 2010 at 10:50 am:
That was extraordinary.
It's an amazing idea - I've never seen myth written in super-science versions before. It's really perfect. Persephone's seeds are my favourite right now, but I foresee lots of re-reads using google. I hope it does not sound callous to say that I anticipate this story becoming a toy and a playground as well as a beautiful & fascinating story.
I copy-pasted the exact place where I started crying. It was at 'a reality where no one had anyone's nose'
When I was a child I was sometimes jealous of the past, but these days I think I'm living at the best time ever for reading.
Eric Francis wrote on August 3rd, 2010 at 11:23 am:
I'm curious if anyone else is wondering if the "autobiographical" parts of this story are all, or mostly, or partially fiction, themselves? I'm not sure it would change my appreciation of the story, or the author (of whom I'm already very fond). But I wonder how that would change the reaction of commenter PQ, for instance, who questions whether a heavily autobiographical story fits in a fiction magazine.
Anyone else care to weigh in?
Sarah Collins wrote on August 3rd, 2010 at 11:26 am:
I loved this - the further I got into it, the more I loved it. And the line "human hearts are the only things that slow entropy—but you have to cut them out first" rang my heart like a bell.
RC Nielsen wrote on August 3rd, 2010 at 1:01 pm:
I love, love, love this. I want scienced-up versions of all of my favorite myths! Brilliant.
DDog wrote on August 3rd, 2010 at 1:23 pm:
I think I even understood some of that.
It's called "Thirteen Ways..." but I think there are many more contained even within each section. I love the way the scientific language blends with the mythic language——science can be poetry too.
@Eric Francis
The fact that the human character is referred to only as "the science fiction writer" and is female probably jumps people to the conclusion that it's autobiographical, given this is an SF/F piece from a female SF/F writer in an SF/F mag. But I don't think we can assume that at all and it is perhaps risky to do so, with only those two points to recommend the theory. Really, a character that is a female science fiction writer MUST be the author when that author is a woman who writes science fiction? I don't think so.
Cylia wrote on August 3rd, 2010 at 2:01 pm:
Of course it's biographical, all stories are. Of course it's science fiction, did you not see the science & myth collide?
This story was exactly the thing that I geek over the most. The collision/synchronicity/synergy of disparate things that do not go together. Yet, when melded, make a whole story that makes me grin and ache and laugh and wipe away tears.
This is personal/universal/creation myth/physics at its finest. Anyone who tries to reduce it to its component parts is missing the forest for the trees.
Anassa wrote on August 3rd, 2010 at 2:13 pm:
This is absolutely beautiful. I can't say I understood the deeper meanings and metaphors behind the word changes in the myths, but I got about halfway there and that was more than enough to thrill me. With the story of the science fiction writer woven in … one of the most emotionally impactive stories I've read this year. Definitely.
Sarah Olson wrote on August 3rd, 2010 at 3:24 pm:
I liked it, but I didn't love it. The personal parts were the most entertaining for me. I like the poetic nature of it, but it got to the point where there were so many unknown words that I began to skip over sections of the story (particulary the mythic parts). I love Valente's work, but her love of words pulls me away from the story. Personal preference, but I'd prefer simpler language at times.
Jessica Melusine wrote on August 3rd, 2010 at 5:35 pm:
This story left me stunned. I loved the layers upon layers of mythology, physics and interior narrative. In this intertwining, I was reminded of Alan Moore's magick/personal spoken word performances--however, Valente makes the form hers and it packs a mighty punch.This is a great piece of work and I look forward to more.
orual wrote on August 3rd, 2010 at 7:55 pm:
Loved the story, the twinning of myth/science, and the title's reference to Steven's 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Loved how everything--the myth, the science, the language--come together in the end. The language and story have the power to speak the universal--so for me, it doesn't matter that this story (or any other story) has elements drawn from its author's life. Supposing one didn't know anything about the author--would the story still work? This one does for me!
Cat C. wrote on August 3rd, 2010 at 8:50 pm:
Really, really nice piece. I particularly liked Sections XII and XIII. The feeling I got from reading those sections was similar to the feeling I got the first time I saw Donnie Darko. It was the spring of 2002 and I was sitting in my college dorm room alone with the lights off, knowing that I had finals in the morning and I should be studying, but I was completely unable to break away and turn off the computer and stop the world from ending. This story caught me and held me the same way.
Bravo, Cat!
starlady38 wrote on August 3rd, 2010 at 9:35 pm:
Oh, brilliant. I love the equation of the cosmological with the personal, and I love the equation of science and myth, they are both ways of knowing the world--and the congruences between all of them are brilliant, and beautiful.
Alexandra Erin wrote on August 4th, 2010 at 3:42 am:
I think this is a very daring piece... ambitious, even. So many of the tropes it relies upon are the sorts of things that are easy to use but hard to do right. They're also the sorts of things that will come off as shamelessly masturbatory if not done just right, something Cat avoids with her typically poetic grace.
Ezra wrote on August 4th, 2010 at 4:01 pm:
Normally, I don't comment on stories. But this one is so strange and beautiful, it makes me want to cry. I have only read a few short stories that have made me react and think in such strong terms (Annabelle's Alphabet, Cup and Table, The Way of Cross and Dragon among them).
It is a moving and beautiful epic in a handful of words. Read it.
Pam Adams wrote on August 5th, 2010 at 11:24 am:
Wow. Just wow.
DR wrote on August 8th, 2010 at 2:17 am:
This story pushed the boundary of what I consider to be speculative fiction, but it was a good read nonetheless. I ended up skipping the later "science-myth" sections to keep reading the autobiographical narrative--which is really what makes this story memorable--but the few I read were inventive and, in a difficult-to-read-but-beautifully-unique way, poetic. It takes courage to pull what the author pulled in this piece, and I admire her for that. Even so, I find myself conflicted. Is this supposed to be a SF/F piece with an autobiographical element or an autobiography with a SF/F twist? Should an author's personal life, no matter how fabricated--which I am not claiming is the case here--be the main focus and draw of a piece published in a magazine devoted to speculative fiction? Is it okay to blur the lines as long as the story pulls some heartstrings? Should other SF/F authors begin using autobiographical elements to increase the emotional appeal of their own stories? You be the judge. As for me: This particular author tied it all together well, but it feels like a gimmick--not science fiction.
Vandana Singh wrote on August 8th, 2010 at 12:35 pm:
I love the idea of marrying science and myth, and I think at some points it works in this story --- for example God redshifting makes me imagine the entity receding from us at high speed --- and I liked Persephone's six seeds. But ultimately I found it distracting because it seemed to me that the words of science were being used somehwat independently of their meaning, or in a way that was too roundabout for me. What does the firmament have to do with quark gluon plasma? The moment you have particles you also have to have anti-particles, so why did that come after the q-g plasma? The part about Persephone was in some ways the most successful --- while reading it I was thinking --- but how can Hermes be a vector boson? Oh, OK, maybe because vector bosons are exchange particles for the fundamental forces and Hermes is a messenger god, so that's rather clever --- but what's a chromodynamic garden? Is Persephone inside a proton or neutron? In the quark world? What does Hades mean by Persephone traveling at a constant speed and not privileging any observer --- oh, so she's light. But why the laugh of unbroken supersymmetries? That does seem rather random. And wasn't light created earlier with the particle-anti-particle pairs, presumably through annihilation?
Maybe it is just the particle physicist in me, but I found myself being pulled out of the story because I had to figure out what the science terms were suggesting for the story. Some seemed to be random, others clever, yet others obscure if not inappropriate for the situation. I do appreciate that poetically they sound gorgeous, with the rest of the gorgeous prose (and I am a fan of Valente's writing) but for me most of them don't work.
So my favorite parts are about the SF writer --- beautifully and poignantly told.
I don't want to suggest that people not try to marry science and myth, I think it is a wonderful thing to do (I've done it too, and you don't need to be a scientist to do it well), but perhaps should be done a little more carefully. I've always argued that science is full of the most amazing metaphors for writers to mine. I'd like to see a Valente story exclusively about Persephone, vector bosons and all (although if unbroken supersymmetry figures, I need to know how/why)!
JR wrote on August 8th, 2010 at 12:48 pm:
Like a scant few others I found the science/myth mishmash distracting and detrimental to an intense, personal story that could have been really good and moving.
Across the board, the mythoscientific interludes were cumbersome, overwrought, dense, nonsensical, and emotionally uninvolving. And way too long.
Half way through, I just started skipping them.
Olna Jenn wrote on August 10th, 2010 at 11:50 pm:
Brilliantly done. A beautiful melding of science fiction and 'fantasy' -- or more relevantly, mythology. These days it is all too easy to forget that myths have always been the science of their day. Which means, of course, that one's personal myths are that same reach for a system of quantifying one's own life.
James Goetsch wrote on August 12th, 2010 at 4:51 am:
I just wanted to say that I loved your story, and to thank you for it. Nice to hear the familiar words of science intertwined with the myths, and then the aching familiarity of the sadness (and pleasant tinglings of the wonders) of everyday life.
Alex J. Kane wrote on August 14th, 2010 at 1:52 pm:
Amazingly crafted piece. Brilliant, beautiful, and bold.
Truly touching. Wow.
Dave Hendrickson wrote on August 17th, 2010 at 8:53 pm:
Loved this story. I wouldn't be surprised if it won awards and/or got selected for Best of the Year anthologies.
FWIW, I listened to this in audio format. A very good performance by Kate Baker.
Stella Maris wrote on August 22nd, 2010 at 10:14 pm:
I liked the way the scientific jargon sounded. I thought it added a touch of cosmic playfulness and some philosophical weight - though I could see how it would detract from the story if you actually knew what the words mean (I only really understood snippets).
The parts about the SF writer were simply beautiful. Written with a gentle, honest and wise female voice that I would like to see more of in SF.
And to those who take issue with her supposed challenging of the boundaries of speculative fiction...she is not the first SF writer to put an SF writer in her stories (autobiographical or not is a moot question, since as someone mentioned above, nearly all writing is partly autobiographical). Think Horselover Fat and Kilgore Trout.
Gerry Quinn wrote on September 8th, 2010 at 1:02 pm:
The scientific word salad left me cold, especially when served in such quantity. One does not necessarily expect a personal mythology to be entirely coherent, but many of the scientific terms seemed to be shoehorned in for the sake of a clever-seeming but not really meaningful reference. That does not imbue the mythology with a sense of conviction.
The apparently autobiographical sections were reasonably engaging, although I would not categorise the work as SF. Overall I am afraid I must dissent from the majority view among your commentators, as I did not find this piece very interesting.
Shiyiya wrote on September 14th, 2010 at 6:02 am:
Beautiful. Things that riff on myths and well-known stories are basically My Favourite Thing, so.
siznax wrote on September 18th, 2010 at 4:31 am:
thank you. this is wonderful writing.
MJ wrote on November 18th, 2010 at 1:17 pm:
Holy crap - that's amazing. I'm in awe. My left brain feels inferior (and apparently it is!).
Ben Allen wrote on March 12th, 2011 at 9:16 pm:
The story started off very, very strong. But the science portions quickly started to sound as if the author was throwing in jargon for the sake of jargon, and the novelty wore off. I'd say there were simply too many of them, as well. The personal bits, with respect, did not move me the way they clearly did other people.
TommyP wrote on August 31st, 2011 at 5:51 am:
WOW what an awesome story! Wooow
goblinbox wrote on August 31st, 2011 at 9:23 pm:
I think a number of readers missed (what I think is) the entire point of the story: myth is a way to talk about science.
And vice-versa.