Surfacing Surfaces Again

My Hugo- and Nebula-nominated novella “Surfacing” is now available for your love on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Baen, and Smashwords.  It will appear on other sites in the next few days, and is a mere $2.99.  You have my permission to spend freely.

The book is set in the same future as my novel Knight Moves, though you don’t need to have read the novel in order to enjoy the story.  In fact “Surfacing” is basically an attempt to do Knight Moves all over again.

I thought I had failed with the novel.  I was wrong, but I didn’t know that at the time

Based on the completely false notion that I’d somehow let myself down with Knight Moves, I decided on a do-over, at a more compact length.  I set the story in the Knight Moves universe some hundreds of years later, and wrote a story that shares the major concerns of the novel: love, communication, obsession, life, death, immortality, and a nigh-hopeless quest to unravel one of nature’s more imponderable mysteries.

I should point out that “Surfacing” doesn’t actually cover the exact same ground as the novel.  It has different characters and a different plot.  It just explores similar concerns.

I wrote the story in a furious white-hot blaze, then stalled on the ending.  I remember workshopping the incomplete story with Terry Boren and Laura Mixon, and they couldn’t figure out an ending, either.

So I put the story aside for about six months, and then went back to it.  And when I looked at it, I realized that I’d already written the ending I wanted.  I just hadn’t realized it.

Some people still find the ending incomplete.  I get that.  I faced a choice where the finale was concerned.  One possible ending would be: “Anthony and Philana resolve to solve their problems together, and after years of therapy and one fuck of a long lawsuit against Telemon, finally achieve something like happiness.”  Which would have turned my tidy novella into an epic the size of Anna Karenina, and would have been pretty damn dull, besides.  (I find that accounts of therapy are of interest only to the therapized: the rest of us have been there, already.)

What I decided to write instead of the long, dull ending was a triumphant scene filled with ringing trumpets and hope, that would imply that Anthony and Philana were on the right track, and would solve their problems in time.

A couple of things “informed,” as we say, the narrative.  The first was this long essay I wrote a good ten years earlier, when I was living in Boston.  I knew nobody there, and I had no job and no money, and so I ended up sitting around in a coffee shop writing long, desperate letters to everyone I knew.  And one day I— having run out of friends to pity me— found myself writing a long essay on whale speech, which I actually knew nothing about.  I hypothesized, however, that the black watery realm would tend to break down the barriers between the self and the environment, and result in a grammar in which subject and object were one.

(This already exists in the grammar of the Navajos.  “I’m going to the store,” can’t be said in Navajo, what you end up saying is “The store and I are in a condition of moving toward one another.”  Because you and the store inhabit the same universe, and it’s all part of the same circle, and everything’s connected.)

All of which was said in much greater detail in my essay.

Another element of the story is that Philana’s condition— which I won’t describe BECAUSE SPOILERS— is a metaphor for mental illness.  I’d been around some people who, even if they might not fit the diagnostic description of multiple personality disorder, nevertheless seemed to have more than one person clumping around in their heads.  In one case, I went to bed with a very nice, loving lady, and next day woke up with a complete stranger.  (And no, it wasn’t that she just needed her morning coffee.)

Anyway, this and other experiences had me thinking about MPD, and all that led later to Aristoi.  

So anyway: “Surfacing.”  Whale speech, aliens, desperate love, Nebula and Hugo nominations, and the sense that I was on the right track.

Read, ye people, and enjoy.