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Tristram is very much me as a child—she even lives in the part of the country where I grew up. Childhood was a sad and difficult place for me, one in which I was always trying to come up with explanations of the world without asking grown ups questions which might lead to me being rejected in some fashion. I was quite neurotic, really. All of that goes into Tristram.
I really wanted to write about this world I’d discovered, its rich, slow secrecy—its winter melancholy that turned gradually, then all at once, into an astoundingly fecund summer. To do that, I needed a plausible way for Molly to stay behind, to live reasonably well in an otherwise-abandoned version of the place. I hit upon a creeping apocalypse.
Welcome to issue twenty-four of Lightspeed! We’ve got another great issue for you this month, so click-thru to see what we have in store.
If you’re looking at society at large, I think there would be a lot of civil unrest inspired by the destruction of our society’s existing certainties about the way the world works. I imagine millennial cults would develop and that traditional religious belief would see a sharp rise. Secular and scientific voices would likely be drowned out.
I knew I wanted to tackle a story that was hard SF, and set off Earth, so why not on one of Jupiter’s moons? I have a bad habit of starting story development with setting instead of plot, and that’s what happened here. So I just kept throwing ideas at the page until I had enough to create a story for my chosen setting.
Futurists get to a certain age and, as one does, they suddenly recognize their own mortality, and they often decide that what’s going on is that everything is just totally screwed and shabby now, whereas when they were younger everything was better.
The story derives from a single image, a kind of Pygmalion variant. My wife and I traveled in Asia on our way to Switzerland, in 1985, which was the first time I had ever been in the developing world. I wrote the first half of the story on a night train between Bangkok and Kohsamui, and the second half on a night train between Cairo and Luxor.
Many elements of my life came together to become this story: my love of old buildings (of course) and my Russian heritage. Mostly, however, it came from the deep fear that the things around us, the things we live with every day and take for granted, are more conscious and sentient than we know. I blame stories like The Velveteen Rabbit and The Mouse and His Child for raising these uncertainties in my young mind.
If you read a number of the older books about doing magic, and what people believed you could magically do, there is supposed magic whereby if you take the correct bone of a cat and put it under your tongue, you could become invisible. From there it was a short step to say, “What if, instead of that, it simply conferred this wonderful, huge rush of—not necessarily immortality—but renewed youth and vigor, and you didn’t need anything else except that? How would that work? What would you be willing to give up for that? Would you actually be giving up anything?”
When I was thinking about these colony ships, a couple of the key features were (1) that they were designed to interface with their cargo, and (2) they had enormous lifespans. It seemed natural to me that a complex organic entity that interacted with humans for thousands of years would develop consciousness.
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