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  Glimmering

  Elizabeth Hand

  It’s 1999 and the world is falling apart at the seams. The sky is afire, the oceans are rising—and mankind is to blame. While the spoils of the 20th Century dwindle, Jack Finnegan lives on the fringes in his decaying mansion, struggling to keep his life afloat and his loved ones safe while battling that most modern of diseases—AIDS.

  As the New Millennium approaches, Jack’s former lover, a famous photographer reveling in the world’s decay, gifts him with a mysterious elixir called Fusax, a medicine rumored to cure the incurable AIDS. But soon, the “side effects” of Fusax become more apparent, and Jack gets mixed up with a bizarre entourage of rock stars, Japanese scientists, corporate executives, AIDS victims, and religious terrorists. While these larger players compete to control mankind’s fate in the 21st Century, Jack is forced to choose his own role in the World’s End, and how to live with it.

  Originally published in 1997, Glimmering is a visionary mix of fantasy and science fiction about a world in which humanity struggles to cope with the ever-approaching “End of the End.”

  Elizabeth Hand

  GLIMMERING

  To my son, Tristan,

  heir to a broken world, but with the tools to fix it.

  With all my love.

  Four voices just audible in the hush of any Christmas:

  Accept my friendship or die.

  I shall keep order and not very much will happen.

  Bring me luck and of course I’ll support you.

  I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.

  —W. H. Auden, “Blessed Event”

  “Fin de siecle,” murmured Lord Henry.

  “Fin du globe,” answered his hostess.

  “I wish it were fin du globe,” said Dorian with a sigh.

  “Life is such a great disappointment.”

  —Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

  AUTHOR’S NOTES TO THIS REVISED EDITION

  I began writing Glimmering in 1994 as a near-future science fiction novel about a climate change–induced apocalypse. Today, 15 years after its 1997 publication, it reads more like a documentary. Terrorist air strikes against a New York City landmark, devastating storms and rising sea levels, fundamentalist terrorism of various stripes—eco, Christian, Muslim—viral pandemics, mass extinctions, melting ice shelves, rolling brownouts, economic meltdown, 3-D entertainment on a mass scale, music downloads, handheld computers—I loaded the book with these not because I anticipated they’d be part of my own near-future, but because I wanted to create an over-the-top, perfect storm scenario that would support a cautionary SF novel of the type I’d loved reading when I was a teenager in the 1970s, books like Dhalgren, The Sheep Look Up, Heroes and Villains. (The strange celestial effects which gave the book its title have yet to occur, and I completely missed the impact of cell phones, global email—then in its infancy—and social networks.)

  In my wildest nightmares—and I’m a lifelong pessimist who’d written extensively about apocalyptic scenarios—I never imagined that the world of Glimmering would arrive so quickly, and with such devastating impact.

  In 1993 I saw Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, in its Broadway preview. The experience galvanized me to attempt an ambitious novel that would deal with the AIDS epidemic then ravaging the world, as well as to tackle the growing impact of climate change. I wanted to keep the focus tight, on several protagonists from very different backgrounds; seemingly unconnected characters from different parts of the world whose lives intersect on the eve of the new millennium in New York City. This trope has become familiar over the last decade, mostly from films like Crash, Traffic, Magnolia, and the like. It wasn’t exactly unknown in fiction, but I wasn’t familiar with many SF novels that attempted to tell a story this way. The book received mostly good reviews, especially in the UK, where it was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and was discussed as a possible contender for the Booker Prize.

  Mostly, however, readers seemed bemused by a near-future novel whose main protagonists were three gay men (two with AIDS, at the time a death sentence), and a straight fundamentalist singer-songwriter who begins to lose his faith after an obsessive sexual encounter with a refugee from Eastern Europe. The cataclysmic events of 9/11 had not occurred when the book first appeared at the tail end of the go-go ’90s, and the novel’s extremely grim view of an imminent future was way out of step with the era’s excesses and ill-considered optimism.

  Things have changed.

  The UK critic Graham Sleight first suggested to me several years ago that the book now reads as alternate history, and put the idea in my head to bring it back into print. In September 2009 I gave a lunchtime talk in the former one-room schoolhouse here, to members of the Lincolnville Improvement Association. I spoke about climate change, and used Glimmering as an example of demonstrating various “sci fi” ideas which had actually come to pass.

  Afterward, a man came up to me and said, “I’m probably the only person in that room who knows exactly what you’re talking about.” He was Robert Olson, senior fellow at the Institute for Alternative Futures, a D.C. think tank. He hadn’t read Glimmering, but he and his wife Marge, summer people in this part of Maine, and I became good friends. When he did read the novel, he made several very cogent suggestions as to improving it. A short time later, Victoria Blake of Underland Press agreed to publish a new edition.

  Originally I wanted to reprint the book as is, but as I read it for the first time in fourteen years, I decided to revise it. Most of the changes consist of cuts—a huge amount of extraneous description was left on the cutting-room floor. I implemented Bob’s suggestion for the disastrous event that causes the glimmering, as it’s more scientifically feasible than the one I’d come up with. Then, in an email, Bob threw down the gauntlet for me to “man up” to the dire vision I’d put on the page.

  I think “the end of the end” is a legitimate theme, but I’m not giving up on encouraging you to bring your talents to bear on a more positive vision of what could be. There is darkness ahead. We’ve waited too long on climate change and other global problems to prevent that. The question is whether the crises ahead will make us increasingly dysfunctional or mobilize capabilities we do really have but that go far beyond what we now believe we can do.

  So the biggest change is in the tone of the book’s ending. My children Callie and Tristan were very young when I wrote Glimmering. Both are now in college (my son studying environmental science), and face the consequences of living in a world that in too many ways mirrors the one I envisioned. Their parents’ generation helped fling open the Pandora’s Box that has caused such devastation to our planet; I have taken the author’s prerogative, and snapped the box closed in time to keep its final gift to humankind alive and intact.

  For this new edition I give heartfelt thanks to my agent, Martha Millard, proprietor of the world’s only full-service literary agency; to Victoria Blake and Joel Schneier of Underland Press; to Stan Robinson, for his generosity in providing an introduction to this new edition; and to John Clute.

  Most of all, very special thanks to Bob Olson, for his encouragement and suggestions for a more positive end of the world than I could envision all those years ago.

  Elizabeth Hand

  Lincolnville, Maine

  September 19, 2010

  INTRODUCTION

  by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Elizabeth Hand’s novel Glimmering is a science fiction novel written in the mid-1990s and set at the time of the millennium, just a few years later. As such it is an example of “near future science fiction,” which is one of the central subgenres of science fiction. It’s a subgenre that focuses attention on the present moment of a book’s publicatio
n, and in particular on that part of contemporary life that can only be captured by describing it in the future tense, so to speak. All of the emergent properties of the present are revealed slightly in advance of the fact; this subgenre of science fiction is therefore a kind of “proleptic realism”—and given the rapid and accelerating sense of change in our world today, it is in many ways the most accurate realism, even perhaps the only possible realism.

  Now that we are in the year 2012, and beginning the teens of the twenty-first century, this novel also now serves as a kind of historical novel, documenting how things felt at the end of the nineties. But because of several canny choices or intuitions on Hand’s part, the novel still has a very contemporary feel. For one thing, because Hand was expressing emergent fears, they have now had time to emerge; the novel therefore describes our moment too, but from a different angle. Also, most importantly, her invention of the glimmering, as a kind of grand image or objective correlative of all the environmental damage we are wreaking on the biosphere, was particularly well done. It represents very well many of the particular manifestations of damage that we now see erupting around us, endangering the human community and all our horizontal brothers and sisters. As I write this, for instance, the glimmering is unctuously sheening over the water of the Gulf of Mexico, as if mirroring Hand’s sky. By the time you read this, it may be something else.

  When this novel was first published a number of reviews referred to it as a thriller or a horror novel, something that might result from a combination of Stephen King and T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” There is indeed a strong undercurrent of horror in the situations the main characters are trapped in: sick with incurable diseases, exploited by distant forces and individuals, cut off from those they care about, cut off from their past, and their sense of any possible future: this is the stuff of nightmare. Jack and Martin and Trip and their little communities struggle courageously to create and hold on to meaning in these situations, and much of the suspense of the novel comes from watching them fight so hard, and with a certain amount of success.

  So, an element of horror fiction, yes; but when considering the feel of the novel’s internal history, and how well it still fits our current moment a decade later, I was reminded too of the tone of dystopian science fiction. And dystopia is always the reverse side of the coin of the utopian; dystopia’s purpose is to point out the bad result we will reach if we continue on the path we are on, and there is always a utopian urge in that warning—a hope that if the warning is effective enough, we will change direction. When reading Glimmering and thinking about what exactly had gone wrong in its internal history to cast the characters into their dystopian world, I recalled the distinction that Martin Heidegger made between earth and world. Earth in his system is the natural world, the material reality which keeps us alive; world then is the human construct that envelops the natural reality and gives it meaning. In Hand’s novel, Earth has been wrecked, and then humanity tries to go on living, but necessarily in world only. This attempt has a grotesque pathos to it, because it can’t really be done. The characters face an impossible situation, radically impoverished, because they are trying to create meaning out of world alone. This makes for a “Masque of the Red Death” feeling, a hopeless pre-posthumous revelry most clearly represented by the character Leonard. It reminds me of Hemingway’s remark about the publishing industry in Manhattan in the early 1950s, composed of people trying to live in world only—“they’re like worms in a bottle.”

  We need the Earth, both the Heideggerian earth and the real earth under our feet and inside our bodies. We can’t do without it. This is what dystopian fiction often says, but seldom so forcefully as in Hand’s dark, intense requiem, her heartfelt warning. If we don’t recognize this need in time, we too will find ourselves in the situation of Jack and his little household of survivors, of Martin and Trip in their Maine refuge, all doing their best to keep humanity not only alive, but human. You won’t forget their story, and that’s good. Take heed.

  PROLOGUE

  Afterward he would think, We should have known it was coming. Should have seen it in the fiery darkness above the Palisades, or traced it in the flaming contrails left by disintegrating jets as they plunged into that watery cleft between the Battery and Liberty Island. Fingerprints upon a windowpane, etched in August ice; crocuses blooming in December, then November; peepers waking in the February mud to sing, too early by far, to sing again next spring, and then never to wake again.

  We should have known, I should have known, he thought, a hole in the sky, the fabric of the world rent, and we the living should have known what would stream through that shimmering gap, we should have remembered before they returned to remind us: we the dying at the end of the world should never have forgotten the dead.

  RUBRIC

  I. In June 1996, an emergency meeting of the United Nations World Council I. on Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Global Warming was held in Rio Gallegos, Argentina, to discuss the unpredicted and potentially disastrous rise in global temperatures during the previous eighteen months. In a desperate effort to stabilize the atmospheric concentrations of carbon gases, the European Union, allying itself with Trinidad, Tobago, New Zealand, and Australia, led the push for ratifying the 1991 UN climate treaty and the earlier Montreal Protocol. This revised treaty, very narrowly passed despite the vocal and hostile opposition of the United States, China, and Russia, provided for immediate worldwide implementation of an involuntary cap on emissions, as well as an international ban on CFCs and HCFCs. In a concession to pressure from the conservative governments of the U.S., Japan, Russia, and China, the council also passed a bill that permitted limited industrial use of the experimental refrigerant and heating agent bromotetrachloride, or BRITE.

  II. In the early 1990s, BRITE had been developed in Finland as a substitute II. for chlorofluorocarbons and hexachlorofluorocarbons, and had been used in experiments to mine gas hydrate in the Arctic. The polar regions’ vast deposits of gas hydrate, with their frozen stores of methane, held the potential to provide twice as much carbon energy as the fossil fuels that had helped cause the rapid degradation of the ozone layer. BRITE appeared to have no adverse environmental effects; unlike CFCs and HCFCs, it degraded in the upper levels of the atmosphere. It was also relatively inexpensive to produce.

  By the end of 1996, BRITE was in common use throughout the industrialized world.

  III. In March 1997, during an American gas hydrate–mining expedition off the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, a massive series of ocean floor avalanches occurred, releasing a sudden, almost inconceivably vast store of methane from the hydrate reservoir. The Antarctic deposits alone contained over three times the amount of methane found in the atmosphere; methane has a greenhouse effect eleven times that of carbon dioxide. Along with the loss of life and scientific equipment in Antarctica, three thousand canisters of BRITE were destroyed, their contents voided into the atmosphere like smoke.

  The gas hydrate explosion had the misfortune to occur at the same time as a massive solar storm, predicted some three days earlier by NOAA’s newly launched Hermes X-ray satellite. Solar physicists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab cheered as the first images crept across their monitors: the sun’s corona disappearing as a billion tons of gas spewed forth. Three days later, this river of solar particles streamed into the Van Allen radiation belt like a celestial lava flow, even as the Ross Ice Shelf collapsed.

  This disastrous confluence of events created a surging electrical current that altered the earth’s magnetic field. Transformers exploded; circuit breakers shut down; satellite transmissions were lost as an early night descended upon the world’s cities. Fifty kilometers above the earth, the sun’s ultraviolet rays began a complicated pavane with bromotetrachloride.

  IV. On March 26, 1997, the glimmering began.

  PART ONE

  Come As You Are

  CHAPTER ONE

  March 26, 1997: At Lazyland

  On the night of his fortieth
birthday, John Chanvers Finnegan stood upon the balcony of his Yonkers mansion and watched the sky explode above the Hudson River. It was the end of March, an unusually warm and beautiful day in early spring; though all the days now seemed lovely and warm, bathed as they were in the vernal glow of a dying century. From the house beneath him came the sigh and hum of conversation, an occasional ritornello of raucous laughter—Leonard’s, Jack thought, and allowed himself a melancholy smile. He had come outside, not so much to be alone as to savor the notion that everyone he loved best in the world was there with him now: his surviving friends, his ex-lover, his grandmother, his brothers. From here he could listen to them all, see them even, if he leaned over the balcony and craned his neck to look back at the house.

  But he didn’t do that. It was enough, to know they were there; enough to sip champagne from a crystal lily, and listen.

  The house was called Lazyland. It had been built in 1884 by the department store entrepreneur Myles Finnegan, Jack’s great-grandfather. Just four years earlier, in 1880, Myles had worked in Stevens’s variety store on North Broadway in Yonkers, stocking shelves and sweeping the day’s detritus of torn paper, bent nails, and broken glass out onto the sidewalk. One rainy morning in September his employer, suffering from an attack of gout, sent Myles in his place to the import warehouse of a toy wholesaler in Brooklyn. There Myles was to inspect the company’s selection of new and unusual items to sell at Christmas.