Glimmering

Available Dark
Radiant Days
Errantry: Strange Stories
Generation Loss
Illyria
Saffron & Brimstone
Mortal Love
Bibliomancy
Black Light
Last Summer at Mars Hill
Waking the Moon
Icarus Descending
Æstival Tide
Winterlong

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 publication, 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.”

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