That Which Crieth Unto Me From the Ground (a James Tiptree Jr fanfic)

[queenlua]

The price of Seeing was the Stones; every true-living creature knew that.

(70s-style "weird" scifi horror/xenofiction pastiche. it's riffing on the James Tiptree Jr's short story "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever", but probably reads OK canon-blind. ~5k words.)

Read here on AO3.

* I'm pretty sure like two days before Yuletide signups closed, I was bitching about how Gender keeps sneaking into my fiction whether I like it or not, and I'm not even GOOD at writing Gender, the next thing I write will be Gender-free for SURE, etc etc

* (not because Gender is an uninteresting or unimportant topic, but because i have zero faith in my ability to tackle Gender. like, i've come to grimly accept the fact that a lot of what i write ends up being about Gender, but christ i can't be doing that on purpose, right. it's gotta sneak up on me by accident. and it's hard to do it by accident when i'm supposed to be directly playing with Tiptree's stuff!!!)

* anyway, 0.8 seconds after receiving my Yuletide assignment, I was like "i got a Tiptree prompt, oh HELL yeah," followed by the 0.85 second later realization of "wait a sec. doesn't fic'ing Tiptree borderline-necessitate it being about Gender in some way," and then i became hugely whiny, flopped dramatically onto the nearest couch, whinged a lot to a friend, etc

* but my prompt was (very blessedly) open-ended, so I decided to stew on it a bit rather than cowarding out immediately, on the off chance I could figure out a way to fic Tiptree that wouldn't violate my vow,

* and I took the idea of expanding on the worldbuilding in "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" quite seriously, despite the fact that that would IN FACT be very directly about Gender, because I'd been finding myself thinking quite a lot about that universe lately—its uncommonly prosocial, warm vision of a future in which the way biological/social reproduction works is Very Different Than Our Own was always very striking to me, and also, yeah, the general observation of "look, once we've used technology to automate away the need for all the Raw Physical Strength Things that cis dudes have a marginal edge in, what is even left of gender; is what we call 'masculine' just 'whatever field happens to be majority-dude at the moment'" is something i have... also been thinking about... as i watch a Certain Group Of Dudes who all have the same email job i do losing their everloving mind and becoming Weird Boosters For Weirdly Trad Understandings Of Gender in a way that just seems EVEN MORE ABSURD THAN BASELINE given that, again, they have email jobs...

* BUT, exploring all that felt like a bigger project than I felt like I'd have time to execute on in the Yuletide creation period, right? it's the kind of thing i'm going to have to stew on for a year at least before I've got my feelings in a story-shaped form

* so i decided to just reread a bunch of stories from Tiptree's anthology while keeping an open mind,

* and i kept looping back around to "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever," which i don't even think is one of Tiptree's best stories! it's one of the "damn was that fucked up or what" stories. which is a perfectly fine genre of story to exist, to be clear; The Twilight Zone is like 50% "damn was that fucked up or what" by volume; it's just that it doesn't suggest an obvious avenue for riffing...

* ...but the picture "Her Smoke Rose Up forever" presents is a pretty haunting one, right, in a Nietzschean-eternal-recurrence sort of way. in Nietzsche's view, the eternal recurrence is the kind of thing you embrace if you love ALL of life—which includes the hardships, yes, but also the highs, the joys, etc. in Zarathustra i always got the sense that the potentially-horrific element of the eternal recurrence was the recurrence rather than the bad stuff per se. whereas Tiptree's view is: what if the only thing that outlives you is the bad stuff. what if that specifically is what's recurring, forever and ever. is it still worth it, then? and that question intrigued me.

* an added element of horror in the original story is the insinuation that these recurrences are in fact triggered by some other entity. in the story, it's left ambiguous whether those entities even realize they're doing the triggering, and if so, whether they have the capacity to care that they're doing it, or, even if they do have that capacity, whether they have the capacity to care about humans in particular—what if they're replaying Peter's memories the way i'd replay an old record on a turntable i got at a secondhand shop; what if they're just gaining some incidental, instrumental, almost-thoughtless value from that dude's suffering—and that's when a story started spilling out

* thus, while this fic is directly in conversation with "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever"... i was mostly thinking about "Love is the Plan the Plan is Death" while writing it, and to a lesser extent, "She Waits for All Men Born." i was too intimidated to write a riff on "Love is the Plan the Plan is Death" directly because that's ONE OF THE BEST TO EVER DO IT, right, like. she commits so much harder to the bit of Fully Inhabiting An Alien Mind With All Its Different Verbiage And Referents And Etc than i did. but sneaking up on it sideways was the only way i was ever going to write anything like that, so.

* speaking of which: rereading Tiptree was just really damn fun? god but she has such fun with macho schlock. god but she has fun with language. like, huge parts of "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" are just her going on at length about duck hunting because she thinks duck hunting is cool as fuck and she wants you to feel it. like just READ this opening ALOUD and see if you can help smiling at the sheer joy of the thing:

—Deliverance quickens, catapults him into his boots on mountain gravel, his mittened hand on the rusty 1935 International truck. Cold rushes into his young lungs, his eyelashes are knots of ice as he peers down at the lake below the pass. He is in a bare bleak bowl of mountains just showing rusty in the dawn; not one scrap of cover anywhere, not a tree, not a rock.

like come ON. this rules so HARD it's so JOYOUS. who the fuck opens a piece with "deliverance quickens" as their opening paragraph? a cheesy bastard, that's who. the cold rushing into his young lungs, that's pure Aesop Rock, pure visceral punchy play. I LOVE OLD SCIFI <3

* anyway. in the story i wrote: i stole "lera" as a term for "prey animal" directly from David Clement-Davies's The Sight, if memory serves. (i did not reread or even touch the novel while writing my own story, but i'm pretty sure lera was used that way in The Sight.) i guess in hindsight i might've uh also stolen the concept of the Sight itself from Clement-Davies, but i'm pretty sure my version of "Seeing" was different than the thing Clement-Davies was playing with. iirc his version was more concerned with prophecy and shit? anyway whatever the point is thank you Watership Down & all its imitators; this is all my love letter to that lot

* i do think i managed to avoid writing Gender, mostly. i mean, it's there inasmuch as Gatik is huger and hotter than Lyr and also it'd be kinda cool to see her step on Lyr but, like. that's true of all female birds of prey relative to dude birds of prey, right. that's just ornithology.

* i toyed with titling this "Hate Is The Higher Law", as a sort of cheeky call-back to an obscure ye olde YA novel, Love is the Higher Law, which sort of had the opposite thesis of this story

* and i also thought some about Christopher Nolan's Interstellar while writing, since that's ANOTHER story that had the opposite thesis—love is the the thing that outlasts & connects us, in Nolan's view. and that's a beautiful view. the view i'd rather be true. but it's unclear, de novo, whether there's any reason to think that's actually true, right...?

* the title i actually ended up choosing for the story is from Genesis 4. Cain & Abel; I'm sure you've heard the story before. here's the money shot, from verses 8-10: "And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper? And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground." the connection writes itself, etc etc

* i found myself surprised, while doing edits, that i changed very little. writing the alien voice was just such a weird singular thing, and all my edits tried to turn it more into The Kind Of Prose I'd Write, and then i'd reread it and realize: but now it doesn't sound at all like the way Lyr would think. and then i deleted it and just left it as-was. weird!

* speaking of Lyr: all the names in this fic were meant to be placeholders, but then i grew to like them all too much as they were and kept them. rip alas etc.

* a few other things i thought about while writing: this poem i read once in the Vanderbilt Review, naomi kanakia's "tales" (wrt structure), my own abandoned Watership Down-style novel featuring birds of prey c. my preteen years, a really cool anecdote a birder friend told me once about a hawk he saw hovering over a duck until it was forced to come up for air & then it pounced, william blake's dark satanic mills (h/t this essay), "snake bone room" from the chrono cross OST, this bit of art i happened on while writing that felt SO this-story-coded that it felt like someone had preemptively fanart'd it in a vibes-y way haha

* oh i think i also asked tumblr this question partially because i was noodling on, well.. this story. from a certain angle i think it might be the most evil thing i've ever written. the content isn't especially graphic but the worldview, if swallowed wholesale, is... a little blackpilled. in a way i think Tiptree would endorse but in a way that made me a little queasy. but then again Tiptree's fiction does mostly make me queasy (even as i love it so much!) so fair play to her.

* so yeah, pasticheing an author you adore is SO INTIMIDATING but i'm glad i took the plunge; i ended up liking the result more than i expected & after some faltering starts, had a total blast~