Glimmering

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.”

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.