Elizabeth Hand - Glimmering

Copyright 1997, 2012 by Elizabeth Hand

Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts The Wasteland, in Collected Poems 19091962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt, Brace & Co., copyright 1964, 1963 by T. S. Eliot.

A House Is Not a Motel, by Arthur Lee, published by Grass Roots Music BMI.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission should be emailed to

UNDERLAND PRESS

www.underlandpress.com

Portland, Oregon

eISBN : 978-0-982-66393-6

First Underland Press Edition: June 2012

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

AUTHORS NOTES TO THIS REVISED EDITION

Introduction

PROLOGUE

RUBRIC

PART ONE - Come As You Are

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

PART TWO - Everyones Invited

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

PART THREE - Regrets Only

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NOVELS BY ELIZABETH HAND

I began writing Glimmering in 1994 as a near-future science fiction novel about a climate changeinduced 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 stripeseco, Christian, Muslimviral pandemics, mass extinctions, melting ice shelves, rolling brownouts, economic meltdown, 3-D entertainment on a mass scale, music downloads, handheld computersI loaded the book with these not because I anticipated theyd 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 Id 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 emailthen in its infancyand social networks.)

In my wildest nightmaresand Im a lifelong pessimist whod written extensively about apocalyptic scenariosI never imagined that the world of Glimmering would arrive so quickly, and with such devastating impact.

In 1993 I saw Tony Kushners 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 wasnt exactly unknown in fiction, but I wasnt 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 novels extremely grim view of an imminent future was way out of step with the eras 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, Im probably the only person in that room who knows exactly what youre talking about. He was Robert Olson, senior fellow at the Institute for Alternative Futures, a D.C. think tank. He hadnt 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 cutsa huge amount of extraneous description was left on the cutting-room floor. I implemented Bobs suggestion for the disastrous event that causes the glimmering, as its more scientifically feasible than the one Id come up with. Then, in an email, Bob threw down the gauntlet for me to man up to the dire vision Id put on the page.

I think the end of the end is a legitimate theme, but Im 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. Weve 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 books 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 Pandoras Box that has caused such devastation to our planet; I have taken the authors prerogative, and snapped the box closed in time to keep its final gift to humankind alive and intact.